Some charismatic folks...

The Wild West of the Galapagos

Enid _________ is an immigrant from the mainland port of Guayaquil. She raised 11 children, 9 of whom survived. One is working in her new milk factory and another is the father of a CDF volunteer, Anita. Enid is 77 years old, looks youthful and talks with warmth and a slow Spanish. I interviewed her on her highland ranch in a large kitchen filled with brass and wooden tools.

"I came here in 1961 and have lived the life of the Wild West. I cried when I first got here, since I had left everything. No one visited for years since the islands are far from the mainland. After a year in the village of Puerto Ayora, we accepted a land grant from the government. It was here, in the mountains above town. For years the only way to the only town was on horseback. It was a tough trail, and, because I was raising my 11 children, I almost never went. The best thing about town was that it had a well, attached to a wind pump. Over time, we got some modern things like a kerosene refrigerator. We made money by hunting the wild cows that the Navy had left behind, decades earlier. They had become hard to find, and hard to capture. But we used traps and then saved every pound in our new refrigerators. My children went to school on horses until the built a school in Bellavista.

"I survived all of this because I had to raise my kids. I had to be where my husband was. I made it, in spite of adversity. These days things are different. People have cell phones and there are factories for milk. In fact, we are building a milk products factory so we can sell yogurt and cheese to the tourist boats and markets in town."