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.

Encounter with the President

No, not that President.

It was an overcast Sunday, and I was hanging out with my friend Andrea, who lives in an upscale Quito neighborhood. As someone raised in U.S. suburbs, I found it all a little too familiar: paved sidewalks and tree-lined medians surrounding modern apartment buildings and some large houses, electronic gates around the housing developments, and inside everything finished and manufactured. I saw no naked light bulbs screwed into ceiling sockets, no slap-dash paint jobs, and no window cracks sealed with putty.

We stood in line at the ice cream shop at an outdoor mall near her apartment, minding our own business, when the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, strolled in with his family and took his place two people behind us. Completely star-struck as soon as I laid eyes on him, I fixed my gaze on the chocolate-covered waffle cones for fear of gawking should I turn my head in his direction. Andrea casually mentioned that she had taken a class with the former professor of economics. Incredibly, he recognized her. More incredibly, he struck up a short, polite conversation with her. He was distracted, so I took the opportunity to gawk uninhibited.

After finishing our ice cream a mere two tables away from el Mandatario, who was not sitting in a bullet-proof chamber or surrounded by heavily armed men, Andrea approached him. She thanked him for inspiring her to pursue her current job with a leading environmental firm that analyzes financing possibilities for the emerging carbon market. It just so happened that the President’s team was reviewing a proposal for protecting one of Ecuador’s major jungle reserves as part of a global cap-and-trade scheme; he wondered, could her firm take a look and give his team suggestions? She handed him her business card.

No, I’m not making this up.

I watched the President shake hands and have his picture taken with the customers and store employees and kiss babies, all under the watchful eye of five or six policeman who leaned against their police cars. Of course a scene like this is more possible in a country of 12 million people, roughly eight times the number that will see Barack Obama be inaugurated in Washington D.C. in January. And there is certainly a significant downside to all of this familiarity. The Ecuadorian government is famous for its nepotism—I have a whole blog’s worth of stories about my dealings with inept bureaucrats who got their jobs because they are the son of the governor’s best friend’s daughter’s cousin.

On the other hand, when six degrees of separation are reduced to two degrees, does that open the door to share new good ideas, not simply get you a fat government paycheck? After all, Rafael Correa was right there in the ice cream store talking to my friend about environmental policy. Would a casual conversation about dry ecological toilets over a bowl of mango sherbet be that far-fetched?

I’ll keep you posted.

Uncertainty's Dance

My friend Natalia and I were talking recently about the world economic crisis, how it might impact Ecuadorians like her, and how it might impact foreigners like me with work-based visas from U.S. non-profit organizations that are already starting to brace themselves. “For us, we live with uncertainty everyday, so we’re used to it. But for you guys,” she sympathized, “it must be really hard.”

Just to put it in perspective, in the last 18 months, the price of 40 kilos of chicken feed—corn—in Ecuador has gone from $10.50 to $24, an increase that is part of the story of the global food shortage. A lot of chicken farmers here feel the squeeze, as do corn growers in the region where I live, who have not gotten significantly more for their crops. Prices for basics like rice, sugar, and eggs, have shot up 30% according to government statistics, a difficult burden for families who make on average about $250-$400 per month. And if you make $70, as thousands of families in the Amazon do, it’s just about insurmountable.

From what I’ve read and heard, food prices are a perennial campaign issue in this country with its small middle class, weak educational system, and few large industries, though the government has been subsidizing staples for the last several months. As with many other issues, the uncertainty of whether the average family will put enough food on the table, (I mean food like a plate of rice and some plaintains, forget about vegetables or dairy or protein) is one people learn to live with. When my friends here who read about the chaos in the U.S. and world stock markets ask me if it’s really as bad as it sounds, the expression on their faces falls somewhere between stunned and vaguely concerned, whereas I know my face shows something more akin to dread. But I think that’s because I have not yet dropped that particularly seductive American viewpoint that we have total control over our destiny.

So what else to do but learn how to dance with uncertainty, a process I started before I left the U.S. and one that perhaps subconsciously drew me to this place that could make one a master at it.

A couple of things I've been doing to improve my dancing skills . . .

1. Take a cheap vacation to a mini-utopia.

This is Salinas, a small town in Guaranda province that over the last 30 years transformed itself from a hamlet of straw and mud huts to a town of more than 20 locally run cooperatives that make everything from cheese and chocolates to essential oils.

People don’t live high on the hog here, and the system is far from perfect, but unlike many places in Ecuador, most people have jobs and the young people come back to live after they finish their education. My short trip to this center of micro-economy helped me forget nettlesome macro-economic problems.


2. Watch the sunset. Something that is both predictable and beautiful always brings me a sense of calm. And attention is all I have to pay.

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.

Burning the Old Man

The first sign for me, never having spent the end of the year in Ecuador before, was the pile of headless stuffed figures dressed in jeans and button-down shirts on the street corner. I didn’t think much of it at first because on any given street corner, at any given time, you can find things from mangoes to DVDs to diet supplements. But when I started seeing stacks of the stuffed people on street corners all over Quito and an array of freakish masks, I asked. “Those are the old men,” my friend informed me.

The last few days of every year Ecuadorians pick out their old man, give him a face, attach notes to him conveying whatever sentiments, thoughts, etc they want to get rid of, and then burn the whole thing on the street. The old man, 2007, is reduced to ash, and for added affect, men don party dresses and wigs and parade around as the widows of the old men. My guess is these are mostly straight men, based on the unsophisticated drag, but I’m sure some gay men get into the act to, since it’s the only time of the year when cross-dressing is widely accepted.

