To the eye they were only feet apart, but in space the miles separating them reached well into the thousands. Never before had the grandparents seen the toddlers, or the children each other, and in their hour together they discussed "family affairs, private things" - at least the adults did, while the children fidgeted.

This was a virtual family reunion, a video conference conducted between one room at Banco del Austro in the Ecuadorian city of Ca–ar and another at Austro Financial Services on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights. For Manuel, 25, the father of two who sat on the Queens side facing his family in Ecuador, it rated well above the phone calls that had connected them during his 11 years in New York.

"It's very different, much more beautiful with the video conference," he said immediately after concluding his session. "It's as if we were together. I never imagined it would be so beautiful."

Video conferences are simply the newest and most high-tech way of achieving something that Ecuadorians in Queens have been doing for years - keeping in touch with their families back home.

The length of Roosevelt Avenue is a testament to the way entrepreneurs have long catered to the needs of the city's burgeoning Ecuadorian community, producing an extensive network of goods and services to bridge the distance between the two countries. In the heart of Jackson Heights, an immigrant cannot only buy a frozen cuy, or guinea pig, to cook for dinner, he can also shop for a house in his home town and purchase an appliance to be delivered on his family's doorstep in Ecuador.

Two New York-based Ecuadorian newspapers give commentary on what's making headlines on the home front, while a satellite television station that began operating a year ago broadcasts Ecuadorian programming across North America.

But what would appear to be the most rapid and direct way to stay in touch - the Internet - remains inaccessible to many because they or their loved ones stand on the wrong side of the digital divide. Eliminating that wall is a duty that has fallen partly to the Catholic church, which through low-cost Internet access and computer training in both countries, is providing instantaneous communication to those who need it most.

Moving money and more

Perhaps no one can be credited with better foresight than Hector Delgado, an Ecuadorian who three decades ago founded an empire of travel agencies that now single-handedly links Queens immigrants to countless communities across Latin America.

Remittances, the money that immigrants wire home to their families, are currently the second largest source of income in Ecuador after oil, and much of that monetary traffic goes through Delgado Travel, which is headquartered at 79-08 Roosevelt Ave. After opening in the mid-1970s as a basic travel agency, Delgado expanded by paying airlines to send packages to Ecuador and creating a wiring service to send money, which together serve as the backbone of an enterprise that now lists phone calls and radio stations among its offerings.

Reflecting back on his career in an interview some months ago, Delgado described his achievement as "to have been able to serve my community, to have changed the way they send money, send goods, to have given them a service that before they didn't have."

Now one or more of his services are replicated by mom-and-pop-sized competitors, such as Gerardo Escandon's Ecuamerica Cargo Center on 76th Street and Roosevelt Avenue. Every Monday and Thursday he bundles a pile of packages into multiple white burlap sacks to drop off at Kennedy Airport for shipping to Ecuador; other businesses do the same, only on alternate days of the week. Escandon said migrants tend to send clothing and games for their children, especially at Christmastime, while in return they receive home-cooked guinea pig and fresh Ecuadorian cheese.

Guinea pig, a delicacy in Ecuador, is also on sale in frozen variety at Los Paisanos, a grocery store at 76th Street and Roosevelt Avenue that imports Latin American products. Whereas in Ecuador the "cuyes" are a common site lined up on hot grills with their paws reaching up as if clawing the air, on Roosevelt Avenue they sit wrapped in plastic and stacked on the bottom rack of a freezer.

Recognizing that immigrants want to flex their American buying power to help their families at home, the Ecuadorian electronics chain Creditos Econ—micos eight years ago opened up a showroom in Queens where people can examine and purchase merchandise that the store's Ecuador branches will deliver to any address.

"He buys it and this same model arrives at his house (in Ecuador)," said Nelly Bravo, who manages the Queens showroom. "They never had their range, their refrigerator - and now that they are working here, they have the money to be able to buy what they didn't have."

Panels full of pictures posted on the store window show the giddy faces of satisfied families in Ecuador, their televisions and stereo systems awkwardly propped on wooden tables in rustic houses as they hold signs thanking the company.

Ecuadorians can also shop for homes at the Roosevelt Avenue office of Mutualista Pichincha, where three-dimensional models show off the best angles of housing units that can only be purchased by someone in Ecuador itself.

"We try to give them the options to have a property in Ecuador in a serious way without losing their money," said the company's New York director, Elizabeth de Gallegos Anda.

Once the soon-to-be homeowner signs documents at the Ecuadorian consulate to give his family purchasing power in his name, the money needed to close the deal can conveniently be wired from Pichincha's basement.

Newsprint and satellite

Among the Ecuadorian merchandise that reaches Queens daily by plane are stacks of newspapers ranging from El Comercio, the leading daily from the capital city of Quito, to Extra, a low-brow tabloid that regularly features photos of corpses on the front page.

But those publications, sold by Queens travel agencies at a cost of $1 compared to the typical 35-cent cover price in Ecuador, compete in a marketplace that already features two free New York-based Ecuadorian newspapers: The weekly Ecuador News and biweekly EcuaTimes.

Ecuador News was launched as a monthly in 1996 but now comes out each week in Ecuadorian enclaves across the United States, from Miami and Los Angeles to Chicago and New Jersey. Founder Marcelo Arboleda, a former Ecuadorian diplomat to Russia and onetime editor for a New York Spanish-language paper, emphasized that the colorful tabloid fills its 60-plus pages with original content by correspondents in Ecuador and beyond.

