Amazon Basin

Hello all! I just returned from a very exciting trip to the jungle/amazon basin/el oriente/la celva/rain forest (what ever you want to call it, it goes by many names around here, mostly the spanish ones), and it was an incredible experience. Our plan was to observe the water projects, help where needed, and do hygiene training. Me, Phil (another working visitor in the water projects office), and Ali were visiting Alex and Alfredo Leon, a British-Ecuadorian couple working as engineers on the water projects team.

I left on Monday morning from Quito, headed towards a small town called Shell. This is named after the oil company, which sort of represents the large presence oil companies have in the Ecuadorian rain forrest. Its defining feature is the military airstrip, which I think is why there are missionaries there. The majority of the Ecuadorian rain forest is only accessible by plane, and missionaries need planes to reach the people. HCJB has a hospital there, a community development center, among other things. I think HCJB constitutes about half the missionaries there, Mission Aviation Fellowship has a few pilots, and another organization (I forget the name, I’ll change this once I figure it out) has about 8 families. I was quoted that the town is about 30,000 (but she said she was bad with numbers, and I thought it looked closer to 5 - 10 thousand, not including the military base).

We arrived right at sunset Monday night (one thing I learned, is that sunset in the jungle can’t be beat anywhere, the clouds are AMAZING!), and checked into our hostel, called “Germany Hostal” (which is kinda funny, because its run by a german woman, but they wrote “Germany” in english, and wrote “hostal” the way its spelled in spanish. I could see a mix of “Deutschland Hostal” or “Germany Hostel” or “Alemiania Hostal”… ), which had a great view of the rain forest plant life. We had to stay there because the guest house was full, it was cheaper, and prettier, so I had no complaints. We went out to eat at a pizza place, which had amazing pizza, and we found out they learned how to make it germany and was better than most pizza shops I’ve ever been to. This was surprising seeing as we were in a poor jungle town.

Anyway… the next morning we showed up bright and early to the HCJB compound, packed and ready for our flight. We dropped 1/3 of our equipment trying to make sure we were light enough for the plane, keeping essentials like rubber boots, rain jacket, parts for the pumps, dropping things like warm cloths, our shoes, and books (yeah, those are kinda heavy). All flights ended up being grounded because of poor weather, but we got to the hanger to be weighed up and we got in the air by noon, only 3 hours past our scheduled departure time (I learned that these departure times are give or take a day… regularly… very regularly). Me and Ali went over hygiene stuff, which we needed to do anyway.

The plane flight was something I had been looking forward to since we scheduled the trip, and hoping for since I knew I was coming to Ecuador. Jumping in and out of communities on the small planes, and the excitement of the whole flying process was everything I wanted, but looking back on the experience, it wasn’t the highlight. The highlight was the whole realization that came from trip as a whole, that Gods world is so vastly different, and intricate, and above all, beautiful! The people of Ecuador are so diverse, there appearance and culture, as you can see from my images, and there needs, which I realized can differ between communities 5km apart. Forces that impact a community can be so different in isolated communities in the jungle, and the spiritual, mental, and physical needs can be vastly different, and this calls for a huge investment of time into relationship building.

The first community was only 8 families, and needed a pump fixed. It was an extremely easy repair, but they had left it untouched for 4 months, leaving them with no clean water. This community seemed to need encouragement and empowerment to take things into their own hands, for realization that they are the primary agents of change in their own lives. Me and Ali did hygiene training, and it seemed that they realized that they need to change some of there practices, but asked for latrines to be built for them. Alex, the engineer on our team, was skeptical whether they would be willing to build it themselves, which really is the only way to ensure sustainability.

The second community was the highlight of the trip for me. There were about 36 families in here. This community was receiving instructions for their distribution system. They already had a clean spring captured and just need it to be distributed properly. This community was very receptive, giving, and motivated. I had a few wonderful conversations with some of the men and they seemed so excited to know all about what we were doing, about our lives, about what we thought of their community, about hygiene, about how they can do things better, about EVERYTHING!! It was so inspiring. It was such a blessing to be with these people.

The third community was quite a different experience. It was occupied by about 50 families, and we recieved zero welcome or attention, accept for people watching the plane come in. One family was rather nice, but I didn’t have much exposure to them. I stayed in a large medical clinic that a German agency built. HCJB and this agency has had a bashing of heads in the past, for developmental philosophy differences. I won’t go into detail about it, but the community represented this divide. It was sad to see, but very real.

We made the trip back safely, Phil got his camera stolen on the bus on the way down, but that was the only misfortune of the whole trip. Well… I did get some badly bitten legs, even though I was wearing boots and pants. For those who are not faint of heart can look at the images of them on my flickr (just click one of the images). I have some really nice images of the jungle and the trip, so you should check those out. I had trouble putting images in and formatting the text. *edit* fixed - realized I wasn’t puting the pictures in block level elements. *edit*

Thanks for all the support and prayer, love you all

Will Krzymowski

This entry was posted on April 23, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.