Tena, Ecuador

Tena is full of surprises. The senior couple that lives there, the Lovingiers, trained us in the office, and then went “to the jungle.” When I think of jungle, I think mostly of snakes, which absolutely terrify me, and I couldn’t imagine anyone actually wanting to occupy the same space as snakes. But they seemed terribly anxious to go. So I jumped at the chance to visit for the weekend.

It takes six hours to get to Tena by bus. You climb up and out of the Quito basin, over the Andes, and descend into the jungle. At the three-hour mark, the bus stops in Baez for a potty stop. But the potty was closed. And then the next three hours is ona dirt road going down the side of the mountains. I’ll pause while you (women) imagine the discomfort. . .

I expected Tena to be a “jungle-y” place. I guess I expected people living in huts surrounded by trees with monkeys swinging in them (with the snakes all taking a holiday someplace else). Here’s Tena’s main street.


When I finally remarked, “this doesn’t seem like the jungle,” Hermana Larsen said, “If you go five blocks out of town, you’re in the jungle.” And so it was. On Sunday, we were invited to dinner at Leslie’s house. Leslie is not a member of our church, though many of her (adopted) family are. She says, “I’m a Catholic. I’ll always be a Catholic. But my friends all think I’m a Mormon.” Of course, we think that’s the hard part, and since she’s already considered a Mormon, she should just bite the bullet and become one. Nonetheless, she is a great friend to the missionaries, and she fed us well. Following are pictures of Leslie’s back yard (finally—jungle) and the Lovingiers coming up her “driveway.”



Leslie adopts people and animals. She has raised to adulthood several children whose own families couldn’t raise them. She has a menagerie at her house, including tortoises, monkeys and something I have never seen before, but which very much resembles the RUS’s in the movie The Princess Bride (RUS = Rodent of Unusual Size). The first picture is, I think, Leslie's natural child. The next two are of the RUS. It's about 18" long and 12" high.




She has a nocturnal monkey, shown here eating raw chocolate beans. Chocolate is not nearly as attractive in the raw as it is in a Hershey bar.)



She also has a spider monkey named Jack, after the monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean. Jack ran away into the jungle one day. When he came back, he had no hair. Nobody knows what happened to Jack in the jungle. I, for one, have no desire to try to find out. (It could have had something to do with a snake.) In the pictures below, Jack has grown most of his hair back, except for his tail.



Grocery shopping at Leslie’s is fascinating. Below is a picture of shopping for mandarin oranges.


The groceries also pecked at the ground surrounding our feet while we ate one of their sisters for dinner.


I am so the I-like-my-meat-in-a-white-styrofoam-container-wrapped-tightly-in-plastic type that I didn’t want to give too much consideration as to what might have happened in the kitchen before we arrived. Nonetheless, dinner was delicious and quite filling with chicken, rice, lentils, and yucca. Then we had birthday cake! In the jungle! Our host, Leslie, is on the right-hand side, holding her little sweetheart you saw earlier in the swing.


Tena, the town, is so charming. Here’s a picture of a tree that someone has carved “Tena” into.


It’s across from what I call Tena’s Riverwalk, which is located at the point Tena’s two rivers merge. The island the merged rivers create has monkeys that play in the trees and some animals on display.




While we were enjoying the Riverwalk, a tapir escaped from the island and must have swam across the river to the inhabited river bank. Some people were afraid of it and threw rocks at it, but it never made any aggressive moves. On the other hand, it didn’t look like it was in any hurry to go back to its own side of the river either.


Tena’s best restaurant is inhabited by three sloths. We went there, but (thankfully) didn’t see the sloths. Hermana Lovingier says once when she was there, an arm came down out of the thatched overhang and started playing with her hair. Sorry, but that’s just a little too freaky for me.

The taxis of Tena are all pickup trucks. Every ride costs a dollar and you can put as many people in the back as you can fit—a very dangerous practice that I don’t like.


Our hotel (Los Yutsos for those of you who are even now planning your next vacation in Tena), was delightful. This is the view outside our window. When I took the photo, I did so because I thought it was jungle-y luxuriant. It wasn't until the next day that I realized I had photographed the thatched roof of the gazebo that was built around a huge tree as its main support. The impatiens had established themselves in the thatching.




Unlike Quito, Tena is perfectly safe at night. I loved walking around in the warm night air. People pulled barbecue grills out onto the streets and sidewalks and cooked. Music was playing, families were strolling and visiting with one another. It was a world so far away from, say, New York City, or Los Angeles, or Quito. Very possibly isolation is a good thing.

At one point, when Hermana Larsen and I were heading back to our hotel, I experienced a feeling that’s difficult to describe, but goes something like this. I was going to back to my “home,” a hotel in Tena in the Amazon Jungle. But I really live in an apartment in Quito, Ecuador. But I really live in a house in Kaysville, Utah. Then today, I realized that none of those places are my real home—my real home is with Heavenly Father. And so my life is like an onion. I live in layers. It kind of gives the hymn “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go” new meaning. He wants us to leave Him and come to earth. He wants us to leave our homes, and serve a mission. He wants us to leave our comfort zone and travel to where the snakes live. How grateful I am that I get to serve, and that our merciful Heavenly Father sent all snakes on holiday while I was in the jungle.