Volunteering in Ecuador – they can’t all be winners

After some Ecuadorian beach time, we wanted to get our farm groove back on. We learned about Rio Muchacho Organic Farm near the surfing town of Canoa and after reading the website, it sounded like an ideal place. The project is admirable – Dario and Nicola founded the farm in 1989 with a goal of introducing environmental regeneration and sustainable agricultural practices to the locals of Rio Muchacho. Projects at the farm include permaculture, reforestation, worm beds for humus, animal manure for compost, biogas, grey water filtration systems and bicycle powered pumps. In addition, they started are the Rio Muchacho Environmental School and Eco-papel (producing recycled paper products). One can’t deny that Dario and Nicola care deeply about environmental issues and want to make an impact in their community.

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, our experience with Rio Muchacho was rather disappointing. Perhaps after so many amazing volunteer gigs, we began to have certain expectations, especially for a paid one which seemed very organized. Our first mistake is that we overlooked the fact that the farm is primarily an eco-tourism site. When the primary source of income comes from tourism, the focus shifts from running a farm to catering to the visitors. A lot of the practices at the farm were just for demonstration and not fully utilized – for example, the eight pigs and dozens of piglets were used only for manure and trade, not for meat. They built a complicated system for producing biogas from animal excrement with no practical application, such as for cooking. There was a solar system that was so old and poorly maintained that it provided very little power when the electricity went out.

Another problem for us was how Rio Muchacho dealt with volunteers. Nicola was in in Quito our entire stay, and with her gone Dario was always busy and spent most of his time off the farm. The volunteers met with him for only few minutes in the morning when he assigned our daily jobs. It’s a shame because Dario is obviously knowledgeable and charismatic, but we just didn’t have enough time with him. We were paired up with farm workers for chores and projects, but they were only doing the work because it was their job, not their passion. As a result, they couldn’t really tell us what the broader purpose of our work was, or how it would impact the community or the environment. In fact, almost all the knowledge was disseminated through other volunteers, which was second hand information usually lacking insight or experience. We got a chance to build a solar water heater (a great project) but only because we had the know-how and proactively took the lead on the project. If you come there as a tourist, it’s fantastic – you see demonstrations of eco-practices, chill at a beautiful location and learn a great deal. As a volunteer, however, we felt used as labor for the upkeep of a tourist destination. We didn’t learn much or feel like a part of any community. Well, they can’t all be life changing experiences, and at least we made some good friends and had some fun along the way.