A social-worker friend who travels a lot had been visiting Kolkata last week and we had been having long talks about resource conservation, Himalayan treks and Belgian beers, not in any particular order. Teresa was telling us about her voluntary work with organizations and what she saw and felt about conservation and community development efforts in Ecuador, China and other places. I asked her if she would want to write for Southern Initiatives and she readily agreed. The post below is from her travel diary from Ecuador , a country she visited in 2007. Look out for more of her writing in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development.
Community Development in Tsurakú
by Teresa Au
After leaving Pacaya Samiria, I high-tailed it back to Ecuador, as I had already over-stayed my visa by nearly a month! I only had to pay a small fee on the way out though, and then spent the next few days on a constant stream of boats, moto-taxis, and buses. The cargo boat ride out of Pacaya Samiria to Tarapoto was even more grueling than the ride there. No parrots in my face this time, but there were about 30 muchachos (teenage boys) sleeping directly underneath my hammock at night. I'm not kidding; sometimes I would shift positions while sleeping and feel someone's knee in my back. It rained both nights, drenching all the hammocks on the poorly-covered upper deck, which I had hoped would be better than the kiddie-playground/zoo of a 2nd deck. I met a nice Colombian couple though and they helped me stay "muy tranquilo" during the journey.
After brief stops in the beautiful colonial cities of Loja and Cuenca, I arrived back in Quito. It was a very nice homecoming. My Quito family hadn't yet checked their email, so they had no idea I was coming. But when I showed up on their doorstep, they could not have been more welcoming. By then, I was suffering from another fierce bout of mysterious stomach illness, which started after a particularly unappetizing 3 sol menú in the Peruvian highlands of Huaraz. They were so wonderful and took such great care of me, making me special soups and asking about my doctor's visits. Again, I just felt so incredibly lucky to know such warm, loving, generous people. Meeting them is definitely one of the best things that has happened to me on my whole trip.
Once my stomach was feeling a bit better, I headed down next to Tsurakú, an indigenous Shuar community where I would be spending the next few weeks, volunteering with the Ecuadorian non-profit Jatun Sacha Foundation (www.jatunsacha.org). Jatun Sacha has seven different stations all around Ecuador, all trying to promote conservation in different ways. Their projects range from scientific research to environmental education to reforestation. I chose the station at Tsurakú because this is their only station located in the middle of a community. I loved what JJ and Emma were doing at Piedras, but research stations like theirs are so remote that the impact on local communities is not very apparent – aside from providing employment for 3 or 4 locals and making the land legally inaccessible to local people who might otherwise try to make a living off it through logging or gold-panning. What happens when you not only have to think about how to preserve the environment but need to consider the welfare of the local people who actually live there? If your only concern is conserving a large chunk of forest, it is possible to come in as a foreigner, purchase large amounts of land and effectively rope it off from any locals who might want to log it, clear it for farming (which is notoriously unsuccessful in rainforest anyway), or otherwise exploit its natural resources. This is essentially what a lot of people do; they set up private reserves or ecotourism lodges that protect the forest (or at least claim to) by prohibiting anyone else from touching it. But where does this leave local people, who are already struggling to put food on the table? A few are employed in ecotourism lodges owned by foreigners, but these places obviously can’t employ everyone and often they don’t even seem to try very hard (most of the people who work at Explorer’s Inn seem to be from big, faraway cities like Cusco or Lima).
Community development itself though is a very thorny issue. Often what is viewed as progress doesn’t seem to really end up benefiting either the community or the environment. In many of the other countries I have visited, I have seen this tension between development and conservation. In China, Nick and I hiked up incredibly beautiful and spiritual mountains, now flooded with tourists throwing their litter everywhere and carving their names into rocks. While trekking through subtropical forests in China's Yunnan, Simon and I saw hundreds of hills stripped of their trees for failed agricultural experiments, now lying bald and baking in the sun. Then in Vietnam, we hiked through stunning rainforest for 7 hours to reach an ethnic Muong village, only to find that a roaring highway had been built right beside the village.
Is it possible to create alternatives to exploiting the environment that are sustainable and also benefit local communities? I hoped that I would get some insight into this question at Tsurakú, a small community of roughly 300 Shuar. The Shuar are one of the largest, most organized indigenous groups in Ecuador, with their own language and customs that are more than 1000 years old. Although they are probably most well-known for being fearsome warriors, for shrinking the heads of their victims, and for polygamy, in the past 50 years Christian missionaries and the Ecuadorian government have changed (and in some cases outlawed) many of their traditional practices. Many have given up their traditional semi-nomadic existence to live in larger, permanent settlements like Tsurakú, which lies right on the rough dirt road between the two small cities of Puyo and Macas. Changes like these have not only impacted their culture and traditional way of life but have had a substantial impact on the environment, as populations have grown exponentially and put much more of a concentrated strain on the forest’s resources.
