The Jungle Kids go to the Big City (Andrew)

So last Thursday, as you were all sitting down to nice turkey dinners, we were boarding a plane to cross the Andes. We didn’t actually see the mountains until the end of the trip as we dropped down to Lima- in fact, besides a brief glimpse of the river as we took off, we saw almost nothing but a bright heavenly glow in the clouds. We arrived at the capital city around mid-day and found ourselves much more comfortable than the last time we were here. It may have been due to the fact that we knew where we were going and that we had a taxi waiting for us, or that we arrived at the domestic terminal and didn’t have to go through customs with giant bags to eventually be launched into a giant crowd of hustling taxi-drivers, but things seemed a lot more relaxed. Our taxi ride took us through the same bustling, industrial neighborhoods we had passed through before (Lima is running out of water, so everything is very dusty) and down to the road along the strip between the cliffs and the ocean (this area has been augmented by multiple jetties to catch the sediment). We got to our hostel and made a few familial phone calls and inquiries to the hostel owner about activities (yes, there was someone who could look at Jess’s computer, no, there wasn’t a bullfight for Andrew to go to). The most pleasant surprise were blankets (2!!) on the beds and hot water heaters in the bathrooms (Sidenote: You might not believe me, but little two foot tall electric water heaters that you have to flip on half an hour before you get a hot shower are fantastic! I’m just not sure if they are code-worthy in the States…). Needless to say, we don’t have any of these amenities in Iquitos because coldness is a foreign concept here. We met a couple other Fulbright scholars already at the hostel, including a biologist studying birds in the cloud forest and an anthropologist (along with her husband) studying the role of children in Cusco’s tourist industry. It was great to get to know them, and, even better for me, to realize that I was not the only one crazy enough to jump into a year-long trip with my significant other when you don’t actually speak the language.

On Friday we had a late Thanksgiving lunch at the Fulbright Commission, and I am happy to admit that it was delicious (although nothing like home): turkey, mashed and sweet potatoes, green salad, and of course, cranberry sauce. It was probably one of the best Friday Thanksgivings I’ve ever had. Along with the cold weather, it made us very nostalgic. We met lots of new people, including a Peruvian piano player who studied at Bloomington, a diplomat from the Embassy who had worked with US senators on the recent free trade agreement (and was very interested in discussing mining issues, and Jared Diamond books), as well as most of the rest of the other Fulbright scholars: another biologist working in the cloud forest (although this time with beetles, and she is from Asheville/Wake Forest!), a political geographer studying the relationships between an Andean mining operation and the local communities, an economist studying the informal economy of Lima, a linguist documenting a nearly extinct language in the jungle (her spouse was also visiting, but only for a month), and a photographer retracing the route of the conquistadors. They were all very interesting projects, many of which were somewhat related to each other and we enjoyed sharing stories and project difficulties.

On Saturday we met Leonor Unger, the mother of a friend of ours who is a member of Binkley Baptist in Chapel Hill. She took us on a drive to see the neighborhood of Miraflores and the National Anthropology Museum in Magdalena. She told us many interesting stories from her lifetime, as she had watched the multiple towns around Lima merge into a vast metropolis, growing in population from a half million to nearly 8 million. At the museum we learned some fascinating things about the amazingly diverse cultures of Peru (for those of you interested, read Charles Mann’s book, “1491”), including the Chavin, Moche, Wari, and Inka. For us, it was very interesting to see many aspects of these cultures illustrated through what appeared to be teapots. There were pots with animals, pots with vegetables, pots with faces of people with different jobs, even pots showing different diseases. After several hours admiring the artwork, we realized that we had not even started to see the half of the museum documenting the Spanish colonial period, so we raced through that before finding a delicious set-menu café for lunch.

