04 - 05 Oct - Father Colin

After our adventures at Cotopaxi, Father Colin MacInnes, a priest from South Uist who has lived in Quito for 20 years helping in one of the shanty towns, met us for dinner. We went to a Pizza place and discussed what we would like to to the next day.

He picked us up at midday to take us around the Comitte del Pubelo, a shanty town on the outskirts of Quito, his home for a long time now. Mairi remembers many a fundraiser for Father Colin and Quito so it will be strange for her to see first hand where the money went. The Comitte Del Pubelo is run by Marxists who all call one another Comrade which is great for Father Colin as he`s not great with names, but who wouldn´t allow him to biuld the church within the actual Comitte area and is on the edge.

We first visited his church and flat which are both very nice. As he attends to a parishoner the phone rings a few times - obviously urgent so we don´t answer. When he comes back the phone rings again and it´s a rather agitated person at the other church where he´s due to say a funeral. We all jump into his car and get our first views of the Comitte. It´s quite a contrast to LA MAriscal or "El Gringo" area we´re staying in, no flash bars and restaurants, no corporate building, in their place small houses made out of breeze blocks with corrugated iron roofs, and this is infinitely better than the shacks and unpaved roads which were here when he first arrived.

The funeral was interesting, Don Raffael, pulled quite a crowd of wailing women, no stiff upper lip on show here, quite different from a funeral back home. After the service the congregation dispersed with the coffin and headed off to a private burial with no priest. The catholic church leave some of the more traditional aspect of life alone - they know their boundaries!!!

We were take around some of the places which he has helped build. We were shown around the hospital like some important people, taken in to meet the sick and the workers. Half of the equipment came for Scotland the xray machine from Fort William, still had the Belview Ward written on it, and was probably the same machine which had xray´d my sister Shona´s head over 20 years ago when she fell off a motorbike in Fort William - very strange.

We also visited a couple of schools, a drop in centre and a credit union (which at one point was the 10th largest in the country). It`s totally amazing to meet somebody who has achieved so much when the rest of us do nothing at all.

It was nice to see that some of the young people working in these places would have initially benefited from his charity work. The area is now reletively well off, paved roads, schools and a hospital but is still incredibly poor, it only makes you very glad you wern`t born into this.

We headed back to the posh area where half of the people of the Comitte could never afford to come.

We met up with Matt and Sahra (from the Galapagos cruise) and go for drinks and a curry - it`s odd doing something so normal and yet so out of reach of most of the population of this incrediblely interesting city.