Students visited the Mondaña clinic,

Joel Anders and Michelle Carter deliver medicine to the Mondaña Clinic.

Students toured the Yachana Gourmet marmalade factory, just one hundred meters from the lodge. The factory supports local communities and preservation of Ecuador’s endangered rain forest by paying market price for locally grown fruits to support the surrounding community. Often patients at the Mondaña clinic pay for their treatment in fruits, which the clinic then sells to the factory. "Sustainability of these efforts is the key to our mission," said Dr. Clemente Ponce, CEO of FUNEDESIN, an NGO that owns the Mondaña clinic/Yachana lodge complex.

Cornelia Genanci

Working with the Mondaña Clinic for the last seven months has definitely showed me the forced value of human life.  For lack of money, precious lives are lost, and for lack of adequate education children don’t have access to improved quality of life.  It is a very strong reality check, which shocks you while also giving you energy to fight to change the situation – by working together.

The FUNEDESIN Foundation’s Mondaña Project helps 30 indigenous communities build schools, improve medical clinics, install running water and develop methods of sustainable agriculture.  In the short term, FUNEDESIN seeks community economic development by improving production technology of coffee, cocoa, and short-term crops: corn, rice, yucca, and bananas (which constitute the population’s basic diet.) Environmental protection is key to the program’s success by reaching an equilibrium between farming and the appropriate use of the zone’s natural resources.   All proceeds from the ecotourist Yachana Lodge support the FUNEDESIN Foundation and the Mondaña clinic.

 Vicente Urrutia, Economist for FUNEDESIN