El Pangui

I'm a week into my ISP (independent study project)- it's the last component of the study abroad program, and essentially what we've been gearing up for since day one.  We get 4 weeks to do first hand research, on the topic of our choosing (it can be anything from the cultural history of salsa dancing to the personal accounts of refugees).  It's more or less a small attempt at anthropological fieldwork.  From our findings, we need to write a 30 page paper in Spanish, and prepare an oral presentation for our directors and classmates.  Our directors set us up with advisors to guide us along the way, we were given some cash, emergency phone numbers, and pretty much sent on our ways.

I left Quito last Saturday for Loja, still undecided on my project theme.  My director suggested I just hop on a bus to Loja (a city about 14 hours from Quito in the South of Ecuador), talk to my advisor, and decide on a topic.  I have a hard time deciding what I want for breakfast in the morning, let alone a research project topic with no guidelines, so I figured that this could end disasterously. 

After a brief stay in Cuenca to break up the bus ride, I headed to Loja with Kyle, another undecided on my program.  We got a $5 hostel in what appeared to be a ghosttown.  Nothing- and seriously, I mean nothing- was open when we got there sunday afternoon.  We spent our evening looking for outlets in the hotel.  It wasn't just that there weren't plugs in the room, it was that there weren't any anywhere in the hostal.  After a good while of searching high and low (under couches, in the bathrooms, and on the ceilings) we finally found one outlet, down two floors and around the corner behind a chair.  Ectastic with our discovery, and left in a town with zero nightlife, we spent the evening watching Good Will Hunting huddled around the lone outlet in a hallway of a cheap hostal in a deserted city closer to Peru than Quito.

It turns out that Loja is actually a pretty happening place all other days besides Sundays.  The city was filled with people (I waited 30 minutes in a huge line at the bank) and there were tons of shops all over the place.  I met with my adviser Monday morning to discuss my project, and I decided on the theme of mining in Ecuador. My adviser got in touch with his contacts in the area, and we made plans to head to El Pangui, a town on the outskirts of the rainforest at the heart of the mining conflict in Ecuador, for the next afternoon.  I was pretty excited that things finally seemed to be looking up - I had a topic, I had a destination, and I had plans for the next day.

Tuesday afternoon:
Bus 1.  Loja to Zamora
Bus 2. Zamora to some unknown small town destination.
Bus 3. Small town destination to El Pangui, an even smaller town

I spent the better part of Tuesday on a series of buses with people that I barely knew.  My adviser left me in Zamora with a contact of his who was deeply involved in the resistance movement against large scale mining in El Pangui.  We then took a bus from Zamora and ended up in El Pangui at 11:30 Tuesday night.  I'm pretty sure I was sleeping before my head hit the pillow.  Between the traveling, the jungle heat, and the Spanish- I was exhausted.  From Tuesday until this morning (Saturday) I spent all of my time in El Pangui conducting interviews, seeing the town and the surrounding communties, and staking out government officials. I got enough information to write my 30 page paper after the first day.  I talked with people from the community, mostly people fighting against the mining company, and got the history of what was going on.  This is more or less the abridged version:

El Pangui is a small town of about 2000 people in the southern part of Ecuador that is currently fighting a transnational mining company from Canada that is mining up in the mountains not far from the town.  The company came down in 2000 to start exploration, but nobody (except the Ecuadorian government) realized what was going on until 2006 when they arrived with their equipment to start up the operation.  The people of the town staged a massive protest- the mining co. needed to get their equipment from one side of the Zamora river to the other in order to start their operations.  There are two ways across the river- a footbridge or a barge.  The people camped out for 2 days blocking the barge, and cut down the footbridge.  Despite all of organizing and protests that followed, the mining started up in 2008.  There are a few issues that people have with the mining.  One-it's a big company.  There's some serious harm to the environment.  The water and soil are contaminated with toxic chemicals, which is a huge problem for a people that are largely farmers and cattle ranchers.  Two- it's a foreign company.  The company comes in, takes the resources of Ecuador, pollutes, and then leaves rich.  The community doesn't economically benefit from the gold or copper that are being taken from their backyards.  Three- the community is being torn apart.  Some people support the mining, others don't. The mining company has deep pockets, and has no reservations about buying support.  There is no inbetween, either you're in the resistence movement or you're supporting the mining company.  Families have been split up and communities left divided because of differences in opinions.

Over the past few days, I collected testimonies from the townspeople, saw where the protests happened, and learned about the mining question in this country.  The people that allowed me to interview them opened up their entire lives to me- they held nothing back and told me everything they knew, and everything they believed.  The amount of passion in someone speaking about their fight to preserve their way of life is incredible.   One afternoon, a woman asked me if I was going to forget Ecuador after I left.  That is the gravest of all sins here- to come down, share in certain experiences, and then disappear.  I told her no, no I wouldn't forget.  What I really wanted to say though was that I have been given so much that it would be impossible for me to forget this place or the people I have met.  I have learned things about myself and the world around me that I would never have known otherwise.  To all of the people in El Pangui, I am forever grateful.  I know that I will never be able to repay them for what they have given me.