The next day, in between Jess’s attempts to put together her Fulbright presentation, we had lunch with Leonor’s husband, Tomás Unger, who is a famous science writer and artist (our cab driver back to the airport knew who he was). After seeing their beautiful home in one of the older neighborhoods of Lima (which included not one, but two interior courtyards and a backdoor that opened into a city park!), we set off for lunch on the coast. Unfortunately, there was some construction work being done on the house and Leonor had to stay behind, but Tomás treated us to some delicious seafood at a restaurant on the coast (see the youtube video), and did some sketches of the seabirds diving just outside the windows. We returned to our hostel and Jess spent most of the afternoon completing her presentation.

On Monday morning, the Fulbright scholars and partners piled into a couple cabs (ours got lost on the way) to make our way to the Fulbright Commission for the project presentations. These were meant to share the things we were doing and the difficulties we had experienced, but at this point we had discussed most of the projects with each other, so we had a pretty good idea of what was coming. We did meet the final scholars of the group, who were staying in Lima, and learned about their projects studying the development impacts of Machu Picchu and 16th century negotiations between the Spanish empire and some of the native people in Peru. All of the presentations were fascinating and it was nice to hear them fleshed out with more details and goals. Logistically, however, the presentations were a bit of a disappointment. Afterwards, the sun came out for the first time, and we were able to see mountains behind the city, so we enjoyed the brief period of sunlight to explore our local neighborhood of Barranco before a final dinner together (pictures on Flickr).

On Tuesday we were the last Americans left at the hostel as our new friends left for their respective corners of the country. We were sad to say goodbye to the city with its refreshing temperatures, low humidity, and excellent food. And I wish I could say that we were overjoyed to be going back to Iquitos, but the prospect of the upcoming hot/mosquito season didn’t seem completely appealing to us. We were rejuvenated by the excursion, and feeling more confident about our projects here, but we’re already planning trips in April to visit Cusco and hopefully Machu Picchu!

Healthiness (Jess)

We were a bit worried about going out to the villages this second time because we seem to have picked up some sort of intestinal parasites and we were in disharmony with them for most of the week in Iquitos. Fortunately, we reached a temporary peace accord during the majority of the field excursion so we were able to think about things beyond our stomach sensations. However, we’ve been sick enough so far to get a more than theoretical understanding of how much one’s health affects everything. Even if one is not sick enough to be incapacitated but only sick enough to be uncomfortable, it’s really hard to be productive and considerate and clear-headed and all those other things one generally hopes to be. This, in combination with some of what we saw in the villages this time around, brings me to a whole new level of appreciation of the value of sanitation, healthcare, and some of the other social services I’ve never thought too hard about.

Consider this scenario: you are 19 years old, you have a 1 year old who has a combination of malaria and a persistent cough, and your husband got drunk last night and beat you so badly that both your eyes are black and blue and swollen almost shut. You and your husband share the other room of the two room hut that you live in with your parents. Your parents know that he beat you but it is apparently not that unusual, in fact your father used to beat your mother back in his more rowdy drinking days, and though she is worried sick and he is disapproving, boys will be boys, right? And so you stay in your 7 x 7 foot room for two straight days waiting for the swelling to go down because you are ashamed and don’t want anyone to see you that way and there is nothing else you can do. Meanwhile your toddler wanders in and out of the room crying. Your husband also wanders in and out of the room, embarrassed at first, but then back to life as usual. There will almost certainly be a next time.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. One of the first things that I was asked when we had set up our tent was whether I had any cream for “golpes”. I knew this word meant “blows” but that made no sense to me so I was horrified after I had to have them spell out why they needed this cream. We didn’t have any with us, but I gave the anxious mother some Ibuprofen for her daughter’s pain and swelling which was all I had and anyway that’s about the extent of my medical knowledge. The next morning the mother gave me a bracelet that the daughter had made for me, but I couldn’t thank the daughter because she was still shut in her room. The Ibuprofen did help though, so later they asked for more Ibuprofen for a grandfather’s aching shoulder, and then for more for various other ailments among the family. We gave them our whole bottle, wanting to feel helpful to this family who was generously sharing their house and food and daily life with us.

