Studying to get closer to the forest

I've lived all my life in the Ecuadorian Amazon and grew up close to my family. From an early age I started working with my father, from the time I could grab a machete and follow him to the coffee and cocoa farm to make a living. During my high school I studied in a boarding school where we had twenty-one days of study and one week of vacation. Since my childhood I was keen for the natural sciences because I had the jungle around me and I learned how life and nature work, and also the interaction between man and nature. Whenever I have some spare time I use it to read and to talk to all sorts of people – it is a way of knowing more about the world. Sometimes I feel there is a limited access to information or find hard to find books and other sources because in my culture reading is not usual.

When I reflect on the situation of the Amazon I come to think that this region lacks in health and education. I think that if there were more educated people, who were aware of their own natural environment, there would be fewer problems regarding deforestation. Education in the Amazon region has always been of poor quality for political and economic reasons. My grades through both primary and secondary school were very poor and the poor quality of education offered made me have little interest in studying, besides not having many options to consider as my family did not have the means to send me to another place to study.

One of the most important experiences I had was when I changed schools and left to live three years in a school in the jungle, with a completely different education system than the public system. During these years my peers were students from different cultures of the Amazon and there were volunteers from other countries who taught English classes. I feel I grew up as individual and was exposed to ideas from different points of view, which allowed me to get to know myself.

Despite having lived a lifetime in the midst of nature and the forest, the way I regarded it was not enough to make me worry openly about preserving that environment. All I knew was that my father went hunting and had to cut down trees to plant and to provide for the family. At "Yachana", the high school I attended, I learned that everything in the forest is important. For example, I learned that termites help falling trees to decompose thus acting as fertilizer to other trees; that butterfly caterpillars feed on particular species of plant, and that if this plant that they eat is extinct the butterflies will also be extinct. Everything, even the smallest of the organisms, play a very important role in nature.

This experience has influenced most of the students. The school I attended has a philosophy called "learning by doing" and that's how all students learn, by working in every area of study. Since it was a boarding school, our timetable was as follows: at half past five we were up to go to the toilet and tidy our room so at six o'clock we would be eating breakfast. At half past six we were all ready to get instructions from the directors and then would go to work in each of the areas.

The areas in which we worked were agronomy, livestock, small businesses and tourism. Each week we rotated in small groups for each of the areas. Most of the food for cooking depended on what was produced in the areas of agriculture and livestock - in agronomy we planted tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, spinach, rice, etc. In livestock, we raised chickens, pigs, fish and laying hens. Small business produced handcrafts and t-shirts were printed to sell to visitors. In the tourism area a group of students would go to the hotel that is the foundation for learning about guidance, cuisine and service. At 12 we had lunch and at 1pm the classes started, focusing mainly on the theory of what was done on the morning of work, in addition to regular classes.

All these experiences have changed my life one hundred eighty degrees because, after graduating from college, I had the opportunity to enter a University on a scholarship and to write for a publication called Our Planet. I must emphasize that all these dreams have come true thanks to the Yachana Foundation.