“One’s destination is never a place.....

....but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

One of the best parts of my visit to Cuyabeno National Park was getting to meet people who had traveled all over the world just to visit or live in the Amazon.  Traveling in groups has a weird way of creating community among strangers; it is easy to find yourself in conversations you would normally only have with good friends at home.

On the second or third day of our trip, my travel group had visited the Siona people.  That evening's topic of conversation had kept coming back to whether these people were living like "true" natives.  Yes, it sounds disgusting.  We all knew it did.  Everyone agreed that you couldn't deny these people the right to modernize, yet there was a surprising distaste in everyone's mouth.  No one wanted to be spectators in a human zoo.  Still, the question kept popping up from different mouths as if by accident, "Why did we visit them if they weren't really all that native?"

I can't say that I was expecting anything different from what we had seen that day, but I have lived here longer.  I understood the others' disappointment though.  I had had it before.  I think their question was not posed well.  I think on some level what we really wondering about was whether there was anyone in existence who was truly untouched by modern conveniences.

It was later that night while sitting beneath the candlelight at the dinner tables, barraged by cicadas, that we found our answer.  Years earlier our guide had lived with a tribe called the Waorani.  When he heard our dilemma, he spoke up.  Everyone wants a better life, he said, yet our desire to improve our lives and the lives of others is something that should be controlled.  His answer surprised me.  People wanting to help other people was a problem?  Wasn't that the definition of humanity?  I thought it over as he talked.

During the months that our guide had lived with the Waorani, he was completing research for his thesis.  He had gone to learn about the oil companies' effect on the Waorani lifestyle.  Ethically, he could not do anything more.  When the Waorani people wanted to learn from his research, he had to reject them.  It forever changed his relationship with the community.  However, if he had helped the Waorani, he could not have predicted what would have happened next.  Their environment was unstable.  The desires of the people would change.  They could be taken advantage of.  He could not predict the dangers that might come, so he did nothing. 

"How could he have the strength to do this?" I thought, "How could one person deny the urge to help another and feel confident that they had done the right thing?"  At the same time, I had a strong trust in my guide's beliefs.  He had a respect for the tribes that I had not seen before.  Even as he disliked denying anyone help, his conviction and logic suggested that he had not made his Waorani decision lightly.  The experience left me with new things to think about.  Did the tribe need the modern conveniences?  Were we denying them basic human rights?  Or was it wrong to believe that the most important priority on earth was prolonging human life at any cost?  

We had spent all day feeling wrong for expecting more "nativeness" from the Sionas than we had gotten, yet those people had lost their ability to survive without tourism and government support.  In some ways, they were worse off than they had been before.  In other ways, their lives were better.  Their future seemed so delicate.  Recent years had brought so much change for them.  The slightest shift in power, a sudden drop in tourism, and their livelihood would be in serious jeopardy.  Yet the Waorani, though more secluded, were just as prone to this same problem.  My tour group and I were a necessary evil.  Like our guide, we would never be sure whether our actions were the right help at the right time or just another good effort with a bad outcome.  As our chat wound down, we sat quietly and watched the moths burn in the candle light.  We slowly drifted to bed without reaching any conclusions.  We didn't bring up the topic again, but two mornings later, as we filled out our departure survey, no one ranked the Siona visit as their least favorite activity.  Perhaps the trip had changed us.

My First Trip to the Amazon!

When I was in the fourth grade, I had an amazing teacher.  As a teacher now, I think back on her classes, and I'm always impressed by how much she impacted my life.  She was the first person to teach me about simple machines, my state's history, the middle ages, and, of course, the rain forest.  And now, over a decade later, I've made it to the Amazon!

On Monday the 29th, as my motorboat sped for two hours down the Amazon, I couldn't believe my own luck.  I whispered little thank yous to my teacher as a toucan's notorious beak caught my eye just before it soared into the trees.  I remembered having spelling tests over drip tips and bromeliads as I noticed different ferns and orchids from the boat.

I was traveling into Cuyabeno National Park, the second largest in Ecuador.  One of my guides told me that Cuyabeno has twice as many opportunities to see wildlife asYasuní National Park, which has gained more publicity and tourists due to its oil-fields and law suits.  Maybe it's a testament to how much I fell in love with the area, but after four days there, I believed him.  Among the things we saw were monkeys (at least four types), bats, birds (too many types to remember), white and red piranha, caiman, snakes, turtles, river dolphin, tarantulas, frogs, assorted insects and fish, peacock bass, an enormous arowana, and a gecko. That doesn't include the flora, like the Ceibos trees, a type of palo santo tree, sangre de drago, and some honeysuckle-like plants that I kept referring to as "chupitas de miel."  I couldn't possibly sum everything up in one blog post, so I'll stop here and start the photos.  Thank you to Cuayabeno National Park, the Siona tribe, Jamu Lodge (highly recommended), my assorted travel partners, and, of course, my fourth grade teacher!   

swimming and sunsets on Laguna Grande

piranha fishing

 hiking on the Tapir trail

almond-scented centipede

Monkeys!

