A Year in Perú: Pucallpa!

Pucallpa was so great! (minus the 26 hr bus ride!) aaaand to be a bit more specific we weren't actually working in Pucallpa. We stayed the first night there, organized and packed up all of the food equipment and supplies and loaded up two boats and headed upriver for 8 hours to a village of Shipibo Indians called Alfonso Ugarte. We set up our tents in a clearing on the edge of the village and some of the local young men helped set up showers (aka plastic stalls with garbage cans full of cold well water!) and they kindly macheted (whew..spelling?) the knee high grass in front of the school outhouses...which one of the girls would soon find out was full of bats down below! I believe the kids knew about it before hand but "forgot" to tell her...I think if anyone in the village wasn't aware before, they were after that scream. We smoked them out and covered the holes with platano leaves to circumvent reinfestation but trust me I was very cautious all week! Later cooked dinner, set up hammocks and got to know some of the locals before crashing. The next morning we got up early to set up clinic and I started translating only to find out that most of the patients didn't speak Spanish! They teach Spanish in the schools there but all of the older folks speak Shipibo. So to communicate our boat driver Wilfredo translated from Shipibo to Spanish. It takes 210 soles worth of gasoline to get a boat to Pucallpa and just to ride is 15 soles so most of the kids had never been to town. The village grows jungle fruits and imports them to Pucallpa by boat so many of the men speak Spanish.

I was walking around one morning and heard a chainsaw and went to go check out where it was coming from. All of the village men were building a boat...but the local carpenter was making the cuts with a chain saw!! They will use this boat to send the produce to market.

The experience working with this team was amazing, it was different than any other campaign I had been on. I was glad to have been able to go to Moyobamba (another jungle city---but up north a bit) on other occasions because I could recognize fruits, understand thick accents and anticipated the zancudos (big mosquitos!). I also very much enjoyed the opportunity to learn about this people groups way of life and culture. It was such a privilege to learn from and serve them although it also saddened me to see all of the damage that western culture has brought. I use the word damage because in so many ways it is the most accurate. Yes, modern advances have occasionally brought medicine, machetes, t-shirts and TVs. But it has also cut down the forest, destroyed the possibility of living life in harmony with the environment, and left whole generations bitter and feeling left behind by the rest of the world. But this is reality for the majority of the people in the world isn't it? Globalization doesn't make us all winners. We should look back in history at what has happened, but we must look forward as well as we work in the present to provide people the tools and knowledge to use their resources effectively...and also help them to look past this life to the hope that we know is in Christ.