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Settling into a new job is never easy. Settling into a new home can be a fairly testing experience as well. I’m sure that most people reading this will have endured at least one, if not both of the above at some point in their lives. Some of you might have even moved to a new job and home in another country, which brings a whole new set of challenges into the mix.

If you’ve gone that far, then please spare a thought for the new voluntary Community Development Manager at San Jose de Payamino. That’s me - pleased to meet you! Until recently I was happily tramping around South America on a career break, when, from out of the blue, I received an email from a former colleague with information about a voluntary job vacancy in Ecuador, managing a sustainable development project at an indigenous Kichwa community somewhere in the Amazon. It seemed like an interesting challenge, and I thought that I kind of loosely fitted the person specification (in the same way that a small child loosely fits into his dad’s biggest, baggiest winter jumper), so decided to apply. Quite unexpectedly, a few months later, I found myself in Coca, a petrol boom-town and gateway into Ecuador’s small slice of the Amazon basin, waiting to meet up with Lucio Cejua, Community Coordinator for the Payamino Project, so that I could be whisked off to start a new chapter in my life.

After spending the best part of the day shopping for vital supplies (Plastic bin to keep the rats off my food – check; machete – check; wellie boots – check) we finally headed off on the two-hour journey to Payamino, arriving just before nightfall. The community was made up of a collection of rickety-looking wooden shacks on stilts with corrugated zinc roves, which had apparently been donated by the EC about twenty years previously. These were gathered around the obligatory football pitch (overgrown rectangle of weedy grass with a pair of bamboo canes at either end for goals), with a two-classroom school and volleyball court at one end and a community health centre at the other.

As the light dimmed, Lucio showed me into his house, where I would be staying. The front half of the house was an open-sided living area/balcony, with clothes hanging from the roof to dry and random bits of family clutter strewn on the floor. Behind this were two bedrooms, one where I would be sleeping and another where Lucio, his wife and two children sleep. The whole thing was no bigger than a well-proportioned English suburban living room and the loosely nailed-together boards that made up the walls and floor looked like they were going to fall apart at any moment. In fact, quite a few of them were already missing.

A motley collection of small children, women, dogs, cats and chickens came to stare at me in the faint light of a candle that Lucio had lit. I made a few attempts at conversation in Spanish which were met with nervous giggles and more stares, but failed to generate anything in the way of dialogue until I discovered that asking the children how to say certain words in Kichwa was an effective way of getting a response. Thus, by the end of my first day in Payamino I was able to say iman allatak kanki (how are you?) allku (dog), luziru (star), alli punlla (good morning), alli chishi (good afternoon) and alli tuta (good night), the latter of which I took advantage of in order to excuse myself and go to bed.

As I lay in the darkness I wondered what I had let myself in for. Here I was, in the middle of nowhere, staying in a house that looked like a disintegrating pile of driftwood with no electricity, no running water, no toilets, no phone signal and no shops – and I was planning on living like this for at least a year? Just as I was starting to realise the scale of the personal challenge ahead of me, my attention was distracted by the nocturnal sounds of Payamino. Frogs, millions of them, partying like it was the end-of-season 25% discount happy hour at the all-night froggy-food karaoke, bar and grill.

You might be aware that the American bullfrog is so-called because its croak sounds remarkably like the bellow of a large bovine creature. Working on that kind of logic, I decided to give new common names to quite a few of Payamino’s amphibians, including the chihuahua frog (the name may be substituted by that of any other pointless, small and infuriatingly yappy dog breed of choice), then there’s the donkey frog and finally the grumpy-old-tory-in-the-house-of-commons-after-too-many-lunchtime-ports frog. As hour after deafening hour went by in the darkness, I tried to block out the sound by repeating over and over to myself, this may take a little getting used to.

The frogs were not the greatest of nocturnal challenges, however. That came a couple of nights later when the end of my bed – the end that my head happened to be resting upon – suffered an unwelcome invasion. The first warning came as I was just about to fall asleep. Some kind of dream was beginning to stir in my mind when all of a sudden I heard something that sounded like many legs (presumably attached to one body) scampering across my pillow. I woke with a start and focussed on listening as hard as I could in the darkness, trying to decide whether or not I had imagined the noise. Then it came again. I sat up and fumbled around the bed for my torch, switching it on and shining the light on my pillow, upon which a flurry of cockroaches went shooting off the end of my bed and into the half-inch cracks that separate the wooden planks of my bedroom wall. I picked up my pillow to find more cockroaches hiding under there. After that, whenever I turned the light out, the cockroaches would come creeping back out of the walls and onto my bed.

I should make it clear that I do not dislike cockroaches. In fact, I’m quite a fan of them; I have kept Madagascan hissing cockroaches, giant cave cockroaches and death’s head cockroaches as pets in the past. Once you get to know cockroaches, you soon learn that they are fascinating creatures: thanks to their having five brains, they can survive without their head for up to a week (eventually dying of thirst); they can go without food for a month and can hold their breath for up to forty minutes. A cockroach has an early warning radar system that tells it when danger is coming, how fast it is coming, and which direction it is coming from, and with a reaction speed of 125^th of a second, it can make up its mind to get out of the way fast. Once it decides to get out of there, it can run fifty times its body length in a second, which makes it two and a half times faster than a cheetah, relative to body size.

Before we start to let all these tales of cockroach indestructibility give us nightmares, though, we also should bear in mind that of the 4,000 or so known species of cockroach in the world, only 30 are regular visitors to human houses, and only about four of these get classed as pests, so they’re not all bad. In fact, they fulfil quite an important duty in keeping the world neat and tidy. Cockroaches are what we call ‘detritivores,’ which means that they eat detritus. For those of us who don’t talk posh, detritus means rubbish, and by rubbish I mean absolutely any discarded organic waste: dead bodies, rotting vegetation, even animal poo. If it weren’t for animals like cockroaches, all the nasty smelly stuff that nature produces would be impossible for us to ignore, because it would be lying around all over the place. We may like to think of cockroaches as dirty animals, but in fact, it is thanks to them that the natural world is kept clean, tidy and minty-fresh smelling, just the way we like it.  

Despite all of this, I do not appreciate having my sleep interrupted by miniature armies of cockroaches walking over my face in the darkness. Nonetheless, this is what I had to endure until the small hours of the morning when a terrific thunderstorm erupted. The howling wind and rolling thunder seemed to alarm the cockroaches as much as they did me, only unlike me, they had the good sense to run away and hide.  I, on the other hand, am stubbornly remaining put in Payamino, despite wondering what other nocturnal surprises may come my way in the coming months.