Chau, Monkey Jungle Kids

I've been hesitant to write this blog post, I think because I didn't know quite what to say. I'm still not sure I have the words to explain to everyone exactly what has happened within the past, well, two weeks, but here it goes. 

To start off with, I'm home... surprise! The Yachana Gap Year is officially closed, and all of us volunteers, and all of the students at the high school have returned home. The reasons and dirty details behind the closing of the Gap Year, are not things I feel comfortable posting in a public blog, but if you really are interested, I would be happy to fill you in.

Things happened fast. One Thursday morning, the volunteers had a meeting with Douglas where we were informed with the bad news that everything was coming to an end, we had a meeting with the kids that afternoon, and were out for good the next morning at 8. 

Leaving Yachana was difficult. Our farewell was abrupt and rushed. During the last jornada, which lasted only a week, many of the students had not yet returned to the high school. So there was not the chance for formal goodbyes with everyone. The mood was low. It was confusing and very emotional. While we were unsure during that last week of what was going to happen, no one could have foreseen how bad it would feel when we found out we would be leaving early.

Transitioning back to life at home has been interesting and challenging. At first it was exciting. My family was here, and my dog, and my house, just the way I'd left it. It was great to have a closet full of "new" clothes. At least clothes not stained with bleach and eaten through by cockroaches. I found it hard to start throwing my toilet paper in the toilet again instead of into the trash can (TMI?). I felt overwhelmed by the food options available to me, not only at the grocery store, but also in my own kitchen. It's been great to cook for myself, and drink good wine, and IPA. It's all so familiar, and so new at the same time. It's really an odd feeling.

There were things I started to miss, like aji peppers, passionfruit juice, fried plantains, the sound of the oropendulas with their water drop call, Prince Royce singing bachata on the cell phones of our kids. Most of all, I think, right away I missed my little family of Yachana volunteers. Ryan, Chris, Stephanie and Megan were my family for 8 months. We spend every day together. We travelled at lot. We laughed a lot. We were frustrated a lot. And we got to know each other... a lot. Ryan once put it really well that no matter where he goes and what he does, no matter how much he loves what he is doing and who he is with, he will never again experience the kind of relationship that the 5 and then 4 of us had. It was a unique situation that can never be replicated. I loved working with my team.

So now, out of the jungle. No more machetes, no more bug bites, no more 90% humidity and blazing equator sun. But also: no more jungle monkey kids; no more monkey; no more waking up to a blank page of a day upon which anything could possibly be written, or painted, seen or experienced; no more canoe rides down river - or better yet - up river (it takes longer); no more caiman hiding out in our kitchen; no more showering below the giant breadfruit trees; no more late night high school dances to reggaeton in the volleyball field under the luminous stars; no more walks on rainforest paths, finding brilliantly colored dart and tree frogs, poisonous snakes, bird eating spiders, and who knows what other terrifying creatures; so many other "no mores." All of these are things I don't want to forget. I don't think I'll forget, but I'm afraid I might forget. Past experiences tend to fade like an old polaroid picture. They start to become like storybook tales. Did that really happen? 

While my time in the jungle ended earlier than expected, it was an incredible experience and opportunity that I feel so lucky to have had. I met wonderful, inspiring people who filled me with energy and awe. I hope to meet them again someday. But for now it's adios to the beautiful rainforest. I hope to explore more someday. Now it's off to the bees!

PS: I just want to send a special shout out to Mike Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook. Congratulations, you have reached the farthest reaches of the world: The Amazon rainforest. And my life would be far more glum without your phenomenal genius. Now I can talk with my students, who think that Facebook is the equivalent to the internet. You have truly left your mark.

Let it Bee.

When the going gets tough, and the rain never stops… you just keep on goin’. This is how I’ve been feeling during the past few weeks in Yachana. We kept asking locals, “And when is the rainy season exactly?” to which we received varying answers and a lot of confused looks that seemed to say, “I live in the Amazon RAIN forest; it always RAINS.” Now we (and most everyone else for that matter) are pretty certain we have stumbled right into the rainy season, having been given little time to prepare our minds or to change our moldy sheets. It rains every day. And when it rains, you’re not going anywhere. Movement from the high school to the lodge has become more challenging. The path is one big muddy swamp. We sink, knee deep, into what once was safe, solid ground. We slip and slide in a chocolate pudding slick as we trudge along with our bags of laundry and our laptops.