When I arrived at Tsurakú, the station direction Marlon walked me through Jatun Sacha’s long list of very ambitious projects. This region of the Ecuadorian Amazon is quite special, as it lies in the zone between cloudforest and lowland rainforest. Once upon a time, Mahogany (ahuano) tress were abundant in the forests around Tsurakú. The numbers have dwindled over the years, as mahogany is a particularly profitable and increasingly rare hardwood. Jatun Sacha raises young mahogany trees as well as a variety of other endemic tree species and fruit trees in their plant nursery. They then plant these trees in plots of forest (“fincas”) owned by various Shuar families in the community. So far, they say they have planted over 5000 trees! Jatun Sacha is also planting and maintaining a community plot of land, where they are farming mahogany trees that could someday be sold by the community for profit. In the community, there are also two medicinal plant gardens that Jatun Sacha has started, to both cultivate these useful plants and to preserve the knowledge the Shuar have of natural medicine. Recently, Jatun Sacha has also started a project to conduct transects through different fincas to survey plant and animal populations. During the school year, Jatun Sacha also teaches environmental education classes at the local high school. I was very impressed by the ambitiousness of all the projects and thought that they all seemed interesting and worthwhile.
Over the course of the first week though, I discovered that worthy goals are not necessarily enough, unfortunately. There were about 3 or 4 other volunteers at the station the whole time I was there, and we worked on the various projects each day with the station coordinator and the single community member that they employ, a really cool Shuar named Natale. The work was enjoyable enough, the Jatun Sacha coordinators (Marlon and Carlos, both from Quito who rotated their time at Tsurakú) were both very intelligent, well-intentioned, and dedicated people, and Natale was great to work with and chat to… but where was everyone else in the community?
I quickly learned that people in the community tend to keep to themselves, while simultaneously knowing everyone else’s business. What this means really is that they don’t like to work together, and certainly don’t seem very motivated to work with Jatun Sacha. Jatun Sacha’s online description of Tsurakú had said, “The Shuar at the Tsuraku Center will be managing the reserve with two Foundation staff members.” This really should have read, “Our two wonderfully well-intentioned Foundation staff members will be managing several ambitious but seemingly futile projects with a single member of the Shuar community, who we employ.” Maybe that is a bit unfair. At least 2 families out of the 32 families at Tsurakú seem interested in what Jatun Sacha is doing. However, from the website’s description, I had envisaged working side by side with many different members of the community everyday. Unfortunately, the reality was very different. We rarely even worked with the 2 families who seemed most supportive of Jatun Sacha’s activities. Most people in the community don’t even seem to really understand what Jatun Sacha is trying to do, why they are there, or how they are trying to help the community, apart from the small monetary contribution Jatun Sacha pays to the community every month. While Jatun Sacha has a lot of really good ideas, many of their projects seem doomed to fail without community participation. Eventually, they hope that the community will be motivated enough and able to maintain Jatun Sacha’s conservation projects all on their own. I suppose to be fair, it is still a bit difficult to see how things will turn out, as the station is still very very young, and many changes could require years or generations to really take hold. Still, because the community itself suffers from so many of its own problems that are entirely independent of Jatun Sacha, it seems that Jatun Sacha is working against very unfavorable odds. Already, several of Jatun Sacha’s projects have flopped completely.
As usual, all of the issues involved here are frustratingly complicated. Traditional Shuar practices like hunting are simply not sustainable anymore, as the surrounding forests have been largely depleted of wildlife and populations have only grown. But how can Jatun Sacha get the community to think more in the long-term and be more conservation-minded (both for their own benefit and for the forest’s sake) when community members don’t even seem to want Jatun Sacha there or understand that they are trying to help? While I sympathized with Jatun Sacha’s struggles, I could also sympathize with the community. How can you expect the community to really embrace Jatun Sacha’s efforts when so far, they haven’t appeared to be any significant, DIRECT benefits to the community? Sure, they will eventually get to sell the mahogany from the mahogany farm (if any of it grows well enough), but that is at least 50 years down the line.
