Going Swimming

There’s a strange tension in the air. The kids, young and old alike, have become quite. Reserved. Anxious. They whisper to one and other as I finish eating lunch, and one of the twins finally gets the nerve to whisper a question to his mom. I barely catch the words “him” and “swimming” before his mom cuts him off, whispering a little more loudly, to “let him finish eating!! Let him rest a little!” before shooing all of the kids out of the kitchen. More than curious I stretch my mind to make sense of what’s going on. Anticipation. Everyone is waiting for something to happen. Everyone seems nervous.

As I finish my lunch Martha casually asks me how I’m feeling. “Are you tired, Benjamin? Do you need to rest? Or…” she adds nonchalantly “would you want to go see what Mario is doing down by the river? You could go swimming…”

The day is hot, overcast and incredibly humid. There’s no escape from the oppressiveness of it. I was already considering going swimming, so the decision was easy to make. I could see one of the twins and a couple other kids anxiously waiting to see what my answer would be. As I said that I’d love to go to the river, the sense of anticipation multiplied dramatically. The kids broke into smiles and began running around collecting items and changing clothes. I had no idea what to make of the situation. Up until that point the kids had for the most part not really interacted with me. They were obviously in a hurry now that permission had been granted to take me to the river, so I quickly changed and got ready to go. Before I had time to think I was whisked away by anxious guides onto a narrow path leading into the jungle. The path leads along the edge of a small river which empties into the much bigger Rio Anzu.

The tension is more noticeable than the humidity as we step out of the jungle onto the rocky beach of the Anzu.  I can see Mario sitting on a rock working on something, several other kids already seated quietly behind him. My guides quietly take their seats on various rocks behind Mario. Nobody talks. Nobody moves except Mario as he finishes up whatever he’s working on; some ritual that has the kids and teenagers alike in a trance of anticipation.

Mario finishes and sets down some small tool. With slow, deliberate movements he pulls a cigarette from his bag and lights it. The kids begin to quiver, unable to hold it in any longer. Mario gently rises to his feet, pauses, taking a couple drags, and begins to casually, though ceremoniously, make his way over to the edge of the river. The kids are on their feet. Mario takes another drag and bends over to collect a few small pebbles. The kids are bouncing, jumping, pacing back and forth on the beach. Mario turns a little, back arched to the wind, and I can see him blowing on the ember of the cigarette. The kids begin to move forward. Mario tosses the rocks, one at a time, into the river just in front of him, each one landing exactly where the previous one had. The kids begin to form a line along the riverbank, but still well back from the edge. Their eyes are wide, their pulses are racing. They can hardly contain themselves. It’s going to be a race. They’re all lined up at the starting line. In position. Anxiously waiting for the sound of the gun.

Mario, finished with the cigarette, drops it onto the beach. In his other hand he holds an object that I can’t identify. Gently, precisely, he tosses the object into the river following the pebbles. The moment the object leaves his hand the world stops. The birds don’t sing, the bugs don’t chirp, and nobody is breathing. The only sound is that of the object splashing into the water. Paralysis. Nothing moves. All eyes are riveted on the river, the splash not yet carried away by the running water. One second. Two seconds. Eternities without end.

The gun fires. The dynamite explodes. The ground jolts beneath me from the shock. The race is on!!

As the blast from the dynamite reaches the surface of the river it forms a strange bubble, which pops spewing water up like a geyser. With it come the fish. At the sound of the explosion the kids all run and dive into the river like they’re going for gold. Most of the fish are dead, some are just stunned, but all are being carried away by the current.

The older kids reach the area first and immediately begin to grab for fish. Some have nets, others use their shirts, and others simply grab and throw the fish towards the bank. Unaware of what was happening I find myself alone at the edge of the river. Alone except for the hail of fish that now begins to rain down on me. Scrambling I begin to grab for fish. If they made it to the rocky beach, they’re safe enough for now, most however are floating away in the shallow water near the edge. As fast as I can I grab and toss the fish onto the beach, aiming for a small depression where they’ll be more likely to stay put. More than once I’m hit by one that’s been thrown. 

Eventually we’ve got all the ones floating on the surface collected and the kids begin to dive down to feel in the mud on the bottom for any that sank. They come up with quite a few more and keep on diving. At the same time the women from the house appear from the jungle carrying nets, bowls and knives. Gathering up the fish from the beach they bring them to the edge of the water and begin to scale them using the knives. The cleaned fish are placed into a large net, ready to carry home.

