preparación de la chonta
Mariana, Abuela, Génesis, and I (from right to left) are peeling steaming-hot chonta fruit. We then mash the oily, orange fruit and ferment it to make chicha: the rich, nutritious drink that has been the staple of our diet for months. Mushu Causai is now 'mi otra family,' a Kichwa community of almost 600 people that lives on 1600 hectares of Ecuadorian Amazon rain forest in the foothills of the Andes. It's a five-hour hike down the mountain to the nearest road, and a three-hour bus ride from there to Archidona, the nearest town with electricity and running water. In 2005,Mushu Causai broke from CONAIE, the bloated, ineffective national indigenous advocacy organization, in an effort to pursue the political changes they needed most. However, as an Kichwa-speaking association with 25 active members, they have had great difficulty securing necessary resources. I drew on my studies of Ecuadorian oil politics and indigenous land rights, and used everything I learned about local subsistence, agroforestry, identification with the land, and desire for political autonomy to help my friends formulate plans for maintaining the health of their land and protecting it from polluters, developers, and marauding oil companies. I then wrote a series of grant proposals, first in Spanish then in English.
In a partiarchal political system in which indigenous voices are silenced and the needs of rural communities are subordinated to those of industrialized capitalism, I hope that connecting across boundaries can be a catalyst for change.
note: Cairo, Géni's older brother, paused in his peeling to snap this photo for us.