Andrew and I didn’t have too much time to feel good about this plan of solving the problems of San Antonio with Ibuprofen because things got more complicated. They started asking if we had any medicine for arthritis, giant shoulder tumors, and something that sounded like it could be uterine cancer. Another kid in the family was diagnosed with a complicated case of the more dangerous kind malaria. Several other children and women we met were also in the process of being treated for malaria. We talked with a woman who had just lost her newborn because the cut for the umbilical cord had gotten infected. These towns are not bad off for small isolated villages- San Antonio has a little medical building supplied with antibiotics and general clinical supplies and the other villages at least have caches of basic medicines. However, think about how many times you or someone in your family has had to go to the hospital for something more serious or complicated. They have cancer here too, and heart problems, and diabetes, and all those things that we struggle with in the states except that the nearest hospital is over a day away down the river, and they can’t leave their 6 children very easily to go to Iquitos to get a test done or have some sort of treatment or therapy. Be that as it may, sickness and death are just as real and just as devastating here as they are in our churches and families in the U.S. It’s not an easy thing to think about. I stick by my earlier statement that these are for the most part happy people, but their realities can be extremely harsh, which makes their happiness all the more moving and humbling. At one point, when the mother of the family we were staying with was telling me about some of the hardships that she has dealt with and about her Christianity and about how she worries for her children, I was having kind of a what-to-do-with-myself crisis. I was wishing I was a doctor, or a teacher, or even a minister, or some other profession that has the instant gratification of being able to address other people’s urgent needs. One of the things about working in conservation biology is that most of the time, meeting the urgent needs of individuals is exactly not what you are doing. You are trying to look out for the needs of beings that are not people, you are trying to look out for the needs of whole communities of people, on a global scale, and you are talking about meeting needs in the long term. I am sure that this is just as important work, but it doesn’t have the straightforward satisfaction of being able to make a mother’s baby not sick anymore.

Hmm... I have gotten off on a tangent. I’ll try to post more on other aspects of the trip in another post very soon. (Don’t worry, it isn’t all this heavy.)

The Road to San Antonio (Andrew)

So it’s been another long, hot week in the field (although not nearly as long or as hot as the last one). We visited some new villages and ate/drank some new foods, met some new people, and overcame some new challenges. (We also survived an earthquake)

We left town on Monday, in our now familiar speed boat, the red and white “Kori & Candy”. With just the two of us and our project leader Janet, we were a smaller group this time than our last adventure. The boat sped up the river to San Antonio and the winding, three and a half hour trip passed rather quickly as we admired the vines and forests of the passing scenery.

Over the next two days, we enjoyed life in San Antonio, where we are feeling more at home, and where the people are starting to adjust to us. We resumed our familiar place on the porch of our hosts (although we used a tent this time, rather than just mosquito nets- better at keeping cockroaches out, but also better at keeping heat in) and caught up on the family news, which, unfortunately was not good. Two of the smallest children had fevers and malaria, and one of their daughters was recovering from an assault from her drunk husband only a day or two earlier. This put us in some interesting positions and conversations, in which we were asked for medicine for bruises, pain relief, and fevers. We offered some ibuprofen, but are resisting becoming the medical supply source for the village, although it is hard to say no to the family which has been hosting us.

During the days, we set out with a dozen or so local women (and a few men) armed with boots, compasses and machetes (we had the compasses, they had machetes) in an attempt to measure and delineate 100 by 100 meter plots of recently cut-over rainforest in order to plant Chambira trees, to ensure a long-lasting supply of material for handicraft production. It was hot and tiring, but fun (at least retrospectively) and we felt like we were helping a lot. We discovered that two dozen people armed with giant metal blades can do a lot of work in a morning, and that Jess is better at making a straight line through the forest than Andrew.