Other challenges have been an internet outage which lasted for just over a week. Not a huge deal. But I will admit that I was starting to get antsy with the lack of means of communication with the outside world. Not only that, but I had planned a whole jornada around the use of donated cameras to have the students create photo blogs in English. I am still determined to make it happen. But, like most things here in Ecuador, and most of all in the Amazon, things move a little more slowly than one might hope. And, you just keep on goin’.

We three volunteers are settling into our new position of “co-principals,” and, by default, primary authority figures of Yachana Technical High School. It’s still a little bit laughable to me when I really think about what I’m doing. Me? Running a high school in the middle of the Amazon rain forest? Disciplining students only a few years younger than myself? How did this happen?

But honestly, it’s really not just a big joke. It’s a pretty challenging situation, and one that none of us had expected when we signed up for this year. The issues we have most recently been dealing with is with kids sneaking out,  not returning to the high school after having been sent out to run an errand (such as carrying gas tanks to the lodge, or to fetch cheese for breakfast in the morning). I don’t mean to complain about the kids. They are good kids and I don’t expect them to get into any REAL trouble in which anyone truly gets hurt. At least on purpose. But we do feel a certain degree of responsibility for the kids and are trying to balance enforcing our authority, while giving them the space that they need as adolescents and as respectable kids. Not a lesson I planned on learning until I had kids of my own!

There are times when we find ourselves in a slump. Especially when we start to feel a little bit like the only ones invested in the school (whether a reality or just a suspicion). And I have started to notice that the mood of the group tends to dictate the mood of its members. It’s a bit like a bee hive. (Can you see where my mind is starting to turn?) When you approach the hive the bees’ buzzing changes in pitch. When you open the lid, there’s another change. The bees become agitated. So the beekeeper must move slowly, to minimize the extent to which the bees (as a hive) perceive a threat. I wonder: who perceives the threat first? Is there an individual in the hive who, upon first perception of threat, communicates that awareness to the rest of the hive? Or do the bees, as a hive, recognize the threat immediately, all together?  Who, then, calms the hive? Is there an individual who must inform the hive that the threat has withdrawn? Or is there a sort of “collective consciousness” – to get all Anthropology-ish on you – that regulates the mood of the hive?

In some ways, I wonder if the same questions can be answered through observations of our own group dynamic. I never sensed that one person became negative before the others. It just sort of happened before we even realized it. Now that I realize it, I feel that the sense of threat might not be a reality at all, but my own perception and feeling of abandonment. Now that I can recognize it as possibly just a perception, I can start to discard it as necessarily truth. Now I feel a little bit better. I don’t have to feel negative towards the situation and I can start to buzz at a slower frequency. I take a deep breath and smile at my students instead of blaming them for something that’s not their fault. There is not a real threat among us. They are going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. I make them too.

So can a smile change, even a little bit, the mood of the “hive”? Can it communicate to the masses that the perceived threat is no longer perceived? Or that maybe it wasn’t ever there at all?

Maybe I’m making a bit of a stretch here; I’m not trying to say that we function exactly like bees in their hive. But I can see some similarities. Either way, it’s high time to lift the group morale, and it might take a glimmer of a smile or a hint of a laugh to communicate to the group that things are alright. 

Oh the times they are a changin'

As I sit here listening to the Lambada blasting from our one GIANT speaker on the porch of Yachana Technical High School, I start to remember how different life is here. After about 6 and a half months of living in Ecuador, things seem pretty normal, or maybe abnormality is just getting more normal. Rather than weekend dances in the high school gymnasium, dances take place under the stars, on the outdoor volleyball court. Students prefer to dance to salsa, merengue and bachata to rap or electronic... although they do like to imitate the American tendency to jump up and down with one hand in the air when an electronic song does pass through the playlist.

The dances have a unique feeling to those that I remember when I was a high school teenybopper. Even at a young age, the dancing is traditional. There is lots of hip swinging and coordinated movements that you don't expect teenagers to be so skilled at performing. Yet for each young man there must be one young woman, so that everyone has a dance partner. If the numbers are off, the whole dance floor becomes a bit muddled. No one quite knows how to respond. Usually what happens is that everyone sees one lone dancer awkwardly shaking his or her hips among a sea of couples, and the floor is opened up into a giant circle of swaying bodies. Once in a while, when the music picks up, one or two people will enter the center of the circle and perform some sort of entertaining dance move. Zero dance skill is needed.

