What are we doing here? (-Jess)

As some of you have recently pointed out, we haven’t explained very much about who we are working for, what we are hoping to accomplish, or why we are out in the villages or in Peru in the first place. That is partly because we’re not completely sure of those things ourselves, but I can still fill in a few more details.

Because I was not quite ready to enter graduate school and had no concrete plans beyond graduation, last September one of my professors put me in touch with his friend who knew about a new conservation project starting in the Peruvian Amazon. I frenziedly threw together a last minute proposal to work with them as a Fulbright scholar, and was shocked and, well, mildly unprepared and a bit anxious when I found out last summer that I would actually be going. Andrew was up for the challenge and thankfully agreed to come along and try it out as a team. So we made our best guesses at what things we might need for the next year and made the trip here at the beginning of October, hoping it would all work out.

The name of the conservation project is PROCREL, which stands for Program for Conservation in the Region of Loreto. They have the modest objective of preserving and protecting the enormous biodiversity of the region while bettering the quality of life for the region’s inhabitants and ensuring the health of ecosystems and communities in perpetuity. Who can argue with goals like those? On the other hand, how do you even start trying to meet goals like those? So far, I have been surprised and impressed by how seriously they are tackling these issues. The general idea is to create a network of regional conservation areas that will protect key natural areas of the region- headwaters of major watersheds, migration corridors, rich habitats still relatively undisturbed, etc. Then they work with the communities closest to these newly protected areas to try to figure out ways to make it easier for them to meet their needs without having to heavily extract any resources from the nearby protected area. However, they are allowed to use the area to some extent, under strict management plans, because the hope is that if the area is useful and valuable to them then they will help to protect it. This all sounds very good in theory but there are a myriad of issues to overcome in order to make it work in practice, but the PROCREL team is giving it their best shot.

We work primarily in the proposed Nanay-Mazan-Arabela Conservation Area, which is the watershed that provides water for the city of Iquitos. We go out with between one and five members of the team whenever anyone goes up the river to visit the communities in this area (so far, somewhere between a third and half of every month). Our role here is mostly to learn- both from the team and from the villagers. However, we are increasingly able to help with some of PROCREL’s activities in the villages and we do odd jobs around the office (like many interns) in when we are in Iquitos. We are developing some independent projects for our free-time in the villages; gathering stories and information about the way the community members use resources and how things are changing for them in the rapidly shifting reality of the Amazon region. Additionally, we’re trying to pick up more Spanish, stay healthy and sane, learn more about neotropical flora and fauna, get a better handle on what conservation means, decide what we want to be when we grow up, and master the art of the maracuya smoothie. Other goals may crop up over time, but those are keeping our hands full at the moment.

Welcome to the Belen, We've got fun 'n' games, We got everything you want, and Honey, we know the names...well, some of them (Andrew)

Happy New Year to you all! We hope that your holiday breaks haven’t been as star-crossed as ours. We got off to a rough start to the holiday with stomach illnesses, and then missed the Christmas Eve church service by changing our mind about which chapel to visit and showing up just as the crowd was letting out and the bells were chiming since the service was at a different time. Even worse, the next day we showed up for what we thought was the Christmas Day lunch we had been invited to at 11:30 am, only to find out that it had been the night before at 11:30 pm (how were we supposed to know that Christmas dinner is on Christmas eve?!). Fortunately, our hosts were very kind and invited us in for a delicious lunch of leftover turkey and stuffing, and we actually got to talk with them more than we probably would have at the real dinner. We’re hoping that we get to go back to trade English lessons for cooking lessons.

So with our remaining week and a half of the holiday break, we decided that we needed to take charge and engage more proactively with the city. One of our so-far unachieved goals was to see the Belen market, which is listed in the guidebooks as the main feature of Iquitos besides the jungle tours (we’d been stalling on this because we heard there is a good possibility of getting robbed). We called our friend Cesar, and he obliged by coming over with a friend early on Sunday morning to give us a tour. We tried not to make ourselves easy gringo targets- no wristwatches or cameras (except the FlipCam, so there are some videos), and everything else in interior zip pocks- although I was still warned that someone might take my UNC ball-cap (no!).

