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Last summer I worked as a Participatory Rural Appraisal Team Coordinator in the Pululahua Geobotanical Reserve up in the Ecuadorian Andes. Our team, as per the poor quality photo, consisted of (left to right) Indra Candanedo, Panamanian; someone else in photo who wasn't in our team; Kelly Charnetski, Canadian; me; Christine Housel, American. Basically a PRA is a participatory methodology that aims to enable local people to do their own self-analysis that leads to planning and action on a completely cooperative basis. For more information on PRAs, see the Institute of Development Studies PRA Briefing Paper.
The following piece briefly and in an entertaining fashion describes our work inside the Pululahua Crater which forms the largest part of the reserve.
On that first rainy day my team and I descended in car down the winding throat of Pululahua. When the clouds finally blew upward, the high rock walls of the volcano towered up around us. For a moment I imagined barbed wire and armed guards patroling high on the rim of the inescapable cauldron and then realized it was just my TRI study site.
It was an email message that had led me there. And it was just one other email message that brought three women master students from the US, Canada, and Panama with me. My Ecuadoran counterpart had written that Pululahua was a volcanic crater in the Andes with a farming community inside on its floor. But a volcanic crater is no volcano until you're standing there at the bottom of it, looking up. It was nearly inactive, flaunting occassional spurts of thermal water and toxic gas from isolated crevices; in 1918 a shaker even caused a rock bluff on the far side to weaken and buckle. Lava spewed out and rolled over a lime-mining community. The few survivors decided lime wasn't their true calling anymore and instead took up the hoe.
Thus was born the community of Pululahua. Located inside a national protected area, they were good people but troubled by the volcano. Their primary worries, interestingly, did not include being incinerated. No, they were troubled by two things in particular: 1) an undead spectre of their past who kept their community heaved in two political halves, and 2) they couldn't get out. Almost.
First the spectre. From the 1920s to the 1960s rich lords ran a plantation or hacienda in Pululahua driving the workers to plant and harvest corn, beans, peas, potatoes -- the same crops they still plant -- seven days a week. They weren't slaves, rather more like indentured servants. They weren't beaten like blacks of pre-bellum South, but they were abused. The most famous abuser was Miguel Chipantasig, a devious and learned man who worked his way up to taskmaster of the Hacienda in the 1950s and ruled over 80 workers.
Then Agrarian Reform came
along in 1968 and shattered the hacienda into many small private
properties owned by the ex-workers. But for the former taskmaster
didn't go away, he still lives in the community. And so do all
the ex-workers. The spectre however, is not Miguel (in photo on
left), it is his relationship with the ex-workers. Miguel leads
the Improvements Committee of the community, one of the two
powerful institutions there. The other, the Association of
Agricultural Workers, is led by Humberto Murminacho (in photo on
right), the most noble and respected member of the community, and
one worker particularly abused by the former taskmaster.
The spectre acts like a boxing referee. He both keeps the two fighters faced off and split up. That's the community we had to work in: divided and quarreling. Good people all, but just not together in one place.
And hell, they almost can't get out. Being small-scale market farmers, they need to get their crops out of the iron pot in which they cultivate them and to the market which lies just beyond the rim. They can hike out with donkey or horse, huffing and puffing, straight up a steep path winding skyward over loose rock and dust. At the top then they have to hire a pickup to bring them the rest of the way. And upon reaching the market, they have already spent in time and money most of their potential earnings. Doctors won't come down, the priest makes the trip only a couple times a year, and forget about traveling circuses!
My counterpart, a member of one of Ecuador's leading environmental groups that specialized in ecological study and development of the nation's protected areas, wanted badly to develop an interpretative program in Pululahua, the smallest protected area in the system, but the one closest to Quito, the capital. But he didn't know how to enter this troubled community and work with them. So we came down to carry out a participatory rural appraisal, a methodology designed to allow the people the opportunity to identify their problems and solutions so that aid and government agencies knew exactly the people's concerns.
We carried out the procedure inside that volcano. No surprise the people chose the lack of an exodus as priority problem numero uno. They wanted as they have always wanted to build a road right through the crater wall, especially through the overlook where all the tourists come (and from where the photo was taken). When we tried to guide them into the phase of writing a list of viable solutions and alternatives, it became apparent that the road was as possible as building a multi-million-dollar helicopter port right in the middle of the crater (Why impossible? Well it's in a protected area and it would require a lot of dynamite!)
We suggested that, in lieu of talking about the impossible, we talk about realistic options: better horses and gear, contracting cheaper buses at the top, buying a truck owned by a community cooperative... But the people of Pululahua would have nothing of it. There before our eyes, they erupted, flying out of their seats in the schoolhouse like hot and frustrated chunks of volcanic rock.
Well, the message was clear: any development project that wants to attend to the people's real concerns will have to deal with transportation of goods. When we left, our notebook indicated no ambiguity. We can only hope our counterpart organization and the government that administers the reserve noted the same rumble in their own notebooks. Else, the next time Pululahua , they may not find the community once the ashes clear.
Photos of Miguel and Humberto taken by Indra Candanedo.
Updated on 6 June 1997