While I was at Tsurakú, I was fortunate to have the opportunity of speaking with Katie, the local Peace Corps volunteer. She is also trying help the community through various development initiatives, but has encountered many of the same obstacles as Jatun Sacha has. One of her main projects is helping the community develop community-run ecotourism as a source of income. Katie herself though has become a bit disenchanted by the whole notion of development, especially in this particularly community. By “development,” are we really improving the welfare of these people or are we just hastening their “progress” towards consumerism and commodification of their culture? As Marlon even said, when community members start making more money, the first thing they buy is a television and sound system, even before they think about providing more balanced meals for their children. But who are we really to tell them what to do with their money? As if our own society is any better…
While these issues troubled me a great deal during my time at Tsurakú, the volunteering experience was quite enjoyable in itself. I really enjoyed all of the talks I had with Marlon, Carlos, and Natale, with the other volunteers, and with Katie. I also found it really interesting to learn a bit about Shuar culture from Natale and some of the other people in the community that I met. My last weekend there, we participated in a community workgroup, or “minga.” This was probably my favorite part of my whole time there, as it involved walking 5 hours through the forest to get to even more beautiful primary forest, and then helping out the community with work that needed to be done. The “work” ended up consisting mostly of clearing some vicious weeds and secondary growth to make way for a football (soccer) pitch. I questioned again the real value of our contribution, but it was nice to take part in a community effort like that and get to know some of the people in the community a little bit. I had some good conversations with a very nice woman named Rosalina about chicha-brewing techniques and with her nephew Antonio on hunting and its role in Shuar culture. Some of the other community members who took part in the minga also told us fantastic stories about their family history, which was often very bloody and violent.
While the forest was not nearly as pristine as the forest in the other parts of the Amazon where I’ve volunteered, it was very beautiful in its own right. Because of its location in the zone between cloudforest and the lowlands, the whole region reflects a mix of those two habitats. Giant palms grow everywhere, and I recognized many of the same (or similar) types that I had seen in Peru. But here, moss covers all of the tree trunks and stilt roots. I really loved learning about plants I hadn’t seen before from Natale, Rosalina, Antonio and others, and I was constantly asking them random plant questions or exclaiming, “Que chevere!” (How cool!) when I came across yet another strange new plant.
Teresa Au has studied biology and psychology at Stanford and travelled for months in nations of the South to meet people and experiment different ways of life and living.
Copyright notice: The above post is © Teresa Au, 2009. All rights reserved. Do not use without prior written permission. Our email.
Community Development in Tsurakú
by Teresa Au
After leaving Pacaya Samiria, I high-tailed it back to Ecuador, as I had already over-stayed my visa by nearly a month! I only had to pay a small fee on the way out though, and then spent the next few days on a constant stream of boats, moto-taxis, and buses. The cargo boat ride out of Pacaya Samiria to Tarapoto was even more grueling than the ride there. No parrots in my face this time, but there were about 30 muchachos (teenage boys) sleeping directly underneath my hammock at night. I'm not kidding; sometimes I would shift positions while sleeping and feel someone's knee in my back. It rained both nights, drenching all the hammocks on the poorly-covered upper deck, which I had hoped would be better than the kiddie-playground/zoo of a 2nd deck. I met a nice Colombian couple though and they helped me stay "muy tranquilo" during the journey.
After brief stops in the beautiful colonial cities of Loja and Cuenca, I arrived back in Quito. It was a very nice homecoming. My Quito family hadn't yet checked their email, so they had no idea I was coming. But when I showed up on their doorstep, they could not have been more welcoming. By then, I was suffering from another fierce bout of mysterious stomach illness, which started after a particularly unappetizing 3 sol menú in the Peruvian highlands of Huaraz. They were so wonderful and took such great care of me, making me special soups and asking about my doctor's visits. Again, I just felt so incredibly lucky to know such warm, loving, generous people. Meeting them is definitely one of the best things that has happened to me on my whole trip.
