Adventures outside this Western, air-conditioned box await...

Finally. My first year of graduate school almost completed. I breathe a little easier knowing I won’t look at this tiny computer screen, eternally scarring my vision, for longer than the minutes it takes to check my email once in a while for at least two months… Well, that is, once I finish my last final.

I am printing off my final Written Testimony to Congress (a faux committee, I’m not that important yet  ) for my Energy and Climate Change course today. This afternoon I will lock myself in my parlor for three hours to finish an essay final for Food and Water Security. A few errands around the house as the young fellow subleasing my apartment this summer is moving in this weekend. A week with my folks and friends around the great state of Colorado – running a 10K with 50,000 other runners in one of Colorado’s craziest races, touring the breweries via bicycle and barbeque-ing with some of my old friends in Fort Collins, a backpacking trip up to Conundrum Hot Springs for a couple days.

Insert – alteration of my mind… or at least for a few months. This summer, I am off to Yachana Foundation in the heart of the Ecuadorean Amazon, to complete my research proposal I have completed with a team of five others in my Multi-level Data Analysis class. Our discoveries will not be the sexy, risky research adventures doted on in international journals of development (those I have made myself all too familiar with); nonetheless, its important work we are doing.

Yachana, in Kichwa “A place for learning”, was founded in 1991 and is the best representation of holistic development I have yet to be introduced to. Perched alongside the banks of the Upper Napo River, a tributary to the Amazon, embedded in lush, serene rainforest, Yachana is a technical high school educating indigenous youth, an award-winning eco-lodge, an organic cacao production facility, an agricultural extension services provider, and a symbol of opportunity for a people previously untouched by opportunity, out of which flows dignity and self-sufficiency…. and jobs. Yachana focuses on education and conservation, preserving 1800 acres of precious landscape hosting some of the world’s most diverse flora and fauna, and some of histories most precious cultures fast losing their memory to oil exploitation and globalization. Last year, Yachana recieved a grant to open a post-secondary technical training institute where they will train high school graduates in three areas which are linked to available jobs in the area: eco-tourism (catering, gastronomy), Agroforestry, and Renewable Energy production. Hopes are to link students with apprenticeships with local businesses and/or to assist in the creative development micro-consignmnet. Yachana wants us to do some focus groups with potential students to better inform their development process of the school’s curriculum and structure. We will also do individual household surveys gathering socioeconomic data on the families in the area to track (in years to come) how the post-secondary institute has amended the economic vista of the community.

I sense, as the wander-lusting, vagabonding type usually do, I will learn more from my indigenous Kichwa partners than I could ever offer to them in my mere two months. I am humbled, actually, thinking of the intractable generosity and openness it must take to allow strangers to infiltrate their communities. I imagine elite Frenchmen galavanting around my neighborhood, knocking on my door, investigating my personal life with questions of monthly income, aspirations, nutritional intake, asset possession and contraceptive use. I would rightly say (shout, perhaps) a rather un-kind collection of uncommon words and shut the door in their face. I aim to do my best, utilizing the trust and relationships Yachana has built there in the last 20 years to make myself as human as possible, a partner, a companion willing to share the risk.

For at least a couple months, I will not stare this LCD lighting int he face. For at least two months, no endless, enervating, sometimes seemingly pointless reading of articles and academics pontificating in their esoteric circles, sitting in their air-conditioned corner offices sipping on their mass-produced Starbucks latte. For the next two months I get to see it, live it, experience it, share the risk. I humbly embed myself in a culture and a people, thriving ideas and brave attempts, experiential knowledge and welcomed challenges.