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This blog is something of a novelty: for the first time, I am writing about Payamino from the relative safety of an English living room, surrounded by comfortable furniture, radiators, double glazing and a giant flat screen TV. My little shack in the jungle seems so far away right now...

On the 10^th of April, I celebrated the first year anniversary of my arrival in Payamino, and with it, my visa ran out, forcing me to return to Britain in order to procure a new one. I had time to catch up with friends and relations and to enjoy a few home comforts such as a decent cup of tea, chocolate digestives, marmite and food that you’d actually want to eat for reasons other than the mere survival value of doing so. After a year and a half away, including a year in Payamino, people back home have been bombarding me with questions, the majority of which have been unanswerable (“So, what’s it like?” “Um... “). However, all of them have helped me look back and reflect on the last year as I try to get the measure of where we’ve been and where we’re going. 

So where have we been? The achievements can be quantified quite quickly: three community groups have been prepared and equipped to run a microloans project, which was successfully launched, and (as of the first quarter review) being managed much better than I had anticipated; just under $5,000 was invested in educational materials for the community’s primary and secondary school students; infrastructure has been created for the community to be able to receive tourists and volunteers; additional funding has been procured for tourism and agricultural projects; the volunteer scheme has been launched, and the first applicants are starting to come through; connections are being made with tour agencies in Ecuador and abroad; training has been provided for the community in areas such as first aid, community tourism, ornithological tourism, compost toilet construction and accounting.

Parallel to the project’s work, a team from Manchester University has been developing the potential for using Payamino as a base for research and study. The research station a couple of miles up the Payamino River from the village has been expanded, and an agreement signed with the community, the Ministry of the Environment, an Ecuadorian university and the Natural History Museum in Quito, which allows the research station to function legally. Payamino has received field visits from the universities of Glasgow and Manchester for a number of years, but these new developments should lay the foundations for visits from other university groups and students, providing an additional income for the community and furthering our knowledge of the biodiversity within the Payamino territory and the culture of its human inhabitants.

Other developments have been taking place thanks to the local government: a fortnight before I left, Payamino was hooked up to a mains electricity supply and access to the community is being improved with the 20 kilometres of dirt track that lead into the territory having been resurfaced. Furthermore, construction work started on a bridge to span the Armadillo River, which cuts off the road whenever there is heavy rain. It appears that the politicians may finally be starting to notice that Payamino exists.

So far, so good; so what’s next? The year ahead will be focussed on trying to build on what we’ve achieved during the past year. That means ongoing fine-tuning for the microloans project; promoting Payamino as a tourist destination up in Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, and getting tour groups down to Payamino; working with volunteers to begin developing ways in which they can contribute to the community through helping with the management of tourist initiatives, developing small income-generating projects or helping the school and creating extra-curricular education programmes; developing more efficient ways of using the financial resources that we have available for healthcare and education; continuing to improve accessibility and infrastructure for tourists in the community; promoting and facilitating use of the research station by university groups and students, and more.

The greatest challenge for the year ahead doesn’t lie with the practicalities of any of the above, however; the real hard work, and the key to the project’s success lies in the direct interaction and communication that we have with the community, which involves creating a work ethic which permits the project and the community to achieve the above goals for the year ahead in a fashion that is compatible with the community’s aspirations and world view.

One thing that’s frequently said about the Kichwas is that their temporal awareness is very different from ours. Whereas we imagine ourselves travelling forwards through time, their concept of time is one of backward movement: to them, the past is in front – because it has already happened, so it’s tangible and can be visualised – while the future lies behind - it can’t be seen because it hasn’t happened yet. Hence the Kichwa phrase for ‘after’ is chay washa. Chay means ‘that’, and washa means ‘back’ (in the anatomical sense of the word), so the phrase translates as ‘to the back of that’.

If you can’t visualise the future you can’t plan for it, and living a subsistence lifestyle doesn’t require you to. Manioc, which has been a staple crop in the Amazon for much longer than the Kichwas have been around, has a planting to harvesting cycle of six months, the longest that any of the crops that they grow take to be ready to consume (with the sole exception of pineapples). The very nature of subsistence agriculture is to meet immediate demand only, so you grow what you need to feed your family, and if there’s any more left over, you can just eat that as well. Capitalistic ideas of working to accrue and accumulate surplus wealth, and using that wealth to generate more wealth through investment, don’t exist within a subsistence agriculturalist lifestyle.

