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Nick Pharazyn writes

...about his experience while volunteering in Ecuador.

26 November 2006: Adjusting to life in the jungle
Righto... haven't written for yonks due to being busy with various activities as well as the irregular hours at which this office (which has computers with an Internet connection) is open but plenty has happened in the past week. Life in the jungle is pretty interesting... The humidity here is like 95%. Books don't like these conditions and I need to air my bags/dirty clothes in the sun soon so that they don't go mouldy. The place is bursting with life, I must have seen at least 15 different species of grasshoppers so far and marisposas (butterflies) and their caterpillars are everywhere. Some species are pretty spectacular like the blue morpho - the interiors of its wings are a bright blue and they're pretty big. Hahahaha, oh yeah, almost everything here bites - all of the ant species, even the tiny ones - this is a bit of shock to me coming from New Zealand where the only things that can really kill you in the bush are hypothermia or a nasty fall. I've seen about 5 Congas so far - praise allah that I was warned not to touch one the first time I set eyes one of these black 3 cm long ants. Apparently their sting feels like a gunshot wound. Oh yeah, many of the bugs are enormous here too. This moth flew into the dining room yesterday and the first question we (the volunteers) asked was "is that a bat?"

Friday was my first day of work. A group of us cut grass/weeds with machetes (they use them for everything here). Saturdays are Bosque (forest) days so we went on a 7 hour hike (really easy pace mind you) through the reserve. Was lucky enough to see and be able to hold a tiny little red and blue poison dart frog (they're only poisonous if the secretions on their skin get into open wounds). These things fascinated me when I was 9 so that was pretty cool. Afterwards we visited a bar where the lady at the counter had her baby with her - kids under 10 are absolutely everywhere in Ecuador - there's a massive demographic imbalance... It really underscores the explosive population growth going on here. I bought a 300 ml coke in a glass bottle. They reuse many glass bottles here over and over again - mine was dated 1996!! On the downside of waste related environmental issues though, people frequently just biff rubbish out vehicle windows - some of the roadsides are in a terrible state.

Monday was good. Although I was on kitchen duty most of the day a troop of saddle backed Tamarins came swinging through the secondary (regenerating) forest that surrounds the buildings here around lunch time - there were about 6 of them all chittering away like little birds and performing acrobatic leaps. After lunch I went back to my cabin to chill and suddenly I heard what sounded like a coconut falling out of a tree outside, Johanes, one of the German volunteers here exclaimed something so I went out to have a look and was greeted by a metre long snake. It lay there coiled up, hissing at us as we gathered around and lunged at me when I got close to take a photo, mind you I wasn't really reckless, an American volunteer here named Carter was fairly sure it wasn't poisonous and promptly picked the beast up. Loco!

On Wednesday 3 of us drove an hour and half north back up the road to Quito to a small quichua community. It seems that indigenous peoples worldwide really do suffer the same problems. Here all the young people are moving away to the big cities of Quito, Cuenca and Guayaquil and losing touch with their culture. In an effort to sort of reaffirm their cultural identity, a local community group was creating a small ethno-botanical/medicinal plant garden - we brought plants with us and then helped to plant them, we also planted a field with Mani (peanuts). They're used as a ground cover to control erosion here and as legumes they also pump nitrogen into the soil and of course you can always harvest the peanuts. This was really satisfying work and afterwards we visited some 3000 year old rock carvings up the road. That was pretty cool. Then we cooled off in this picturesque mountain river where about 30 local kids were also swimming. Swimming in the Rio Napo near the station here is nice too but this was better because the river banks weren't buzzing with mosquitoes. Haha, I spent Thursday recovering from intense sun burn and yesterday did work clearing weeds in the CCPA (Centro de Conservacion Plantas Amazonicas) - a sort of ethno-botanical/educational garden and tree nursery down the road from the station. Saw a bright green and purple hummingbird up close which was feral. I later identified it as a "Fork tailed Woodnymph" - the names of hummingbirds here are almost as enchanting as the creatures themselves. Other examples include: "Glittering Throated Emerald", "Black Throated Mango" and "Amethyst Woodstar".

