15th November, El Chota, Ecuador: unlikely breeding ground for footballers
There’s an area in the far north of Ecuador, near the Colombian border, called El Chota. It consists of about 3 or 4 villages, very poor, inhabited by black Ecuadoreans. Women stand outside houses, washing clothes, and children and chickens run round the dusty streets.
Everyone knows everyone, there are few phones and a strong sense of community. We pull into the first village we arrive at, Carpuela, and find a smiling woman, washing, with her 3 children around her. She laughs and laughs at the sight of our bike, and even harder when we give her 3 children a ride.
The reason that we are here is that we have been told that these communities breed world-class football players. Men like Augustin Delgado and Ulises De La Cruz. The parents of whom still live in these villages, so we thought we’d hunt them out and find out a little more about these unlikely petri dishes of football talent.
For Delgado, the lady points towards Juncal, a village further back along the PanAmerican highway. When we arrive there, we ask the first family we see, all sitting out on the street in the Sunday sunshine, about where Delgado’s parents live and they say “sure! just up the road! our son will show you!” so he hops into the sidecar, I balance on the side, and we head up into the heart of the village.
“Delgado’s dad lives in that house there,” he points. Hmmm. Only his dad? “His mum lives in Ibarra” (the nearest big town) “they are separated”. D’oh! How about his brother? “Also separated”. De La Cruz? Not from this village. Anyone else? Edmundo Zura’s family lives just up the road.
Edmundo Zura plays for the Ecuadorean national team, and was a star player in the Cup of the Americas in 2007. He lives and plays in Quito at the moment, but has been playing for an Australian team, Newcastle, in the last year. Interesting.
So he guides us to Zura’s family home. A long line of people are sitting on a long step outside the house, all just hanging out together on a Sunday morning. Children immediately crowd around the bike, and we become the centre of attention. We ask about Zura’s mum and dad, who are there in the line up of family members, and they are happy to do an interview. Zura’s brother then points and says that Zura himself is just over there. And sure as hell, there is a tall, good-looking guy walking towards us, who immediately offers us juice.
And bonus! He’s married! He and his wife have come to visit for the weekend from Quito. And they’re happy to be interviewed! I love it when a plan comes together…
Nothing moves very fast here. So we don’t get down to work straight away. Edmundo wants to nip into Ibarra to get some money out, and he’s taking his dad. So they hop into an incongruously huge and blinging SUV and leave us to chat to the (huge) family. Turns out that the parents had 16 children, 12 of whom survived, and now have 30 grandchildren. All of whom want a ride on the bike. Which keeps Mike busy for the next half hour…
The place feels totally incongruous with our experience of South America. The colour, the sounds, the laughter. It feels like a little pocket of Africa in amongst the largely indigenous north of Ecuador. It’s probably a good time to talk about the inherent racism in this country, there are strict strata and it seems everyone is wary of everyone else. With the black population being very much at the bottom of them all. The black population in Ecuador are largely centred around the coastal city of Esmeralda on the coast. Legend has it that a slave ship was sinking off the coast there and the slave cargo swam to freedom and settled in that nearby town. The villages of the El Chotta area are a very rare inland offshoot of that.
We ask why the area produces such good footballers and Zura replies that it’s the perfect environment for it: the weather is great (always sunny, but not too hot), the ground is ideal (dusty but not too hard) and the kids are able to spend long hours, barefoot on the dusty terrain kicking a ball around. Add their innate physionomy to that and you have a recipe for football greatness.
Zura’s father is a farmer. The local area is hugely fertile and basically, everything grows, so there’s much to do as a farmer. He wanted Zura to follow him, but Edmundo had other ideas, being obsessed with football from the very beginning. His parents have known each other forever, both being from the same small village where they still live, so Juncal is all the family has ever known. They are Catholic and strong believers, and their family is everything to them.
Zura is 25, his wife 21 and they have been married for 8 years. They have one little dude of a son called Elkin Ronaldino. Joanna likes being the wife of a footballer (not least because his body is perfection… I lasciviously run my hand over his 6 pack like the desperate, old hag that I am), they obviously earn great money in Quito, and Elkin has a great childhood there. They come back to see the family once or twice a month. Sundays are particularly special, Joanna says, because the whole community comes together around the football field, women talking, men playing and children kicking balls around.