"We put out interesting things, what happens with Ecuador in our community," he said at the paper's Jackson Heights office. "At the same time we inform people about what's happening in Ecuador but with our own viewpoints, our own reporting in Ecuador."

EcuaTimes printed its 36th edition in August, marking a year and a half in operation. The three founders had approached Aldo Bravo, an Ecuadorian-born engineer and businessman from Long Island, to invest in the paper when only its third edition had come out. After later dropping out one-by-one, the original founders left Bravo alone as the owner and president.

"They created a fun newspaper which was very appealing, and particularly was new," Bravo said, later explaining how competition with Ecuador News helped solidify the identities of each paper. "The owner of Ecuador News has told me that his newspaper has improved and changed in personality since we came along, and I believe that to be so."

Both newspapers boast a philosophy shared by ethnic media sources across Queens: More than just news organizations, they see themselves as service providers catering to a community that is struggling to adapt and succeed in a new society.

"Our desire is to help them get their papers," Arboleda said of the many undocumented Ecuadorians who read Ecuador News. "Our newspaper is like a clear, pure crystal. Our newspaper is like a father - to teach, to guide, to lead people down a good route."

For Bravo, that means steering clear of controversy.

"We want to communicate above all the culture of Ecuador," Bravo said. "We are not an investigative type of newspaper. We do not engage in controversial matters. We find great abilities in our community which we portray as important to the overall community."

Meanwhile, immigrants who look back with guilty relish at all the television they are missing in Ecuador - whether soccer matches or "telenovelas," Spanish-language soap operas - can now stay up-to-date with a satellite service called "EcuaTV."

The channel mixes programming from five stations in Ecuador, enabling immigrants to "see day to day what happens in their country, and above all to stay abreast of national happenings as well as sports and daily living," according to its Web site.

Digital divide

Even as EcuaTV offers direct access to their favorite telenovelas, immigrants turn to the television screens at Austro Financial Services to get a far more personalized view of home via video-conferencing

The arrangement is simple: The immigrant on the Queens side pays between $1 and $1.50 per minute, while his family in Ecuador pays nothing. They book a time well in advance, to coordinate people in both countries, and over the course of a weekend the scheduled blocks for the center's two video rooms fill up with dozens of virtual family reunions.

"It's as if the customer goes back to Ecuador and meets them in a house," said Oscar Alcivar, an Austro Financial employee who coordinated the conferences one Saturday.

The room in Queens features a wide-screen plasma television, hanging from the wall like a window into Ecuador, which peers down at a black leather couch set before a backdrop of kitschy New York City paintings. The setup looks identical to the rooms beamed on screen from Ecuadorian branches of Banco del Austro, the parent to New York's Austro Financial Services. The cameras trained on the couches are adjustable to change the view, and the rooms are wired to pick up and broadcast sounds so everyone can talk naturally as if they were in one place.

The idea of seeing, speaking and interacting with family members in real time achieves something that mere photographs, videos or phone calls cannot, clients say.

"I want to see how much bigger they are," said one client, Angel, referring to his 5- and 6-year-old children who remain in Ecuador as he and his wife work in New York. The conference had yet to start and he was anxious. "This is practically seeing each other face-to-face. It's very beautiful, very emotional."

El Centro Comunitario Mitad del Mundo - "the Middle of the World Community Center," so named because the Equator runs through Ecuador - offers a similar, more economical service down the block at 80-20 Roosevelt Ave., only it is via Internet with lower-resolution images displayed on a computer screen.

"It was always our intention to create a communications space to aid families of migrants," said Monica Orellana, the center's director who came from Ecuador to found it almost two years ago. "Imagine people who see their children, they leave happy when they do the video conferencesÉ But to finally see the faces of their family, they leave here sad because they really want to be over there."

Mitad del Mundo and its partner centers in Ecuador are run by the Catholic church, which can supply only limited funding to keep them operational. In both places the coordinators complain that money is tight, so much so that some sites in Ecuador had to close for a time.

"Many people don't know about our center, and for that reason we need money to advertise ourselves," Orellana said.

Anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, basic computer camera, microphone and headphones can set up a video conference from his own home, but those components are a tall order not just for immigrants but especially for their families in Ecuador

"Access to the Internet is very low in Ecuador. We are creating Internet centers, it's something that is just starting," said Fernando Vega, a Catholic pastor from the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca who helped create a Web site for immigrants, www.migrantesenlinea.org. "It's incipient because in order to talk about impact, you have to talk about thousands using it - and it's still not there."

Computer classes on both ends are helping to ease the digital divide, so immigrants have the skills to be able to take advantage of low-cost computer centers, even if owning their own computer is still an impossibility.

"There are many people who don't know how to use computers or get onto Internet," said Fabricio Achig, the director of a computer center in Cuenca affiliated with Mitad del Mundo in Queens. "We teach them how to use the computer, how to communicate, so they all have the opportunity."

The church's ultimate objective is to use technology to make the distance between Queens and Ecuador that much smaller - a goal that remains unrealized even as it sits tantalizingly close.

"Technology keeps advancing, it's going to allow these families of immigrants to have an accessible form of communication," Orellana said. "It will allow a family that is separated to come closer together."

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