We’re extremely pleased to announce that one of our primary environmental/humanitarian initiatives is well underway. Pulse Tours is a vehicle we built to help us be and make the change we want to see in the world. Our success in the last couple of years has allowed the funding for us to set an example and make a real difference in the village of Libertad: We’re installing solar panels and bringing 24 hour lighting to each and every home in the village.

This project is not happening without help. One of our past guests, who wishes to remain anonymous due to his employment situation, arranged a donation of 58 solar panels, each with a whopping 430 watts of generating capacity. In total, that will provide over 24 kilowatts of power. The only thing is, we had to go down into the Atacama Desert of Chile to collect the panels and get them back up into the jungles of northeastern Peru. It was not an easy trip!!!

Myself and Carlos, our highly dependable native Libertadeno and General Manager at Ayahuasca Adventure Center, traveled down to Chile this month to pick up the panels. It was super rewarding for me because I got to provide Carlos with an opportunity to do many “firsts.” Carlos is 34 years old and until then had never been outside the jungle. He’d never even been to Lima! So, I was able to be with Carlos for his first flight, his first trip to a city (Lima), his first walk through customs, his first time outside Peru (and in a different country), his first time in a shopping mall, his first time seeing the Ocean!, his first time eating McDonald’s (I bought him a Big Mac, of course), and his first experience in a movie theater (we saw Batman vs. Superman in 3D).

Our weeklong trip together focused mainly on arranging the complex logistics of getting the panels first by road from the desert to Santiago, then by cargo ship from Santiago (Chile) to Lima (Peru), then by road again from Lima to Pucallpa, and lastly by river from Pucallpa to Iquitos. The transportation alone cost us about $14,000 and in total will require over a month from A to Z. But we also had some fun along the way and even managed to meet up with our anonymous friend who donated the panels for a couple raucous nights in Santiago.

At the moment, Carlos is down in Lima with our accountant, Charles, arranging the transfer of the panels through customs. Customs in Peru can be a highly bureaucratic, complicated process. Yet, I’m confident we have the right men for the job there to do it. We expect to have the panels on site at Ayahuasca Adventure Center by mid-May, and will likely get the installation started sometime this summer when we save up some more funds. The transportation cost double what I expected! But the project is important and, let’s be real, happiness comes from service to others and to the environment; not from money.

Another initiative we’d like to get started on sometime this year is rebuilding their community school and integrating power and technology. Right now, their school is built too low off the ground and gets flooded by the high waters every year. This delays the children by a few months each year, which adds up over time. Their only other alternative is to travel two hours by boat to the closest city of Nauta and study there, but not many do. This project will require some serious planning and probably a crowd funding campaign. So if any of you wish to donate to a good cause, stay tuned for updates about this in the next few months!

However, anytime you wish to donate to the village, anything from school supplies to clothing to feminine products to cash, we have an ongoing donation program. Please contact [email protected] if you’d like to arrange a donation.

Thank you for reading and for your continued support.

Much love,

Dan