The End of My Second Week

June 8, 2007

Margaret Novak

It is now the end of my second week with Ecotrackers. This past week was pretty interesting. On Monday, a man named Manuel came in to talk to Max about setting up a project site in Kuamar, a Shuar village in the southern part of the Ecuadorian Amazon. It is about an 8 hour bus ride from Quito, followed by an 8 hour hike through the jungle. There is going to be a huge Shuar cultural festival next April, and so Manuel also wanted to talk about setting up for that event. Later on that day, a couple of kids from England showed up and wanted to do a volunteer project in the jungle, so we sent them off with Manuel. They will be helping to teach Shuar children English by giving them key words related to nature, like butterfly for example, and then taking them on a small jungle trek to find the butterflies in order to put an object to the word. They will also be helping to set up for the upcoming Shuar cultural event. It was really interesting to see how just like that we were able to get a project started up in a remote Shuar village. I plan on visiting Kuamar sometime in the near future, as I am sure an 8 hour trek through the Amazon jungle would be quite an adventure. I also talked with Max about going to a scuba convention in Salango at the end of June. I would be able to get scuba-certified, and apparently it is whale season! That sounds like a ton of fun! We also talked about a 9 day Amazon River trip, where we would take a raft all the way down to Peru; that would be pretty awesome too! I am not visiting any site this weekend as my mom and my sister are coming to visit, but I do plan to visit as many as possible after they return to the States. We are also trying to get the constitution changed in order to protect the disappearing coastal rainforest in Esmeraldas. There isn’t much time left and we need about a thousand more signatures (Max is there right now trying to get some more) and then we need to enter them into the computer system. Yesterday I helped Juan Carlos enter some names and numbers into the system; I didn’t realize how much work it takes to change a law or part of the constitution- it takes a lot!! Anyways, the sun is shining now, so that is good; it isn’t quite as cold as it was last week! I can´t wait to see what next week brings!