The Medford Rogue Rotary club provided a $4,000 District Grant to add 2,000 cacao trees to nutritionally reforest areas in the Tena, Ecuador area in 2024-2025.  Cacao plants are native in Ecuador, they grow well, improve the soil, and the crop brings in good money. The Yakum Foundation governs the Food Forest project and has been focused on responding to mal-nutrition in five Kichwa communities in the Napo Province of Amazonian Ecuador. Due to outside pressures from government, markets, and the church, the Kichwas were pushed to abandon their home garden “chakra tradition” cutting vast areas of tropical forests in order to cattle ranch in the area. Here the Amazon headwaters meets the Andean foothills, providing for the most species rich tropical forests in the world. Times have changed, and the Kichwa have organized to reforest their areas, and refurbish their ancestral culture. They have been working to reforest their lands and have already planted over 17,500 fruit, nut and palm fruit trees, from 80 species, in four of the five communities.