While things, as foreign and new as they are, have begun to seem commonplace, a lot has changed since I came down here. The first week was charged with meetings and orientation during which we volunteers, the 4 of us that there were at that time, came up with the schedule and face of what we are calling the Yachana "Gap Year." We came up with mission statements and goals, objectives and jobs for each person on our small team of Americans and Ecuadorians. We had a Principal and a Yachana graduate, Mauricio, who was in charge of leading the students in agricultural activities in the afternoons. We had volunteers in Quito supporting us with advice, suggestions and resources.

Since that time, our Principal has left the school, our agriculturist has become a free-lance jungle guide, our business volunteer has gone back to grad school in California, and Stephanie has moved to Quito to house students during their internships in Quito. This leaves Ryan, Chris and myself as the leaders of the Gap Year program at the high school. The first few days after Carlos had gone, we panicked, just a bit. We felt a loss of the support we came in with, and weren't sure how the students would react to the lack of a general leader. And we definitely weren't prepared to be the "Principals" of a school in the Amazon rain forest. None of us really felt qualified nor willing to take on that role.

We have had to improvise. The class part was easy. We have continued to teach our classes in the mornings. We are on a schedule in which each day, two of us teach for one hour while one teaches for two. The more interesting time of day is the afternoon. We have a considerably large farm area in which we grow plantains, orange trees, cacao (the fruit from which we make chocolate), aji (a type of very hot pepper), yuca and lemons. In the past, when there were more students living and studying at the high school, there would be as many as 30 students each day, morning and afternoon, working the fields. Now we have only 10 students, the occasional afternoon, and one agricultural specialist who visits the school for 3 days at a time, once a month. Therefore, we have begun to be not only the co-principals of the jungle high school, but also those in charge of the jungle farm. This, for three gringos, is no light undertaking. When I found myself hacking away with a machete at weeds taller than me and giant stinging nettle among the banana trees, I started to realize that I have adapted to some pretty extreme circumstances, and have begun to delve into tasks that I never thought I would find myself delving into.

It's interesting to watch the changes. But it's also slightly disconcerting that there are 4 months left of unpredictability. That's a good word for the jungle: unpredictable. You really don't know what will happen. There's just no way of knowing.

Entangled habitats

When you leave things untouched for too long in the jungle, interesting things start to happen. Habitats begin to form upon and within things that you might not normally consider to be habitable. Then you start to think, "Who's habitat have I made my own?"

I recently changed rooms at the high school. You wouldn't think there would be much of a difference between the small wooden boxes where we exist but, in fact, there are several things to consider. The benefits of my new and improved residence is that it is on the end of the hall, and has almost wrap around windows which are screened! The biggest thrill: more light = less mold. That doesn't mean that my clothes are any less mildew-y than they were before, but it makes me feel like maybe my pillow won't develop a layer of scum every 4 or 5 days.

Each room in the high school seems to have it's own personality. Ryan's room, for instance, has proven to be the living place of some of the most gigantic cockroaches in the Amazon. Megan's room, on the other hand, was the place where grasshoppers came at night to say their final words, and leave their final marks on the mortal world. In the morning, she would sweep out a good 10 to 20 grasshoppers, and find several fresh grasshopper excrement stains on her mosquito net. Thank the divine Creator for mosquito nets.

You might find interesting some of the things that were going on in my OLD room of which I was unaware for 5 months:

At first glance, this may seem to you a normal, well worn climbing shoe...

... but on closer observation, it has become a nest for baby spiders.

We sometimes wonder how our presence in the world has changed the Earth's natural cycles, ecosystems, biospheres... We see that big cities have been invasive on many levels. They have introduced pollution, taken away habitats, and created stresses for humans and animals. But even as we try to get "closer to nature," or to get away from the destructive nature of a "Western lifestyle," we can see that our very presence is taxing on the environment.

I don't think that crayons are a staple in the normal diet of a jungle cockroach.

But they have certainly taken a liking to mine which had been sitting on my top bunk for 4 months.

