Ten days ago we arrived in the small Andean town or Pucara and were greeted our local contact, Peter Shear, along with almost half of the local community. We were sat down to a welcoming ceramony involving a cultural dance performed by women in traditional attire. After the ceremony we were all introduced to our homestay families and given the rest of the afternoon and evening to settle in to our new accommodations.
On our first full day Peter gave us a tour of the town and past community projects and we finished with a walk around his own personal farm. Some of the things he has managed to accomplish in the last 20 years he has lived here is unbelievable. Just in the last year he finished up a new sewage disposal system in accordance to his eco-conscious and sustainable motives. The design involves three piscinas filled with river rock into which the towns sewage funnels into and filters through the rocks before progressing down into the two subsequent pools. He uses cattail-like marshland plants that he has planted in each pool which absorb up the fecal matter into their stalks along with the water which keeps the pools clean and allows the process to continue without blockage or any unruly scents. By the time the water re-emerges from the last piscina its fecal bacteria count has depleted from an initial 700,000 parts per million to just over 100 and is clean enough to funnel down from the mountain and back into the Intag river.
The drought that the region was facing before our arrival somewhat disrupted our planned volunteer project, planting trees to reforest areas around the community, so we ended up working on various permaculture projects that Peter is pioneering around his farm. We spent some time constructing a greenhouse out of cement and recycled glass bottles which turned out to be a pretty delicate process because the angle at which the bottles are laid is crucial toward refracting the light effectively. Another group laid out logs to build towers which they later drilled holes into and innocculated with various mushroom spores for a simple but elegant mushroom farm. Later in the day the many of us headed down to the piña fields to distribute and plant pineapple bulbs – also a surprisingly delicate process. One afternoon, me and Peter K offered to help out with the honey bee hives that Peter has established around his farm for a surplus of benefits. Although this isn’t something unique to Ecuador it was one of the the most extraordinary experiences i’ve had thus far. But after most of the mornings we spent working, we had the afternoons off to meet up as a group and to interact as much as we could with the people of Pucara.
One of the days we all took a hike around part of the river and stopped for lunch at the house of a man named Carlos, one of Peter’s close friends. Carlos has been one of the faces leading the fight against the international and national mining corporations devastating the Intag region in their desperate search for copper. He took the time to explain the depths of the situation they’re up against and share the history of corruption, human rights violations, and perverse destruction that one of the most bio-diverse places the planet is undergoing. It was a horribly disturbing but all too familiar story of the modern worlds insatiable thirst for natural resources and the atrocities we’re willing to commit in that pursuit. We left Carlos’s house and finished the last few hours of our hike in the typical heavy rain you’d expect from a cloud forest climate. We arrived in nearby town of Apuela late afternoon and were shown around the Intag Coffee Co-op, another project Peter helped establish years ago, and saw all the intricacies of the coffee making process.
We finished our time up in Pucara with a friendly soccer game against the local team in which the Gringos were sadly but very predictably demolished. Over the span of a few days our group made its way to Junin, a small community at the heart of the mining issue, and got to speak with locals about the problem and even took an amazing 6 hour hike up past several waterfalls, farms, and many spectacular views – as always. And finally past the mining camps at a few points along the way which really killed all our good vibes to realize that a place of such beauty that has survived untainted for millions of years is about to be destroyed.
As of last night, we all arrived back in Quito and are staying at our favorite little Community Hostal – the same place we started out at – hanging out with movies and brownies awaiting our flight to Peru in the morning.