Is that a monkey licking at my ears? Nick Thorpe's hilarious encounters with the residents of the Inti Wara Yasi

By Shannon Walbran

Tómas, an 11-year-old boy from the largest slum in Bolivia, is carefully locking a chicken-wire cage at the Inti Wara Yasi animal refuge. "I'm not locking animals in," he explains shyly. "I'm keeping animals out." The cage holds backpacks and equipment that visitors have hauled into the only animal preserve in Bolivia that is run by young people.

Tómas came to the tropical Chapari region a year ago, leaving behind his dusty, mud-brick highlands home perched in El Alto – the High Place – on the perimeter of La Paz. In 1997 the World Health Organization labeled El Alto "uninhabitable" because of a lack of adequate medical care, food, sanitation, water and – given its altitude at 3,800 meters – oxygen. In his new job, Tómas has learned to care for pumas, monkeys and parrots rescued from circuses and poachers. His story illuminates the unusual goals of the Inti Wara Yasi, an association of youth brigades who defend the environment and protect wildlife.

Cherishing the environment is the paramount aim of Inti Wara Yasi, and yet the side benefits are myriad. The young people learn management, leadership, public speaking, entrepreneurial skills and the powerful sense of belonging to a community that accomplishes its goals.

Tómas, for example, has gained self-esteem through his knowledge of all kinds of wild animals, a skill that would be hard to attain shining shoes or selling candy in the streets of La Paz, where 60 percent of the residents of El Alto go daily to work. "I like working with the animals," he says, "and I really like teaching other kids about them."

Plucked From a Slum

Tómas first crossed paths with the organizer of the refuge, Juan Carlos Antezana, during a clean-up program in El Alto, and like many children whose families view them as mouths to feed rather than hands to work, Tómas seemed eager for new adventures, and joined Antezana at the refuge.

When a visitor arrives at the refuge, monkeys immediately descend from the trees and jump onto his head. The monkeys steal pens, coins, snacks – and attention. Nena Baltazar, the director of the refuge and co-coordinator of Inti Wara Yasi, calls each monkey by name and relates their sad histories: "This little one here, Marco, came to us because his mother was killed. That's how poachers get the baby monkeys; they shoot the parents and then scoop up the young. Now he refuses to leave me." Marco made this evident by clinging to Baltazar's shirt with his walnut-sized hand.

The monkeys quickly develop social networks, greeting newly rescued animals and choosing leaders. So too have the youth brigades evolved into mini-societies. Antezana confesses his secret: "Self-determination. The children make their own decisions, plan their own environmental activities, raise their own funds. It wouldn't work any other way. Too many organizations say they empower children but end up planning everything and telling the kids what to do. We walk our talk."

When Antezana began his social activism in El Alto, he found teen-agers who already "had a natural affinity for each other – friends, classmates, teams." He invited them to participate in park clean-ups and talks on cruelty to animals. Then the young people themselves chose a commander from among their ranks and began to plan their own marches, news conferences, clean-ups and fundraisers. From that beginning, more than 3,000 fifteen- to twenty-year-olds from all of Bolivia's nine regions have joined Inti Wara Yasi.

Few adults are involved: Antezana, Baltazar, a part-time volunteer secretary and a few others, including a priest who lets them borrow his fax machine. There is good reason for the low profile: Both Baltazar, 23, and Antezana have been threatened by loggers and hunters.

No Logging Truck Too Big to Block

Among the many benefits of a youth-led system is the originality of the projects proposed by the various troops: Protest marches against illegal logging by timber companies, human chains that block logging roads. In some incidents, the truckers were eventually convinced that their pay was not worth the loss of the forest treasure they had in common.

The organization's name, Inti Wara Yasi, means Sun Star Moon in the three indigenous languages of Bolivia, Aymara, Quechua, and Chiriwara, a reflection of the young people involved. They come from all classes, from street orphans to the children of drug traffickers to families of great political prestige. They learn of the group by word of mouth, from school to school. In one odd intersection, a drug trafficker contacted Antezana to check out Inti Wara Yasi after his children talked and talked about their "new club." The trafficker let his children join.

The group's best known protest occurred in April, when a brigade of young people marched for four days on the highway to Chile, saying they were headed toward the Summit of the Americas meeting of presidents and prime ministers in Santiago. Their message was simple: make the environment a priority because our future is endangered by pollutants. But the authorities had another plan. Afraid of bad publicity during the summit, Chilean police arrested Antezana at the border, along with eighteen young protestors and four park rangers.