Belen is basically a huge section of the city along the floodplain of Iquitos’ eastern edge that is transformed into a market. We had made some brief forays into the edge of it for Christmas supplies, but never as deeply and never on a Sunday morning, apparently the busiest time. Thousands of people crowded the maze of tunnels created by all the tables and overhanging tarps. There are two separate parts- an upper area (on the same level as our apartment) where most of the tables and vendors are located, and a lower section in the floodplain below where people live and where some of the more illicit exchanges go on. This lower section is often flooded by water, so many of the houses are on stilts or on floating logs and the inhabitants get around in small boats. However, the river has apparently been unusually low, so we were able to walk around some on the concrete and mud pathways.

There were piles of foods, many of which we had seen before, but also many that were new to us. There were mounds of fruits and vegetables, some familiar (bananas, onions, potatoes, etc) and some not (coconas, copoazus, carambolas, camu camu and many other things that didn’t start with the letter C). There was one particularly cramped passageway with lots of bark shavings, vines, leaves, and other plant products, where the local shamans supposedly do a lot of their shopping. There was also an abundance of spices and sauces in tiny clear plastic bags. And whenever you bought something, even if it was already in a plastic bag, they made sure to give you another bag to put it in. Some tables had stacks and stacks of dried, salted fish while others had still living ones flopping around in baskets. Although we declined to go the section of the market where there were live animals for sale, we still saw plenty of turtles, giant snails, and poultry struggling to get free (not fun for Jess). Some of the less lively meat included rows and rows of chickens (with or without heads), hog heads and intestines (with or without flies), slabs of paiche (a threatened giant Amazon fish), and endangered turtle and caiman meat.

All this got us thinking about the amount of resources being harvested from the surrounding rainforest to supply consumers in Iquitos (and also to be shipped out to Lima and beyond). Jess wanted to purchase a turtle in order to set it free later (this is one reason we didn’t go to the main live-animal vending section), but we realized that paying someone for the turtle would just encourage them (and others) to go catch more. Even the plastic bags end up on the ground or in the river, or, in the best-case scenario, they’ll wind up in the unregulated landfill of the city that also leaks into the river. It’s not so much different from the big box grocery and electronic stores at home, just a little easier here to comprehend the route from collection to consumption and disposal. Plus, it isn’t obvious that the prices that they charge for the goods sold there really make the transfer of the stuff downriver to Iquitos worthwhile.

Throughout the market there were dogs and children running around in the mud and a distinctive, unpleasant smell that has stayed in our clothes after returning home. In the floodplain below, where there are a least several thousand houses on stilts, there is no running water and we have to assume that much of what is used comes from the well-polluted river. Most of the concrete below our feet was crumbling or covered in mud (and poop), and most of the food (and all of the meat) was sitting in the open air for all the passing humans and insects to touch (if you watch the youtube videos, you can see women flicking the flies off their meat). It makes you think about the things we take for granted in the United States- clean running water, food and safety regulations, sanitation, healthcare, and stray animal services- most of which haven’t actually been around very long and still seem to be continually under threat from someone. Life here still seems to exist in the small jungle village mentality, except on a much larger, denser scale which doesn’t logically seem like it can be supported for very long.

In the end, we decided to get just a few fruits to experiment with in our blender, a Christmas-present to ourselves. (Cesar and his friend were not incredibly knowledgeable about how to make refrescos, apparently it works the same way here where teenage boys rely on their moms to do most of the cooking). We chose fruits still safely packaged within skins and peels in the hopes that this might be enough to ward off unfriendly stomach bugs. So far we’ve only tried the cocona, which made a good refresco-juice, but we forgot we also need to find a colander to get out all the seeds. In spite of all our qualms with the market, it was a lively and authentic-feeling place and we are looking forward to diving in more in the future for spices and veggies and more crazy jungle fruits.

