Arutam

Instead of staying at Jatun Sacha for a third week, I decided to go 3km down the road to Arutam, a much smaller Shuar community of 21 people. I had asked Katie if she thought Jatun Sacha’s projects would be much more successful given a different community with fewer internal problems. She had replied, “Yes, and I know this because it has worked much better… just 3 km down the road at Arutam!” She explained that at Arutam, they have many of the same projects as Jatun Sacha (e.g. reforestation) in addition to ecotourism, but that unlike Tsurakú, everything is entirely run by the community. I decided to spend the next week at Arutam, imagining it as a shining beacon of successful and sustainable development.

Unfortunately, my ultimate verdict was much more mixed. I was very impressed by certain things about Arutam. The fact that it is entirely run by community members is already quite an accomplishment in itself, and some of the community members were really great: one guy named Jose is one of the most charismatic, gifted storytellers I have ever met, and he was always very enthusiastic to share Shuar culture and their mythology with me. However, the experience of volunteering here was not exactly what I had imagined. The volunteers were often not treated very well, and the community (which was really just a single family) really seemed to only truly value the money we paid them. This made volunteering seem very much like just glorified tourism. As I’ve discovered, volunteering in Ecuador and Peru often is essentially just another form of tourism, and the daily fee you pay is used not just to pay for your food but also serves as a source of income for the community. At some places, volunteers seem to make a contribution through both their work and their money while at other places, the focus seems to be almost entirely on their monetary contribution. Arutam seemed to fall into the latter category, and I really didn’t like the atmosphere it created. None of the people in the community seemed particularly engaged in or invested in any of the projects we were working on. And to my disappointment, we really didn’t work much with people in the community, apart from the Shuar volunteer coordinator who spent half his time making sleazy advances on the female volunteers.

Nearly all of the volunteers left earlier than they had planned. I left after just one week, to meet up with my Quito family in Riobamba to celebrate Carnaval.