"These youths are sacrificing themselves in order to prevent the deaths of thousands of children throughout the Americas from toxic water supplies," Antezana said in an interview with La Razón, a La Paz daily, "to prevent millions of trees from being cut down, to prevent the indiscriminate imprisonment of animals." The group was detained for a few hours and then, thwarted but not discouraged, was sent back to La Paz.

In another effort to put pressure on the summit leaders, another brigade took the four-hour bus trip west from La Paz to Lake Titicaca, whose sparkling waters have been tainted by trash scattered by pilgrims to the church Our Lady of Copacabana. Inti Wara Yasi mobilized a clean-up on the beaches, motivated in part by a serious gash suffered by an eight-year-old boy from glass on the beach. With characteristic optimism, Antezana had only one complaint about the event: "The Mayor of Copacabana refused to lend any type of money or personnel to help." On the bright side, media coverage of the brigade's later march through La Paz was generous, particularly the reports on the immense pile of garbage collected at Titicaca and deposited on Plaza San Francisco, the most prominent square in La Paz.

Introducing Susi the Puma

Far from La Paz, far from Lake Titicaca, lies the magic hinterland called the Chapari, where Inti Wara Yasi's animal refuge sits on the banks of the Espíritu Santo River. Perhaps the refuge is better recognized by non-Bolivians: Word of mouth has brought thousands of Israeli, North American, European and Australian visitors to this isolated jungle spot, most as tourists, some as longer-term volunteers. In the humid greenery, listening to the calls of parrots and the chatter of monkeys, the roar of a huge drug-control helicopter rips through the natural hum and sends the wildlife into a frenzy.

The star of the refuge, Susi Waldock, is the new puma, named after a Canadian volunteer. When the puma arrived from a circus, she came with her own cage, two meters on a side. Now, with funds from private American groups and the skills of a visiting German carpenter, Susi lives in a space that is twelve times as large. She still has psychological trauma from her circus years: She was made to jump over fire and burned the pads of her feet until she could no longer walk. She is being gradually re-introduced to larger spaces until she is ready to be set free, though there are still unanswered questions about her hunting skills. But where can you set a puma free to lead her own life, even in the wilds of Bolivia? Baltazar and Antezana have their eyes on a piece of land that costs about $4,000.

Juan Carlos Antezana with Susi Waldock

But the young volunteers saved the animals once again: First from circus cages, second from Nature's rages. To raise money, student groups canvassed Carnival celebrations and sold raffle tickets and home-made snacks, explaining their vision to customers. Antezana excels at convincing the business community of the viability and value of his dream: Banks cover some costs of medical care for injured animals; universities supply educational material; hotel managers, delighted to provide services to bird-watchers and hikers, provide space for the youths to solicit funds.

When Visitors Come, a Child Leads Them

Antezana has clearly won over young people who might have chosen a different path, especially in view of the temptations of drug-based instant wealth in the Chapari, a center of coca production. It is an odd sort of mentoring process: Giving young people a chance to help small creatures gives the youths the sense that they have power over their own personal choices, and can choose to stay out of the pervasive drug-supply culture.

This March three volunteers, from Israel, California and England, were here feeding animals, answering questions and chasing a parrot out of the monkeys' territory. Tómas, the young Bolivian, used his year's worth of knowledge to show them the way, although the volunteers were at least eight years older than he. Baltazar says she likes to have two or three volunteers at a time. She described her ideal worker: "They would need to speak decent Spanish and know something about animals, be willing to work hard and in simple conditions. Although they would need to pay for their plane ticket, we could find them a free place to stay in Villa Tunari." So far, there have been almost twenty international volunteers.

In January Antezana attended an Ashoka-sponsored event in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the Network for 21st Century Actors for Social Change. There he agreed with an Ecuadorean group called My Kite to host exchanges between the groups with the common goal of protecting the environment. Standing before a large wall map, Antezana described a South America laced with corridors along which the young people would find food and lodging with members of both groups. As he traced his finger over the Andes, he said, "Our kids will have a welcome reception from Cochabamba to La Paz, to Puno, Cuzco, Areuquipa, Trujillo, all the way to Guayaquil and Quito. It will be great for them to see a different way of life, and to realize that not only are we brothers and sisters, but we come from the same mother, the Earth."