SAVING THE AMAZON WITH YOUR HELP

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

For all of our supporters I wanted to give you an update on the project to protect the Amazon. We continue with the protection of our 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of rainforest. And I continue with my desire to help the environment through education, but what is interesting, and to my surprise, is how social media is helping in this. I am using TikTok, which is now the worlds most popular social media platform, and all of the videos are in Spanish. The reception is incredible. We are raising awareness with people all over the world on the need to protect the Amazon and importance of sustainability at levels I never imagined. The numbers are crazy; here they are: We are posting a video every day, and all total, they have been viewed 21.5 million times. We have received 1.6 million likes and 35,600 comments. And have 273,000 followers. You can see the videos at www.tiktok.com/@yachana.com  Thanks for your interest and support of Yachana, Douglas