Carnaval (Andrew)

Last Sunday we got to take part in Carnaval (or Carnival), the giant Roman Catholic celebration that happens just before Lent. The world’s biggest Carnaval festivities take place in Brazil (or Carnival of Venice??), but Peru has its own festivities that have been gearing up over the last month. Over the previous few weekends we had seen more and more children (who are on vacation from school at the moment) on the sides of the roads, throwing water balloons and the occasional full bucket of water. Some friends of ours tried to describe what was going on, and we found out that Sunday, February 3rd was going to be the biggest celebration day and would culminate in each neighborhood performing some sort of crazy tree-chopping ceremony. Our friend Sergio from PROCREL invited us over to his house for the day’s activities, and we eagerly accepted the offer of a familiar house and group of people to enjoy the cultural event with.

We wore old clothes after hearing about all the paint and clay that would be fair game on Sunday and after experiencing buckets of water thrown at us while riding mototaxis the previous day. We arrived to find Sergio out in front of his house, decorating a 30 foot tall palm tree brought in from a forest somewhere with balloons and streamers and plastic presents. We were immediately bombarded with balloons and buckets of water by the neighbors, so we retaliated and soon found ourselves soaked. After finishing the decorating and putting the tree up unsteadily (in a hole in the street, leaning against telephone wires…) we enjoyed a delicious lunch from Sergio’s wife, Magali. She made me (Andrew) wipe off some of the orange clay that had already accumulated on his face before eating.

After lunch, our friends Pamela and Cesar arrived, along with our friend Nathan from the Field Museum in Chicago. Then we set about filling water balloons and buckets to prepare for battle. The neighborhood residents were lining the streets, ready to wreak havoc. There were some unwritten rules about who was fair game for attack in a mototaxi (ie no dressed-up people, no mothers with infants), which meant mostly younger people riding around squealing. We could see the kids at the intersection down the street dousing mototaxis with buckets of water and took our cues from them for who to go after. And whenever traffic got slow, someone would run across the street to launch a surprise attack on the neighbors. Jess and Pamela really enjoyed painting themselves with colored clay. Cesar and I preferred to avoid it, but other people (mostly Jess and Magali) still managed to cover us. There was also some strange purple ink being squirted about, which we discovered would not come out of clothes and only came off skin with much scrubbing. Things went well until a strange woman from across the street began attacking us (maybe because she had been an easy target for our waterballoons??...) with motor oil, which she smeared first in my face and then in Jess’s. I was not too happy about this and tried to reach out to protect Jess just as she ducked, resulting in a bloody nose. We played for several hours, but didn’t wait around long enough to see the tree get chopped down, although there was some dancing around it. We had had plenty of fun and didn’t feel the need to endanger ourselves with a crashing tree, a scramble for presents, and possibly some downed powerlines. On our way back to the apartment, we were attacked by other groups of kids with waterballoons, who were impressed with our thorough multicolored dirtiness.

After a quick shower, I joined our American medical school apartment mates to watch the SuperBowl at a nearby gringo hangout- The Yellow Rose of Texas Bar and Restaurant- still sporting some conspicuous purple stains on my arms and face. It was a pretty subdued crowd (most of whom had spent the day terrified of Carnaval) drinking overpriced beer and I decided that it was much more fun hanging out with Peruvians. However, the last 10 minutes of the football game were spectacular and made up for it (I hate the Patriots and New England teams in general). It was a nice way to start the week before heading to our new office and sitting through long presentations for several days.

This Sunday was a little quieter, with a fun on a birding trip to Reserva Nacional Allpahuayo-Mishana in the morning with our professor Haven Wiley, who is visiting Iquitos from Chapel Hill. The Reserve protects an area along the road to Nauta that contains some unique white-sand ecosystems and endemic species, but is currently being threatened by leakage from the nearby city-dump (the rivers also run into the place where Iquitos gets its water supply- not a good choice of location). We visited an area that borders the Reserve at the beginning of our time here, but haven’t had much of an opportunity to get into the park. This time, we saw a lot of new bird species (see the species list on the side), and a neat frog (see pictures), not to mention some very interesting white sand habitats. And now that we have a better idea of how to get there (and which trail to sneak in on), we’re excited about going back on our own. We may not get that chance for a while though, as we’re headed out to the field on Thursday with the PROCREL team for 10 days. We have lots of work to do before then though, so we might not be able to post anything for a while. Send us an email if you get the chance!!

