Shanti

shantifreitas@gmail.com
http://www.museokamakmaki.com

Shanti Freitas was born and grew up near Chicago, IL, in a family that always valued and encouraged travel. Therefore, after completing a B.A. in Sociology at Smith College in Massachusetts, she moved to Ecuador and has been living there since 2008. She worked for the Yanapuma Foundation as the Volunteer and Intern Coordinator to organize individual volunteers and groups in various service projects around the country. She also works in the summers for the Experiment in International Living, as a Group Leader for high school student summer abroad trips, hoping to inspire in her students a love for travel and openness for cultural awareness. Most recently, Shanti has been working with Museo Kamak Maki, a community tourism project in the Amazon Basin region of Ecuador that works to preserve cultural and ancestral knowledge of the Kichwa culture. Further, she just started a job with Minga Imports, an organization that works with small-scale artisans from Ecuador, Peru and Columbia, to promote their products fair trade in the United States.