In the end we came up with 20 – 25 fish, but none are very big. The biggest are between 8 – 10 inches. This river used to provide for the communities that lived along its banks. Industrialization has destroyed the river now. Mining and removing material for roads etc. has changed the river dramatically and killed off most of the fish. Today’s was the biggest catch anyone has had in a long time. They used to get baskets and baskets of fish every time they’d go fishing. Big ones. 18 inches long or more. There used to be so many fish that all the surrounding communities would come out to the river when someone was going to throw dynamite because the haul would be too much for anyone to handle by themselves. Everyone would dive into the river and grab what they could, taking it home to feed their family for days.

As the kids are diving for any remaining fish, one of them finds a bar of soap, still in its plastic wrapper. Taking advantage, we all soap up and bathe before climbing out of the river, gathering up supplies, and heading back into the jungle towards home.

Finding Martha

Driving into Tena was surreal.  I had heard about this town for years and years, but it wasn't any more real than a fairy tale.  Now here we were!  There was the restaurant they used to eat at, and the bridge.  Even though it had been 18 years, William's memory of town was clear: the park, where their apartment was by the river, even the road their dad( Don Michael) bought salt blocks on for the cows and horses.  We found a beautiful hotel, determined to find Martha the next day.

The next day dawned bright and hot.  We knew where to start looking for Martha, but had no idea where she might be.  We knew very little of her life since Robert and William left Ecuador and had no idea if she would still be living in her tiny community.  The trip, which took hours in 1998, took barely 20 minutes.  We crossed a skinny bridge and turned off the pavement.  We hadn't gone 100 yards down the dirt road before Robert suddenly stopped the car and he and William jumped out.
"A termite nest!!"
"I haven't poked one of those forever!!"
"Lets go poke it!"
Leaving their very confused wives in the dust they were across the road, over the ditch, and at the fence in no time at all.  They did, indeed, poke the nest.  The termites swarmed out at the intrusion.  I thought "What a fun memory!  Of course a ten year old boy would get a kick out of that."  But as it turns out, the fun of the swarm wasn't the purpose of the poking.  About the time Natalie(William's wife) and I(Robert's wife) caught up to them William took his finger out of the nest and LICKED IT!!

On the way back to the car we stopped to look at a fainting fern "Dormilona," and then we stopped to climb a guava tree and taste it's cotton candy fruit.  We passed elephant grass, cacao trees, heleconia flowers, banana groves, crazy hanging bird nests.  To say the boys were giddy would be an understatement.  They wanted us to taste, touch, smell, and see everything.  This place had been their whole world and they had been waiting to share it with us for a long time.

guava tree

Just as I was wondering if we would ever make it to the little community we were looking for, William announced "Uncle Raymond's Hedge!"  This hedge marked the edge of the community and as we passed it we saw a soccer game going on at the packed-earth field.  We stopped to ask some spectators if Martha Pauchi still lived there and where her house was.  We got a lot of stares, and then someone pointed us down the road.  We started driving, but the road was filling with people behind us.  Pretty soon, William saw Martha's brother and we decided to get out of the car and start asking around. By the time I got out of the back seat and around the back of the car William was already crying on the head of a short woman lost in his bear hug.  This must be Martha!

She cried and kissed on William, and then she cried and kissed on Robert, then she cried and kissed on Natalie and I.  I thought I'd better get the baby out of the car and then she got cried and kissed on, and then she disappeared into a sea of sun-toasted faces who had never seen a white baby.

What we didn't know was that getting out of the car at the soccer game had started a ripple of excitement that spread faster than we were driving.  Exclamations of "Don Michael!" turned every head.(William looks like his dad, Don Michael, and wears a beard)  Martha, who was inside her sister's house, had been crying that very morning about how much better her life would have been if she had been able to come back to the States with the Porter's.  She thought her sister was teasing her about it when she said Don Michael was here.  The sister had to shove Martha out of the house and sure enough, she saw us drive by and stop and ran up right as William opened the door.

We spent the day with Martha; telling her about the family, showing her pictures.  We met her grandson, her nephews, her daughter.  We crossed the river in a canoe and sat with her on the beach watching her daughter and nephews play.  Her life has been hard.  She told the boys how sad she had been. "We said goodbye like you were going into town and you never came back!" She felt abandoned, forgotten.  Of course, these two never did forget.  Then one day, they dropped out of the sky just as unexpectedly as if they had come back from the dead.

