Oil and Water

My friend Juan, who has a college degree and used to run a tourism project in the Kichwa community where he grew up, gave me two reasons that he is now working for Ivanhoe, a Canadian oil company contracted by the Ecuadorian government to drill in the most populous region of the province, where he and I both live: People in the cities benefit from tourism dollars, but not the communities. And heavy crude is breaking through the surface, so it’s a health hazard to leave it there.

There are counter arguments to Juan’s statements, but I can't deny his concerns about work. I also know, as does he, the atrocious record that some oil companies have in the northern Amazon. Chevron-Texaco’s unfettered oil drilling dumped 30 times more crude in the rivers than was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster, and cancer is rampant in that area.

Everyone here knows what happened in the north, and some trust that the government will implement sufficient controls to prevent widespread environmental destruction. Others see that the government has already broken its own laws, including allegations of “serious irregularities” in the Ivanhoe deal. And then there is the fact that Ivanhoe’s technology for converting heavy crude (all that exists here) into light crude has been tested only over the last few years and on a small scale in Bakersfield, CA. Living on a tributary of the Amazon River and in one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world, we are a long way from Bakersfield.

It was one thing to read about these conflicts from my former apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I can watch them unfold right outside my door. Ivanhoe thinks it will be able to extract more than 100,000 barrels a day about 2 miles from where I live in Tena.


The government finance directors think the oil revenue will pay for health and education programs. Some locals think Ivanhoe will shower them with jobs or money for infrastructure. Politicians think they’ll earn extra cash and votes. I think it could be a disaster, and not just environmentally. Coca and Lago Agrio, in the heart of the Chevron-Texaco mess, are notoriously dangerous, drug-plagued cities. Tena is so safe that I don’t even bother to lock my door sometimes.

But rather than give in to fear, I’m hoping that the delicious incompetence of the Ecuadorian government, combined with falling oil prices, will buy a little time. Meanwhile, some friends of mine and I have started Amazon Partnerships Foundation to help communities find practical ways to use and renew natural resources to meet their basic needs so that jobs promised by oil companies are not their only option.

We’ll provide grants and project management training to communities that want to design and implement their own projects to protect the environment or promote the conservation values of traditional Kichwa culture. One grant could supply a women’s group with training to market their hand-made jewelry and baskets, earning them income to buy food and school supplies for their kids. Another grant could help a community start a sustainable forestry project so they could reforest part of their land for conservation and have a reliable source of income through lumber sales.


For everyone, it's an experiment in coping during difficult times, and none of us has any guarantee of an outcome that will ensure happiness and well-being. But one thing this place teaches us foreigners is that small victories matter. And when I look out at the lush foothills and rivers and imagine what could disappear . . . whatever I might see ten years from now, I want to know that at least I didn't shy away from the battle.

Thanks to Sadie Funk for the river photo.

Picnic on the Rio Napo

When some Kichwa friends of mine invited my American friends Jason and Mary and me on a picnic, I knew enough not to expect a grassy lawn with a wooden picnic table and a Weber barbecue. But I wasn’t expecting that I should have worn my rubber, knee-high wading boots. I should have known better.

We started off at Juan and Irene’s house, packed up the peeled oranges, papaya, and corn cobs from their farm, the old pots, knives, plastic cups and carving knives from their kitchen, plus the raw chicken, cheese, and chocolate chip cookies that Jason, Mary and I had brought. Then we crossed the paved road and headed down a steep slippery bank, where we had to proceed human-chain style to keep from pitching over the side. As we scaled down a rickety ladder that someone had built on the trail, I was wondering if there wasn’t an easier way to get to the river.

It turns out that we were going to Juan’s mother’s field to harvest some yuca that we’d be boiling over an open fire. With the tubers in our bag, we trekked another 20 minutes or so, fording a couple of slippery-bottomed streams, to arrive at a rocky bank on the Rio Napo.

Mary watches as Juan sets up the fire pit.

