In his third-story Seattle apartment, Hugo whispers as he packs his bag for class. He’s worried about waking Asha, his 15-month-old daughter, who’s had a fever all day but has finally fallen asleep on the couch, her dark hair splayed across the pillow. On a bookshelf next to her sits the curled skin of an anaconda and a couple of feathered headbands. In the kitchen, Hugo’s American wife, Sadie, home from her job as a preschool teacher, is ribbing red chard for dinner. Outside the apartment window it is already dark, and a cold rain is falling.

Class tonight — at the Seattle community college Hugo’s been attending for two years, fitting a few classes at a time between jobs to pay for them — is public speaking. Last year Hugo spoke at Brown University, to a freshman class that had watched a documentary about his people’s struggles with oil development; now a professor there is trying to help him become a Brown student himself, but first he needs to work on his humanities grades. Writing in English has always been his biggest academic struggle, so public speaking seemed a good option. Earlier this week, for an assignment, he gave a speech pretending to present one of the elders and founders of Zábalo with an award for defending Cofán territory. When the professor assigns a show-and-tell speech for a later class, Hugo raises his hand. “Could I bring a spear?” he asks.

Until last month, Hugo was working as a valet at fancy restaurants and events, parking bmw s and Mercedes and Ferraris. One time last summer he parked Bill Gates’s car, another time Sir Mix-a-Lot’s. But in a move that terrified him, he took out his first U.S. loan to buy a Prius and go into business as a Lyft driver. Last weekend, as Seattle celebrated an nfc championship win that would take the Seahawks to the Super Bowl, Hugo stayed out until 3 a.m., making good money driving revelers home.

He takes pleasure in being able to navigate the city, a hard-earned skill. Hugo’s first trip here, when he was 10, was mystifying. He and Detore — who would become his legal guardian a year later — flew from Quito to another city, which Hugo assumed was the one he’d been told about, but instead they got on another plane and flew to another city, and then another and another and another. He didn’t know how to ask where they were or what all these stops meant. By the time he was in a car, surrounded by an unbelievable number of other cars, he might have been on a different planet.

Hugo badly wanted to swim, to clean himself off, but there was no river he could see. Finally Detore showed him how to turn on the shower. He climbed in, as he usually did in the river, with his clothes on. Later she took him to a thrift store to buy new clothes, and he picked out a pair of pink girls’ shorts. He was fascinated and confused by things like the fake grass at a soccer field, the plastic flowers on restaurant tables, cars carrying only one person, the perpetual availability of food. “He was questioning constantly,” remembers David Crabtree, a friend of Detore’s who became a mentor to Hugo. “Stoplights. Stop signs. Certain codes: You go first — no, you go first. Lots of these things, they were so foreign.”

At Hugo’s West Seattle elementary school, the esl teacher, Maxine Loo, was told that the silent new kid in her class spoke Spanish; it was only a month after he enrolled, at an open house, that she met Detore and heard of Cofán. One day, a class bully broke the beaded necklace his family gave him before he left. Detore explained its significance to Loo, who sat the other kids down: How would you like to be far away from your family, she asked, all alone in a strange place? Hugo gravitated toward kids in similar positions. He and his first friends there, from Turkey and the Philippines, had little common language, but they were always together. As Hugo slowly learned English, the American students peppered him with questions, mostly about the animals in his home. Were there really monkeys and piranhas? They invited him over to watch Indiana Jones and The Jungle Book. Loo tutored him after school, but when it came time for standardized tests, she says, “he would fall flat on his face.” He was a hard worker and hated failing. I know which plants are poison and how to treat a snakebite, Loo remembers him saying; why do they always ask things I don’t know?

For most of that entire first school year, Hugo had no way to contact his parents. He only had the promise they’d made when he left that someday he’d come back. In Zábalo, his family, especially his mother, Norma, talked of him often — What might Hugo be doing? Eating? Is he sick or well? In the village, a woman becomes known by the name of her oldest son. For ten years, Norma had been called Omama, the O short for Ovi, Hugo’s village nickname. And now he was gone. When summer came and Hugo and Detore, together with two of his classmates and a few chaperones, returned for a visit, it was a joyous relief. His Cofán was slow and awkward, but here he was, safe. Hugo exhausted himself trying to serve as translator, to answer everybody’s questions about one another.

In Seattle, Hugo lived in Detore’s house. She was a full-time student and worked, sometimes two jobs, to support him. “I didn’t sleep much those first couple of years,” she says. “I was so young at the time; I didn’t even realize what I was getting into.” When Bolivar had broached his question, she’d been shocked. The Hugo she knew “was, like, this jungle kid. He could do all these amazing things in the forest, but he didn’t wear shoes, didn’t have any kind of awareness of the world I had come from.” Still, she was honored by Bolivar’s trust and felt she should at least find out if what he asked was possible. At the American embassy in Quito, a consulate told her she could bring Hugo home with her if someone could fax the necessary documents by that afternoon. Detore called her father, who was hearing of the plan for the first time, and by the next day Hugo had a visa; before long, she was home in Seattle, plus one kid.

Detore paid most of Hugo’s costs herself, though one private school offered a yearlong scholarship and others offered discounts. Detore sold handicrafts she’d brought back from Ecuador, and she and Hugo handed out fliers asking for donations to help the Cofán. Crabtree remembers telling people that their contributions would go toward saving the rain forest.

When Hugo was 12, Loo got a call from a friend at the U.N. planning a session on indigenous people. She recommended Hugo without mentioning his age. His school raised money to send him, and Hugo found himself in New York, planting trees on Earth Day alongside Kofi Annan. Detore paid for his parents to join them; they toured the Empire State Building and played carnival games and walked the streets with their faces tilted upward at the soaring glass buildings. When Loo knocked on Norma and Bolivar’s hotel-room door, she found they had moved the bed’s mattress to the floor for fear of falling off it.

About once a year Hugo would return to Zábalo to visit, at one point staying for a year at a missionary school in Quito, where he learned Spanish. Each time he left, he’d break down at the look on his mother’s face: “I’d start crying, she’d start crying, and then I’d turn and walk away.” He often longed to go home for good, to stay where it felt simpler to be himself. But he felt a duty to stay in Seattle. “I don’t think I would have finished high school if I had a choice,” he said. “But I told myself that I had to.” Crabtree watched Hugo struggle with the expectations bearing down on him, including his own. “He wanted to fit in just like everybody else, but at the same time, it was this tremendous thing: People were looking at him as this story, not, like, as a person.”

As Hugo grew older, normal teenage tensions — the struggles for identity, for independence — were amplified by his circumstances. He and Detore began to butt heads. Later, when Hugo was about 21, they would stop speaking; both are reluctant to talk about it, though they say they wish the best for each other. “Hugo is just a human being like the rest of us, doing the best he can,” says Detore. “It’s a huge burden and it’s a huge responsibility, and just because he was asked to go learn English as a little kid doesn’t mean he has to rise to this huge responsibility now, as an adult.”

Hugo often speaks of feeling frustration — with what’s happening to his people, with making ends meet in Seattle, with the gulf between what he’d like to accomplish and what he’s been able to — but he seldom shows it. He stays cheerful, and you can see him carefully picking the right words. Sitting in his car after class, during which the professor focused on the importance of tailoring a message to an audience, Hugo, now 27, says he’s sometimes uncomfortably aware of his role as a symbol — “like a dolphin for Save the Ocean.” But the dolphin doesn’t have to figure out how to live on land. “I’m sure I’ll never feel like I’m doing enough,” he says.