Cocoa Harvest

The other day, armed with machetes, buckets, sacks and boots, Martha and I went to harvest cocoa with her sister-in-law and her children. In between harvests the jungle attempts to reinsert itself into the area. In less than a year the orchard has become a nearly impenetrable wall of various plants, flowers, vines and trees. Banana trees grow like weeds, as do lilies, iris and just about everything else down here. In order to get to the first of the trees, some of the kids are sent in with machetes to clear the ground. In short order the weeds have all been cut and the trees begin to emerge. There are a few different varieties of cocoa trees. The pods start out green and turn yellow as they mature, or they start out a deep red and ripen into a fiery orange. The pods are large and football shaped, but deeply lobed like a pumpkin, and range in size from a little bigger than a baseball to a little smaller than an actual football. The thick rigid shell is expertly parted with a machete to expose the quarter sized seeds inside. The seeds themselves are coated in white mucus that has an intensely sweet flavor.

The adults and older kids take the machetes tree to tree cutting the pods from the trees while the kids collect the fallen pods. As we progress from one tree to another we have to clear a path. Some of the trees a have grown too large to reach the pods even with the machetes. The younger kids clamber up the trees and toss ripe fruit down to those collecting. As we go we encounter all kinds of interesting things. They shout warnings to me, the outsider who doesn’t know what he’s looking at. “careful, that kind of bush hides wasps!” “that tree has thorns!”. As we begin to spread out one of the twins is assigned to collect for me. I’m assuming he was also appointed as my chaperon. Heaven knows I need one.

I feel like such a child here sometimes. So many things that should be common sense that I’ve never been confronted with before. Even for something as simple as going down to the river to bathe, I was instructed never to do alone. At first I was a little indignant, it’s been a long time since I was that helpless. They explain that although it isn’t common, it is possible for the river to rise quickly and it can be very dangerous. There are also other dangers and Martha worries about me. I’m grateful. The reality is that I know nothing about my surroundings down here. I’ve always prided myself on be fairly observant as well, but down here it’s like I’m walking around with my eyes closed. Martha takes good care of me though. In fact, on our way to harvest the cocoa we were walking alongside one of the rivers here. Suddenly Martha told me step off the path and into the water. Without a second thought I did as she had said. It turns out that I had unwittingly attracted the attention of a Conga ant, which had been following me and was just about to climb up my leg when Martha had seen it and shouted her warning. Conga ants can get up to about the size of your thumb, but this one as a little bit smaller. If they bite you, it causes the area to swell up enormously and it causes a searing writhing pain lasts for hours and hours. Definitely don’t want to experience that.

By the end we had harvested probably about a hundred cocoa pods. I’m terrible at estimating, but the pile would have just filled a normal sized bathtub I’d say. It wasn’t a great harvest. Due in some part to weather, bugs and birds a lot of the pods were too damaged to harvest and others were rotten inside when we cut them open. We all gathered in more or less the center of the orchard and piled the pods in the middle. The women and older kids adeptly began to split the pods open. In one had they hold the machete in the middle of the blade and use the end to chop along the north/south axis. When they’re open they hand them off to the younger kids to scoop the seeds out into a 5 gallon bucket. I rather awkwardly attempted to help. Observing and then trying mirror their actions I started splitting one pod for every 3 or 4 of theirs. I’m sure Martha was convinced I was about to lose a finger. I wasn’t feeling so confident myself, to be honest. Sometimes as I try to help with things Martha will gently suggest that maybe I don’t help. This time I think she wanted to see how I’d do. Luckily I’m fairly resourceful and pretty good at figuring out solutions. I discovered that I had much more confidence if set the pod on the ground and chopped at it with my fingers well out of the way. First I chopped the ends off and then a single chop at the side split the shell enough to pry it apart with my fingers. It wasn’t pretty like theirs were, but I was able to get it done just about as fast. I also discovered that I had been an idiot and sat down on an ant pile….

When we were all done we packed up and loaded the buckets of seeds onto poles to be carried between two of the kids. Martha and I set about collecting some of the various plants we had cut down to replant at her new home. As we walked around she pointed out different plants and trees and explained some of their nutritional, medicinal or in some cases historical value.

All in all the harvest came out to about two 5 gallon buckets. They said that much will sell for about $50. It doesn’t seem like much but considering that the daily wage is between $10-$15 it isn’t too bad. $50 goes a long way down here with food, and every little bit helps.

For the record, the first two closeup photos are not mine.

