In the last week of volunteering I (Bronwyn) got a fantastic opportunity to go along with one of the local workers to visit a nearby community. The idea is that the money the tourists would bring to the community is to help them improve health and education standards. The community was fairly removed from any main commodities with it taking around 6 hours on a bus from Tena, then a 10 minute canoe ride down the Rio Napo followed by a one hour walk through the jungle. I went along for the weekend with a representative from Jatun Sacha and two other volunteers. Our role was to literally be tourists and provide advice to them on what to improve, feedback on what they had put together so far and to tell all our friends about the project and encourage them to come along and visit. The most exciting part of this project was the fact that we the first tourists to enter this community. They had spent the past two months building the cabanas, kitchen and bar huts plus arrange the whole area with ornamental plants for privacy in the right places, mark out tracks etc. On our first night we had a mini presentation about their community, archaelogical finds in the region, artisian works and a couple of myths and legends stories. This was good however a tiring process seeing though it was presented in Quichia, then our representative from Jatun Sacha would translate into Spanish and what I didn't understand one of the volunteers would translate into English. Not to mention the fact that we had got up at 4.30 in the morning. Then on Saturday we were taken on a walk through the jungle to some cascades. Well their guiding skills need to be improved seeing though our 4.5 hour walk turned into around 8.5 hours. They quite obviously lost the track which meant we did a lot of hard jungle walking. Adventurous but tiring. All in all heaps of fun and a great experience. Apart from the fact that myself and another volunteer seemed to attract the attention of some insects and have spent the past couple of days trying to rid our insect rash by seeing one of the guides that is a specialist in alternative medicine. Slowly slowly it is disappearing.