presentations & bicycle helmets, part 2

okay, so i know, i left you with a cliff-hanger yesterday with my random tuesday thought that turned terrifying. so we left off that my friend just went unconscious on the side of the Panamerican Highway in Ecuador. 


Okay, so panic sets in for all of us. We pull out our local cell phones, and call our professor (who was more like a parent) and our program director in ecuador. A few guys run down the street to a building where there may be people to get help. We try to flag down cars driving by. Most just think we're stupid gringos waving at them. One finally stops. We need to get her off of this 3 foot wide strip of grass between one of the busiest roads in South America and a huge cliff to the river down below. We use our broken panicked spanish. (good thing we've been living there for a few months already). They help us get her into their car. 


Shortly after this, an ambulance arrives. They can take her to the hospital. Two people from the group go with her. The rest of us are left. On the side of the road, with 3 extra bikes. I decide that's it. I never want to ride a bike again. All she did was hit the wall with her handlebars on the right side, and then landed on her left shoulder (& head--which could have been way worse had she not been wearing a helmet). And she was getting carted away to a small town hospital in a developing country. No way was I going to do the next 30 miles on a bike. So, a few of us grabbed the extra bikes, and waited for the next bus heading northbound. Some others continued on the trek, no hard feelings on either end for continuing or not. 


The bus came, the put our bikes on the top of the bus, charged us an arm and a leg ($1 per person + $7 a bike)--RIDICULOUS in Ecuadorian terms. For reference, a typical bus fare roughly equals $1 per hour on the road, so a roughly 3 hour trip would cost about $3. We had only had to go 6 miles! We were in shock about the incident, and just paid whatever they asked for. We cleaned ourselves up and the bus entered the town of Banos. We were about 2 blocks from our drop off point, when we heard a crash behind us. We looked back, and there was a bike, on the hood of the police car behind us. And two other bikes on the ground. They had gotten caught in the overhead wires. The bus driver called us, told us to get off, gave us the other bikes, and just drove away. We didn't realize how damaged the bikes were until he was long gone. [The police officer just drove off, unphased.] 


We brought the bikes back to the shop, the front wheels mangled on the bikes that fell. The woman started screaming at us [in Spanish], telling us we had to pay for new bikes - $200 each. We owed them $600. Everything is so cheap in Ecuador, we were staying here for 3 nights, eating food, and getting bus fare back to Quito--I only had $60 cash on me for all of that. 


We explained that the bus driver did not tie the bikes down like he was supposed to, and that he just drove off. In the small town, a witness to the bikes falling was able to identify the bus company and driver. We got back on the phone with our program director, as we got marched down the block to the bus company.


The bus company explained that the owner was poor, and that he had sick children, and he couldn't take care of them, so he couldn't pay for the bikes. The police, who were next to the bus company, said that we had to pay for them for the same reason. We were advised to have a mechanic look at the bikes to see how much it would cost to repair them, rather than replace the bikes.

We did that, and the cost was $20/bike. We scrounged the money together to give them, and just let that be that. We were completely taken advantage of twice that day, it shouldn't have been our responsibility to tie the bikes down. This is where I learned the word "culpa" in spanish (that means 'fault', as in whose fault is it?). 

My friend had broken her collarbone, and they put her in a weird cast. The hospital cost was less than $10, for x-rays, medication, and the cast. She took a taxi 3 hours back to Quito, where the doctor there put her in another cast. It made for a rough last month of the semester abroad for her, but at least she was able to stay. It was a scary ordeal, but its one that I will definitely share with my children when they tell me they don't want to wear a bike helmet anymore, because it could have been so much worse.