Up ahead, a fire was burning in the middle of the road. A restless crowd milled around the fire, vaguely threatening. They had cut a tree down, and blocked all traffic with the trunk, dragged across the road. On the other side of the blocked passage, a line of pickups had backed up. We had just come off the Rio Aguarico, after five days living in indigenous communities. For the last hour, we had driven through a vast plantation of African palm trees--cultivated for the palm oil. 40,000 acres of one palm tree after another. It was a dusty slow ride, under a baking sun.

At dusk, on the Rio Aguarico, there are women sitting on stools in the water, their skirts folded up, their laundry in wet heaps beside them. They pound it with paddles, and the soap makes swirls in the brown-green water. Children splash around in their underwear, push each other in, make a joyful racket. A man and his two boys scrub down with soap, jump

There is just no way to get around it--despair is a thick sap that creeps over a people forgotten. If we came here to listen, we´ve got to hear--no hay ningun esparanza. There isn´t a single hope. You know, we like happy endings, or at least bittersweet ones. But the happy ending that colonos (colonists from other regions of Ecuador who ´pioneered´ into the rainforest when the oil companies started building roads) look for, and I am basically quoting, is death.

La companía has left us with nothing but illness and destruction. We just wait around to die.

We came to collect the stories of those affected by oil development in an attempt to give voice to the voiceless. Now back in Quito my note book sits next to my keyboard full of these voices and I´m not sure what to do with them. These are not happy stories, with fairy tale endings. They are not stories of the privileged, of those that have access to a future of hope.

Fasting is a very old tradition within many faiths, including my own. Fast to cleanse the body and clear the mind, as an offering in times of mourning, in times of preparation--the forty days of fast before feasting. Physical hunger as a reminder of the finitude of this world--pains that bring one inward, to that space that would never be filled by the bread of humans. By depriving one's body, one's soul was able to focus on that which is beyond, the seventh chakra, God--to prepare for that celebration.