It was with great pleasure that I learned that Randy Borman would be making a brief visit to the San Francisco Bay Area. Fellow member of TRC’s Board of Directors, Tom Vincze, and I were able to connect at a café near Stanford University.

Randy is somewhat of a celebrity in the rainforest conservation circles. He has dedicated his life towards the preservation of the ancestral territories of the Cofan peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon. He is an integral part of the tribe and has been an international advocate for recognition of indigenous people’s rights.

I was in Ecuador in 1994, when I first met Randy. I was supporting a film project documenting adventure travel in the Amazon basin. Two weeks prior to my arrival there had been a very tense stand-off between oil workers who were trespassing into the Cofan sector. It was not clear whether the Ecuadorian military would back the Cofan or the oil companies trying to conduct subsurface exploration.

Fortunately, the Cofan prevailed and territorial rights are much better protected under Ecuadorian law today than in any previous time in their history. Randy’s unending support for the Cofan was invaluable in securing these rights. By contrast, my meeting in a café in the middle of the Silicon Valley seemed very tame compared to my previous encounter with him amidst the tense confrontational atmosphere.

In the coming months, we will be reviewing proposals and finalizing agreements and treaties necessary to start our sponsorship of several exciting Save-an-Acre projects. So stay tuned and as always we thank you for your ongoing support.

---

Meet Randy Borman

Randy Borman has spent most of his life in the rain forest. He was born in Shell Ecuador in 1955. His parents, father from Illinois, mother from California, were missionaries who moved to Ecuador in the early 1950's to live with the Cofán. They learned the Cofán language and culture so that they could translate the Bible into the Cofán language.

Raised as a Cofán, Randy spent most of youth in the village of Dureno where most of the Cofan lived. Randy went to high school in Quito and attended a university in the States for two years before returning to his home in the Ecuadorian forest. Randy returned to find that roads had been bulldozed into the jungle, and where once only 500 Cofán lived there were 30,000 colonists. Game had been driven away, the river was polluted.

Randy traveled down river, deeper into the Amazonia, to establish a new hunting camp and home. In a short time, other Cofán families followed, seeking a return to the pristine life in the rain forest. A new Cofan village, Zabalo, was founded.

Randy married Amelia Quenama, a Cofan, and they have three sons. Trained by her grandmother, Amelia is an expert in the use of medicinal plants of the rain forest.

In part because of his leadership, strategic, and hunting skills, and in part because of his Western education, Randy has been an important leader for the Cofan, a proud nation of over 700 people trying to live with one foot in the old world and the other foot in the modern, Western world.