7 Gringos and an Anteater

Last week we were joined in Iquitos by Jess’s parents Doug and Denise, their friends Stan and Elaine, and our friend Kate who wanted to escape the harsh North Carolina winter and share in our Amazon experience. We had just returned from a long weekend trip to the village of Santa Maria, (where we got to observe village politics at their finest), inherited a small pygmy anteater which reeked havoc on our bathroom, and attended a public presentation of the rapid biological assessment results for the area we are working to protect. So it was a bit of a rush to get everything together for a family visit. But we were excited to see familiar faces so we had plenty of energy to haul ourselves to the airport at 6 in the morning.
After letting the travelers have breakfast and a quick nap to recover from their long overnight stay in the fishy Lima airport, we spent the afternoon preparing to launch on a weeklong ecotour. (The most difficult challenge was finding rubber boots big enough for Gringo feet). On the recommendation of friends and workmates, we had already decided to go with a company named Muyuna, which appears to be very concerned with local conservation and seemed to provide a little more authentic experience than some of the other lodges (i.e. no pools or air-conditioning). We spent the afternoon playing with the anteater, who we nicknamed Squinny (he had an infected eye) before delivering him to Mrs. Gudrun Sperrar, the owner of the local butterfly sanctuary and animal orphanage.
The next morning we headed out on a six day ecotour adventure; it was our first experience with trips to the jungle where someone else had the responsibility of thinking about food, sleeping arrangements, and transportation, and we can see why that might be more popular. The trip to the lodge was our first real experience on the Amazon River (we’re usually on smaller, black-water tributary rivers), and it was very different. Other than being much wider and cloudier, it was also nearly completely surrounded by small houses and farms, and had lots of reeds along the edges, but no steep banks. We arrived at the lodge on the Yanayacu River (meaning “Black Water”, but the rising Amazon had clouded it with sediment) just in time for lunch in their screened-in dining room. Our cabins were all on stilts and connected by raised walkways for the high water season, although this week there was still bare ground underneath. Jess and I we were pleasantly surprised to find running water in the bathrooms (showers in the field! Holy cow!) and added our own hammocks to the porch, from which we were able to see more birds than we had in all of our previous time in Iquitos.
Beginning with a hike that afternoon, the next few days were packed with outdoor activities. We went bird watching along the river in the mornings, caiman and sloth spotting at night, piranha fishing, swimming with dolphins in the Amazon, canoeing through flooded forest, and capped it off with a night of camping. The rainy season began in earnest and a few activities were rained out, but honestly we were exhausted and it is the rainforest after all. Our one-&-a-half-lingual guide, Cliver, helped us spot a ton of animals that we never would have seen by ourselves. We spent some time relaxing in the hammocks and read some of our new books (yay!!!) and catching up chatting about the world back at home in Raleigh. At night the lodge and its walkways were beautifully lit by small kerosene lanterns. Despite the mosquitoes, it was a fantastic experience and gave us our first real taste of the diversity of the Peruvian rainforest when it’s not too heavily taxed by human demands.
After returning to Iquitos, we spent a morning exploring the Belen market with our friend Cesar to guide us again. We saw many of the same foods and animals as before and the Itaya River still hasn’t risen all the way, so we were able to walk around the lower areas to see the houses on stilts again. We were a little worried about the safety of 7 gringos walking together through a crowded market (or at least the safety of their stuff), but it all turned out well. On Thursday we also took the group to Pilpintuwasi, or “la casa de mariposas” (the house of the butterflies). Gudrun wasn’t there, but her husband Roblar Moreno gave us a great tour. We got an in-depth tour of the butterfly raising process, and we watched as he fed Pedro the jaguar, Lucas the Tapir, and a larger species of anteater. Oh, and I think there were some monkeys around. There was no sign of Squinny, although they assured us that he had been eating termites and was recovering in the large protected butterfly enclosure.
On Friday afternoon, the two couples departed, needing to get back for work and Sunday obligations. Kate stayed a day longer to explore the Iquitos nightlife and Camu Camu pisco-sours before departing on Saturday. Coincidentally, our main UNC biology advisor arrived just as everyone was leaving, so we were able to catch up with him before he went to the field for his research. Now that everyone has departed things are much quieter around the apartment and we’ve had to go back to work and live a little more like regular people again. But we are enjoying all the presents that everyone sent along (but send more chocolate malt-balls, we’re running dangerously low…).
To our visitors, Thank You for coming and we’re glad that no one got too seriously ill. We hope that everyone will enjoy the new pictures and videos we’ve posted (we had so many pictures we had to start a new Flickr website). We’re also hoping that some of our visitors will contribute some postings about their own impressions (hint hint) that we can put on the blog.

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.

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!