Come intern with Fundación Runa and learn firsthand about the indigenous Kichwa farmers we partner with to provide you with delicious, Amazonian guayusa. The following is a tale from Community Development intern Sara Hundt about her home stay with one such family of farmers in the community of San Pablo, outside of Tena, Ecuador.

The day begins around 6 AM in the San Pablo community. The chickens and dogs have been barking for hours. Years ago, Kichwa families would have been brewing guayusa for at least three hours by now.While this twilight ritual is less common with the younger indigenous Kichwa generation in the Napo province of Ecuador, being early risers is still part of their routine.   I keep my eyes shut for another half hour, and by the time I force myself out of bed, everyone in the family has already had breakfast and is getting ready to go to school. Whoops. 

The people here are by no means lazy. After all, as my host father Bartolo explained, if you wanted to get your food for the day, you had to start early. The men in Kichwa communities would traditionally head out for their first casería or hunt of the day by four AM to catch animals like guatusa—a type of Amazonian pig which lives in the mountainous foothills of the Andes. Animals are like humans, Bartolo explained—any later in the day and they’d be up having breakfast just like we would be.

Understanding the behavior of the animals that live alongside of them is just one of the many skills Kichwa people passed on from generation to generation. Annual doses of spicey ají to the eyes strengthened Kicha hunters’s sight, allowing them to make a second casería during the evening. And resourcefulness? Don’t even get me started. From using the leaves of local plants to collect chuntacoros (roly-poly worms—see photo below) and later use as a sort of super-oven when frying the worms for a meal, to using seeds of plants and fruits to construct beautiful artisan crafts, this community lets nothing go to waste.

To say these people are rich in culture is an understatement. From retelling colorful stories about hunting jaguars, to ancient traditions of making shikra—a bag sewn from the fibers of a plant called pita, strung with various sacred beads—the people of San Pablo are deeply connected with both the history of their people and the world around them.  In just a few days, I could confidently conclude that the Kichwa community in San Pablo is swimming in Runa spirit: if these people aren’t fully-living, I’m not sure who is.