On New Year’s Eve I was in Cuenca, which I discovered is fairly buttoned-down during the holiday, but that afternoon people were busy preparing a massive float for the midnight parade. The old men to be burned were none other than the Spanish Prime Minister, the King of Spain (am I the only person who didn’t realize Spain still has a king?), and Hugo Chavez. I didn’t get the joke until I saw the end-of-the-year news montages on TV: at a meeting in Chile earlier in the year, Hugo Chavez was insulting the Prime Minister, and the King, sitting between them, said, “¿Por qué no te calles?”—why don’t you just shut up? It wasn’t long before the King’s phrase got ripped to an MP3 file and downloaded as a ringtone on millions of Ecuadorian cell phones. As my Ecuadorian friend put it, “Chavez is Chavez. We all know how obnoxious he is. But on the other hand he’s still a head of state. You (referring to the King) can’t treat him like he’s one of your servants.”

So all three went up in flames as Ecuador prepared for 2008. But not all the old men were politicians. Here’s a baby Shrek (the movie is wildly popular here—I don’t know why) named Pipicho, the Kichwa word for penis. Who knows what notes were attached to that one . . .

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.

Bienvenidos al Ecuador

After sending travel missives in old-fashioned email, I finally decided to upgrade to a blog. Welcome to my first foray. I’m not sure what the larger purpose of Traveling Storywriter will be, but for now it will at least serve as a convenient way to share a few stories from my adventures in Ecuador and read your comments (yes, I’m prompting you!)

On this, my fifth trip to Ecuador in just over a year, I had a mission on behalf of Global Pediatric Alliance, the non-profit for which I work: travel to communities around the country and see what projects local people are cooking up to improve child and maternal health. In other words, I had come On Business. I had no illusions that I would simply send a few emails, leave a few voicemails, set up appointments and shazaam! everything would fall into place. After all, I’d inadvertently scheduled my arrival around Carnaval, the national holiday where people drink, dance, pelt each other with water balloons and spray each other with water guns or cans of pink foam for five days and then begin 40 days of lent. Even without Carnaval, I expected a few bumps. I did not expect a major paro.

The week after I landed in Quito I was due for a meeting in Tena, a town in Napo Province in the Amazon Basin. On Sunday, two days after I arrived, I discovered that the northern road to Tena through a small mountainous town called Baeza was closed due to a protest, or “paro”. Often, paros entail protesters with signs and chants and a smattering of burning tires. Sometimes if people are extremely frustrated, they use the backhoes that government repair crews leave along the side of the road, since roads in Napo are always in some state of construction, and dig massive holes or push boulders from previously cleared rock slides to block the way.

In my limited experience, paros usually last just a few days, enough to get the attention of the federal authorities who apparently don’t respond to other methods, especially from people from the Amazon. Most Ecuadorians from other parts of the country, public officials and private citizens alike, consider people who live in the Amazon to be inferior and primitive. I’ve seen this rampant racism almost everywhere people interact—on busses, in restaurants, on the evening news.

Since my meeting in Tena wasn’t until the following Saturday, I didn’t initially consider the paro to be a major obstacle in getting from Quito to Tena. By Tuesday I’d learned that Napo denizens were protesting the lack of federal financial support from oil drilling proceeds. According to my friend and colleague Natalia, who is from Tena but now lives in Quito, this dispute has been going on since oil drilling began in the Amazon basin in the 70s. There have been other flare ups, but in the past the protests had fallen along political party lines. Now people across all parties were united in demanding development money for oil extracted from their region.

On Wednesday, I’d gotten spotty reports from friends in Tena and bits on the news that things had gotten worse. A delegation from Tena had gone to Quito to meet with the President over the dispute, but he’d refused to see them. Next I heard that violence was breaking out in Baeza—protesters threw dynamite at police and police attacked, though I’m not sure in what order. In any case, things were deteriorating. The government declared martial law in Napo, and public officials including the mayor of Tena, who belongs to the same political party as the President, were arrested for inciting violence. Whether they did or not I’m not sure, but it seemed to me like at least a little bit of grandstanding from the feds.

People in Tena took to the streets, marching with machetes and torches. According to my friends there, in the melee the police killed 3 or 4 people and beat a 12-year-old boy in the head. People became more furious and threatened to arm themselves against the police (with more than machetes, I gathered) and to rupture the oil pipeline that runs through Napo to the coast. Some of my friends told me they’d been put on a list of people the national police would arrest for being affiliated, personally or professionally, with the mayor and other local officials.

By Thursday afternoon I nervous about my friends’ safety and worried this wouldn’t be just any old paro. I also figured there was no way I was getting to Tena for the weekend. Even my Quiteño friends, who expect these kinds of fires to die out rather than rampage, seemed concerned. This dispute looked more like what I’d seen and read about in Guatemala, where people almost never get justice through the political process and violence is the standard power tool for all sides.

But when I woke up Friday morning, the news reports said that everything had been resolved. Good morning Ecuador, you simply had a bad dream. The roads were open, the paro had been disbanded, martial law had been lifted, and the peaceful city of Tena was ready to receive thousands of revelers who usually descended on the city for Carnaval. Although I was surprised by this news, no one else seemed to be.

I hopped on a bus to Tena and passed through Baeza, where the remnants of melted tires were the only sign of what had happened the day before. When I reached Tena, everything appeared calm, though I everywhere I noticed signs people had printed with laser printers and posted in store and car windows: “Soy Primitivo” and “Somos Primitivos”—“I’m primitive” and “We are primitive.” I assumed the opposing side must have hurled that insult and people in Tena had decided to turn it back on them. Friday evening was quiet, but by Saturday the salsa music was pounding up and down the river where a good-sized crowd of partiers from other regions had put the news of the paro behind them. Though the fire had been doused, I suspect the embers are still glowing hot, and I assume I’ll learn more when I settle in Tena for a few weeks.