Later in the week, we continued up the nearby rivers, to the tiny villages of Atalaya and Buena Vista for more meetings with the local women. In Atalaya we spent the night sleeping on pews in the Evangelical Church before an early morning meeting. Although smaller, Atalaya is cleaner and nicer looking than several other villages we have been to. Buena Vista was a few minutes further up the river (after a stop for a meal of fish, platanos, and fermented pineapple), where we heard some frightening stories about past experiences with foreigners. In both Buena Vista and later in San Antonio, I made the mistake of mentioning that my stomach felt bad (both times in attempts to avoid eating another questionable dish), and was offered a drink that included something we think was called “aguardiente”, which is a type of hard liquor, along with different types of fermented bark and leaves that was a bit like dark purple scotch. It’s not the most appealing stuff, but when the bottle was retrieved especially for me and everyone was watching, I couldn’t say no (kind of like the grub- which was actually not that bad, probably better than raw cow tongue, John). After a game of soccer with some small children and watching the adults play volleyball or get their nails done, we headed for dinner (a spam/cheese/rice/noodle mixture requested by Jess) and the last meeting of our trip.

After a little trouble getting the generator started, the meeting went well, although sometimes it is hard for us to tell how well the information is received by the locals. Unfortunately, at the end of it, there was still gas left in the generator, so as we were just getting into our tent, someone in our house decided to turn on a stereo full blast, to take advantage of the electricity. We’ve posted a video so you can see exactly what our feelings were at the time. We put in ear plugs, threw bags of clothes over our heads, and tried to go to sleep anyway- we were so exhausted, that it didn’t take long. The next day, as we headed back down the river with a villager headed for Iquitos, we found out that there had been a 6.7 magnitude earthquake, centered on the Peru-Ecuador border (not very far from us) and we noticed that several large pieces of river banks had slipped into the water. Later we found out that it was felt pretty strongly in Iquitos too, making buildings shake and furniture move across rooms. We, however, missed it completely. Whether because we were so tired already, or because the music was so loud and shaking the house by itself, we had absolutely no inkling that anything odd had occurred. It kind of makes me wonder about all the other things that we might have failed to notice.

Nevertheless, we have seen a lot, and it looks like I will be returning by myself to the villages on Monday for more adventures, this time without the safety net of Jess’s Spanish. Vamos a ver...

How I learned to love the Grub (-Andrew)

Imagine, if you will, that it is a dark, Halloween night and you are way outside your comfort zone. You're standing on a wide-planked wooden floor that sags ominously when you step, under a high palm thatched roof but with no walls, in a shelter on the banks of a slow dark river that feeds into the Amazon. There are ducks, random dogs, and goodness only knows how many chickens moving around your feet, occasionally brushing your chigger-bitten legs or letting out a sudden unearthly wail. You're helping photograph and videotape a horde of young children who just converged on the only place you're even slightly comfortably being in in the entire village and are now wielding a small flaming gourd, while you pray that they don't burn the whole place down. Suddenly, the woman who has been your host for the last 3 days and will be for the next 3, who has been cooking dinners for you, letting you sleep on her porch, and letting you keep your stupid mosquito nets hanging for 24 hours a day in her already fairly limited space turns to you. She holds out her hand to offer you a small dark something about the size of a golfball that you can't actually see in the flickering gourd light. You can't tell what is in her hand, but when she also gives you a piece of yuca to go along with it, presumably to make it go down easier, and yuca isn't that good by itself, you know that at the very least, it will be interesting. Especially when you look down and see that the gourd passing has stopped, and a dozen children, several adults, and your loving girlfriend are all looking at you expectantly, with little smiles on their faces that are not at all comforting. Keep in mind that only one of these people actually speaks a language that you understand, and that one doesn't look like she's about to offer any helpful advice. You imagine a variety of gruesome tastes and textures, all the horror stories you've ever heard and the lessons your parents taught you about accepting things from strangers, compounded by the fact that you're in one of the last great wildernesses on the face of the planet, which has more than enough diseases/parasites/viruses to subdue a multitude of explorers, all of whom were a hundred times tougher than your puny little gringo self.