We set up camp, complete with palm-frond sun shelter, improvised fire pit, and delicious cheese-stuffed roasted bananas (the less sweet kind, called “maduros”).

Peeling yuca in the shade of our natural umbrella.

Irene tending the maduros and chicken strips on our barbecue.

We feasted and some people swam (I waded) while Juan went fishing in the traditional Kichwa style with a hand-made net of thin palm fibers. I watched him throwing the net and diving in after it into the wide, fast Rio Napo.


Something about the river always makes me reflective, and I was thinking about how striking it was to watch someone with a college education and a computer in his house fish in the same way his great-great-grandparents did. I can’t think of anything I do that my great-grandparents did. Except travel, I suppose.

Packing up in the late afternoon, we took a shorter path back. Our Kichwa friends led all of us white people by the hand so we wouldn’t slip crossing the river. You learn to swallow your pride in situations like this. Groggy from the sun, I was glad to arrive and Juan and Irene’s house, where we drank chicha and ate the chocolate chip cookies, a novelty to our friends. As I heard a familiar distant roaring engine, I realized that I've adapted more to this environment than it might have seemed when the day started: I could distinguish from all of the other car noises the sound of the bus back to Tena.

Thanks to Jason Kaminsky for the great photos.

A Long Way from Philly, by Lynne Cooke

When I met Mary in graduate school at San Diego State University about fifteen years ago, I never imagined that someday we would be on a motor powered canoe headed into the jungle. But there we were, on our way to Casa del Suizo, a lodge nestled in the Amazon. But, wait, maybe I should back up and tell you who I am and what I’m doing writing on Mary’s blog. I’m Mary’s friend, Lynne, who lives in suburban Philadelphia, PA, which is, well, quite different from Ecuador. During my visit to Ecuador, Mary generously asked me to be a guest blogger, and, as you can tell, I accepted the offer. I teach technical writing, and unfortunately, my prose reflects my profession. Stick with me through this blog entry, though. I promise not to use subheadings, bulleted lists, or forecasting statements, as we technical writers are apt to do. (On the plus side, I won’t use wordy phrases such as “due to the fact that” or “it is important to note that.”)

Mary and I met up in Quito on a rainy Saturday afternoon and stayed the night in La Mariscal, the happening part of the city – live music everywhere, great restaurants, and a bunch of hostels. The next day we began our trip to Tena by bus via a windy, hilly, hairpin turn, mostly unpaved road. I found the buses fascinating – people were in the seats, in the aisles, constantly getting on or off at unmarked stops. Scattered along the road were tiny shacks, some lit with a single, naked light bulb that hung from the ceiling. Although intellectually I knew that Ecuador was a developing country, I didn’t fully grasp what that meant until that moment. The contrast between what many Americans call home (5,000 sq ft. McMansions) and what many Ecuadorians call home is shocking. Don’t get me started…

We stayed at Mary’s place in Tena for a day before heading out to the jungle lodge. Tena is a mix of urban and rural. Small specialty stores, hostels, and restaurants line the streets, dogs roam the neighborhoods, and chickens cluck from day to night. Mary is quite the local – we kept running into people she knew – and she’s got a great place within walking distance of downtown Tena. Mary lives on the second story of a concrete single-family home. Her three-bedroom home has beautiful hardwood floors, lots of windows, and a great patio conducive to wine drinking, book reading, and snoozing. As a westerner who had never been to a developing country before, I was surprised by the rebar sticking out of the patio. I thought, “Is this place still under construction?” But no, this is just the way things are in Ecuador. Part of the infrastructure is in place if the owners want to build on to the house. Sounds reasonable to me.

From Tena we took a two-hour bus ride and then a 20 minute canoe ride to reach the jungle lodge, where we stayed in a room with a spectacular view of the river. Sitting on that balcony was one of the most peaceful experiences I have ever had.

