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.