Yachana Blog

By Eric Rindal

On Thursday, June 18^th the first ever Yachana Talent Show was held at the high school. All the students thought it would be a great way to end the final group session for this school year – and the hype grew as Thursday approached.

A week before the show, students were whispering about possible group performances, while others were quietly singing in their rooms practicing for their big debut. Amongst the myriad of conversational topics during each mealtime, one could hear at least ten people proudly explain their talent and how awesome it would be. Entry rules were wide open…students had the option to sing, dance, juggle, magic tricks, impressions, or simply a surprise…and they took full advantage of their freedom.

With the lights out in the 6^th course classroom, all the students were humming with excitement, loud bumping music creating the atmosphere, the first act prepared to enter; everything was perfect. Flash! The lights burst on! The first act of 4^th course boys wearing low stocking caps break dancing followed by choreographed danced moves — The crowd’s vitality fueled the dancers and officially set the tone for the rest of the talent show.

Next up, juggling. You may know that we don’t have all the “resources” for a juggling routine at Yachana, so José (the juggler) used three potatoes from the kitchen. Up, down, around, the potatoes flew through his hands like a professional – Oh! He dropped them… “Again” the crowed roared. José restarted, up, down, around – and potatoes down on the ground. Yet the crowed cheered for more, and José continued to give them quite the show!

A few specialties entered the scene and diversified the format of the show. Taking advantage of the freedom offered, one student read poetry he had written.

The crowed was silent with respect and intent on listening to their classmate’s poems and marveling his writing ability. Following the poetry reading, a volunteer from the U.S. performed a modern dance routine. She balanced on her head, stretched her body and flew to the rhythm of the music – definitely an act the students loved and had never seen before. A group four of 6^th course guys performed a dance as the “Yachana Mamas.”

Wearing girls’ dresses and high heels, they danced to traditional Ecuadorian music – needless to say, and the crowed was laughing hysterically. Ending the night was a lip-sync of a Brian Adams song, levitation under a sheet, and a phenomenal guitar and harmonica duo playing the Beatles song “Hey Jude.”

Without exception the talent show was the perfect way to end this school year, and will be an annual part of Yachana high school. This type of performance is a perfect way for the students to be proud of their talents and showoff within the community of Yachana.

By: Gina La Ruffa

I woke up at 5:30 in the morning, grabbed my bowl and silverware from my room, and headed towards the cafeteria. I got in line for breakfast before a long day of chores and school. My breakfast consisted of a hard-boiled egg, two rolls of bread, an apple, and chocolate milk - just the breakfast I would need to get me through the day. After I was done, all of us students got in formation on the main lawn to hear the lesson of the day and listen to our professors. I was called on

afterward to summarize what I had learned in the story, kids around me giggled, and we were off on our way to complete our respective chores. Today I would be in charge of cleaning the pig pen. Here at Yachana we have three very large pigs that are used to sell their litters and also for their feces. The feces go into a biodigestor and then the methane gas produced is pumped up to the chicken coop to supply the lanterns that keep the baby chicks warm at night while the liquid runoff is mixed 75:1 with water and used as fertilizer for everything we grow here at Yachana.

I started off by putting on my boots and unleashing the hose. I began to spray everything down in the first pig pen. The leftover scraps of food that we had fed for the pigs were draining down a small hole into the biodigester, along with the pig excrement. The job itself was very smelly, but it is something that needs to be done daily. Once I had cleaned out one pig pen I moved onto the next until I was done forcing all the leftovers down a small hole in order for the pen to be clean. I then hosed off the pigs that were quite dirty themselves. They didn’t seem to enjoy being sprayed. After doing my chores with the animals, I cleaned up, went to lunch and continued my day of classes in our typical outdoor, Amazonian classrooms. This was just the beginning of my day, and every morning will be similar to this for the rest of my weeks here at Yachana.

