To my shock, there is a vegetarian restaurant here in Coca. This is very, very good news, as I have reached the point where the prospect of another plate of rice and beans is borderline soul-crushing. And to think, it was all of three blocks away from my hotel this entire time! It is fitting… Continue reading Radio Silence
I rarely have to ask more than a handful of questions in my interviews here: as soon as I mention “oil” and “Amazon” in the same sentence, people here can go on for hours. It’s better that way, of course, since it allows me to stick to a few Spanish paragraphs of explanation of my… Continue reading Location, Location, Location
The dirty secret of my budding* career in the social sciences is that talking to people kind of scares me. It’s a bit difficult to explain why: having spent three years Mohawk-ed in one of the country’s more conservative institutions, I can’t say that I’m too obsessed with what people think of me. Still, though,… Continue reading Cold Calling
It occurred to me that my last three posts have been about, respectively, animal slaughter and alcoholism, ethnocide, and beggars. I will now attempt to share some less depressing anecdotes. Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Manuela Ima, the President of the Huaorani Women’s Association. We met up in my hotel, which happens… Continue reading On a lighter note…
There are some interviews that I just know are going to be fantastic as soon as I walk into an office. I got that feeling today, when I walked down a half-inundated alley and up some rickety stairs into the dank and decrepit lair of FOCAO, the Federación de Organizaciones Campesinas de Orellana. Technically, the… Continue reading Hand to Mouth
If I actually had the wherewithal to draw up a budget for this trip, I think I would have to include a byline for what I give to mendigos (Spanish for “beggars”). As sure as it is that I will go to Café Amazonica every day in Coca—they get the whole vegetarian thing, and have… Continue reading Mendigos and Some Development Naivety
Q: How do I know Yasuní National Park is the most biodiverse place in the planet? A: Because on Saturday mornings, that diversity is on sale in Pompeya. I´m not quite sure what I was expecting to discover this Saturday, but I certainly didn´t plan on finding anything as disturbing as I did. One of… Continue reading Blood on All Hands
It’s been raining non-stop since I returned to Coca from Quito twelve hours ago. While it’s fair to say this is not particularly out of the ordinary in the rainforest, for me it’s fairly debilitating. The pounding of heavy droplets on corrugated metal means that I can neither understand anyone nor do any transcription. The… Continue reading Monkey TV
If laws on the books were all that mattered, I’d put Ecuador way ahead of the U.S. The new constitution gives a formal right to existence and protection to “nature”, and, somewhat more practically, offers civil unions to gay couples. Ecuador has nearly open-borders and strict gun control; almost the inverse of the U.S., where… Continue reading La Revolución Ciudadana Está En Marcha
This weekend the train of bread crumbs that took me to Coca ran out, and I faced two days in the city with no one to interview and no meetings to attend. I wasted Saturday watching monkeys. On Sunday a friend who I made by phenomenally random chance at the Francisco de Orellana Anniversary-of-the-Merger-of-Two-Provicial-Directorates Fiesta… Continue reading Trust
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 