I'm fascinated by the work it takes to keep our habitat habitable here in the middle of a web of ecosystems and species of flora and fauna. The jungle seems to swallow things whole. If we leave the banana plantation to fend for itself for too long, it is overgrown with stinging nettle and other tall grasses and tree saplings. One old classroom which is no longer in use is nearly unrecognizable as a thatched roof hut, as the elements have taken their toll over the past year. The dorm building that is vacant this year has been infested with termite nests. Since we are currently in a gap year, and have only between 8 and 10 students at the high school at any given time, we are unable to keep the school from getting a bit rundown. 

As humans we really are a quite invasive species. Even as we try to live in conjunction with nature, we bring a great amount of stress to it. Even to as (seemingly) small of a degree as our crayola crayons.

Delinquent Blogger

I have officially been designated “delinquent blogger” by one of the lovely volunteers we have here at Yachana this month. A faithful blogger would never dream of taking a month-long blogging hiatus. In my own defense, I must point out that sometimes life needs to be lived, and the telling of it all has to wait its turn. In any case, I apologize for the neglect and promise that for the rest of my blogging career I shall under no circumstances let dust settle upon my keyboard.

I’ve been having a really wonderful jornada back at Yachana after a terrific three week December break during which I had the chance to return to Peru, visit with my host parents Dina and Claus, and travel around with my college roommate, Amanda, and her mother who was incredibly generous to me during their trip, treating me to 2 nights in a five-star hotel in the Sacred Valley, delicious meals and a tour of some of the most interesting ruins between Cusco and Urubamba.

Never thought I would get to share Cusco with my college roomie!! - Amanda and I in the center of Cusco.

The ruins of Moray. They were an Inca agricultural experimentation site where different crops were grown on the different terraces. The temperature is consistently 11 degrees C higher at the bottom of the circular structure. This allowed the Incas to grow (or test the possibility of cultivating) crops that would not normally survive at the high altitude of over 3,500 ft. above sea level.

Visiting Peru was refreshing. There was none of the day to day stress of planning classes and staff meetings, tromping back and forth a kilometer and a half two ways every day between the high school and the lodge, got to pick my own meals and visit my old haunts in Cusco. Every time I go back there it seems like the magnetic energy gets stronger, pulling me closer and insisting upon my return. Things happen, important people pass into my life, chance meetings. Each time my vision becomes clearer as to how I want my life to transpire. I’m reminded of what's important and I realize, really, there is no formula for how to live life. There are actually no rules.

After having tracked down Jerry and Nancy, who had moved from their home in Pisac to a town just outside of Urubamba, I was introduced to their bee project: The Sacred Valley Bee Sanctuary. They are avid bee-keepers and have developed a technique for bee-keeping which maximizes on the bees’ own production method, and not introducing synthetic materials into the hives. The vision is to understand the hive as a living and thriving entity, with the bees as essential parts of a united whole. More to come on this in a future post!

The road that runs through the Sacred Valley. This is where Nancy and Jerry have their bee sanctuary.

Condor in flight - we visited an animal reserve and entered a walk -in cage. A worker placed a piece of raw meat 100 feet away and the condors came flying over our heads! Their wing span can reach 9 feet.

 

 

And we even got to pet the baby condor!

 

Some mountain cat with beautiful leopard-like print.

Having spent two nights in the luxurious Tambo Inca Hotel in Urubamba where the lights in the halls illuminate the way as you wander through…

… where beds were made of clouds:

… the rain showers pristinely clean:

… and the food treated as a form of art:

... I wasn´t exactly running back to my damp, dirty, moldy room in the jungle. The cockroaches welcomed me back by climbing out of the drain and up my leg while I was taking a shower... sometimes you just have to desensitize yourself to deal with situations that are just simply unpleasant.

But once I was back I had a realy wonderful jornada. Probably the best yet! The kids from the quinto curso (our youngest group of kids) were back and, I hate to choose favorites but, they are hands-down my favorite group at Yachana. Amanda and her mom spent a few days at Yachana so I got to host hem and see the other side of the Yachana experience - the tourist side. We visited the local shaman, went on a night hike, made homemade chocolate from fresch cacao, and Amanda´s mom even taught an art class!

Peeled and roasted cacao beans.

Ground cacao beans. The cacao fruit is yellow when ripe, and the fruit on the outside is sweet and delicious!

City girl in the jungle! Getting ready to ground the cacao.

So that is my brief update of the past couple months. I promise to all that I will be updating far more regularly from here on out. That is - assuming that our power situation at Colegio Yachana is improved when I return. Nunca se sabe!!


Sincerely,


-The Delinquent Blogger