A couple weeks ago I got the books out on the road (and trail) into the jungle. A friend of mine was going out to an indigenous Shuar community so it seemed like a good time to hop along and visit some schools out in the interior communities.
These communities, or ¨al dentro¨ they are sometimes called, are the ones that can´t be reached by road, meaning you have to get there by airplane, motor canoe, or foot. We rode in bus and pickup for a couple hours,
then walked about four hours into two small commnuities of about 100 inhabitants each.
The communities definately look different. Most houses and buildings are made out of the traditional materials, there`s much less trash, and people (especially kids) are dressed much simpler. The school rooms looked about the same as ones along the highways. High school kids go off to town to live with an aunt and uncle and attend high school, although some girls get pregnant at a young age and never make it out. The little kids are precious though! They are fascinated with the hair on my arms and some even called me "colono", the word for a mestizo (non-indigenous) Ecuadorian!
Food was also noticably different, being in much scarcer quantity. Chicha, a fermented yucca drink, makes up most of the diet here. Its really sad to see the malnutrition in the kids resulting from parasites and vitamin deficiency. The land produces fruits and vegetables but the people have lost the custom and impetus to grow them.
The saddest thing of all thought was seeing the road that is being blazed in towards some of these interior communities, a fact that is repeated throught the Ecuadorian Amazon. It is true that roads can bring the promise of economic development to rural communities, but its is a proven fact that road construction is the primary agent of tropical deforestation. Roads open new land to logging and subsequent development, usually cattle grazing but sometimes mineral exploration. Do not be mistaken, indigenous communities take great pride in their rainforest riches, as they have been for the hundreds of years they have been inhabiting them. However, many fail to see the connection between roads and deforestation. One enlightened local leader of an Ecuadorian NGO told me once, you open a road to the communities but what have they got to offer, what do they have to sell? Timber, nothing else.
Two local groups I have met in Ecuador do work that stands above their peers. One is Amazon Partnerships Foundation, a group that works with local communities to implement small scale development projects to improve quality of life and protect their local environment.
www.amazonpartnerships.org
Another is EcoMinga, an organization that manages ecological reserves located in valuable and threatened ecological habitats.
www.ecominga.net
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