The next day, we visited amaZOOnica, a preserve for monkeys, toucans, enormous colorful parrots, wild pigs, and the like. As recently as thirty or forty years ago, you could have seen these animals in the wild, but because of overhunting and habitat loss, most of the big mammals and birds are gone. AmaZOOnica is no urban zoo: volunteers live in on the grounds, give tours, and care for the animals, most of which were rescued from poachers or illegally kept as pets. Only about 20% can be reintroduced into the wild.
Before returning to Tena, I took a tour of a Kichwa village where I learned about some of the local customs, including the preparation of chichi, an intoxicating beverage which Mary has described as “tasting the way moldy laundry smells” (and she’s right). The tour also featured local artisans who create beautiful clay pots with intricate designs and parrots out of balsawood, all of which are for sale in the village. In this ecotourism model both the jungle lodge and the indigenous people benefit: The Kichwa have the opportunity to sell their crafts and educate tourists about their culture, and the jungle lodge can offer tourists a glimpse of Kichwa life that would otherwise be closed to outsiders.

A few days later, I took a bus back to Quito. This time the woman seated next to me balanced a box of 20 or so tiny, yellow chicks on her lap that peeped the whole way to Quito. I found the peeping soothing, in part because I didn’t have any idea what people were saying around me. You see, I don’t speak or understand Spanish (shameful, I know, because I lived in San Diego for many, many years). I felt like such a typical American tourist, gesturing and pointing to things and hoping people might understand a word or two of English. Fortunately, people were very kind to me. I made it from the bus station to the hostel, ordered a meal from a menu with pictures, and flew back to the US the next day.

I’ll end by thanking Mary for being an incredibly gracious host and by letting you know that the work she’s doing in Ecuador makes a difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mary decided to stay in Tena permanently because the Kichwa people I met think of her as a member of their community, which she is.

We Are Pioneers: Supermaxi, Biodegradable Bags, and the Women of Cuya Loma

Happy Earth Day from the Amazon! I’m celebrating by writing this blog and participating in the CALL FOR CLIMATE campaign to demand that Congress act now to reverse global warming. Any other earthlings who feel so inspired, please pick up your phones on APRIL 22 and dial your Senator and Representative: 202-224-3121.

For five hours over a partially paved, mostly potholed “highway,” I sat on the bus from Quito to Tena with my plastic shopping bags trapped between my feet. I enjoyed the cloud forest whizzing by as we descended from the Andes to the lowland jungle, feeling a little less guilty than usual after my trip to Supermaxi in Quito. As the name implies, Supermaxi is the largest nationwide grocery and household goods store in Ecuador and sells two things I find I can’t buy in Tena and can't live without, despite my efforts to “live local” and “get off the grid”: dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar.

Fortunately, Supermaxi has gotten the memo about the climate crisis and has replaced its conventional plastic bags with biodegradable ones, which announce “We Are Pioneers.” In the grand scheme, it’s a small step of course, but it shows decent corporate leadership and helps me feel better about my carbon footprint:

+ 6 jars of imported dijon mustard
- 1 biodegradable bag
+ 1 5-hour diesel bus ride
- 1 4-hour trip in private car
= how much carbon I’m putting into the atmosphere?

Well, the math is beyond me, but that’s what these nifty carbon calculators are for.


Though excellent laundry services abound in Tena (80 cents a kilo gets even your underwear washed, dried, and ironed), most women (women) wash their family’s clothes in big cement sinks at home. Most people can’t afford to buy washers and dryers, and even the wealthy tend to relegate the task to their maid (again, a woman). Since I have a cement sink and clothes line, I do the same with most of my clothes. It took only two or three weeks of sudsing, scrubbing, wringing, and hanging for me to appreciate both modern technology and the feminist movement. All the books and articles I’ve read on gender roles seemed like abstract musings compared to what I learned washing my own clothes by hand in Ecuador.

