Professional standards in a developing country

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Runa (the company) knows very little about Guayusa as a plant. They have a small research center about 15 minutes away from Fundacion Runa’s office to make their Guayusa investigations. When I went to go visit it, we were shown around the nursery where they were growing Guayusa in different soil compositions and then to the lab where they were preparing samples to be DNA coded in Quito. I was surprised by how methodical and regimented the facility was. Was it unfair of me to be surprised? What should we expect of professionals in a developing country?

Overall, developing countries are almost indefinitely less organized than a country like the United States. Fewer resources can be allotted to things like health code enforcement, the national government is often less stable, and punctuality just isn’t as much of a “thing”. As such, it seems like I have a right to be surprised by how organized the Ecuadorian-run lab was. Does this mean I am holding Ecuador to lower standard than I do the US? Oscar, a Quiteño family friend of ours, was telling me last weekend that, in order for Ecuador to develop, we need to hold the professional workers to a higher standard. Ecuador shouldn’t allow incapable doctors to practice and shouldn’t pay ineffective teachers to teach. He believes that, if the bar is raised, people will rise to meet it.  To a certain extent, I agree with him. I think that lowering your expectations of a person can keep them from achieving their fullest potential. Not only that, but it can create a paternalistic and belittling relationship. However, I also think it is much more difficult for a person in a developing country to receive an excellent education in medicine than it is for an upper class private schooler like me. In this, it may be unfair of me to expect them to meet my Western standards for the professional workplace.

Congrats if you managed to work through that half-developed musing.

Moving to Santa Rita

I have just finished moving into my new home for the next 3-4 weeks! I am now in the Kichwa community of Santa Rita, about 20 minutes up from Archidona and 45 minutes away from the house in Tena. I am living with the President of Santa Rita, his wife, and their 6 children.

In the province of Napo, the word “community” is used to refer to a Kichwa village. Santa Rita is the largest one I have seen, consisting of 120 families. Most communities are built around a soccer field and a covered court (built by the government) with the primary school on the edges of the field. Santa Rita was founded in 1965 by a group of families moving from the deep rainforest to be closer to the town of Archidona. The houses are quite close together, each with a bit of land to grow fruits and yuka. Most of the food is grown in a family’s “chacra”, which is a plot of land with a mix of wild growth and planned cultivation. A chacra tends to be between 1 and 2 hectares (100m by 100m) and is usually a few minutes walk away from the centro.

The house I am living in is basic, with two bedrooms and a common space. The family’s other house has the same design but is on stilts and is made out of wood. Obviously, they are very different from my family’s house in the US. That being said, I am curious to know if I am now living in a house that most people in the world would consider a normal house. I suppose my question would be, what is the overall state of houses in the world? I’m not going to pretend to know how one would statistically determine that. However, for me it is interesting to think that I might now be living a life most people in the world would consider normal while the life I had before would be considered abnormal (at the least). For those that are Hunger Games inclined, I imagine it to be like moving from the Capitol to any of the other districts.

Slow Food

This Thursday the Runa interns prepared a “slow food” dinner. The idea behind slow food is that you collect every ingredient from its original point source so that you really “know” your meal in its entirety. In the case of this dinner, we managed to collect some ingredients ourselves (platanos and live chickens) while we ended up buying things like dried cacao seeds and vegetables. On Wednesday, I milked a cow and went night fishing with a few técnicos from fundacion Runa. I was struck by how easy it was to get the food from its original source. In the US, I’d have to jump through quite a few hoops to milk a cow and then buy the raw milk. But here, buying locally is what makes sense financially. If only it were the case back home!

So, what is it that you're doing, again?

I haven’t done a very good job of describing what my internship for Fundacion Runa consists of, so this post will be an attempt to make it as simple as I can.

Runa is a for-profit corporation, founded by two Brown graduates in YEAR. It buys Guayusa from local farmers, processes it in Ecuador, and sells it in the United States. Guayusa is a type of tea that is integral to the Kichwa culture in Ecuador. Traditionally, families will wake up at 4 to prepare it and spend time together sharing and interpreting dreams. It is high in caffeine content so it is their way of kickstarting their morning. Runa is the first company to commoditize Guayusa so there is still a lot that they do not know about it: where else it is grown, the best growing practices, whether all plants are clones of one original plant*, and the best way to prepare it.

Fundacion Runa is a nonprofit that was founded by one of the Brown graduates in an effort to ensure that the business does not begin to exploit the people or environment involved in Guayusa production. The Fundacion goes about this by, among other things, founding and fostering farmer cooperatives, measuring the economic effect of Runa’s business, and helping farmer maximize their Guayusa production. In regards to the protection of the environment, their philosophy is that, by giving monetary value to a plant that is traditionally grown using agroforestry, they are creating more value for property in the Amazon, making it more profitable to chose not to clear cut it. To be perfectly honest, this last sentence is so vague because I am still somewhat confused on how the rainforest is protected by the commoditization of this tea.

