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After the last finals are written and the boxes packed up, as most undergraduates head out for three months of academic freedom, Spanish Professor John Uggen and a group of intrepid students pack their bags to fly south.

They are retracing a journey Uggen made fresh out of college, when he volunteered to serve in Ecuador with President John F. Kennedy’s newly established Peace Corps. There he worked as an agricultural volunteer with peasant farmers, helped build a school and coached a boxing team. He also met his wife, Martha Gavilanez, who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture and now teaches Spanish at Willamette.

Though Uggen has long since returned to the States, his research is still centered in Ecuador. He published a book about Ecuador’s land tenure and is working on a biography about American entrepreneur Archer Harmon, who constructed and directed the country’s first railroad — and its first international corporation. Uggen’s findings about the country’s multinational corporations were presented at the University of Cambridge in London and the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where investors for the original railroad lived. And he has been invited by the Ecuadorian Academy of History to give public lectures this summer in the Ecuadorian town where he was a Peace Corps volunteer, and where the railroad began — 100 years ago.

For Uggen and his students, first it’s Portland to Quito, where students stay in the homes of locals and practice Spanish. At 9,000 feet, Ecuador’s capitol city is the second highest in the world, and Andeans call it “the middle of the world” because it bumps up against the equator.

Then it’s a small plane to Coca, a city walled in by Amazon jungle. From there, it’s a canoe, an open-sided bus on a road that disappears into rain forest, and another canoe, loaded with food and water, for the final paddle upriver. The trip concludes at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, where a native guide introduces students to their rustic cabins. Rainwater is collected and generators are turned on for night light.