Spend a Month in the Alto Choco Cloud Forest

When I arrived for a month of volunteer work on the Alto Choco cloud forest reserve in Imbabura Province in Northern Ecuador, the volunteer coordinator asked me what I would like to work on. Environmental education, I suggested. "Great, you can be the head of it," she responded.

So after activities and working with other volunteers to get the materials ready, I delivered an invitation in my clumsy Spanish to the teacher at the school in the town of Santa Rosa, just down the road from the gates of the reserve. The program I had designed involved tree-planting, a scavenger hunt, an art project, games, and a snack. Since the reserve is involved with programs to help endangered Andean spectacled bears, the scavenger hunt put the kids on a quest for food, shelter, water, and hiding places that bears might need to survive. The snack was a mix of food the bears liked to eat, and the art project included coloring in cut-outs of bears.

The Alto Choco reserve is located in the Choco bioregion, which the World Wildlife Fund and the World Bank calls one of the ten most important biological hotspots in the world. The forest and the species that live there are threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture, livestock farming, and logging. Currently, projects at the reserve involve preserving rare species through the development of a botanical garden, the extension of programs designed to protect Andean bears, and managing the reserve in cooperation with local communities.

I had chosen Alto Choco from among various options for working in Ecuadorian cloud forests because it was the cheapest program. Volunteers have been coming to this threatened patch of cloud forest—which is like a rainforest, only at higher elevation—for only a few years. Because it's still a start-up operation, there is some disorganization and lack of equipment, but its relatively new status allows for a lot of flexibility. Volunteers can even create their own projects, possibly setting up programs that will continue long after they are gone.

By Kate Gustafson

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