By: Eric Rindal

Yachana Lodge has realistically prepared me for a life of eco-tourism. By studying at Yachana, I have learned how eco-tourism works, as well as how to apply it to my own life. Having interned at Yachana Lodge, I have been exposed to tourists and the hotel business from a firsthand basis. Everything from serving food to guests, to taking them on tours of the Amazon around us has been an amazing learning experience. If I do not end up working myself at the lodge in the future, I will have a strong sense of what eco-tourism may hold for me in the future.

Yachana Lodge and Yachana Technical High School have a very symbiotic relationship. One could not run without the other in the sense that the lodge provides funds for the school to build buildings, feed the children, sponsor programs, and the hotel would not function without its restaurant hosts, tour guides, food raised by students etc. This relationship is what keeps the program alive and is what makes Yachana what it is today.

Many students like myself, while on their 3 week “off” rotation from school at Yachana in which they are expected to go home, choose to spend their time working for the lodge. This way they can get hands on experience and complete their internship with people they know. This provides for a real community feel, where people get to know one another well after spending so much time together. They foster relationships and educational experiences that will last them a lifetime.

By: Sarah Chien

Chickens are a pretty common sight around Yachana. Yachana has its own chicken coop where it raises the 100 chickens that are consumed every week by the high school and the lodge. Chickens run freely in people’s yards in Mondaña and other neighboring communities. They are still used as payment by patients who go to visit the local shaman. They show up in the soup served up in the Yachana cafeteria. And every once in awhile a chicken is also donated to the cause of science.

It’s time for agronomy class in cuarto curso and the students are trickling into the classroom after lunch. When the professor arrives, he doesn’t ask everyone to take out their books or to turn in homework. Instead he simply says, “Mátenme un pollo,” and everyone follows him out of the classroom, back through the school grounds and down to the butcher’s table.

Whereas in the United States our dissection subjects came in plastic bags and formaldehyde, here in the Amazon one of Yachana’s chickens is simply selected, killed, and then the professor begins the dissection right there on the butcher’s table. With the students standing around the table, he cuts past the breast meat and traces the path of the digestive system, selecting pieces of the esophagus, the liver, the intestine to pass around. The students get to take look inside the stomach and see half-digested grains, or unwind the long intestine to see how long the folded tube really is. Some are eager to touch the organs others wince and whine and try to purposely miss their turn.

But despite the fun of participating in a dissection, this is still class. After all the parts have been laid out on the table the professor quizzes each student, asking them to identify a certain part and name its function. The three students who miss the most questions have to stay and pluck the chicken, readying it for the pot of boiling water prepared earlier.  At Yachana nothing is wasted!

Our media center at the Colegio is truly unique. With roughly 20 computers and 10 connected wirelessly to the Internet, we make the most of what we have in the middle of the jungle. We were looking for a system that had no moving parts and we also wanted a computer that would be resistant to the outdoors, considering our classrooms have no glass windows and are out in the open.

This is where our “Yachana E2” brand computers come into play. They don’t have a hard drive, but instead use an 8GB flash memory card which you can purchase anywhere and costs 20 dollars. They are designed to run on 9 watts of energy, making them very energy efficient.

Aleutia, a British company, made these computers, but we gave them the name Yachana so that they could be sold in south America and appeal to the Spanish speaking population.

Yachana Lodge has a building with a dish on top where the signal comes in, it then goes through a modem and antenna that sends the signal to the tower at the top of a nearby hill. This tower has an omni-directional antenna that overlooks everything. Because there is a mountain in between the school and the antenna on the hill, we send the signal to a cow pasture down river which bypasses the mountain. The signal is then relayed back to the antenna at the school.

The computers are available to us at most any time of the day. We also have computer classes 6 hours a week in which we learn things like typing, how to use our open source programs, research on the Internet, etc. We are fortunate to be connected to the rest of the world while studying at Yachana!

Yachana Microenterprise Development Program: The Opportunities of the Internet for Sales

By: Alex Simon

At Yachana Technical High School, I learned more from the students about the school’s microenterprise development program.

