Crafting Beauty on a Budget

Creating something beautiful is not necessarily a function of cost.

Years ago, thanks to my good friend Zully JF Alvarado, I got a chance to visit Ecuador and while there got an insight into beauty that still inspires me today. Together with a team of social workers, we visited an area visibly affected by poverty.

While there we came upon the little house of a woman, living in what I recall was a reed hut, set among hundreds of the same outside Guayaquil.

Lean, radiant, blond haired and blue eyed, she must have been in her sixties, but appeared to be in her forties. Her taught skin was radiant, her eyes were ablaze with life and passion. With a terrific smile and generous warmth, she welcomed us into her home with jubilant pride, showing off the new smooth, slightly glossed concrete floor that her two grown children, living in Guayaquil, had just installed.

Unlike the surrounding neighborhood, there was a smell of cleanliness in this house, not from detergent but from work, order, attentiveness and warm light, fresh air coming in through openings between the vertical sticks that made up at least part of the walls and the other was this tiny kitchen. The kitchen’s organization reflected her dignity, self-respect, and pride-of-place, through an artful display of things used daily. Simple hooks holding vital utensils all polished, lined up perfectly, pottery, dishes stacked on open shelves-all with just that natural light.

She gracefully showed us her two tiny bedrooms, with clothes neatly folded where all the corners lined up perfectly with brilliant-colored fabrics everywhere, all against the backdrop of those tan colored wooden sticks, with area rugs over that new concrete floor, again, all spotless.

We stepped out the back door to a combined, sheltered from public view, outdoor shower, and toilet, with a metal-rimmed drain hole in a concrete floor that you squat into, a sobering reminder that water and plumbing were still luxuries.

What I learned but only very slowly took on from that memory, was that beauty, real, true beauty-especially in buildings is truly spiritual in nature and only then present in physical form.

There is no house flip-improvement cable show currently guiding too many minds in this country that will ever come close to producing the quality and beauty of that little house in Ecuador.