My Last 3 weeks

Summary of the rest of the summer.
August 6-August 27
So I have accomplished a lot these last nine weeks and today is the last day of my “school-less” summer. Here is a brief summary of my South American experiences and I will fill in all the details in later posts so I can tell you all exactly what went down!
I was not able to post blogs over the last month or so of my trip because I was traveling throughout this country’s diverse ecosystems as well as interesting cultures and communities. Many of the places I traveled to did not have electricity, let alone internet connections, so I couldn’t really whip out my Mac book and blog as much as I would have liked to. But I am going to give you all a summary of what I did:
After Lago Agrio I went to Quito and had my 18thbirthday
Before I forget, be sure to check out the film Crude since it is finally in theaters this September and it will give you the history of the devastation Chevron left in Ecuador in the Lago Agrio region and that I have now experienced first hand:
www.crudethemovie.com
After my birthday celebration, I explored Guayaquil, the second biggest city in Ecuador, with some of my interesting international friends where we celebrated Ecuador’s 200 years of freedom.
With this same group of friends, we continued on to Montanita, a surf and youth community where we spent all hours of the day playing on the beach. We stayed up all night wandering down the one street in town and swimming and making bon fires on the beach till sunrise! I love Montanita!
From August 13 – 23, I met up with a group of “Yoga-ers” and adventurers lead by the Pachamama Alliance and YogaWorks in Quito where we started our ten day yoga travel adventure. First we went to Otovalo, a city in the north (an outdoor market I went to earlier and wrote about in this blog), then we went to Puyo, the last city before we ventured deep into the Amazon rainforest that was close, super south, to the border with Peru. There I learned about the ancient indigenous Achuar culture and participated in their traditions, rituals, daily activities and cultural exchanges. Then we explored the relaxing hot springs in Banos and finally ended our journey by returning to an interesting hotel in Quito, Café Cultura. Every day we practiced yoga in the most incredible natural settings and I hope to continue my practice when I return to the states.
I stayed in Quito for a couple days just hanging out with my family and newfound friends before I cried my eyes out when I had to leave and return to the Bay Area.
Tomorrow I start school! My summer adventure is over, but my life adventures are just beginning! I will write about my summer in more detail with a day-by-day replay when I have a moment, since this is my senior year and it is pretty hectic with classes, extracurricular activities, SAT tests, college applications, catching up with friends and having a life, so I just am being real and letting everyone know what’s up!

Toxi-Tour

Today I woke up at 6:00 am to meet up with my Toxi-Tour Guide and began our tour of all the terrible destruction to these once beautiful lands. A Toxi-Tour is an ecological excursion throughout Lago Agrio in which we trekked to different polluted sites, contaminated by ChevronTexaco, and observed the reality of the pollution in this area of the jungle. I understood that a Toxi-Tour could be really depressing and scary to see first hand since all the crude oil has left a terrible scar in the once beautiful environment. But I never could have been prepared for the reality of this horrid abuse and its gloomy effect of not only leaving a toxic garbage dump but causing much illness to these once healthy peoples.
I met up with Donald, another employee of El Frente, and he showed me some oil pits and other ridiculously polluted areas. The first thing I saw was a 25 foot oil pit, the size of a city bus, that had been there since the 1960s, and Chevron said they had already cleaned it up. There was an orchard of coffee beans next to the pit with their roots growing directly into the oil lake and, this coffee got shipped and exported all over the world. The farmer we ran into even said that some of the beans get sent to Starbucks! Donald went out into the middle of the lake on a little raft and started to pick up the crude oil with a stick. I leaned against a tree and got oil all over my clothes and hands and I couldn’t get it off. I started tot think what if you had to live like this everyday?
And then a local farmer cut his way out of the bush with a machete, fully covered in oil and gunk as he chased his oil covered pig. He stopped when he saw us and started wailing and complaining about how his family didn’t have anything to eat, everything tastes like oil and he is losing his vision. He was right, the waft of oil fumes was ridiculous and it felt like you were in a jungle oil tank. I had raging headache that I could not imagine living with every moment in my home.
We spent several hours visiting other oil drilling sites, oil contaminated rivers, people living in the area, oil wells, oil refinement stations, oil fire torches, spoke with workers of Chevron and just breathed in the oil in the deadly environment. I am so glad I went but it was ridiculously heart breaking.
I said goodbye to my tour guide and took the bus back to Quito. For the next seven hours, I thought about how I could help make a positive change in this violated part of our world…