Once my stomach was feeling a bit better, I headed down next to Tsurakú, an indigenous Shuar community where I would be spending the next few weeks, volunteering with the Ecuadorian non-profit Jatun Sacha Foundation (www.jatunsacha.org). Jatun Sacha has seven different stations all around Ecuador, all trying to promote conservation in different ways. Their projects range from scientific research to environmental education to reforestation. I chose the station at Tsurakú because this is their only station located in the middle of a community. I loved what JJ and Emma were doing at Piedras, but research stations like theirs are so remote that the impact on local communities is not very apparent – aside from providing employment for 3 or 4 locals and making the land legally inaccessible to local people who might otherwise try to make a living off it through logging or gold-panning. What happens when you not only have to think about how to preserve the environment but need to consider the welfare of the local people who actually live there? If your only concern is conserving a large chunk of forest, it is possible to come in as a foreigner, purchase large amounts of land and effectively rope it off from any locals who might want to log it, clear it for farming (which is notoriously unsuccessful in rainforest anyway), or otherwise exploit its natural resources. This is essentially what a lot of people do; they set up private reserves or ecotourism lodges that protect the forest (or at least claim to) by prohibiting anyone else from touching it. But where does this leave local people, who are already struggling to put food on the table? A few are employed in ecotourism lodges owned by foreigners, but these places obviously can’t employ everyone and often they don’t even seem to try very hard (most of the people who work at Explorer’s Inn seem to be from big, faraway cities like Cusco or Lima).
Community development itself though is a very thorny issue. Often what is viewed as progress doesn’t seem to really end up benefiting either the community or the environment. In many of the other countries I have visited, I have seen this tension between development and conservation. In China, Nick and I hiked up incredibly beautiful and spiritual mountains, now flooded with tourists throwing their litter everywhere and carving their names into rocks. While trekking through subtropical forests in China's Yunnan, Simon and I saw hundreds of hills stripped of their trees for failed agricultural experiments, now lying bald and baking in the sun. Then in Vietnam, we hiked through stunning rainforest for 7 hours to reach an ethnic Muong village, only to find that a roaring highway had been built right beside the village.
Is it possible to create alternatives to exploiting the environment that are sustainable and also benefit local communities? I hoped that I would get some insight into this question at Tsurakú, a small community of roughly 300 Shuar. The Shuar are one of the largest, most organized indigenous groups in Ecuador, with their own language and customs that are more than 1000 years old. Although they are probably most well-known for being fearsome warriors, for shrinking the heads of their victims, and for polygamy, in the past 50 years Christian missionaries and the Ecuadorian government have changed (and in some cases outlawed) many of their traditional practices. Many have given up their traditional semi-nomadic existence to live in larger, permanent settlements like Tsurakú, which lies right on the rough dirt road between the two small cities of Puyo and Macas. Changes like these have not only impacted their culture and traditional way of life but have had a substantial impact on the environment, as populations have grown exponentially and put much more of a concentrated strain on the forest’s resources.
When I arrived at Tsurakú, the station direction Marlon walked me through Jatun Sacha’s long list of very ambitious projects. This region of the Ecuadorian Amazon is quite special, as it lies in the zone between cloudforest and lowland rainforest. Once upon a time, Mahogany (ahuano) tress were abundant in the forests around Tsurakú. The numbers have dwindled over the years, as mahogany is a particularly profitable and increasingly rare hardwood. Jatun Sacha raises young mahogany trees as well as a variety of other endemic tree species and fruit trees in their plant nursery. They then plant these trees in plots of forest (“fincas”) owned by various Shuar families in the community. So far, they say they have planted over 5000 trees! Jatun Sacha is also planting and maintaining a community plot of land, where they are farming mahogany trees that could someday be sold by the community for profit. In the community, there are also two medicinal plant gardens that Jatun Sacha has started, to both cultivate these useful plants and to preserve the knowledge the Shuar have of natural medicine. Recently, Jatun Sacha has also started a project to conduct transects through different fincas to survey plant and animal populations. During the school year, Jatun Sacha also teaches environmental education classes at the local high school. I was very impressed by the ambitiousness of all the projects and thought that they all seemed interesting and worthwhile.
Over the course of the first week though, I discovered that worthy goals are not necessarily enough, unfortunately. There were about 3 or 4 other volunteers at the station the whole time I was there, and we worked on the various projects each day with the station coordinator and the single community member that they employ, a really cool Shuar named Natale. The work was enjoyable enough, the Jatun Sacha coordinators (Marlon and Carlos, both from Quito who rotated their time at Tsurakú) were both very intelligent, well-intentioned, and dedicated people, and Natale was great to work with and chat to… but where was everyone else in the community?