My project in specific is focused on creating a buffer zone around the Bosque Colonso, a protected forest in the foothills of the Andes. The idea is that we will provide different types of native timber trees to people living in Santa Rita and Alto Tena (Kichwa communities that border Bosque Colonso) so that they can strengthen the biodiversity of their chacras (see photo below) and also use the timber later on instead of the timber in the forest. We began the project by researching different native trees: their ecological and economic worth, their sensitivity to illnesses, and their natural habitats. We are now mapping the chacras (walking their borders with a gps) in Santa Rita and Alto Tena so that we can plan the distribution of the trees within them. Later, most likely after I have left Ecuador, the team will begin collecting seeds from within the forest, raise them in Runa’s nursery, and begin planting them.

Hope that clears things up a little bit!

*Guayusa is grown by cutting off a branch of one plant and sticking it in fertile soil, making it a clone of the original plant. Supposedly, the plant germinates naturally but it occurs infrequently, and the seeds are most often sterile.

"A Day in the Life" video idea

My first week in Tena, I posted to facebook a picture of a bus that I had helped push, a field of guayusa I had helped plant, and the blisters on my hand from the day of work. Looking back on those pictures, I realized that they were not how I should have first portrayed Tena. Overall, my first week looked nothing like that. It looked more like 2 other American interns, a house, and a downtown street of Tena. The photos that I uploaded were a depiction of how I thought my time in Tena should look. There should be a stuck bus because we’re in a developing country, there should be a field because I’m working with subsistence farmers, I should have blisters because people use machetes in Ecuador. Each of these represents a stereotype of Tena, Ecuador, that I had before arriving here. So, naturally, these are the things I looked for when I wanted to show my friends where I was.

This brings up two questions for me: how do I see a place without fitting it to my expectations? And how do I portray the place in the most honest way possible? In essence, I want to be honest to myself about where I am and honest to you all as well. So far, my idea to accomplish this is to create a “Day in the Life” video. In this video, I will try to portray the most typical day of my life in Tena. I’ll intentionally go after the people, sounds, and sights that, whether I like it or not, take up much of my experience here. I’d love to see other people’s summer experiences so please feel free to join me in making this kind of video!

Outdoor Sunday

Just got back from a 15 mile bike ride through the Cloud Forest, two hours west of Quito. This is one of 25 biodiversity “hotspots” in the world. After the ride, we went to a hummingbird refuge. There are hundreds of hummingbird species there that can only live in ecosystems at altitudes of 6,000 m. For creatures with such short lives, they’re quite picky with their habitats. Finally, we (students and fellow residents of my hostal) toured a small restaurant and learned about their chocolate production there.

Pickpocket

As some of my friends know, I lost my real cell phone the day before I left for Ecuador. This was inconvenient, but not disastrous. Today, I was lent a cell phone by EcuaExplora, a business in Quito that helps various internship organizations plan on-the-ground logistics. It was a cheap thing, worth around $20 in Ecuador. Later in the day, we took the public bus to “Old Quito”, the historic district. For my Dukies, imagine the 10:05 C-1 freshman year, but worse. Long story short, I failed to keep my hands in my pants pockets as I exited the bus and someone most likely grabbed my phone then. Quiteño pickpockets are very skilled at their profession (or hobby, or addiction. Kleptomania is the real deal). I was first surprised, then sad, then very impressed.

Thoughts:

According to my tourguide from today, an iPhone can go for $1,200 USD in Ecuador. And this is in a country where the dollar is much more powerful than it is in the US (the currency here is the USD). Unfortunately for the current owner of my cell phone, my phone may sell on the street for $20, the equivalent of about five decent meals. I’m sure the pickpocket was hoping for a better phone when he dipped into my pocket. The most uncomfortable thing about this experience is how it has made me feel like a cash cow. And a productive one at that. Many people here live off of the money I spend on a vacation. I don't want to be grouped in with all the other wealthy tourists, traveling for weeks at a time so that they can "see the world". I want to have a REAL experience. To be DIFFERENT (this is an attempt to sarcastically reveal how similar I am to all the other tourists in Quito, despite my ironic desire to be authentic). 

Granted, the incredible amount of money that goes toward my worldly experience provides many people with respectable jobs. Nonetheless, it is disturbing to actually face a person (or not face them, as they take something from my pocket) that makes a living off of my luxury spending. 

    

In other news: I have made my first thoughtless food choice (milk in the coffee). And I’ve realized that three outfits and two t-shirts is not enough clothes for 10 weeks here.