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
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