A weekend in the clouds

Hello all! I just returned yesterday from Intag, which is a cloud forest in the mountains of Ecuador about 3-4 hours North of Quito. We spent 4 days on this amazing farm that grows all its own food and operates without electricity or running water. It was incredibly beautiful - we were a short walk away from two waterfalls and a river, plus amazing hiking trails through the jungle. A few notes on the weekend:

1. (Note: I heard this lecture in Spanish, meaning I´m a little fuzzy on some of the details. My apologies). Intag is an area of incredible biodiversity, home to many species found infrequently or nowhere else in the world. However, it is also an area rich in minerals, which has attracted mining companies from all over the world (predominantly Canada). The most major way in which mining disrupts ecosystems is by contaminating the water supply. Runoff from mines seeps into rivers, lakes, and through the soil, killing plants and animals and putting the local population at extreme risk. Its been found that when a water supply is contaminated, the sector of the population most effected is the children. In areas that have been previously mined, there are incredibly high rates of cancer among the local people, especially young ones.

The Intag community has succeeded in getting much of the land, including the farm on which we stayed, named as a national reserve, meaning it cannot be exploited for its natural resources like minerals and petroleum. But not without an effort. The tactic used to procure land for mining is for a ¨junior company,¨one that is not extremely large or well known, to go into areas rich in minerals and buy up land through bribery, intimidation and force. Then the main mining companies come in to exploit the product. The owner of the farm has been a prominent figure in the anti-mining movement, to the extent that in 2006 a junior mining company hired 15 off-duty and retired policemen and soldiers to come to the farm to arrest him on a sketchy charge made by an employee of the mining company. The ultimate intent was not to have the charge stick, but to hire someone to kill him in jail (apparently very easy and relatively cheap). He ended up hiding in the woods and in friends houses for over a month before the charges were dropped, with no help from either the Ecuadoran or US government (he´s an expat from Wisconsin).

Many of these companies come from Canada for two reasons: one, there are apparently few regulations on the companies that trade in the Toronto Stock Exchange - so these junior companies can be listed on the TSE despite being relatively illegitimate and the perpetrators of bribes, intimidation and assassination. The second is that while Canada is one of the most minerally rich countries in the world, there are laws against contaminating in Canada. Therefore, these companies have to find other countries to contaminate.

2. Onto a lighter topic: now, I have never been much of a coffee drinker. The occasional mocha (with enough chocolate so I can´t taste the coffee) is about as far as I go. However, at the farm we stayed at last weekend, they grew, roasted and brewed their own coffee - and it was completely amazing. Ironically, though Ecuador grows some of the best coffee in the world, people here drink Nestle intant coffee, probably packaged in Charlottesville or something ridiculous like that. I spent the entire weekend totally wired because I was having about 10 times as much coffee as my system is used to at every meal. And today, I feel terrible....coincidence?

3. On the way home, a few friends and I stopped at a restaurant that listed ¨Chocolate con Ron¨(ron = rum) as one of the drink options, which sounded amazing and I obviously had to try. However, we´re not actually sure they even put water inthe chocolate - it tasted more like they heated up a big mug of rum and sprinkled chocolate powder in it. Word to the wise.

4. I ran into a rose bush while playing soccer on Monday night. Slight complication: rose bush was surrounded in barbed wire. Ouch.

5. Even though we did have lectures while we were gone - including a fascinating 2.5 hour history lecture - I got to listen to them while in a hammock. Winner.

And now I´m back in Los Chillos. Unfortunately, I do still have to go to school, which I had completely forgotten about while in Intag. However, we only have 7 more days of Spanish class (which is mind-numbingly boring), and then all our classes are going to be seminars on history, politics, economics, development, social movements, etc. I´m pretty excited for those - so far they´ve all been really interesting. And in about 10 days we head to the Amazon, which is going to be sick. It´s completely ridiculous how quickly time goes here.

Hasta luego,
Alice