Nuestra Navidad en la Selva (Jess)

In our most recent trip to the field, Andrew and I were charged with a daunting but ultimately really enjoyable task: making sure that the children in the villages we are working with all had a fun Christmas festival. Due to some miscommunications and funding that didn’t come through, PROCREL wasn’t able to give small presents to all of the children as had been hoped (there are 5 villages and some have up to 80 kids under age 10). Fortunately, there is a great Christmas tradition here called a “Chocolatada”, and fruit-cake-things called Panetónes and hot-chocolate had already been arranged for everyone in the villages (adults included!). So, Andrew and I set to work coming up with ways to cheaply supplement this (our team decided to pay with our own money) with activities that the kids could do before and after their cake. We combed the market district of Iquitos and came up with a dozen yo-yos, jump-ropes, and wind-up cars, and some colored pencils and stickers for prizes. Toy trucks, plastic tea-sets, and puzzles were donated by one of the team member’s wives, and our leader Didi bought an unbelievable amount of candy. We got some water balloons for games, and had fun at home practicing how we might fill them up when the only source of water was the river (we settled on Gatorade bottles with squirt tops) and experimenting with the volume and air/water composition for optimal pop-ability. I also couldn’t resist and bought a bunch of (semi)washable paints to use for finger-painting murals (which we discovered were also useful for making the apparently popular red Rudolph noses).

Armed with these supplies, Andrew’s experience as a summer-camp counselor, and my family traditions of silly games during holiday get-togethers, we put on a couple of chaotic but mostly-successful festivals (Aunt Juanita, I needed your bull-horn). One of my favorite moments was when, after a rocky and reluctant start, the children in San Antonio really got into the finger painting and we needed to bring out more paper and tables so that the mothers and older kids of the village could join in too. A couple of older grizzled men walked up because they were curious and I asked them if they would like to paint; one guy shyly said yes so I asked him what color paint he would like and he took the whole palette- Andrew walked by later and caught him painting red hearts. The water balloon games were a smash-hit; both for the on-lookers and for the kids. Another of my favorite moments was when we switched it up and had the Mamas (several of whom are our age) play a round of water-balloon toss to win prizes for the kids too young to compete. There were some spectacular splashes, much to the hooting delight of their kids and husbands. Passing the balloon down the line using only your chin got the most giggles. Three-legged racing relays were a bit too complicated, we never got around to playing red-rover, and occasionally a kid would get upset if he got stuck with a clumsy partner in the balloon toss, but overall I was amazed by how smoothly things went given my ability to give directions in Spanish. Mostly I think this was because we gave out lots of candy every time someone lost (and the winners got to choose a prize).

However, it made me wonder whether or not I would ever do well with the responsibility of having kids full-time because of the amount of time we spent wondering: What kind of prizes should we buy them? Plastic toy trucks? But they don’t have trucks here, and we don’t want to encourage them to move away to cities or promote oil exploitation. And what if someone strangles their self with a yo-yo string or chokes on a puzzle piece? And what about the kids who won’t win prizes- we don’t want them to fight or encourage them to think that plastic things will make them happier. And what do you do with the kids who want to play but they are too young and can’t follow directions and just stand in the way with their finger in their nose? And what about the candy- do we want to contribute to the sorry dental state of the village? Plus, every time they eat a piece of candy, even if you’ve given it to them for picking up trash after the event, they throw the wrapper on the ground. (One time, Didi had all the kids yell “I will not throw trash on the ground” repeatedly in order to get lollipops. In response to her next question, “And where will you put the trash instead?” the unwavering earnest yell was “In the river!” Yikes!) Teaching kids is a big job. As the day progressed and most of the adult population turned their attention to the village soccer tournament, we occupied the kids with gel pen “tattoos” of birds, butterflies, snakes and scorpions. Go to the video and picture links for some snippets from these events (including a look at Andrew as a tropical Santa Claus!).

Meanwhile, back in Iquitos, we are getting ready to have our first Christmas away from home (boooo). We have been pleased to discover that, thanks to new-fangled inventions like wireless internet and YouTube, we can watch favorite nostalgic holiday specials like Charlie Brown Christmas and Claymation Christmas Carols. I am also getting over my latest bout of stomach catastrophe, hopefully in time to have a tasty Christmas dinner with Sergio’s family (one of the guys on our team whose wife is said to be a terrific cook). Andrew is particularly excited about one of the presents we’ve decided to give ourselves this Christmas- a toaster oven- so now we might be able to do simple baking and make things like biscuits! We have borrowed a medium-sized potted plant from the courtyard at our apartment complex and covered it with blinking colored lights, flagging tape bows (thanks to Andrew’s mom), and some origami Moravian stars that Andrew found a website to refresh himself on how to make. It is actually very lovely- we might try to keep it as a permanent apartment fixture. We are planning to go to a 10 pm Christmas Eve service at one of the churches in town, and we are hoping to touch base via Skype with the family gatherings that we are missing.

