Machetes and wellies

It feels good to earn your food and a hot shower. It´s amazing to work with a machete. It really is the only tool you need. I would buy one to take back with me, except for the problems with convincing the airlines that it´s a garden tool and not a weapon.

Monday morning I started my volunteer adventure in Ecuador and hopped in a truck with the crew going to the Santa Lucia lodge. After a 45-minute ride, we hiked the rest of the way up.

Santa Lucia was a plot of land bought by 20 families in the 1970s, a part of a government act to return land to the local communities. Originally, the families farmed the land, but this proved to be difficult as the land is not good for agriculture and required a lot of deforestation of primary cloud forest. In the 80s, 12 families still remained and began to look for alternatives (bee farming, sugar cane production, etc). In the 90s, after Santa Lucia was declared a protected forest by Ecuador, the familes moved to ecotourism as a sustainable source of income for their community.

It is great to be working directly with the people you are supporting and to immediately see where your work is going. The work varies depending on the day and the time of year. This week, we cleared the main trail and made panela (sugar made from sugar cane). We spent a full day just cutting and cleaning the cane, and another whole day extracting the juice (with mules and a large handmade crusher). After the cane has been extracted, we boilt it down until it is more syrupy, then mix and mix until it is powder. Two full days, for probably about 30 kilos of sugar.

We are up at 6 a.m. every day, and to bed at 9 p.m. Our uniform is work clothes and wellington boots. I am there with five other volunteers (Germans, a Norwegian, an Irishman and an Australian). The people that run the lodge are mostly from the Molina family, and all employees are part of the cooperative of Santa Lucia. Everything is done in Spanish, which is great (and a lot easier to understand than Argentinian Spanish).

I decided to stay another week, and just made a short trip to Quito to use the internet and relax. I am back to the volunteer house tonight and then back up the mountain tomorrow morning for more time with my machete!