SAVING THE AMAZON WITH YOUR HELP

Last Sunday, August 20, 2023, Ecuadorians went go to the polls and voted on a referendum to force the government to not continue oil exploration in the Yasuni National Park, a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve. The Yasuni has the highest biodiversity in the WORD! The Referendum passed with a strong majority in favor of not continuing oil exploration in the park. There are a lot of big money organizations/corporations who are against this vote and are going to try to turn it around. So now we will just have to wait, but it is encouraging that most of the people were on the side of conservation. I will keep you posted as things develop. Thanks for your support, it is vitally important to us, so please keep helping as much as you can. Thanks, and remember, I love you     Douglas

We are working on a lot of very interesting projects. Our biodigester continues to produce around 200 liters a day of bio fertilizer and after a period of giving it away so people got to know its results, we are now selling it to help offset our agricultural expenses. What we are promoting are ways to reduce deforestation. We have around 20 hives of Melipona bees. These are stingless bees and produce very little honey, but it is incredible honey with all sorts of health benefits. We just recently did a rescue project and collected the same kind of bees for an additional seven hives. If we had not collected them, the owners of a building where the bees were living were going to spray it with insecticide the next day and they all would have been killed. We have to keep lending our hives to other producers to ensure the genetic diversity or they will die off. We are planting 1,000 coffee seedlings on one hectare as a demonstration project to show how our bio fertilizer can help get a better return from the same area than normal methods. All of these are designed to reduce the pressure on the rainforest. A lot going on. Thanks for your support. Love, Douglas

We are starting off the New Year with a lot of fun things going on. We have just finished installing a bio digester. This is a big machine that “eats” 135 pounds of “food” per day and drinks 200 liters of water per day! About half the food consists of kitchen waste carefully selected to take out any citrus or other specific products, but add in rotten bananas and other vegetables. The other half of food consists of livestock manure. (Lovely mixture). Anyway, this coupled with a worm farm operation is fun, and environmentally very important. It also is producing 200 liters of completely organic bio fertilizer per day. We are also starting to work with camera traps to catch the nocturnal movements of animals in the forest. A lot going on. We have passed the 1.6 million followers mark! Thanks for your support! Love, Douglas

The Yachana Foundation is constantly expanding and doing things that will ultimately be of a benefit for the people living in the region and people visiting from other parts of Ecuador or the world. At this moment, we have a group of 25 students who are from a high school in Quito who are here to help build a building that will serve as a “co-learning center”. This facility will be for student meetings, community trainings and conferences. We are making progress. We are documenting all of this to put on our social media platforms. Thank you for your support to help make all of these projects a reality.

I wanted to thank everybody who are helping us in our challenge to protect the Amazon rainforest and help the local people. We are approaching this challenge through the use of social media. And it is working! In the past few months we have added Instagram, which currently has 218,000 followers, to the success we have had on TikTok. Combined, we now have over 800,000 followers! The videos we are producing have been viewed over 60 million times. This is enabling us to get our messages on conservation and life in the forest out to millions of people. Thanks for being a part of what we are doing. You can see the videos at www.instagram.com/yachanafoundation/ They are all in Spanish but even if you don’t speak the language, you can enjoy the scenery. They are only about one minute long. Even with all the success we have it has not converted into income, so we need your continued support. Thanks, Douglas