Picture it: A canoe ride in the early morning, the mist rising off the river gives the dense forest on either side of us an even more mysterious feel, making my breath catch in my throat at every sound. Adventure was in the air, a feeling of setting out on an expedition like those seen in nature films. And yet here I was, actually in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador.

This January, I was given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The school I attend, Pacific Lutheran University, has a January term and I was accepted into an environmental literature program headed to Ecuador. I have never been so excited for a trip! The itinerary was to travel the Galpagos Islands on a ship, spend time in a cloud forest in the Andes, and stay at a research station in the Amazon Rainforest.

In the Galpagos, we hiked on the different islands, seeing and learning about species such as iguanas and blue-footed boobies. In the afternoons, we snorkeled and swam with fish, penguins, and sea lions. In the cloud forest, we stayed at the Maquipucuna Reserve, where we hiked on all kinds of trails or watched hummingbirds flit in and out of our lodge. Our guide on one of the hikes pointed out different plants and explained how the natives use them for everything from a sore stomach to cancer.

While I had an eye-opening time in both the Galpagos and the Andes, I think the place that changed me the most was the Amazon Rainforest. It has been my dream to go to the rainforest ever since I learned about it at Sibley Elementary School, and it was glorious to actually be there. We stayed at a research station nestled in Yasun National Park, next to the Tiputini River. Seeing all the wildlife while on hikes and in the canoes was amazing, but the most meaningful experience I had was with the Huaorani people. They are an indigenous, foraging people, and we had the opportunity to visit one of their villages. They painted our faces with the dye of achiote, a local plant, and showed us how to use a blowgun, their hunting tool of choice. Their village was a mix of traditional and new: a house built of grass stood next to a cement basketball court, an old woman with the traditional large holes in her ears was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. I could tell that our society had changed theirs, but whether it was for good or bad I couldn’t tell.

I got to know one Huaorani girl, Mari, on one of our hikes out into the jungle; she and some other girls from the village decided to come with us. It was comical to see us trudging in the mud with our hiking boots, barely keeping ourselves from falling, while these girls were able to find the safest routes wearing flip flops or even no shoes. I walked with Mari on the way back. We talked in Spanish some, but Spanish was her second language, too, so we stuck to the basics: where she lived, how many siblings she had, etc. Even though we spoke little, it was an amicable silence. She took hold of my hand at one point, and it felt like she was leading me, leading me through the jungle that is her home. I was the stranger, while she knew this area like the back of her hand. I felt accepted by her, which is a feeling I had not had anywhere else in Ecuador yet. I always had felt alien, different because of the way I looked and my mediocre Spanish. But Mari didn’t seem to care about that much, introducing me to her family once we got to the research station.

You might be wondering if we actually had class work to do, since all of this sounds like a vacation, but we did work as well. We had class every evening with readings to do beforehand and reports to give, and assignments resonated specifically with each place we were staying. In the Galpagos we learned about the affects of tourism on the islands, and in the Andes we read famous poetry about the natural world.

While we were in the jungle, we read reports and articles about the effects of the oil industry on the Amazon. Texaco first came to the rainforest in 1967 and discovered oil where the Huaroani lived. When they started drilling, the people were lured away, displaced from their homelands. The Huaorani way of life was changed, and not on their terms, but the terms of others. In the articles we also learned of drinking water contaminated with carcinogens by waste-oil pits, pipelines with no check-valves so it would be days before an oil spill was discovered, children playing in black water. My professor, Charles Bergman, said that the situation seems like the movie Erin Brockovitch but without the lawyers to help out the people. Since Texaco is no longer overseeing the drilling in the Amazon, people are unsure about who is responsible for cleaning up the pollution that was created.

Now that I am back in the United States, halfway through spring semester, the Huaorani and their predicament is still on my mind. I keep thinking about what those people are going through just for oil for the rest of the world. I worry about my friend Mari’s health, about everyone in her village. They did nothing to deserve what they have to go through.

The most important thing I have learned through this class is to be more aware of what is going on in our world, because how we live can affect the lives of others without us even realizing it. Awareness is the key because once we are aware, we can take action.

Marta Behling is a 2007 graduate of Albert Lea High School and a sophomore at Pacific Lutheran University.