Microenterprises are present all over the developing world, whether they be in the form of a mobile hardware vendor or a village bakery. At Yachana Technical High School, the students learn the essence of microenterprise by actually conducting one, a small business in which they produce beaded jewelry created entirely from nearby forest plants.

These products are currently sold to tourists who travel to the school as well as in the gift shop at Yachana Lodge.  Watching the students painstakingly drill tiny holes into small beads, I learned that, though the material costs were nonexistent, it takes a large amount of time to make the products, which means incredibly low per-hour earnings: not a sustainable way to operate a microenterprise.

We discussed the idea of outsourcing some of the labor required for the production of the jewelry to the students’ resident communities. This would boost employment opportunities there while increasing the production capacity of goods.

This idea from the students seemed to be a good one, but increasing production capacity would only get the business so far, we discussed.  Increasing the scope of the marketplace for the nice jewelry the students were producing was another important step to increase the revenues and size of the students’ business.  I gave a lecture to the school (in my slightly broken Spanish) about the marketplaces available on the Internet.

Because of the incredibly innovative computer and Internet system Yachana founder Douglas McMeekin had created, access to the Internet in this school was ever-present. This meant, I told the students, that if they can figure out how to ship their products, they could use a site such as eBay to sell their products to customers around the world. I had some experience in these matters, having developed Youth Microcredit International, which sells Guatemalan products online to benefit communities there (www.ymci.org), and I mentioned that the students could also create their own website to better illustrate the social-benefit of buying products from the students’ microenterprise.

The students were very receptive, and thought the idea was a good one. Yachana is all about innovation, and with some effort, hopefully the Yachana students will increase the range of their business and share their products and their story with people across the world.

By: Alex Simon

Though my experiences at the Yachana Lodge and High School were all fascinating, none gave me a better sense of the impact of Yachana than a Sunday I spent with three members of the fifth grade class working with a nearby community.

On Saturday evening, while eating with several students at the school, I was told that the Ecuadorian Education Ministry requires all members of the fifth grade class to teach literacy in the more rural parts of the region. I was intrigued by this idea of mandatory public service, and was eager to participate when invited on one of the teaching excursions the following day.

At 7:30, we departed for a village located just a short canoe trip up the Napo.  Walking to the school, a small wooden room suspended on poles, we found it to be completely empty. After asking around, we learned that later in the afternoon we’d be holding classes, but for now, it was time for a “minga.”

A minga in the Ecuadorian Amazon is when the community collectively acts for the common good.  Typically, a minga occurs when someone realizes that land needs to be cleared to make room for increased farming, or, as I later visited in the highlands, when a community decides to build a cement area for sports playing. Without questioning, Ecuadorian communities will drop whatever they are working on, and come together to achieve this goal, whether it entails pouring cement or nailing together walls for a school.

Sunday’s minga was to clear land so the community would have more space for farming. I’d brought bug repellent and suntan lotion, but nothing in anticipation of clearing land with a machete for half the day!  I soon realized any skills I’d accumulated in my education were completely useless when it came to honest, manual labor.  Additionally, the routine shots of homemade aguardiente (liquor made with anise) as we worked helped make this experience unlike anything I had experienced living in Boston, or probably anywhere in the United States for that matter.

After a half day’s work, we ate our boxed lunches and accepted offerings of more aguardiente and chicken soup.  Hanging out in the shade of a nearby home, I learned that every Sunday the students travel to increase literacy in villages around the school and they participate in some other type of practical, sometimes sustainable, assistance. This week, the minga had been the activity.  Next week, they would be teaching them how to grow small vegetable gardens in their home in order to be more sustainable. This extra effort on the part of the students seemed to draw from their experience at Yachana, which teaches sustainable practices in all areas of living.