Multiply that work by seven people (six kids and one husband, an average family size) and it’s easy to understand why, when I visit rural communities, the women are eager to have electricity, running water, and roads, even though they often come at enormous cost to a fragile rainforest environment. The men want those things too, but technology is more a matter of convenience for them. Though Kichwa men generally help around the house more than other latino men, domestic chores are still optional. Not so for the women. Technology could improve their daily existence dramatically, leaving more time for education, a professional career, or simply the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives.

Does this freedom, as a result of modernization, inevitably lead to the production of trillions of plastic bags? That’s what I wonder when I talk with communities about building water or sanitation “systems” that solve one urgent and important problem but create ten others that burn on a slower, but no less powerful, flame. I’d like to think that freedom—and creativity—can lead directly to solutions that improve the standard of living for the poor and marginalized and skip the step we industrialized nations have taken in the development process, the one in which industries pollute the planet and exhaust natural resources then later scramble to fix things.

It has taken Supermaxi less time to adopt the biodegradable bag than it’s taken Wal-mart to demand its vendors reduce product packaging. And 13 women, including the president of the community of Cuya Loma, will be pitching in to build dry composting toilets for their houses next weekend (more to come on the marvel of the dry composting toilet). So perhaps these are signs of a new kind of pioneering spirit to work with the earth, not against it.

Fruits of Change

After a long hiatus, the blog is back, and I am back in Ecuador, this time to live. I’ve chosen Tena, a city in the Amazon jungle with a population of 16,000, as my home base. When I tell people, especially Ecuadorians, where I live, I get a wide range of reactions, from impressed amazement to bewildered disbelief. Even though five years ago I never would have imagined myself taking up residence in the jungle, it’s neither as adventurous or as dangerous as it might sound. My comfortable apartment has wood floors and cement walls and a patio overlooking the mature fruit trees and ornamental plants that the landlords planted years ago. On mornings when I don’t have meetings or community visits, I sit out there with my coffee and observe the butterflies at work. I can go a week without seeing the same kind twice. So when people ask, “Why Tena?” (or “Why Tena!”), here is what I tell them:

Fruits that look like they come from outer space: I discovered the anona when my landlady picked one from the tree that grows outside in the yard and brought it to me as a welcome gift. Though I haven’t been in the habit of eating fruit that resembles a porcupine, the inside of an anona is gooey and sweet, like tapioca without the disgusting globules. It’s great in cakes, and I plan to try to make ice cream with it next.

Lazy birdwatching: Again, with my cup of coffee on the patio. No binoculars needed.

Inspiring neighbors: Visiting different Kichwa communities for Global Pediatric Alliance, I’ve met a lot of people with little formal education but excellent ideas: One group wants to build dry ecological toilets so they not only will they have sanitation for the first time, but the toilets won’t contaminate the groundwater and will produce completely safe organic compost for gardens. A friend of mine, a father of six who has not had steady work for almost a year, has decided to take a huge risk and go into business for himself, converting a plot of family land into an Kichwa ecolodge. Another friend of mine, who has some university education, presented me with a ten-page proposal to train Kichwa women and young people to be community leaders after I casually mentioned that someday it would be interesting to collaborate on that type of project.

Fewer distractions: Yes, I’ve got t.v. (but not cable) and yes, I’ve got internet (but no high-speed line in my home yet), and yes, my neighbors play salsa music or a compiliation of 80s American music that's a bestseller at the bootleg CD shops here, but despite all of that, I often find myself surrounded by quiet or the noises of nature. Somehow, having fewer things plugged into the wall or running on batteries, I find it it easier to read, write, and think.

Sunsets: After a long, hot day in Tena fighting with the phone company or standing in lines to pay my utility bills, I walk home through town, across the airport tarmac (since the only flights are occasional a government prop planes, at dusk it’s turned into a running track and volleyball court), and watch the sunset over the lush mountains of Llanganates Reserve. Although many, many thousands of trees have been cut down in this area, the forests in the park are still in tact. The sun sinking behind those mountains reminds me that my human clock and the concerns it drives are, at the end of the day, insignificant.