Today we had another bosque and we actually came across a hummingbird on her nest, which was beside the trail at about waist height - the eggs were only a little bigger than tic-tacs! We also visited the 30 metre high bird observation tower. It's basically a steel triangular frame with each side about 40 cm wide and a ladder on one side; great views from near the top (I got about ¾ of the way up) but frankly with slippery ladder rungs and muddy gumboots on my feet I didn't feel safe! I'm going to go up another day with a harness, and some binoculars. We had lunch at this massive abandoned house which has been overgrown over the years by secondary forest. The only things living there now are a few bats and some termites - it had a bit of mahogany in it though which was interesting. That stuff is insanely hard and resistant to rot - not surprising seeing the conditions the trees have to cope with here but pretty interesting all the same. Walked through a cacao plantation which was interesting too. The big fruits start out green and gradually turn red - when they finally turn yellow they're ripe. The foundation has bought out several nearby plots of agricultural land, including many cacao plantations and they're just letting the forest regenerate there.

The landscape here is food for thought. Before I arrived I'd read that the reserve (2500 hectares and 80% primary forest) was pretty much the last patch of forest in the area, the rest having been cleared by settlers. In reality most of the land here is still covered by rainforest - it's just that almost all of it is secondary forest. The crucial point is that plants here grow like... well they grow incredibly fast. It's not the soil - that's generally pretty crap - but the climate of RAIN, SUN, RAIN, SUN... with consistently high temperatures all year round ensures that any untended plots of agricultural land are swiftly reclaimed by the jungle. So there's still a lot of forest, it's just not of the sort that's richest in biodiversity. Of course most of the large forest animals - woolly monkeys, tapirs, jaguars etc, were hunted to local extinction in the area years ago, so the ecosystems around here are kinda incomplete too... Looking at the landscape here reminds me of photos of New Zealand's lowland forests that I've seen from the turn of last century. They're in that same pioneering stage (with a sort of "nature is the enemy" type mentality) here now as we were 100 years ago. The crucial difference is that the destruction here isn't state condoned or as methodical and of course once you destroy the forest in New Zealand it can really be a battle to bring it back again. However I have heard that in other parts of Ecuadorian Amazonia the settlers aren't practicing shifting cultivation. For instance around the oil town of Coca to the north I've heard they're just clear cutting the rainforest in all directions. ¡No bueno!

I forgot to mention this when I wrote last night but today (Sunday) they're having a second round of presidential elections here. It's between two candidates, Alvaro Novoa and Rafael Correa. From what I've heard neither is that great but generally speaking Correa sounds like he'll do more good for the country. His politics lean slightly towards the left and he has some radical ideas like drastically reducing the number of provinces here (there's a problem with small provinces with too many elected officials with nothing to do) and he doesn't approve of the switch in currency Ecuador made in 2000 from the Sucre to the US dollar.

The government of the time made the switch in response to spiralling inflation and it has been good for the economy and effectively acted to stabilize it. However, at the same time prices for goods and services in general have risen so it hasn't been good for the nation's poor, who represent the majority of the population.

He has some quite progressive policies in areas like education and health and also wants oil companies to clean up their environmental practices as well as to ensure that more $$ from the oil industry here actually stay in Ecuador. At the moment the vast majority of profits go offshore.

Novoa (pronounced "No-Boa") doesn't sound great. He's the richest man in Ecuador and makes his profits from the banana plantations he owns. One of the main things he wants to do is push through a free trade agreement with the US which will serve to increase profits for his commercial agricultural operations, but financially it's going to be bad for small scale farmers. He also has a dodgy track record - I was just reading how workers on his plantations have been threatened with being fired or shot if they attempt to unionize in an effort to gain better working conditions. Also, kids as young as 8 have been found forced to work in hazardous conditions on this plantations. There are campaign posters for both candidates everywhere but Novoa posters are more common. I hope it doesn't happen but it looks like he'll be able to win by buying enough votes (democracy can still be a bit dodgy at times in Latin America).