Coming Together for Sustainable Change
My experience with a minga
By Maryuret Rivas
Imagine the trash in your dorm bathroom has not been emptied for a week. Meanwhile you use your own trash bags, and trash piles up and starts smelling. You talk to your RA and ask him or her to do something about it. The RA immediately calls the housekeeping person and, voila, the problem is solved! Now imagine the people of a small Ecuadorian village living day and night around trash and drinking contaminated water. They do not know what to do or where to go for help. If you were a member of this village, what would you do?
For one village in Ecuador, Otavalo, the answer was to form a “minga.” A minga is a gathering of citizens who complete tasks to benefit the community. Mingas have existed in Ecuador since ancient times, long before the Inca Empire. Everyone fulfills their obligation to the community by working for the common good. For example, mingas are called on to repair or maintain roads, water systems and forests, promote social and recreational programs, and, in this case, to clean the community’s land.
Every community has a local leader who is part of the cabildo, the local administration which is responsible for the well-being of the community. The leader of the community I worked with, however, was very busy farming his land and working in a local factory, and he’d done little to solve the community’s water and waste problems. In his place, two other community leaders, Mariana and Jose Luis, who work in the municipal department of Rural Citizenship and Participation, planned a minga that would attempt to address these problems.
It didn’t take me long after arriving in Otavalo to realize how much the minga was needed. The village’s water came from a nearby lake, which was used by some cattle-ranchers for waste disposal. One of the women I talked with affirmed that the villagers had been consuming undrinkable water for a year and said they were mostly concerned for their children. I learned from her that they actually paid $5 every month for this dirty water. Additionally, some cattle-ranchers threw their waste in the streets and used an empty lot adjacent to the community’s school as a dump.
Eighteen people showed up to Mariana and Jose’s minga. Men, women, and children were all included. At that point, I had no idea how the cleaning would happen. But Mariana and Jose Luis had managed to get shovels, brooms, and plastic bags, and everyone understood what to do. Nobody seemed to complain, and, as I chatted with the members of the minga, I felt the rewards of working with people who all shared the same goals for their community.
This bio was current at the time of publication: Maryuret Rivas recently graduated from Allegheny College. She studied in Ecuador in spring 2006 with Minnesota Studies in International Development.