I started work with the Patronato this week, and everything is super chévere (cool). For the foreseeable future, here´s my work: Monday through Wednesday (or Thursday if we get waylaid in some manner) I’ll be in the jungle working with health promoters within the constructs of FODI, a government organization that helps promote health and education for children. There are four sectors, all out in the campo but of varying distances from the metropolitan hub of Guayzimi. The plan now is to alternate from group to group, area to area, and work in all 4 zones and with all eight health promoters in the Patronato. Right now I’m just kind of going with the flow and helping them with their projects, but once I get to know the people and the language more I hope to start up some of my own projects as well, in areas where I feel there´s a need.

So the week went like this: last Thursday there was a day long meeting, of which one sentence at 5 oclock pertained to me…namely, which area of communities did I want to go to first? The communities farthest into the jungle, obviously. So on Monday at 7:30, Bolo, Angel, and Myself took a bus as far as buses go (about an hour and a half past Guayzimi), then waited for the daily motorized canoe to leave from a town called ¨The Orchids¨ at 10:30. We rode that as far as it could go (4 hours in a 15 person canoe packed with thirty people and a pig at first, then fewer and fewer until the three of us and the chauffer were the only people for the last hour or so) past beautiful vegetation, cliffs and waterfalls. When the water got to shallow, we got out and walked for two hours in the jungle, arriving at a town of 12 families at 6pm. This place was out there, no water, electricity, or anything like that. The people ate almost exclusively yucca and bananas that they picked daily. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see three houses, the school, a meeting hut, and the building FODI had built earlier that year from the center of town, which over looked some kind of enchanted mountain. I forget the story exactly, but it definitely looked enchanted. Anyway, once we got everyone round up we had a meeting, which consisted of about 10 people. As it was the first week after vacations, we just took care of logistical things, namely what was going to happen in the next year, registering children, and introducing the gringo that everyone was afraid of.

We visited 4 more villages in the next 2 days, hiking on average 2 hours through the jungle (my job is hiking through the Amazon rainforest!) or catching a boat if we were lucky. We went from purely native shuar villages deep in the jungle, to mixed shuar and saraguro, to mixed indigenous and mestizo villages with electricity and almost drinkable water. Side note: even the pure shuar villages have become modernized. Upon arriving at the first village, I was greeted by a dude wearing a t-shirt featuring a popular American wrestler.

So yeah, it was pretty cool. Hiking through the rainforest is just ass bad ass as it sounds, for better or worse. I don´t know if you´ve heard, but it rains a lot in the rainforest…hard. The trails we covered with 6 inches of mud, which made going up and down ravines in ill fitting rubber boots difficult (but not for Angel and Bolo. On flat ground I could smoke them, but I couldn´t keep up on their home turf). When I wasn´t saturated and cold, I was dehydrated and hot. I was told not to bring much water, advice that I followed to lighten my load. MISTAKE!

Science Lesson: Prairie dogs are so well adapted to life in the desert that their nephrons (The millions of tiny blood filtration gizmos that make up the kidneys. Not at all like a radiator, mom) can reabsorb 100% of the water from their blood before the filtrate is passed through the bladder. This obviates the need to hydrate. In fact, if you feed prairie dogs human food, the extra water will mess up their osmotic balance and they could die.

Science lesson over. My point is Ecuadorians are like prairie dogs. They NEVER drink water. With meals they will have one class of liquid only, but never pure water…that’s just weird. The tiendas have water almost exclusively to sell to gringos. The other weekend, while ¨checking out¨ after shopping, the owner looked confused and asked, ¨don´t you want to buy some water?¨ Why yes I did, thank you. I had forgotten.

Anyway, Angel and Bolo packed zero water, but I knew better and packed 2 litters, which was to last me one day until I could boil water the first night and refill. That chance never happened, nor did it happen the next night. In three days I drank my 2 liters of water, a cup of Chi cha, and another cup of muddy water. Bolo and Angel drank less, and seemed to be fine. I was thirsty and borderline dehydrated the entire time. I was going to bring bleach to put in water, but that doesn´t kill the two organisms you need to worry about in river water, and iodine tablets were nowhere to be found, obviously. Dad, if you haven’t already…send me some of those!

The food situation was a little better…I ate 2 meals daily. Again, Bolo and Angel are total badasses and were able to go without. I however, am a wimp (as it turns out) and was hungry for the three days. I had been eating 6 times daily to gorge my raging metabolism, which is a total blessing in a civilized society, but sucks in the campo when food is limited. I kept recalling the maximum amount of time humans can go without food or water, and was dismayed at how mentally soft I was. I wasn´t even close to dying of thirst or hunger, but I felt like I was because we´re so used to being totally satiated at all times.

Anyway, after getting my hair cut by mayor’s wife, I spent today eating, sleeping, reading, and otherwise recovering from the trip. I was overwhelmed by how kushy life is in Guayzimi…

Next week I go with a different group of promoters down a different river. Now that I know what to pack, the journey should be more enjoyably bad ass and less miserably bad ass.

PS- In one of the towns we visited there are a ton of petrified shells. This was one of the closer ones to civilization, and they were extending the road to it and blasting through the hills with dynamite, which uncovered a bunch of fossils. I found two pretty cool souvenirs for my house, one of which is part of what must have been the biggest shell ever.