Teaching in the Amazon: How it all Began
Log 1 — December 2, 2024
My part in all this is basically an accident.
It began as an idea in the passenger seat of Townley Chisholm’s old Toyota minivan, traveling south to Baltimore for a Thanksgiving gathering of the summer camp where we first met when I was 12. The heating system in the car was broken, so he wore his winter jacket and clutched the steering wheel with a fantastic pair of technicolor knitted mittens. Our breath steamed the windshield.
Next December, he explained, he will take sabbatical from Phillips Exeter Academy and teach for three months in Bameno, a Waorani village of about a hundred inhabitants in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park. The villagers want to learn English and commerce so they can host English-speaking tourists and lead safaris of the surrounding forest and rivers.
I knew Townley had been visiting Bameno as a tourist himself for over a decade, hoping at first to pilot a study abroad program for his biology students. Yasuni National Park, after all, is the most biodiverse region of the world, a confluence of the Amazon River Basin, the foothills of the Andes, and close proximity to the equator. But even once Exeter quickly ruled such a trip too dangerous for students, Townley continued to return, dragging family and friends with him. He was captivated by the rare beauty of the forest, its many extraordinary animal and plant species, and perhaps most of all, the culture and infectious positivity of his Waorani hosts.
Bameno is one of dozens of separate Waorani communities in eastern Ecuador, but interaction among each group varies greatly. Some, like those in Bameno, regularly engage in trade and social relations with other Waorani and, once contact was first documented in 1950, with settlers. But other communities defend their independence at all costs, spearing anyone — even other Waorani — who treads on their land. In the twentieth century, as land disputes due to the encroachment of settlers grew more and more common, over 60% of Waorani deaths were homicides.1
Violence among Waorani has shown a sharp decline in the last several decades, but many villagers in Bameno have lost friends and family to altercations with other tribes. Early deaths to predators such as anacondas are also common, and the town regularly faces food insecurity as they hunt and gather their next meal. Most urgently, the land on which the Waorani live is in high demand by oil, logging, and agriculture companies that clear-cut the forest and contaminate its rivers.
These pressures are what drive Bameno to ecotourism. As a Bakairí chief told author David Grann while he was researching his book on the Amazon, “… I would take you for free, but all Indians must now be capitalists. We have no choice.”2 With a steady income, the people of Bameno will be able to feed themselves more sustainably and advocate to the Ecuadorian state for protection. Hosting guests poses minimal disruptions to their way of life, especially during the tourism off-seasons.
At the helm of this effort is Otobo, a man in his 40s with great influence in the village. Alongside American conservationist and ecotourism guide Tom Quesenberry, he created a website for Otobo’s Amazon Safari in the late 2000s, which is how Townley first learned about Bameno.3 Tom has been instrumental in coordinating Townley’s teaching plans with Otobo, and he and his wife Mariela will join Townley in Bameno for a month to launch the program.
The undertaking will involve many challenges. Fierce sun and swarming insects ravage the skin if one does not take the right precautions, and thick rubber boots are recommended to withstand muddy riverbanks, sharp barbs on the forest floor, and most threatening of all, venomous snakes.
Just getting to the village is an ordeal. After flying to Quito, Townley and his collaborators will drive seven hours to Coca, the provincial capital of Orellana, and then another two and a half to the Shiripuno Amazon Lodge, which is described on its website as “the most remote biological station in the Ecuadorian Amazon Basin.”4 From there, Bameno is accessible via several hours on a small plane, but because they will bring months of food and supplies with them, they were planning to take a motorized canoe for a 15-hour journey split between two days.
During a lull in the conversation, Townley handed me a bunch of browning bananas from a pile of snacks in the back of the van. “Want one? I can’t eat them all and they’re going bad.” As he spoke of Bameno, his tone was gentle and matter-of-fact, but animated under the surface by a fiery passion. After years of working together, this quality had grown warm and familiar to me, like a comfort food.
Before I knew it, I found myself asking Townley if I could join him in Ecuador. I wanted to go for so many reasons, but at bottom, his quiet conviction was why.
When I was thirteen Townley took seven other boys and me on a five-day canoeing trip around Lake Umbagog in northern New Hampshire. Five years later I led the trip alongside him, observing carefully as he taught J-strokes and pocket knife safety. Five years after that Townley suggested I pursue teaching, which I knew by now through his example and others’ was sacred work. If teaching in the Amazon rainforest was important and exciting for Townley, it would be important and exciting for me too.
My part in all this is an accident because I happened to go to the right summer camp with the right teacher who found the right website when he googled “Amazon Safari” fifteen years ago. It’s an accident because I don’t speak Spanish and I certainly don’t speak the Waorani language of Wao, but when he told me his plans during an impromptu road trip, I asked to tag along and he said yes. It’s an accident because my few years of teaching have only really been enough to show me how much I still have to learn about teaching, and yet he said yes because it’d be awfully hard to teach in a remote village by himself.
My part in all this is an accident, but most things in life are. So I’ve given thanks for my good fortune and begun practicing Spanish. I’ve booked plane tickets, visa appointments, and vaccinations; packed mosquito nets, knee-length boots, and ethnographies; and purchased early Christmas presents for my friends and family. Accident or not, I’ll be teaching in the Amazon Rainforest for the next three months. Accident or not, we leave today, December 2nd.
What will be our first impressions of Bameno? What will we eat? How will the school work? Bameno has a generator and satellite internet that works for an hour or two a day. So, time permitting, I will be able to upload regular journal entries here on Substack. Subscribe to have installments sent straight to your inbox.
Notes
Robarchek, Carole; Robarcheck, Clayton. (1998). Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology. Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
Grann, David. (2009). The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Doubleday.
Otobo’s Amazon Safari. otobosamazonsafari.com
Shiripuno Amazon Lodge. shiripunolodge.com