Christmas in Iquitos is kind of an odd thing because, for one, it is the same temperature as it is the whole rest of the year- HOT! For two, there are no coniferous trees around here. Despite this, the city is covered in the same decorations that we have at home in the northern hemisphere- furry-coated Anglo-Saxon white-bearded Santas, snowflakes, plastic fir trees, and songs like Jingle Bells. It really makes no sense. Plus, there is the same prevailing “Buy Buy Buy!” message that we have in the states, which makes even less sense to me in light of the fact that many people here don’t exactly have tons of extra cash. Since it was probably pretty hot and non-coniferous in Jerusalem too, I am wondering where most of our traditional Christmas imagery comes from. It is very interesting to see what parts of our culture really take off in the more remote places in the world. On the other hand, I am a big fan of the Chocolatadas, and it will certainly be new to share a copoazu-flavored ice cream cone on Christmas day. We miss you guys, and we hope that everyone has a great holiday season!

Rats and Snakes and Machetes, Oh My! (Andrew)

Jess and I should have suspected that our most recent trip to the field would be interesting after its inauspicious beginning. We arrived at the Huequito (“the little hole”) port on Friday afternoon, to find our driver Gerard looking frustrated, and the “Kori & Candy” sitting lower in the water than usual. We found the boat already overloaded with gear for our crew as well as food to drop for another group in the middle of a two-week excursion, so we shoved our own bags and boxes of food on board and wedged ourselves into a seat. We then waited as two more people squeezed their gear on board. Jess and I were pretty nervous at this point, but the boat driver decided to make a go of it. We probably made it a couple hundred yards before the boat started having trouble, and we ended up paddling slowly back to port (with only one paddle and an extremely heavy boat, this didn’t work so well, so another boat eventually came out to tow us in). Jess and I had been debating about giving up our seats to reduce weight in the boat and avoid having to make the trip anyway, so we gratefully jumped out and waited as the engine trouble was diagnosed. Since it was getting late in the afternoon (meaning we wouldn’t have arrived until after dark), the group made the decision to postpone the trip until the next morning. Jess and I quickly agreed and went out for a pizza dinner to celebrate.

The next morning, with a new propeller on the engine, we set out again, this time with more success. I saw a quick flash of a grey dolphin on the swollen waters of the Amazon, which is still increasing in size with the Andes snow melt-off. The Pintuyacu River we are working on does not start in the mountains, however, so it is rapidly decreasing due to the recent hot dry weather. We didn’t notice this very much on our way in, but over the following days in San Antonio we watched the clay rim around the river increase each day. Over the next two days we held a couple community workdays (mingas) to help local women lay out grids to plant Chambira (a type of palm), which they use to make traditional crafts. The first evening, the members of our team held a meeting to give gifts of boots and machetes to the women involved (most of whom would have otherwise had to use their husbands’ tools).

