Matapalos Gigantescos: What Happened to the Dry Forest?

One of the things I’ve struggled with from a very young age is the concept of practical application. I don’t mean that in an existential “what’s the point to all of this?” way, but rather how to effectively use the skills and knowledge I’ve picked up over time in real-world settings. I want to know how things are established, how they’ve been put together, and what keeps them together. I look underneath tables in trendy restaurants and in chic showrooms to critically analyze the joinery of the wood. I observe the way in which two strangers interact and wonder what first drew them to one another. At the impressionable age of 6, I watched people in TV documentaries researching primates in the wild and I had no frame of mind to know how or whether it was possible. Three years ago I found out that it was. This was just the beginning of my journey.

El Bosque Seco Lalo Loor: Life in the Dry Forest

I was eating Ramadan dinner with an old friend from High School just a week before leaving for Ecuador and I started thinking a lot about fluency. I had been inseparable with Zakaria so many years ago yet in the process of growing, we grew apart. We had spoken a language with one another, a mutual understanding of our hometown and names of people- tiny details that came bubbling out of a dormant part of me 8 years later. I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten. I hadn’t realized I’d lost touch with my native tongue until I reconnected with a native speaker. Being in Ecuador has awakened a similar fluency. I arrived in Quito two weeks ago, greeted with a shortness of breath at 9000 feet above sea level. Before I could get settled in I was hiking up to volcanos and hunting for Ecuador’s best juice. I found beauty in backstreets and vintage cars juxtaposed on pastel buildings. I didn’t know what I had expected, prepared only with the glowing reviews I received of Ecuador from those in my life blessed to have been here before me. I had been told of its incomparable beauty, its unparalleled street food, and its indisputable abundance of biodiversity, but my love of Ecuador didn’t register with me right away.

Community Partnerships, Empowerment, and Land Management in Coastal Ecuador

Patience is a timeless virtue that the innermost part of me wishes to acquire, yet each chance the Universe has to teach me said virtue my initial reaction is to revert to a child- like stubbornness, covering my ears and hoping my own voice will drown out any lesson that a difficult situation could teach me. Shortly after submitting my final coursework for the semester I began preparing myself to leave for 10 weeks in rural Cameroon, working under the guidance of an incredibly kind-hearted man who signs his emails with the tagline, “In community,”. Just a mere 4 days before I was set to leave, government troops raided the nearby village of Bafut, Cameroon, and many people fled to the forest for safety. To err on the side of caution, the trip was then cancelled with no immediate placement alternatives. The Universe had done it again.