Rehearsing New Worlds: Reflections on Community, Learning, and Hope from Píntag and Mushullakta

By Hannah Podol

Rehearsing Change Alum (Spring 2024)

Wesleyan University ‘25

This year, as we reflect on what it means to build hopeful futures together, I keep returning to a truth I learned in the Andes Mountains and in the Amazon Rainforest: change begins in the rehearsal space, in the everyday acts of listening, sharing, creating, and showing up for one another. Change begins simply by sharing stories.

I first arrived in the Kichwa community of Mushullakta after a long, winding drive from the Andes into the Amazon rainforest. When I opened the door to finally come out into the fresh air and stretch, it was just beginning to drizzle. There were a clump of people walking over, waving and waiting to welcome us.

For four months, I was part of Rehearsing Change, a program created by Fundación Pachaysana, that brings together Ecuadorian and international students for a community-based, arts-centered, decolonial learning experience.  None of us as participants knew what the end goal of our work might look like when we began this collaboration.  We were there to rehearse something new: how to live, learn, and transform together.

Unlearning as a Pathway Forward

One of the first questions that stayed with me came from a Mushullakta classmate after we watched El Abrazo de la Serpiente, a film about colonization and the Amazon.

“So why are they here?” she inquired to our educator, gesturing over to us, the five Americans.

Such a simple question. So heavy. Astute. Important.

What I learned throughout the program is that being here was not about us providing answers. It was about mutual transformation. Pachaysana’s pedagogy invites every participant, local and international, to enter a rehearsal space.  We co-create the learning. We unlearn colonial and modern assumptions together. And we begin to discover what it means to make change rooted in relationships.

This is what decolonial, place-based education looks like: Small daily actions. Shared meals. Embodied learning. Art that welcomes contradiction. Difficult conversations that open new doors. 

To borrow Donna Haraway’s language, it is the “staying with the trouble” that occurs in this space.  I believe that our continued engagement with new and embodied ways of learning and knowing has value. It is this dedication to the rehearsal space, this staying with the trouble, that allows us to engage in the work of hospicing modernity and exploring something new.

Land as Teacher, Storyteller, and Relative

After a rainstorm in Mushullakta, the air carries with it a scent of fullness. The first time it happened; all my attention was devoted to playing a game of soccer. Grass quickly grew heavy with water, mud splashing up on our ankles and calves. It was a warm rain, I thought to myself as I tied my soaking wet hair back out of my eyes and ran towards the offense. Playing soccer in the field in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon, feeling embodied as it pours and pours. How sensationally wondrous.

I remember speaking to one of our educators while drying off after the soccer game. We were supposed to go on a hike that day, but with virtually no predictors of weather from online sources, the sky becomes the dictator of logistical planning.

“It’s such a wonderful example of how to cultivate organic experiences.  To align oneself with the rhythm of the rain, letting the downpour decide the ways in which our students cultivate connection with one another.”

This idea has stayed with me.  There is great benefit in leaning into sensation. An attunement of the body, of the community, to moments of serendipity stemming from the natural world itself.  The land was teaching us, through sensation, not lecture, how to pay attention. 

In Mushullakta, the relationship with land is not metaphorical—it is intimate and it is alive.

Ecuador’s constitution famously grants rights to nature. But in Mushullakta, respect for Pacha Mama is not a legal framework, it is a lived ethic. Community members have spent the last six years transforming their territory away from monoculture and extractive practices toward organic agriculture and reforestation. They are literally planting new futures with their own hands.

And land responds. You can see it in the return of birdsong, the diversity of plants in each chakra (family garden), the way children at the Children of the Living Forest School speak of the river or mountains as relatives rather than resources.

“The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer.

In Mushullakta, stories of restoration are being written every day.

Creative Collaboration as Community Building

If change begins locally, it must also begin creatively.

In Rehearsing Change, art is not a product, it is a process of transformation. We danced, wrote, built, and performed not to “solve” problems but to encounter them differently. The work asked us to suspend judgment, sit with complexity, and use creativity to navigate conflict.

This type of education lifts up farmers, elders, children, forests, and mountains as teachers.

As one of my classmates put it:

“If mountains have a spirit, if mountains share stories, we need to focus on building back our relationship with the natural world rather than just solving the problems of climate change scientifically. That can’t be forgotten.”

And another:

“I feel like my understanding of who I want to be and what I want to do are based in this idea of local revolution and community connection. Change happens when we change the way we interact with each other on an individual level.”

I began to understand that community building is not a noun, it is a verb. A daily practice. A rehearsal.

A Year-End Reflection: Choosing Hope Together

As the year comes to a close, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the immense injustices being carried out in our world.  I believe that the idea of Rehearsing Change is what the world needs now more than ever.

Local revolutions can happen in unexpected ways, with communities of people that span across international borders.

In a conversation with one of the co-founders of Pachaysana, I asked why they chose to name the program as such.

“It is meant to be a rehearsal room,” he shared with me.

“A space where people come to connect from otherwise different walks of life. We want to rehearse the changes that we make in the world, carried out in a safe and brave space to work on real life conflicts. 

Pachaysana’s collaboration between Ecuadorians and Americans necessitates ways of relating that transcend the spoken word to accommodate language barriers and cultural differences. To enter the third space of Pachaysana, and the third spaces of dance, theater, and music is to explore, grieve, and commune in a way that is transformative.

“Making change begins at the level of the local, simply by sharing stories.”

As community members in Ecuador continue restoration, revitalization, and education work at the local level, those of us who came from far away return to our own communities and carry out similar work in the places to which we are local.  We become part of a larger web, where each local revolution strengthens another.

We are building something driven by a dedication to be curious and open to hospicing ways of being, knowing, and thinking.

And the rehearsal continues.