From Rain City to rain forest: A Blanchet grad heads home

In many ways, he's a typical senior waiting for his June 4 graduation ceremonies at Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle.

It's what happens June 26 that sets him apart.

That's when Hugo Lucitante, 19, will fly out of Seattle and return to his village in the rain-forest jungles of Ecuador. It's a village so isolated that even with a motorized canoe, it's still an eight-hour river trip from the nearest town.

Lucitante's parents and other members of the small Cofan tribe to which he belongs have high expectations that he will become a tribal leader.

"The responsibility has been hard," he said last week. "People back home want me to do the best. They need someone who can lead them."

Along with memories, something else that Lucitante will bring back to the village of Zabalo is a laptop computer, which he can power up with a diesel generator.

He wants to use the laptop to write down the stories of the tribe's remaining elders.

Lucitante, who has Internet access when he's in Quito, the capital, also can use the laptop for research to help his tribe, which is in the midst of a legal battle with an oil company over alleged environmental damage from pollution.

"An all-American kid"

In the village, family dinner might be a wild pig shot in the jungle. Breakfast might be boiled bananas that have been mashed into juice.

"Holy Moses. He's now pretty much of an all-American kid," said Amy Hall, development director at the high school. "How's he going to adjust? We hope and cross our fingers."

Right now, Lucitante, who came to the United States to study starting in the fourth grade, is still dealing with school assignments such as explaining the Doppler effect.

At home after school, he might listen to CDs burned with his favorite songs, or send instant messages on the Internet, or talk on his cellphone.

"Kinda funny, a jungle kid using a cellphone," he said.

He shyly admits that "for a little bit," he's had a girlfriend, another student at Blanchet.

His typical dress is shirt, jeans and sneakers. In his bedroom, there are posters of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and the inevitable poster of a Maxim-type model with the slogan, "Nice cans."

In his village, the family home is built on stilts because of river flooding. His bedroom there is simple — some shelving, a bed, a mosquito net.

At village gatherings, Lucitante wears a traditional midthigh-length robe, a bandana and a necklace made of wild boar or jaguar teeth, and he paints his face red with the seed of a native plant.

He often walks barefoot, although he wears rubber boots to protect his feet from snakes when hunting.

That's one of the first things that struck him when he came to the United States. "I never before had to wear shoes all day long," he said.

There are only about 1,000 members of the Cofan tribe, remnants of Amazonian people in what is now eastern Ecuador and southern Colombia. Lucitante says the Cofans' land is affected by massive oil operations that began in 1972.

One issue is the 18.5 billion gallons of wastewater that were generated. Some 30,000 indigenous Ecuadoreans, including the Cofans, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Chevron, according to The Washington Post.

"Under the water in the river, you can sometimes see a layer of oil coming down," Lucitante said. "The babies that are being born had some kind of weird rash." The tribe bathes in the river water but uses rainwater for drinking.

Lucitante said he hopes to go to college in Ecuador or perhaps the United States. He knows that knowledge is power.

"Now I have experienced the Western culture and the culture back home. I don't think I'll be intimidated," he said.

Two lives change

Lucitante's journey to Seattle would not have happened without the help of Miranda Detore, 31, a Boeing firefighter.

In 1996, she was a Latin American studies and geography major at the University of Washington who studied for a year in Ecuador. She spent time in Zabalo, and became good friends with the family of Bolivar Lucitante and his wife, Norma.

"I fell in love with the Cofan people," Detore said. "They know how to live in balance with the environment. There is no such thing as depression. No such thing as obesity."

She said Hugo's father suggested that he go to the United States to study English for a few months, with Detore, 22, taking care of him. Detore said she tried to envision Hugo, then 10, making such a trip.

"It'd be like us going to Mars," she said.

It also was a major change for Detore.

"The hard part was transitioning my lifestyle basically overnight from a 20-something college student to a parent," she said.

"I've been taking care of him like he was my own kid. I made a shift in my priorities.

"It was a new experience for me being the caregiver of a child, but he was such a wonderful child, that part was easy."

Lucitante did well in his first year in Seattle. His family, and Detore, concluded he should continue his studies in Seattle. In the summers, Lucitante would return to Ecuador, with Detore paying for the airplane tickets.

Had he not come here, Lucitante might have been, for example, playing with a friend in the jungle, climbing trees, picking papayas or other fruit to eat, or maybe learning from an elder how to hunt with a blowgun that had a dart laden with poison from a frog.

That's a far cry from his first experience at a McDonald's, where he found he could point at a picture of food and a minute later the food appeared.

It took about a year before Lucitante could speak and understand English. At the beginning, Detore and Lucitante would communicate by drawing pictures and speaking in Spanish and the few Cofan words that Detore knew.

"He'd tell me he'd miss his brothers. The stuffed animals and toys in his room here didn't take the place of his brothers," Detore said.

At age 12, Lucitante was given an unusual opportunity to be a public spokesman for his tribe when he was asked to speak at an indigenous-peoples conference at the United Nations.

Detore paid to fly Lucitante's parents to hear their son in New York on April 20, 2000. "My culture is at risk of being lost forever" was the theme of his short speech.

Slowing down

Lucitante knows some wonder how he'll acclimate to life back in the jungle.

He isn't worried.

"Life here is way too fast. Everybody seems to be frustrated," he said of the United States. "Back home, everybody knows each other, it's more relaxing. People enjoy life."

Remembering his years at Blanchet ("It's horrible to say, but my favorite subject was P.E."), he talked about the interest his fellow students have taken in him and his tribe. The senior class and the Spanish Club have raised more than $3,000 to be donated to the Cofans.

Things will slow down later this month after Lucitante flies into Quito, stays there overnight, then takes a nine-hour bus ride, followed by an eight-hour canoe ride, to his village.

What Lucitante said he'll miss the most about Seattle isn't the modern accouterments.

It's the people. He has this lingering image of U.S. residents, despite the country's fast pace:

"They made me smile," he said.

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com