Ecuador(3) – The Jungle and Its People

In the primitive bamboo hut, under the candle light, the children were fascinated with my digital camera. After I showed them their own faces in that shinny LED, they were eager to pose in front of this little magic silver box. I didn’t know what had crossed their sensitive minds. I didn’t know what they saw in me and my camera. I didn’t know whether the concept of “future”, or “oil”, or “rainforest” had formed in their receptive souls. For them, was it fortunate or unfortunate to be growing up in the jungles? Suppose someday in the future, when their children or grandchildren looked at them in exactly the same innocent eyes and asked them, “What is rainforest? What is a tree like?” Would my presence, together with my cold 21st century toy, be accelerating the arrival of that sad day? On the other hand, if not for the money from tourists like us, wouldn’t Delfin be forced to slash-and-burn like the others? Then, wouldn’t my presence be delaying the arrival of that sad day?

“Will you divide up this forest among your children?” I asked Delfin. They have five children. The youngest daughter was 11 years old, and she was the only one who still remained in Pimpilala. The other three daughters and one son were all living in Tena and going to middle school there. Their oldest daughter was 17 years old.

“I will choose one of them to inherit the entire estate. No matter which one it will be, he/she must promise me to preserve the forest in its entirety.”

“What do the children want? Wouldn’t they want to go to the city, instead?”

Delfin sighed, spread out his left hand, “Children are like the fingers on your hand. Even though they all come from the same hand, they are different from each other.” He stopped for a second and continued, “The girls understand my motivation better, the boys…” He shook his head.

Estela brought in a pot of hot tea, poured one cup for each of us. Delfin walked out of the hut, came back in with a few pieces of oval shaped leaves. “These are the leaves that we used to boil the tea. Later we added in lemon and sugar.” He told us. The tea tasted wonderful. It was fragrant and slightly spicy.

Caroline asked Defin whether the government was planning to provide electricity for Pimpilala. Delfin said, not yet. However, he preferred this way. Once electricity reached the jungle, next to come would be TV, that would be the end of Quichua way of living.

I looked around my traveling friends sitting by the dinning table, and finally asked the question that had been tormenting me, “Is civilization destroying the world?”

“That depends on your definition of ‘destruction’ and ‘civilization’.” Helmut, who often preferred to identify himself as a Physicist, responded first. “Maybe people in the future will no longer know what rainforest is like. The world is progressing. People in the future will experience things we can not even begin to imagine today. That is not necessarily a bad thing. We have never seen dinosaurs, have we? Is that so bad?”

“Maybe,” I thought for a while, “from certain point of view, the night of the jungle is actually quite similar to the night in a big metropolitan city, like New York. It is chaotic, noisy, but full of life and stories. Maybe the people in the future will have their own kind of jungle. One that is made of concrete and steel, instead.”

Carlos had been engaged in some Spanish discussion with Delfin and Estella. Now, he suddenly turned toward us. I asked what he thought of our conversation. “Well, personally, I think technology made everything too easy for us. As a result, we are more and more separated from nature. When the material side of our lives is advancing at such high speed, our spiritual lives are left behind, far far behind.” He picked up a tea leaf that Delfin brought in moments ago, and shook it from side to side. A few rain drops fell off it. “Think of how we now make a cup of tea. I go to the super market and buy a box of tea bags. It is all very convenient. But I no longer know which kind of tree this leaf grows on, what shape the tea leaf is, how does it feel when I touch it? I will not remember how I walked crossed the garden to pick the leaves, how the rain drops felt like falling on my face.” He stopped, looked at us each in the eyes, smiled a bitter smile, “a concrete and steel jungle, huh? Will the people live there be more like trees, or will they be more like concrete and steel?”

In the morning, before we entered the jungle, Delfin came to us with a couple of half opened fruits in his hand. The fruits had thorny shells, inside their thick juice was dark red. He used a thin branch, dipped it in the red juice, and painted Quichuan symbols on our faces. They were supposed to protect us from the evil spirits in the jungle. My favorite symbol was given to Helmut. It was a little human figure carried a long knife on his back, a dagger tied on his left ankle, right hand was a fist, and left hand was fully open. Delfin said, “The right hand symbolized war, and the left hand peace. In the jungle only the ones that are able to balance both have the hope to survive.” I froze. These few simple words brought the entire “civilized” world to me, in the middle of Amazon jungle.