So what do you do?

You MAN UP. (or WOMAN UP if you are one)

You take that little golfball along with the slice of yuca, smile confidently at the crowd, and raise whatever it is up to your mouth. Even when it gets two inches away, and you finally can see in the Jack-O-Lantern gourd light that it is a fat, bulging insect, with a little black face and slimy white sides (although thankfully not moving. yet.), you do not let the smile fade. You put it between your teeth (strategically placing the yuca between your tongue and the bug) and hope that first "Pop" doesn't trigger your gag reflex and cause you to regurgitate whatever's left of that afternoon's tuna-fish, rice and beans almuerzo.

You do it for America. You do it for the English language. You do it because, even though you actually like their version more, where you come from football is a sport where people hit each other and don't fall down for no reason. You do it because you will probably have to come back to this village and face these people in the daylight, and even if you don't, some other pale-face will, and they shouldn't be judged because of you. You do it because biologists are the toughest people on earth. You do it because you only get one chance to do something like this and because trick-or-treating, making small talk at parties, and stumbling down Franklin Street will always be there when you get home.

So you chew, and chew, and chew, and after a longer amount of time than you would like, you swallow. And it actually doesn't taste that bad.

Highlights and Lowlights from our first Field Trip (-Jess)

Man, has it been a whopper of a week. We tagged along on a PROCREL excursion to a few of the villages up-river and decided that, overall, the experience made us want to be here in Peru more rather than less, but it had plenty of extreme ups and downs. I came down with a nasty cold as of 6:00 am the morning that we left, but at the start I was feeling good anyway because the dawn was beautiful and relatively cool and we were on a boat heading away from the city into the great unknown and I had rediscovered the wonders of a handkerchief (it’s like an inexhaustible Kleenex!). Several hours later though, after we arrived at the village and started to set up for the night, most of the perkiness wore off. With my increasingly snot-filled brain, I understood less and less of the Spanish conversations happening around me, Andrew and I had no idea what to do with ourselves, we were going to be sleeping on a dirt floor that we were sharing with some of the ugliest chickens I have ever seen, it was HOT, and everyone in the village was staring at us. We didn’t know where/how we were supposed to go to the bathroom, get water, bathe, eat, or any of that useful information that we often take for granted. That night was one of the most miserable in my life as I lay there becoming more aware of all the places on me that itched because of the chiggers we’d gotten into that morning, waking up every few minutes because I was suffocating due to my clogged nose and head, listening to the 17 babies screaming and roosters crowing all night long, wondering what was crawling on me, and trying to figure out how I could diplomatically bail out of all of this.

So... now that we have gotten most of the downs out in the open, let’s move on to some of the good parts. The first is that I discovered that the Procrel team I’ll be working with is made up of really competent, clever, welcoming, fun people. We got to know them a lot better by sharing meals and sleeping areas and boat-rides and down-time and we also got to watch them in action during the workshops and meetings that they led. By the end of the week, I felt like I could understand most of what they were saying in Spanish (although several of them were working on their English as well) and both my and Andrew’s Spanish improved enough over the course of the week to start making jokes. We also got to know one of the village families pretty well after we slept on their floor (under mosquito nets) for 4 nights. We swapped hymns with the mother of the family and she made me a fan woven out of palm fronds. We took baths in the river under the stars. We ate chicken and rice for the most part, although Andrew tried a kind of roasted grubworm called Suli (see pics). We tried to learn to make handicrafts out of the Chambira palm with the women in the workshop but were more helpful as a source of amusement for the women than as an extra two pairs of hands. We got to learn about growing camu-came fruit trees, sustainable forestry, the process of forming women’s artisan co-ops, and how sustainable development projects can work hand-in-hand with conservation in practical and promising ways. (I’ll write another post later this week explaining more about how the PROCREL project works.) It is a really good feeling to go from cluelessness to understanding, strangers to friends, and we got to do that a lot last week.