Here is the trailer for the documentary Crude and it shows the places I've been visiting and what I have been working for:

Cofan Jewelry

The first half of my day was spent on the bus from Quito to Lago Agrio. The 8 hour bus ride was quite interesting. I already mentioned the Quito bus situation and how the buses can often be an adventure but the inter-provincial buses are even more intense. My friends informed me of this fact, but I had no clue the buses were really like their descriptions. They play bad, B-rated 80´s action films all dubbed in Spanish (but not even dubbed well, all the characters sound like the voice of a middle-aged Ecuadorian man) and, when the bus is not blasting movies, it blares hard core Reggaeton or romantic love ballads in Spanish. It is quite an experience and I highly recommend it!
Finally I arrived in Lago Agrio. I took this solo trip to see the environmental disaster that Chevron has been trying to hide. By now, I have seen the documentary Crude a few times, read and saw the terrible pictures in the book Crude Reflections, and now it was time to see the pain and suffering for myself in 3D, real life, real time. I also set up this trip to meet with the Cofan, an indigenous jungle people of the north of Ecuador. They make colorful jewelry out of seeds, feathers, and twine from local plants, and I am interested in working with them to bring their wonderful worldly crafts to the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
So I got off the bus and took a cab to my hotel. Lago is oppressively hot, but I had a room overlooking the main drag with a cooling fan. I met up with Emerheildo, an indigenous leader of the Cofan people of the north who represents their crafts and trades. He also stands up for the rights of these people of the jungle against the American big oil companies, as well as working for indigenous human rights in general. He is a really wise, interesting and bold man. We talked and walked around Lago and ended up at the Cofan Indigenous Store, which sells crafts from the women in the village to the people in the city of Lago. They sell an assortment of things, ranging from bracelets to necklaces to bags to almost every accessory you can think of, except with an original homegrown twist. I hung around the store for a couple hours, talked with the people and took pictures of these original creations. I spoke with them about creating a fair trade and selling their crafts in the US, how that could be really beneficial for everyone. All of us seemed excited. I hope to talk with some friends and contacts when I return to the states so I can make this idea come to life.
I spent the rest of my night alone watching over the unattractive urban concrete streets of Lago Agrio, observing all from my hotel roof perch.

Chillin in the jungle

After the Crude film première and a fun night of local after parties in Tena, we slept in late at our orchard garden hotel. When I finally woke up, I got out of bed and swam in a swimming pool that looked oddly like a polar bear pool you might see at the zoo. We also swam in the river near by. It was a chill hang out day in the jungle. I went on hikes with my work mates and explored the amazing land of the Amazon rainforest.
It felt so good to be here in the real wilderness. I could breathe better since the air was so fresh and I noticed that I became more one with the earth. I know it might sound corny but I felt really connected to our planet and was devastated when we had to leave.
We left Tena on a bus. I stood up for most of the four hour ride but it was okay. I did finally get a seat with my friend and immediately fell asleep. But I almost sleep too hard in any car, bus or train and I almost missed my bus stop, but I woke up on time.

The premiere of the documentary Crude

This morning I went with a few of my work buddies to Napo, a cute little nearby town along the the Napo river in the jungle. We went swimming in the river and spent hours jumping off the rocks. Then we returned to our hotel and went swimming in the swimming pool, and then (because obviously I can’t get enough swimming!) went to swim in the creek near the hotel with some buddies.
After all my swimming extravaganzas it was late and we needed to get ready for the premiere of the documentary film Crude. So we showered and went out to town. The premiere was shown in a coliseum in the middle of Tena. El Frente had bused people in from the jungle, and many people from Tena and nearby also came to watch this film. As I mentioned in my posting yesterday, this film is about a lawsuit against ChevronTexaco about their destruction of the environment in the Amazon region in the north of Ecuador. The film showing was a success. The stadium was full and many other important environmental people from Ecuador attended and spoke. The local people believed that the film told their story well, and hoped that it might cause the the world to hear and do something to help.
You can find out more about this from El Frente's website:

www.chevrontoxico.com