As Director of Art Education at the Museum School and Tufts University, Patty Bode possesses years of experience as a public-school art teacher, not to mention a specialty in multicultural art education. But leading a two-day artmaking workshop for an indigenous village in the Ecuadorian Amazon? This was, she says, “so outside my box.”

“I haven’t done much world travel,” she says. “For a long time I was busy teaching and raising three kids. We went to Ohio to see my parents.”

Early in the summer, though, armed with an Arts International Residency grant from the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bode traveled to the Aguarico River in northeastern Ecuador. Her destination, accessible only by canoe, was a community of about 150 Secoya people. Accompanied by a former student who works with Ecuadorian communities harmed by the oil production industry, Bode arrived on a Friday night, weighed down by art supplies and gifts of seven chickens and 20 pounds of fresh fish. She met the local Shaman and his youngest daughter, who would be her host for a week. On Saturday morning 50 kids and adults showed up at the thatched-roof community pavilion to make art.

They did leaf rubbings, landscape paintings, and self-portraits. They ate communal lunches between art sessions and gobbed acrylic paint everywhere. Bode knew that Secoyan adults had been introduced to oil painting 30 or 40 years ago by a visiting anthropologist, so she invited one of the local artists, whose landscape paintings are “mind-bogglingly beautiful,” she says, to lead the workshop with her. “I was very aware of my dominant-culture status,” she says. “I did not want to be some maestro who would come in and tell them what art is.”

Since the Secoya people host few outside visitors, Bode, as a white woman, was something of a celebrity. “The kids were pretty enchanted with my silver hair,” she says. Bode and her host, Lydia, communicated through body language and interpreters who translated English into Spanish and Secoyan; despite the language and culture gaps, Bode felt as though the whole community took her in. “I sobbed uncontrollably when I left,” she says. “I grew up as one of nine kids, in an urban setting where familes live close together, where cooking a meal for everyone on the block was normal. Being in a large extended family and seeing when there is work to be done or a baby who needs to be picked up—that was familiar to me.”

For Bode’s next trip to Ecuador—funded, she hopes, by a Fulbright grant—she wants to take a group of public-school teachers to Quito and the Amazon, to study indigenous cultures and the oil-contamination crisis, and to develop curriculum that they can teach in their own schools. “I can’t wait to go back,” she says.