Posted: March 21

Palm Sunday in Riobamba

Riobamba—it sounds like the name of a popular nightclub where the music has a latin beat and people sip exotic drinks. Actually, it is a sleepy provincial capital in central Ecuador sitting between three volcanos. Chinborazo is the highest active volcano in the world (according to my Jesuit hosts who are rightly proud of their world.) Tungurahua regularly sends its ashes floating down on Riobamba; it has the classic cone shape of a volcano. I don´t know what Altar, the third volcano, looks like because it has been hiding in the clouds both days I have been here.

What got my photographic attention yesterday on Palm Sunday was the incredible variety of shapes that the palms were woven into. Artisans sat outside the churches in Riobamba weaving palms into elaborate patterns and adding flowers and fronds. Mass itself was very normal until the very end when it was time to bless everyone´s palms. Then chaos broke out and I started taking lots of pictures. Part of my pleasure in taking the pictures came because I was with a long-time friend, Fr. Rolando Calle, who is also a photographer, and we were both shooting away. Photography is usually a solo pursuit for me so I really enjoyed working with someone else for a change. We also went into the food market next to the church. Ecuador is famous as a garden spot, and the rich arrangement of fruits and vegetables would have brought tears of joy to any Italian. Plus, people were very friendly and did not mind my taking pictures. One father even asked me if I would take a picture of his daughter holding her palms.

My biggest surprise in Riobamba was the sophisticated intranet that the Jesuit high school here has developed. Collegio S. Felipe Neri serves over 1,500 students in 13 grades. Monday morning starts with an assembly of all students in the patio inside the school. They stood quietly in their school uniforms, the boys in coat and tie, the girls in grey skirts. When the assembly finished, the filed neatly off to start their classes, a little after seven in the morning. As orderly as the assembly was, the intranet is even more organized. It is the brainchild of the school´s president, Brother Guillermo Oñate, who saw the potential for gathering all of the information necessary for the functioning of a large school into a powerful database that could be accessed through a web browser. He hired a programmer and several technicians who developed their program from scratch using Linux open-source software. The list of features is impressive and too long to enumerate here. For example, any parent can log onto the system from home and find out what homework has been assigned that day, and can see grades and other reports from the schools. All students and parents can have an email address through the school which uses a satellite connection to deliver broad-band connectivity. As traditional as the colorful market is, Collegio S. Felipe Neri´s information system is state of the art modern. Brother Oñate has set his sights on developing a distance education system for forming his school´s faculty in Jesuit educational tradition. He already has the system designed and is ready to implement it, both in Riobamba and in the other Jesuit colleges in the country. Why not offer it to people who work at Jesuit-run radio stations, I asked him? Why not, indeed?