Between Two Rivers

The day starts early here. Really early. Depending on who you are, and what you do, you could be starting as early as 4:00am. It works though, because the day ends early too. The lifestyle out here is largely mandated by the sun. When the sun goes down, there’s very little to do. The house I’m living in does have electricity. Bare wires strung across walls and through gaps in the roofing provide a single, bare lightbulb that hangs from the ceiling of most rooms. It’s enough to let you see what you’re eating, or the person you’re talking too, but not much else. Apart from the lack of after hour’s activities to keep you busy, you’re also probably pretty exhausted. The sun here is intense. It saps your strength and energy in a very short amount of time. Most of the work here is also some form of manual labor. If you can help it, you really don’t want to be working when afternoon rolls around. Starting work early means you’re done early too and can retreat to the relative comfort of a hammock in the shade, or a bench next to the river.

In general, the stereotypical gender rolls apply here as they would have done in most of the western world 50+ years ago. The men do the breadwinning work, manual labor, and the women do the domestic work, which is also manual labor. They just generally don’t get paid for it. The women are up just as early as the men to make sure they’re fed and outfitted for a day of hard work. They have cleaning to do, animals to feed, food to prepare, fruits and vegetables to collect, and buy when they can’t, and they have laundry to do, probably in the river. Not to mention kids to feed and get to school and keep out of trouble. For the most part the men don’t participate in any of the domestic activities. It seems unfair, backwards, wrong even, to watch as the women here act as servants to the men, but it’s the way it is. And there isn’t much you can do about it either. Martha and her elderly parents are my hosts down here. It’s Martha’s land that we’re going to be using and her house that we’re building. She refuses to let me help with the domestic chores. I can wash dishes just as easily as she can, but she’s adamant. She insists on waiting on and taking care of me, and I think she takes great pride in doing so. She seems genuinely pleased in being able to serve, and I’m afraid to offend her by pushing the equality thing too hard. It isn’t easy for me though.

There’s so much culture here that’s on the verge of being lost. Martha’s is the last generation that really learned the traditions of their parents and ancestors. They’ve tried to teach their children, but the outside world has caught up too quickly for most of them to have much interest in what they may consider useless traditions. I’m excited to be down here and have the opportunity to help this amazing woman and together with Robert and Co. work on a project that’s going to make a difference. I’m also excited to document a little about the history of this area, its culture, traditions and people. 

An Incredible Day

The home I grew up in. (That's me on the porch!)

Today is an incredible day! Today is the day that my dream starts to become a reality. I suppose I should start from the beginning. My name is Robert Porter I am a founder of a small company called Rio Anzu LLC. When I was a one year old my father Michael Porter bought a ranch in the province of Napo, Ecuador. I lived there until I was eleven years old, and it was amazing. I think almost everyone feels that where they grew up is the best place to grow up. I can tell you that where I grew up IS the best place to grow up. I loved it. I loved every minute of it.
During the time we lived in Ecuador a woman named Martha Pauchi came to live with us. Martha was like family to me. When we moved away we lost contact with her. Sadly in 1998 there were a lot less communication mediums than there are now, and she lived in too rural of a location to send her conventional letters. I thought about her all the time, and wondered what had happened to her.
I went to high school, then college, then graduate school. As the years went by I racked my brain to figure out some way I could give back. My life since leaving Ecuador has been very blessed, and I have had great opportunities to grow, and learn.  Opportunities that I know my friends from Ecuador never had. Finally one day I was talking to my older brother William, and my father Michael. We were lamenting the fact that we had not been back to Ecuador in almost eighteen years.

Soon this will be a kitchen

We decided we were done waiting. We decided we would start a school in the area where we grew up. That was a year ago. We have made plans, and revised plans, and scrapped plans, and started all over with our plans more than once. We have learned a lot.

This January I finally traveled to Ecuador. One of the first things we did was find our friend Martha. Tears were shed, manly tears on my part, and we told her what we wanted to do. Amazingly Martha had inherited a plot of land positioned between two rivers that is perfect for our project. She was so excited to be brought on board as a partner in our venture. We came back to the US and started putting things into motion. I enlisted my brother-in-law Benjamin Pratt to be our in country director. Dove into my savings and sent him to Ecuador.
All of this brings us to today. Today is an incredible day! Today as I sit in Provo, Utah writing this blog post Ben along with Martha's family are laying the foundation of our first building in Ecuador. I have had incredible days before in my life, but this one nearly trumps them all. I look forward to posting pictures of the progress as the work goes on. Also you can check us out on facebook for more tidbits. https://www.facebook.com/RioAnzuLLC/ Lets go change the world!