How do you convince someone who’s never been anywhere else that the place that they’re from is special?

“It’s beautiful here” you say, meaning it.

“I wish it was flatter” they say, also meaning it.

When you’re a farmer, life in the mountains is hard. And when you plow the steep slopes with a bull, dress in traditional clothing, live in an adobe home and eat boiled corn three meals a day, every day, the white people that come to visit you seem exotic. You, after all, are very, very normal. Everyone you know is also a poor farmer, barely scraping out a life on a mountain top. Pumas, Andean Foxes, Oncillas and Spectacled Bears are nuisance animals that threaten livestock and crops – the fewer the better. And why worry about them, there are tons in the forest out there. And there is a lot of forest too - just look over there, can’t you see it?

We, with our money and our lily-white skin, seem very important here. We can go anywhere in the world, and see more of Ecuador than these same Ecuadorians ever will. They’re too polite and grounded in the unfairness of life to let escape more than the tiniest traces of envy. Though our importance might be overstated, our privilege cannot be. In fact, their assessment of our privilege is much more reliable than our own – we tend to only compare ourselves to other enormously privileged people.

I brought my laptop into one of the stores fronting the soccer game in Colepato on Sunday to show our friends Don José, Raúl, Ramiro, Wilfredo and a few others the photos we had taken with the camera traps. Someone commented on my computer, saying “this is one of the new kinds, isn’t it?” “No,” I replied, “es bastante viejo, ya tiene cuatro años.” “But,” the person protested, “weren’t the old ones much bigger? With the monitor así?” using his hands to indicate one of the older tube-style monitors. “Oh,” I replied, realizing my arrogant stupidity, “yes, those came before this kind.”

I pulled up the photos from the camera traps to show. My excitement over the photos of the Oncilla and the Puma was shared. “Grand-OH-te es” they observed of the Puma, with the typical exaggerated emphasis on a vowel to indicate the extent of the situation. “And fat, too.” It should be, it ate a whole alpaca the day before and another the night that photo was taken.

I showed them photos of the other animals, too. Don José and others rattled off the local names as soon as the photos flashed onto the screen.

“Cuchuchu.”

“Zhulpo.”

“Venado.” “No, venado es otro. Este es Zhibri.”

“Pavo de Monté.”

“Llamala.”

“Have you eaten this?” I ask Don José of the Mountain Paca.

“He’s eaten everything.” says one of the others.

A Mountain Paca is a small animal. It’s nocturnal but common, and rarely seen due, I suspect, to the fact that it’s reportedly quite tasty and evolution has selected for skittishness. And here we are, rich important people from far away, spending our time and money hiding cameras in the woods taking pictures of it. It, and the Oncilla, which is known locally almost exclusively for its ability to kill oodles of chickens in a single night. And Round River groups have been doing this sort of thing here for years. Gradually, I think, word is out in Colepato that their part of the world is, actually, quite special. We don’t think of ourselves as rich, naturally, but in terms of where we can go and what we can do, the world really is our oyster. Not admitting that would be unappreciative of it. And out of all the places in the world, we come to their little forest at the top of their too-steep hill. And so people in Colepato have begun to draw the only logical conclusion, which is that their home really is something very special. Which, over the course of six months, is the very same conclusion that I have come to.

I would like to acknowledge the role that Stuart White had in shaping my thoughts on this subject.