Author: Kate Gustafson
Placement: 1 month at placement 0112
Period:
July 2005
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Spend a Month in the Alto Choco Cloud Forest
By Kate Gustafson
When I arrived for a month of volunteer work at the reserve in Imbabura Province in Northern Ecuador, the volunteer coordinator asked me what I would like to work on. Environmental education, I suggested. "Great, you can be the head of it," she responded.
So after activities and working with other volunteers to get the materials ready, I delivered an invitation in my clumsy Spanish to the teacher at the school in the town of Santa Rosa, just down the road from the gates of the reserve. The program I had designed involved tree-planting, a scavenger hunt, an art project, games, and a snack. Since the reserve is involved with programs to help endangered Andean spectacled bears, the scavenger hunt put the kids on a quest for food, shelter, water, and hiding places that bears might need to survive. The snack was a mix of food the bears liked to eat, and the art project included coloring in cut-outs of bears.
The reserve is located in the Chocó bioregion, which the World Wildlife Fund and the World Bank calls one of the ten most important biological hotspots in the world. The forest and the species that live there are threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture, livestock farming, and logging. Currently, projects at the reserve involve preserving rare species through the development of a botanical garden, the extension of programs designed to protect Andean bears, and managing the reserve in cooperation with local communities.
I had chosen here from among various options for working in Ecuadorian cloud forests because it was the cheapest program. Volunteers have been coming to this threatened patch of cloud forest-which is like a rainforest, only at higher elevation-for only a few years. Because it's still a start-up operation, there is some disorganization and lack of equipment, but its relatively new status allows for a lot of flexibility. Volunteers can even create their own projects, possibly setting up programs that will continue long after they are gone.
The work was varied and abundant. Aside from environmental education, I participated in activities that involved more physical labor: hoeing the botanical garden in the hot sun and cementing cinder block walls for a new office. The office was almost done in the three weeks I stayed.
The cost of volunteering at the reserve, covers room, a prepared daily lunch, and groceries for making other meals. The volunteers prepare breakfast and dinner for themselves in the rudimentary kitchen of "la casa," the quaint, 3-room cabin that they call home. Sleeping on wooden bunk beds, relaxing in woven hammocks on the porch, and bathing in water pumped into a showerhead from a nearby river are refreshing experiences especially so when you are surrounded by the deep green veil of vine-laden, wildlife-abundant cloud forest.
Along with the work, I enjoyed the 2-hour bus ride from Otavalo to the reserve on switch-back mountain roads, seated on top of a bag of lemons strapped to the roof of the bus; afternoon walks in the cloud forest on trails that pass by magnificent, gushing waterfalls; bathing in the icy river near la casa and sunbathing in the yard under the bright, hot sunshine that emerged when the layer of cloud burned off for the day. Living with and getting to know the other volunteers from around the world was a fascinating experience. I still keep in touch, a year and a half later, with friends from France and Luxembourg.
One of the major benefits to volunteering, of course, is the deeper, more meaningful exposure to local people, customs and issues that a work-related commitment makes possible. Along with the beautiful surroundings and the chance to meet new and interesting people, my experience was further enriched by seeing firsthand the challenges that the reserve faces. One afternoon, clambering hand over fist to the top of a steep hillside that had been slashed in preparation for slash-and-burn farming we found a local farmer and his son furiously hacking with machetes at the slender trees and vines, certain that the land belonged to them. Our volunteer coordinator, adamant that the hillside was part of the reserve, convinced them to stop slashing until she could straighten the matter out officially in the records office in Quito. As the sounds of their machetes fell silent, we looked out on a mountainside littered with felled trees and wrecked foliage. For the farmer and his son, clad in threadbare clothing, the hillside was clearly a matter of subsistence. For the reserve, it was a matter much larger but difficult to explain to hungry neighbors.