This Is How We Dance in Caipirona

For as many times as I’ve suffered disappointment from plans falling through in Ecuador, I’ve also benefited greatly from that same lack of predictability. It was serendipity that recently delivered me to Caipirona, a Kichwa village in the jungle where big decisions were being made. And I got to be a small part of them.

A friend of mine who works for the city of Tena spontaneously invited me to join him on a 45-minute ride in a pick up truck (this time inside the comfortable cab) to where the road ended at a wide river. Alone in the rain, we waited for a canoe. A thin, elderly, brown figure in wading boots approached from the opposite bank, and as she plowed unperturbed into the current, we realized there would be no canoe. We rolled our pants up to our thighs, took off our shoes, and crossed the river yelping every time we stepped on a sharp rock, which was often. I skipped the attempt to put on brave face, since my friend, who is Kichwa and has probably crossed rivers barefoot hundreds of times, was as much a baby as I.

We arrived in the middle of a clearing with a handful of huts, the largest of which was an open-air and thatched-roof structure. About 40 people—babies, old people, teenage nursing mothers, barefoot kids, middle-aged men and women, and a few twenty-somethings—sat in a circle. This was a big political assembly, I discovered, and they’d been sitting in this circle for the last twelve hours discussing everything from the price of their farm lots to the lack of potable water.

I slipped in behind my friend, who followed the custom of shaking the hand of every single adult present, and tried to figure out what was going on. On a dais at the front sat four youngish men speaking Kichwa into a microphone. Occasionally, a woman named Bertha would grab the other microphone and interrupt or correct them, eliciting laughter or cheers from the rest of the group, which was mostly silent. I watched this exchange for a good hour without having a clue what they were talking about. I wasn’t sure if the rest of the people knew either. To me they looked bored out of their minds, but how would I know?

Eventually a bowl of chicha, mildly fermented yucca milk, reached me and I took a few obligatory sips. It’s a taste I haven’t acquired and probably never will—to me chicha tastes the way moldy laundry smells. At that point, my friend, representing the local government, got up to speak in Kichwa about projects, and then I heard my name mentioned. Before I knew it, he handed me the microphone and told me to explain to the group what I was doing there. This would have been easy except for the fact that I hate speaking in public, much less in Spanish, and I didn’t know what I was doing there. Somehow I managed to make something up, maybe thanks to the chicha.

Hours passed. I vacillated between fascination at the social dynamic—who got to speak when, who got the most attention from the audience—and isolation and even a bit of fear. I was utterly a stranger there. But I also felt a little stunned. Five years ago I never would have imagined myself sitting in a straw and wood hut with 40 Kichwa people debating their issues of the day in the Amazon rainforest.

Toward the end of the assembly, the group held elections for the new community president and officers. (The village officials usually have more actual power than the mayor of Tena because they have to face the community daily, though that doesn´t necessarily make them less corrupt or more motivated. Politics is the same wherever you go.) Bertha stood and announced, in Spanish, that she wanted my friend and I to count the votes since we were impartial. I found myself sitting at the dais, microphone in hand, reading off the names of each person in attendance so he or she could cast a vote. Meanwhile my friend tallied and certified the proceedings.

Afterwards we were treated to a big lunch of beef soup, and the attention turned to the band of musicians playing traditional Kichwa songs. My piece of beef was too tough to chew, and since I didn’t have a napkin, I looked for an inconspicuous place to spit it out. I was still looking when a man approached me with his hand extended. To my horror, I thought he wanted me to spit it into his palm. First I show up at their meeting unannounced, then I butcher their names over the loudspeaker, and now I insult their cuisine. When I protested, the man pulled me into the center of the floor, where he told me in Spanish, “This is how we dance in Caipirona.” Still chewing, now mortified that everyone could see the enormous wad in my cheek, I danced with him. My friend and a few other people joined us, and I started to enjoy the stranger-in-a-strange-land role. The song went on and on. By the time we sat down, the meat was soft enough to swallow, which I did.