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Published: August 14th 2008
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(Catherine)
Earlier this year, we booked a two week volunteer placement working with an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but as our starting date got closer we began to have second thoughts. What if it wasn´t what we expected? We were so used to being on our own, how would we cope fitting in with someone else´s timetable? And what if there were loads of scary snakes and spiders?! But we needn´t have worried. As soon as we arrived at the tiny rainforest village of Arutam we knew it was going to be a great experience - scary creatures and all!
Arutam is a traditional Shuar community situated at the base of the Andean foothills. Until the 1960s, Shuar people were a feared tribe in South America because of their tradition for shrinking the heads of their enemies! Luckily for us, none of that business goes on anymore and the people we met on our placement were kind, welcoming and definitely not to be feared!
Although Shuar people are traditionally self-sufficient, these days they need to make some money for necessities such as education, health services and clothes.
In the past, the Arutam community made this money by selling timber. The volunteer project was founded to offer an alternative source of income in order to stop the deforestation.
An arrival in Arutam, we were shown to our new home (a two-storey wooden hut with outdoor toilet) by Ernesto, the chief of the village. Nobody in the community speaks English and our limited Spanish barely stretches beyond booking hotel rooms and buying bus tickets which made things interesting (although we soon learnt the most important words you need in the jungle - ´spider´, ´snake´ and ´dangerous´!). Luckily for us, we were joined on day three by Sam and Jodie from London who spoke brilliant Spanish - hurrah! Our group was also made up of James from Melbourne, Veronica from California and John from Canterbury. Thankfully, everyone was really nice so we didn´t have any ´Big Brother´ style showdowns or Í´m a Celebrity...´arguments!
Our work in the first week consisted of gardening, making a road and reforestation work which basically involved cutting down weeds with machetes - lots of fun! We had been told to bring wellies with us and it soon became apparent why - I guess
Big Green Caterpillar
We came across this cartoon-like caterpillar when we were cutting down weeds. they don´t call it the rainforest for nothing! We ate a traditional Shuar diet of plantain, plantain and more plantain. On a good day, we got some pasta, bananas or papaya with it!
We were also lucky enough to be invited to the local high school graduation and graduation fiesta. Here we got our first taste of a traditional Shuar drink called chicha which is made from yuca root. None of us were overly keen to try it because of the way it is made. Shuar women chew up the root in their mouths until it is liquefied then spit it out into a big bowl. The enzymes in their mouths work to ferment the yuca so after it has been left for a few days, it´s quite alcoholic. At the fiesta, it was being passed around in huge jugs and bowls and because it´s considered rude to refuse food or drink, we had to try it! I tried not to think about how it was made as I took my first (very tiny!) sip. The taste was pretty bad - almost like bitter off-yoghurt. We had to get used to it pretty quickly though as the chicha kept
flowing all night.
We didn´t have to work over the weekend so we all travelled to the pretty thermal spa town of Banos to have our laundry done, eat some food with flavour and, most importantly, stock up on sauces to make the plantain go down easier!
The work we did at Arutam was interesting and worthwhile but, with seven of us, we got through it quite quickly, so we decided to spend the second week with another community managed by the same project. Even smaller than Arutam, Irshim houses just one family and is probably the most remote place we´ve been to on our travels so far. To get there, we had to hike from the nearest road for three hours through the jungle - again our wellies came in very useful as some of the mud was almost knee deep due to a massive thunder storm the night before. The community doesn´t have electricy or running water and the nearest shop is a two and a half hours away. On arrival, we were greeted with a bowl of chicha each (a whole bowl, not just a sip!). This batch had been mixed with water so it
Climbing a Big Vine
Shuar people used to believe these twisty vines went all the way to the moon! didn´t taste as bad as the stuff we´d had at the fiesta but was still an effort to drink.
Irshim has only recently opened up to volunteers and we were the largest group they´ve had so far (they had to make some extra beds before we arrived to fit us all in!). The family were absolutely lovely and really made us feel welcome in their home. Jorge, the chief, has lots of ideas of where he wants this new project to go so he worked us hard. We chopped up bamboo to make shelves, cleared an area of forest to make a crop garden, built a pen to house two tortoises, constucted part of a new hut, collected bananas and helped out in the kitchen. By the end of day one we´d acquired blisters, scratches and bites but we´d also learnt lots about the Shuar traditions, beliefs and lifestyle.
The family have a really hard life and even the simpliest of tasks took a lot of time and energy. Our house was a 15 minute walk from the family home so just getting to breakfast involved trekking up and down in deep mud past a hive of dangerous
wasps (their sting really hurts and if enough of them get you, it can be fatal). We slept on wooden beds with no matresses, bathed in the river and used an outdoor compost toilet (otherwise known as a hole in the ground!). It was hard work but really rewarding.
On our last evening, Jorge taught us some traditional Shuar games and we had great fun throwing wooden spears and fighting each other with spears and shields. Later the children dressed in ceremonial costumes and danced for us while Jorge played a variety of instruments. In return, we shared a bit of our culture by teaching the family how to do the ´Hokey Cokey´!
By our last day we were all ready to leave for the relative comfort of Arutam and the thought of reaching the shop and buying beer and biscuits kept us going on the trek back!
Our two week volunteer placement was an amazing experience and we got so much more out of it than we ever expected. My lasting memories of our time in the jungle will be meeting some great people, seeing lots of scary creatures, trying to drink chicha without grimacing, listening
to Jorge´s Shuar stories, playing cards by torchlight, getting muddier than at Glastonbury and forcing down yet another boring plantain meal!
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Sophie
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Wowzers!
Well done you good eggs!!!! It makes me feel bad that I never did any volunteering when I was away. Good work on drinking the bowl of chicha- I'd never had been able to manage that! I went one place where there was a chicha festival going on, but it was really embarrassing cos I thought it was a 'teacher' festival and they were just saying the word with a bad accent! I was like "Yey, I'm a teacher- a festival for me!!!"