In talking to the Yachana students, I learned that many of them and their classmates had plans to implement sustainable practices learned at Yachana in their communities. One had already helped his family design a greenhouse to increase the efficiency of their farming and others had similar ideas. The effect of Yachana on its students was then apparent and remarkable.

Yachana Technical High School has started a new conservation project to completely map out and research Yachana’s land on the west side of the Napo river, most of which is unknown primary or secondary Rainforest.

For the last 3 years, Global Vision International (G.V.I.) has been mapping out and researching the Yachana Reserve, a 1,200 ha (2,880 acres) protected forest on the eastern side of the river. They have been doing research into the biodiversity of the Reserve, which has deer, ocelots, and puma, among others.

As part of their species identification project, they have identified over 50 species of frogs, including a new species to science, which has been nicknamed the ‘Yachanito’.

Up until now, the high school students have been aiding and learning from these projects in the Reserve, but now have started to map out the western side of the river, the land right behind the Colegio and the Lodge, which is our very own ‘Terra Incognito’. Working in partnership with G.V.I., the students are learning mapping and referencing skills, including how to use compasses and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

Once we have a complete map of our area (and how big it is!), we will then mark out transects (pathways used specifically for species counts) and observation points, and then we will be ready to observe and identify the animal and plant life. Our aim is to get the same system of observation on the eastern side of the river as on the western side, and to compare results. At the moment we simply do not know what’s out there. We could be in for some interesting findings!

Some of the research we would like to see replicated in other areas of the Oriente. For example, G.V.I. is using cutting edge research in fresh water stream ecology in this area, and the presence of certain species indicates that the water is completely free of pollution. This method may become a standard way mark out clean water areas for human consumption, while at the same time preserving rainforest. The students will also improve their guiding and ecotourism skills with exact scientific identification of species and an increased knowledge of habitat and behavior.

In the next month the students will begin an ‘outreach’ program, were they go out into the communities and talk about the need to the conservation of plants and animals. Hopefully we will pursuade people against the hunting of animal species that is common on both sides of the river.

This month saw the opening of the new Library at the Colegio. Previously books had been shelved in the office; now we have a dedicated space which will soon have made to fit shelving and tables and benches for study. There is a computer available for research purposes that has Encarta 2009 installed on it, as well as being Internet ready.

We have recently received two personal donations of books that are being shelved at this time. A donation of other library materials is waiting in Quito to be sorted and transferred to the new library at Yachana.

Students are responding eagerly to the atmosphere created by a new study and reading place. Annie Freeman is the acting Librarian and this term we have three student helpers who work one evening each week in the Library.

Welcome to the new Yachana Blog, sponsored by the Yachana Technical High School. The first article is below, and we will try to post a new article every week or so. Enjoy…!

Every Sunday at Yachana Technical High School, our students become teachers, our students become leaders and our students become pioneers. With the help of the Ecuadorian government, the Quinto course at Yachana High School visits small communities  along the Rio Napo to teach adults how to read and write.  The illiteracy rate of adults in the Amazon region borders around 65% and another 25% having only a basic education.

Thanks to the progressive government that President Rafael Correa has established in Ecuador and the recently passed constitution, education is going through somewhat of a rebirth in the country. Our students are supplied with text books and teaching guides specifically geared toward the Amazon region. Topics in the program include basic health and medical practices, recycling, and environmental education Yachana students are learning at a very young age the importance of community development and spreading quality education to the most rural parts of Ecuador.

Along with the education part of the program, Yachana students are also partaking in community developmental projects to enhance leadership abilities as well as promote a healthy lifestyle. Projects include but are not limited to community trash clean up, recycling, first aid practices and the construction and maintenance of organic composting.

This is a unique experience for the Yachana students to put into practice  the principals and techniques being taught at the High School. As each week of the program passes, the students are feeling more confident and comfortable going into the communities and sharing their knowledge and experiences with the program participants as well as learning effective techniques to apply to their own communities. The program lasts throughout the school year, so please keep posted for future updates.  ¡Gracias!