EcuEVP

Patricia Fernandez was born in Santo Domingo on the coast in 1970 where she lived until she was 13 years old when she moved with her mother, two sisters and a brother to Quito. Here she grew up studying hard and became a teacher in the subjects History, English and Spanish. She kept working with this for 12 years with students in the age of 13 to 18 years and at the same time she started to study night at the university to get her degree in Tourism administration and when she finished this she started to work as a guide and tour leader partly while working as a teacher.

Her main part as a guide she spent in the Amazon jungle and after some time working as a teacher at the same time she quit her teaching position to only work as a guide and kept doing so for 10 years. When the economy crashed in Ecuador in the 90-ties she left for Europe where she lived almost one year in Switzerland before returning home to start her own organization for volunteers and student exchange programs in Ecuador. She still works with the organization that now also works with volunteer groups from GLA that has sent groups to Ecuador and Galapagos Islands since 2009.

Patricia is today director, coordinator and group leader in the organization for volunteers, students and groups.

Patricia is fluent in English, Spanish, German and with some refreshing also in French.

Program coordinator Hakan Karlsson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1974 where he grew up in the suburbs with his parents and older brother. He loved sports and participated in many things at the same time like soccer, hockey athletes but always in a fun way and kept doing this until he was about 16 years old when he mainly just played land hockey or soccer with friends when time permitted.

Hakan has always loved to work with his hands and chose to become an electrician. He worked with this for about 14 years and the last couple of years he was partly leading his own projects of constructing schools, offices, houses and stores but every year he took time to travel around in the world as this is one of his favorite things to do in life.

His traveling took him around in Asia, Australia and Europe where he lived in Austria for six months before he decided that it was time to see something of Latin America. As he has always loved documentary movies he had seen several interesting things on National Geographic and Discovery about the Galapagos Islands so this became the first country in Latin America so he packed his bag and left alone on an almost 5 weeks visit. With no Spanish at all and only Galapagos on his mind he took this as an adventure as you always meet people while traveling and even more if you are alone and the second day, standing in the line for the ATM to get money, he started to talk to the Ecuadorian girl in front of him in the line. Her name was Patricia Fernandez and before they knew it they were talking about Hakan moving to Ecuador where he now has lived since 2005.

Today Hakan works as a coordinator and group leader in the organization for volunteers, students and groups.

Hakan is fluent in Spanish, English, Swedish and he also understands German quite good.