During the course of the week, we came to realize that the lower water levels meant not only a farther walk to bathe, but also an abundance of wildlife (for the same reason). Because the river is down and many of the creeks are dry (it didn’t rain all week), animals have to work much harder to find water and have to come out onto the exposed mud banks. This makes them much easier pickings for the men of the village to hunt. Jess discovered in her conversations with our host family that pretty much all animals are killed, either because they are (perceived to be) dangerous or because they are good to eat. A couple children in the village had their own monkeys on strings, the parents of which had probably already been eaten, just as these pets would be when they got big enough. We were also served huangana, a medium sized peccary, and majaz, a large rodent. They were both pretty tasty. We also saw some men kill what turned out to be a very beautiful coral snake that made the mistake of traveling across open ground in the village (which led to many more interesting stories about all the dangerous snakes in the area), and a small dead caiman was brought in by one of the hunters on Tuesday morning. Probably the most interesting incident for me occurred when a man showed up in front of our house holding a medium sized snake which he called a “water boa”. He put it down on the sidewalk and a crowd soon gathered, and soon began urging me to try to pick it up. It didn’t look very happy, and even though constrictors aren’t poisonous, it still attempted to bite anything that came near it, so I wasn’t too excited. Jess was talking with one of our hosts who, perhaps sensing that we were not excited about the fates of all the other animals we had seen, assured us that they were eventually going to set it free. Soon after, the boys started throwing rocks and sticks at the snake and it turned out that they actually very much intended to kill it, which upset Jess quite a bit. So I decided to play the hero, and after pinning the snake’s head with a stick and grabbing it with two hands, I took the snake down to the water and threw it in. This did not please the people around me, who informed me that it was going to eat their ducks. Jess tried to convince them that they had scared it so much it would flee as far as it could, but I think it would be fair enough if it took out some domestic poultry. It was only when we got back home that I realized that what I had spontaneously decided to grab was also known as a green anaconda (there are pictures on the flickr website), which can grow to be very large and which, in retrospect, I probably would have been a little more nervous about handling. So add that to the good story pile. To cap off the wildlife experiences, on this trip we were subjected to more scampering and chewing noises of rats in the rafters (perhaps because they kill all the snakes?) than we had heard on any of our previous trips. This, along with the very serious ghost stories told to us by our hosts, made for some long, sleepless nights.

The most interesting day for me (and for Jess as well) came on Wednesday. I was invited to go out with a group of men to do some work with a plant called Camu Camu, which has small fruits that are very high in vitamin C and are increasingly valuable for export. Procrel is working with the men to establish new harvest sites of the plants and maintain existing ones to increase their incomes. For this workday we were traveling about 2 hours up the river to a small lake with overgrown camu camu plants around the edges. Our work involved cutting back all the surrounding plants to allow more light to get to the camu camu in order to increase their production and the ease of getting to them. It was pretty hard work and involved a lot of wading in waist deep water, hot sun, and a lot of difficult cutting with machetes. It didn’t take long before I was extremely tired.

This was my second day using a machete (after a chambira minga) and I had gotten some instruction about how to use it safely- swinging at an angle instead of chopping straight down, using a safety stick in front of my left leg, keeping the blade sharp. Unfortunately, working within heavy brush reduced the choices for cutting angles. So, at around 1pm, I brought the machete down, sliced completely through a 4 inch diameter piece of palm, and went straight into my right knee. It didn’t actually hurt at the time, it felt like a dull blow, and my first thought was actually, “Man, I’m glad I didn’t hurt myself”. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple. The guy next to me had stopped his cutting and I looked down to see that there was a rip in my pants and a growing red spot. Fortunately, the men had dealt with this before, so they knew what to do. They all stopped their work and had me sit down and tie the wound. They helped me get back to the boat (through the forest instead of through the water) where I had my first aid kit and could bandage myself up better on the way back to San Antonio. It only took us about an hour and half to go downstream, and they sent a faster 1-person boat ahead to let the doctor know we were coming. Unfortunately, this meant Jess also heard slight details about my injury well before we got there, so she was very upset. (I told one of the men in the boat that the machete didn’t hurt me but Jess probably would). The nurse in the one room hospital washed out the wound with soap and water, put three stitches in my leg to hold the cut together (she wanted to do 4, but apparently my skin was too tough), and gave me a course of antibiotibics and painkillers- they charged us $8 for the whole thing. Needless to say, we were happy to pay and may try to send a gift of medical supplies for Christmas. Afterwards the men of the village were all happy to show me their own machete scars, so I seem to have joined a large club. (We may have some pictures of the wound and stitches later on, if you’re interested)

The last two days were much less interesting, as I was confined to a rocking chair and hammock while Jess led another chambira minga. On Saturday we returned in a much lighter boat to Iquitos, where we cleaned up and took a short trip to the Adventist hospital (yes, open on a Saturday). Again, unlike anything I’ve experienced in the US (where I had to wait for 4 hours to be examined for chest pains), there was no wait to have my knee cleaned and reexamined and the whole thing cost about $15. The nurse tightened one of the stitches, but said that otherwise it looked clean, uninfected, and just needed a couple more days of rest to heal. So here I am, typing up blog entries and loading pictures, giving my knee a rest and enjoying the fan and lack of rats and snakes.