As always feel free to take small bites...

Wow. My fabulous adventure as a humanitarian clown has formally come to an end (for now). I am really going to miss my fellow clowns, who are by nature, a bunch of open minded, intelligent, passionate, revolution-fighting, and instantly intimate friends. I will be in hug/kiss/backrug withdrawl come the weekend. I feel like I am not quite ready to express my experience except for to say that I am thankful for the reminder that: In our daily lives, we have this sort of silly logic that says in order to progress and make our lives better, we have to do things for ourselves and be selfish, but in fact, by doing things for others and sharing love and connecting with others on a more horizontal plane, or lives actually better and further exponentially... Es la verdad.

Tomorrow I am off to the jungle for 4 days (too short in my opinion). Originally I thought where I was headed was 2 hours into the jungle (or ¨selva¨) by boat, but I am happy to report that it is actually 4 hours into the jungle from Iquitos, and I´ve also learned that the trekking group I am going with has been written up in Outdoor magazine as the best Amazon adventure group. I had been a little afraid of ending up with a Disneyland experience (unauthentic) like some of my peers experienced in Brazil during Semester at Sea, however I was lucky to avoid. So, YES! I am so excited! I am going to be taking some jungle survival courses and meeting with a midwife, shaman, and herbalist! ! !

Things I love about Iquitos:
• Purple corn
• Different cumbia, salsa, and regatone music with every store front I pass
• Piles of heart of palm ribbons in salads
• Popsicles and ice cream at least once a day
• Potatoes at every meal (the national food of Peru)
• No high fructose corn syrup, so soda seems less evil
• Kaliente and Explosion—the two cumbia/salsa bands from here that feature back up dancers who wear g-strings and sparkly mid-drifts
• I receive at least 2.5 dozen hugs and kisses a day (Though clowning-related more than Iquitos-related)
• Abundant friends who want to practice English, and as a result- abundant bracelets and other random gifts, for example, one guy wanted to braid my hair with colorful string and beads for almost 2 hours so he could talk to me in English…and oh how he liked to tell me: ¨I love you so much…¨ yikes
• Women openly breastfeeding in the streets and restaurants (get with it America!)
• Beautiful pregnant women…though actually I´m a little unnerved by how many there are…where will all these babies go??
• Food surprises! In more than one way…but literally they love to wrap things up in things in things, for instance chicken on the bone wrapped up with olives (pits in tact) in a ball of rice wrapped up in a banana (or some other green) leaf
• Endless street food…and I´m notoriously fearless (thank God for probiotics)
• You can buy literally anything on the streets…from undies that say ¨stripper,¨ to DVDs and CDs unreleased in the US, knock-off soccer shoes, bath and body products, porn, traditional medicine, moon shine, fresh (still squirming) fish and meat, fresh (like literally on the branch fresh) fruit and veggies, cell phones, household products, backpacks, spices, handicrafts, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc
• They love the carbs…rice, potatoes, and some kind of banana or plaintain with all meals…if you´re lucky yucca and/or pasta too
• Being able to buy a single pill from the pharmacy
• Ceviche
• Chips made from sweet bananas, plaintains, yucca, and yams
• Crazy and abundant jungle fruits and juices…mmmmm maracuya, camu camu, guanabana, cocona, coca, and many many others whose names escape me
• Avocados and lime juice

Other notes:
• I ate a cocoon, which was still squirming as the lady at the market skewered it and stuck it on the grill.
• I am unable to get youtube to work on these crazy stupid slow computers, but I am told that PAHO (the Pan American health organization, a branch of the WHO) will be putting up a video of our project on youtube, which you can search by typing in PAHOPIN. It should have been put up this week. And by the way, how cool is it that our work is being endorsed by the WHO and huge Latin American organizations?
• I´m really starting to embrace sweating.
• The following photo links may or may not work…but there are pictures that people have posted on facebook, if you care to attempt to view: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=47249&id=603426244 (Wendy Ramos´s facebook photos)
• http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=691060222 (Rachel Sandler´s facebook photos)

Things I don´t like about Iquitos:
• Air pollution
• Kids selling stuff on the streets at 11pm…and let´s not even talk about the fact that there are 200 + child prostitutes in Iquitos
• Street kids asking for your food at restaurants
• Lack of trashcans and the resultant nasty streets
• Seeing women get manhandled on the streets
• I´d like to say that in a way it´s interesting to see dogs humping on the streets…it´s actually an uncommon sight, at least where I live…the first time I saw it here, I was like, Oh yeah! That´s how it happens! We never see that in the US since most of the animals get neutered, oh yeah! Nature!….however the resultant number of strays and abundant dog shit on the sidewalks, places this comment in the ¨things I don´t enjoy¨ section


thank you, thank you, thank you,
for your love and interest in my adventures...I have so much more I´d love to write, but as you might guess, I don´t want to spend too much of my day in a hot internet cafe with a circa 1994 PC at crazy slow internet speeds....especially when I can be fighting off cat-calls from moto-taxistas and jumping over potholes in the streets whilst juggling ice cream cones :)

heaps of hugs and kisses,
Rachel

http://www.livinginperu.com/blogs/features/543