We started enjoying ourselves more once we loosened up a little and got braver about interacting with people. For instance, on the day of Halloween, I was trying to explain to a group of villagers at one of the workshops about pumpkins, and from the blank stares I gathered that I wasn’t doing a very good job of communicating in Spanish. I walked away and a group of kids followed me so I tried to draw a Jack-o-Lantern in the dirt with a stick. More blank stares. So I said, thanks, bye, and was walking off to find Andrew when one little guy (named Elie) came running up behind me with a smallish green round thing. I asked if it was hollow inside. He said he thought so. A small crowd of chilluns began to form. I said we would need a knife and a spoon and various children went running off and came back with them. So we sat down on the side of the dirt road and carved a gourd-o-lantern right there on the spot. It was rock hard so it took much muttering and sawing and experiments with several knives, but they were amazingly attentive and patient and faithfully showed up at the house where we were staying that night with a candle to put inside it. To see how the rest of the pumpkin escapade unfolds, see the new You Tube videos and photos on Flickr. This gave us an “in” with the village children, so we also taught them several silly games from the States, were joined by hordes of them whenever we swam, and tried to answer their questions about why our skin was so white, what freckles were, which spots were freckles and which were bug-bites, whether we had moms, why they weren’t with us, etc. This quickly earned us a posse, which was both a good and bad thing.

After several days in El Campo, we realized that the villagers were, for the most part, happy people. It dawned on us that on the first night, when we were feeling sorry for them for being so poor and isolated, we were totally wrong (but they were not far from the mark for feeling sorry for us for being sick and incompetent). This brought up a lot of questions for me about what is needed to be happy- since, in the “haves & have-nots” way of looking at the world, the lives of the people in San Antonio and the people in the Raleigh suburbs where I come from couldn’t be more different. Example: the “master-bedroom” of the house where we stayed, owned by one of the more successful families in the village, was about 7x7 feet big, didn’t have a single piece of furniture, had a floor and walls made of partially rotten wooden slats that didn’t really meet, and was shared by at least 5 people. In other ways they seem to still have a lot of the same sorts of things that we do: a dog named Candy, spoiled youngest children, soccer practice in the afternoons, children’s games like 4-square, community politics, dirty jokes, crises, and celebrations. So... the question is, if we “first-world” inhabitants were to pare down all our things by about 90%, what would we really be losing? Another angle on the question is, which things do you have to lose to truly impact your ability to lead a happy life? Additionally, what is the role of “sustainable development” work in a place where the people are already doing okay? I think the “sustainable” part is much more of the issue than the “development” part since what is needed is protection of resources so the villagers can persist more or less as they are and not necessarily raise the standard of living to fancier master bedrooms (this is very different from the way things are often approached in the U.S.). A final bit of philosophizing that has been bumping around in my head because of this trip is that I realized that, not only can I always count my blessings (i.e. thank goodness for this handkerchief, this thermarest, this mosquito net, this person taking the time to talk to me, this sunset, this glass of water, that Andrew decided to come along and be a fellow bumbler, that this food isn’t monkey brain, etc.), but it makes a humongous difference to my overall sense of well-being if I focus on those blessings rather than all the things that are not what I would wish (itchiness, nausea, dirt, noise, poor Spanish, lonely, no plan, etc.), even when nothing else at all changes about the situation. It’s kind of empowering. And sometimes just changing my mentality does actually change the situation for the better, for instance by making me brave enough to open up to strangers and discover that they have cold medicine, or an outhouse. I hope I remember these things when I get back to the States, or even tomorrow for that matter. Meanwhile, we are back in Iquitos counting a different set of blessings and trying to de-emphasize a different set of problems, so at least things stay interesting. I hope you all are enjoying that lovely cool weather up there. Pronto, escribiré más. Also, we posted about 25 new photos and 11 new videos from the trip, so look for those on the Flickr and YouTube sites.