As an example of this, some families have taken the decision to send their children to school in nearby Loreto, instead of having them enrolled in the small school within the community. This decision is costly, and those families will clear additional land to grow more crops in order to meet the added expenses of travel, accommodation and food. As soon as their child graduates from school the need for working the additional land is no longer there, so they will stop working that land and allow it to revert to secondary forest, even if the land is still viable for agriculture. Even though they could continue using that land to benefit from a higher income, they don’t, because they don’t see an immediate necessity for it, which is all good and well until you slip with your machete and suddenly find yourself having to pay a hospital bill, but don’t have any spare cash with which to do so.

The modern market economy, which revolves around encouraging people to own and spend ever-increasing amounts of money, is inevitably going to cause some kind of culture clash when coming into contact with subsistence agriculturalists. The residents of San Jose de Payamino, along with countless other native Amazonians, have already been well and truly integrated into the market, and are feeling the effects of the culture clash. Commercial pressure to buy brand-name clothes, mobile phones and now (with the arrival of electricity in Payamino) electrical appliances is as strong for the Payamino Runas as it is for any one of us. The subsistence mentality, coupled with pressure for large, short-term expenses, leads to fast, drastic means of earning money, such as felling trees or taking wild animals from the forest to sell as pets or for meat, both of which are not only damaging to the environment that they live in and depend on, but are also illegal in Ecuador. When pressures to spend money affects the community as a whole, there exists the risk that they may give in to more profitable, but also more damaging pressures, such as allowing access to oil companies.

Oil extraction is a difficult issue in Ecuador. It powers 50% of the country’s economy and funds the current government’s populist approach to helping the poor: free healthcare, education, family ‘development’ grants and more are all paid for with oil money. It is also a very damaging industry: communities that have allowed oil extraction to take place within their land frequently suffer pollution to watercourses and groundwater. Many rural communities in Ecuador do not received any kind of piped or treated water, and as a result, contamination has deprived them of water for drinking, cooking and washing, causing cancers, abortions and losses of crops and livestock. Mitigation work by the petrol companies is often belated and insufficient. Despite the risks that communities are subject to from oil extraction, the price for buying them out is relatively small: one Waorani community demanded 120 pairs of Reebok trainers, a couple of canoes with outboard motors and two pick-up trucks – relatively small change for a petrol company. Additionally, in the case of most communities, two or three thousand dollars will be given to each family, and a few thousand to the community as a whole, as a one-off payment. With no guidance in financial planning, and a short-term approach to resource management, this money is usually blown quickly on a few material goods (fridges, TV’s, some nice clothes) and, more than likely, a lot of drinking, and then it’s gone, leaving the community with no money, no water and no crops or livestock from which to make a living, while the petrol company continues pumping black gold out of their land without having to hand over another penny.

Sustainable development initiatives require a different approach and a different mentality. A long term investment of time and labour must be made, with a gradual development over time before income-generating activities will begin to yield results. Participants must be able to keep themselves motivated with thoughts of a financial return that lies some way further up the road; they must imagine money that doesn’t yet exist, which is an ambitiously abstract concept for someone who is used to a hand-to-mouth existence.

In short, if the future of the 17,000 hectares’ territory of San Jose de Payamino, its people and wildlife are to have a future, the forest must be protected, and the people must have a sustainable income. For this to happen, the community need to put in an investment of labour that will allow these income generating schemes to grow, and they need to allow time for these to start generating revenue, and for that to happen, they need to look further into the future than they are accustomed to visualising, which requires a big change of mentality.

Back home in England, since I’ve been away, a lot of people have been growing up, getting married, having children. All of a sudden the future has to be planned and prepared, education paid for, pensions and life insurance set up. We seem to have a much clearer vision of how to lay the foundations for a secure future for ourselves and our children. Or do we? In the news there are stories of an impending fuel crisis and food shortages. We too, have reached a point in our development where we know a change is required, but we frequently seem unable to gain a sufficiently tangible grasp on the future to be willing to make the lifestyle changes that necessary in order to avoid a catastrophe. Can we really visualise the future, or have we also become so dependent on certain resources that we, too, are incapable of imagining, let alone planning for a time when they may not exist, or of seeking alternative resources before circumstances force us into doing so? Maybe what we consider to be the short-sightedness of many indigenous communities is not a cultural chasm that must be bridged for us to help them develop sustainably, but just a microcosm of a much greater issue that requires a change in mentality from all of us if we are to secure a future for generations to follow.