"­¡Qué chévereee!"

People-watching

People-watching is a favorite activity of mine, odd behavior is a specialty, and odd behavior bordering on the philanthropic is even more amazing.  For example, once in Spain, I turned a corner down a disturbingly dark alley only to hear "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" coming from the depths. As I crossed the shadows and cobble stones, what I found was even more surprising: a man with a ukelele had rigged strings to his fingers and arms so that his music was accompanied by a tiny mannequin with his own tiny ukelele.  It was hokey, but unexpected.   A pleasant surprise after a day getting lost in the city.

In Guayaquil last week, I was a little angered with a car that had stopped suddenly in a busy crosswalk as pedestrians were trying to rush through.  "Typical Guayaco driver," I thought as everyone had sped up to avoid getting hit. But, as I looked back to give the driver an angry look, a tiny, old nun stepped out of the car with a large, plastic bag.  She reached the pedestrian island, scooped into her bag, and rained cat food down on the pigeons in the vegetation.  The nun smiled with delight, watched a moment as the pigeon's ate, then hobbled back to the car. It was over as quickly as it had begun.  She drove off and everything went back to normal, all just a part of the daily routine.

Virgencita, Help me

I don't offer a lot of glimpses into the minds of my students here, but this time I'm making an exception.  My kids handed in their final notebooks last week, and there is a particular brand of notebooks they have that cracks me up.  Here's a sampling of some of the messages the children tried to stick in my head before I gave them their final grades:

"Ave Maria, give me a shot."  I especially like the worried face next to it.

"Little Virgin, I swear that I studied but give me a hand."

One that I somehow failed to photograph offered a rubric of ways to grade the student.  The options included:  buena, buenissima, and buenisisisisisisima.  There's more of the less religious/grade-concerned types below.  Apologies for quality as they were taken with my webcam while I was at school.

An included folder/bed complete with sheep and pillows.  "The 5-star hotel for your loose papers"  The chameleon says things about the types of papers that may rest there.

"Official lunch planner"

This notebook says such wonderful things about school as: "Lunch is the best moment of the day!"  Beneath this is a menu suggesting various comidas tipicas for the student: "Monday:  cheese empanada with sugar, Tuesday:  salchipapa (french fries and hot dog bits) with mayonnaise, ketchup, and cola, etc., etc."

They're super-cute, spunky, and quirky, a little snapshot into the "verdadera bombacitas" in my classes.  And, yes, the ninth-grade girl inside me wants a few. 

Vacation Accomplished

Four to five meter-high waves greeted any beach-goers during the 10 de agosto holiday weekend, and as always, I forgot my camera to record it.  Amidst whale-watching, sun-drenched private beaches, amazing seafood, and a tiny little earthquake on Sunday, there is a lot to record in Ecuador...if you can remember your camera.  Unfortunately, all I've got is my words, and if there's one thing I learned from reading "Moby Dick," it's that reading about whales is way uncool.  Seeing them in person, however, is amazing, and I highly recommend it.  And, hey, if you've got $6,000.00 or so to spend on a vacation, might I recommend building your own beach home in Puerto Lopez?  Yes, that's a real price for beach property.  Yes, you should retire here.  Or maybe with all these recessions in the first world, Ecuador should have a new slogan for tourists:  "Why not live here?"

I need a vacation

When you're practically traveling for a living, it might seem selfish to say this, but I need a vacation.  My school, which typically has a 10 to 12 week bimester, is now running on week 13 of a 14 week bimester.  The students are used to being on vacation by now, and they seem ready to burst.  As they have been fond of reminding me this week, it is like "everyday I'm shuffling."  In between reminders to sit, stop singing, and talk in an inside voice, my inside voice is praying for the weekend.  Until then, I'll be dreaming of things like this:

If it were my home...

I just heard about the amazing website If It Were My Home.  For anyone who has ever lived abroad, this is the perfect website to email to friends and family members when they ask what it's like to live in a developing or third world country.  If you're like me, your stories never seem to have the same impact that they have on you.  Numbers are harder to argue with.

If I tell you that the average person in Ecuador makes $7,000.00 a year, and then I tell you that a dvd costs between thirteen and eighteen dollars here, then suddenly you understand why there's an industry for fifty cent pirated dvds.  While these numbers don't cover everything, it's an inventive way to see the world with new eyes.