I quickly learned that people in the community tend to keep to themselves, while simultaneously knowing everyone else’s business. What this means really is that they don’t like to work together, and certainly don’t seem very motivated to work with Jatun Sacha. Jatun Sacha’s online description of Tsurakú had said, “The Shuar at the Tsuraku Center will be managing the reserve with two Foundation staff members.” This really should have read, “Our two wonderfully well-intentioned Foundation staff members will be managing several ambitious but seemingly futile projects with a single member of the Shuar community, who we employ.” Maybe that is a bit unfair. At least 2 families out of the 32 families at Tsurakú seem interested in what Jatun Sacha is doing. However, from the website’s description, I had envisaged working side by side with many different members of the community everyday. Unfortunately, the reality was very different. We rarely even worked with the 2 families who seemed most supportive of Jatun Sacha’s activities. Most people in the community don’t even seem to really understand what Jatun Sacha is trying to do, why they are there, or how they are trying to help the community, apart from the small monetary contribution Jatun Sacha pays to the community every month. While Jatun Sacha has a lot of really good ideas, many of their projects seem doomed to fail without community participation. Eventually, they hope that the community will be motivated enough and able to maintain Jatun Sacha’s conservation projects all on their own. I suppose to be fair, it is still a bit difficult to see how things will turn out, as the station is still very very young, and many changes could require years or generations to really take hold. Still, because the community itself suffers from so many of its own problems that are entirely independent of Jatun Sacha, it seems that Jatun Sacha is working against very unfavorable odds. Already, several of Jatun Sacha’s projects have flopped completely.
As usual, all of the issues involved here are frustratingly complicated. Traditional Shuar practices like hunting are simply not sustainable anymore, as the surrounding forests have been largely depleted of wildlife and populations have only grown. But how can Jatun Sacha get the community to think more in the long-term and be more conservation-minded (both for their own benefit and for the forest’s sake) when community members don’t even seem to want Jatun Sacha there or understand that they are trying to help? While I sympathized with Jatun Sacha’s struggles, I could also sympathize with the community. How can you expect the community to really embrace Jatun Sacha’s efforts when so far, they haven’t appeared to be any significant, DIRECT benefits to the community? Sure, they will eventually get to sell the mahogany from the mahogany farm (if any of it grows well enough), but that is at least 50 years down the line.
While I was at Tsurakú, I was fortunate to have the opportunity of speaking with Katie, the local Peace Corps volunteer. She is also trying help the community through various development initiatives, but has encountered many of the same obstacles as Jatun Sacha has. One of her main projects is helping the community develop community-run ecotourism as a source of income. Katie herself though has become a bit disenchanted by the whole notion of development, especially in this particularly community. By “development,” are we really improving the welfare of these people or are we just hastening their “progress” towards consumerism and commodification of their culture? As Marlon even said, when community members start making more money, the first thing they buy is a television and sound system, even before they think about providing more balanced meals for their children. But who are we really to tell them what to do with their money? As if our own society is any better…
While these issues troubled me a great deal during my time at Tsurakú, the volunteering experience was quite enjoyable in itself. I really enjoyed all of the talks I had with Marlon, Carlos, and Natale, with the other volunteers, and with Katie. I also found it really interesting to learn a bit about Shuar culture from Natale and some of the other people in the community that I met. My last weekend there, we participated in a community workgroup, or “minga.” This was probably my favorite part of my whole time there, as it involved walking 5 hours through the forest to get to even more beautiful primary forest, and then helping out the community with work that needed to be done. The “work” ended up consisting mostly of clearing some vicious weeds and secondary growth to make way for a football (soccer) pitch. I questioned again the real value of our contribution, but it was nice to take part in a community effort like that and get to know some of the people in the community a little bit. I had some good conversations with a very nice woman named Rosalina about chicha-brewing techniques and with her nephew Antonio on hunting and its role in Shuar culture. Some of the other community members who took part in the minga also told us fantastic stories about their family history, which was often very bloody and violent.
While the forest was not nearly as pristine as the forest in the other parts of the Amazon where I’ve volunteered, it was very beautiful in its own right. Because of its location in the zone between cloudforest and the lowlands, the whole region reflects a mix of those two habitats. Giant palms grow everywhere, and I recognized many of the same (or similar) types that I had seen in Peru. But here, moss covers all of the tree trunks and stilt roots. I really loved learning about plants I hadn’t seen before from Natale, Rosalina, Antonio and others, and I was constantly asking them random plant questions or exclaiming, “Que chevere!” (How cool!) when I came across yet another strange new plant.
Teresa Au has studied biology and psychology at Stanford and travelled for months in nations of the South to meet people and experiment different ways of life and living.
Copyright notice: The above post is © Teresa Au, 2009. All rights reserved. Do not use without prior written permission. Our email.
