Alyssa Luboff, PhD

“You’re one of us,” Nelson said. I looked at my friend, equally surprised by the compliment and bewildered by the spin of his words. I had accepted the epithet, “gringa,” long ago; I knew I wasn’t really one of the Afro-descendant or Indigenous Chachi people, the two ancestral groups living in that region of the Ecuadorian rainforest. But I loved them, and I loved the Chocó, that coastal forest wedged between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It broke my heart every

On really hard days, if I’m lucky, the theme song to the children’s show Arthur pops into my head. “Just believe in yourself,” a voice sings, “Well, that’s the place to start…” I smile, feel refreshed, and keep running uphill, ready to face my demons and what felt, just a moment before, like the whole world turned against me. It’s a great message, one I wish I had heard more while I was growing up. Young children are newly building their models of who they are and how the wor