Colca to Santiago

Clothes drying on a line in a vilage in Colca Cañon
Yummy colors

Church in the cañon, open only once a year during festival

I returned yesterday from a 3 day trek to Colca Cañon and I´m leaving tomorrow for the long (35hour or so) journey to Santiago, Chile. More later...

love, Rachel

Reflections

Welp I know I´m backpacking again because I´m using citronela bug spray as ¨perfume,¨ guarding plastic silverware and napkins like it´s the depression, and finding myself sleeping on 15 hour buses and sunken-in beds. And it feels great!

Before I knew it, the clowning trip (and more than a month in Peru) have passed! This year I found Iquitos/Belen easier. I was familiar with the town, knew some people, and spoke a lot more Spanish. But I found that with this smoothness came a tendency to fall into unconsciousness. Traveling can be such a gift (and a point of exhaustion) because in the unfamiliar you are always having to be present in the moment and on your toes. This year, admist the poverty and the miserable conditions of some of the places we visited to clown, I found myself both more complacent (for which I felt ashamed) and also more able to connect with the people.

On the plus side, I found myself more able to keep up with the South Americans, specifically the Argentinians :), who are always having more fun than everyone else it seems. They are somehow able to stay out drinking and dancing until 4am (or later) and then be up in the morning to clown and paint and hold the attention of children. With my Peruvian, Columbian, and Argentine coaches, I was able to stay up most nights (but without drinking), however I always turned in while the South Americans sat smoking or sharing a bottle of beer, laughing and laughing... One of my friends advised me, ¨You just have to keep fighting¨...I´m not sure for what, but I´m trying to learn the ways.

On the other side of the coin, speaking about trying to remain strong and present in the moment: being with the kids in Belen can be very hard. Some are so clearly neglected: with filthy little bodies in tattered clothes, skin rashes and lice. It was obvious that one little boy I was with one afternoon at the workshops was simply not being cared for. He was 5 years old and looked like he was maybe 3. Who were his parents I wondered to myself angrily...and then had to release judgement and remind myself to just be with the boy in that moment and give him love. I didn´t know what more I could do. I can´t remember feeling so heartbroken as when I think of that little boy.

And so the challenge continues...trying to remain present. After an overnight bus ride, I am in Arequipa now. I tryed to push myself and pack in the town today (which is normally not my style), so I visited the Santa Catalina Monastery, which housed hundreds of nuns for almost 400 years within a stone walled city before being opened to the public in 1970. It is literally a city within a city, with streets, a mill, co-op stone ¨laundry¨ and baths, etc. Very cool. Tomorrow I will further explore the colonial white city, construted from white volcanic rock. This will include a visit to see Juanita, a 14 year old girl sacraficed and mummified by the Incas on a nearby volcano, and discovered 15 years ago after being frozen for hundreds of years.

This is what I´m talking about... a lovely Limeñan model with the classic Pilsner

Great T-shirt: If you love me, don´t yell at me, don´t insult me, don´t ignore me, don´t hit me, don´t violate me, don´t kill me... Love me!

Lima

I´m in Lima now, passing time beautifully in a hostel in Miraflores and attending a conference called Art as a Bridge to Health and Development. It´s put on by the Pan-American Health Organization, a branch of the WHO, so it´s a very cool thing to be a part of...and even cooler that it involves clowns!

I will be here until Friday and then I am taking an overnight bus to Arequipa with a couple girls I met in Iquitos. Tonight I am seeing Patch speak about love strategies. It´s funny having to pay to see him speak after spending 2 weeks with him, but I´m excited that the money from this lecture will go directly to the purchase of another community center in Belen. Yes! He is also raising money right now to send 4 people to go work at an orphanage in Russia with 400 kids, which is currently being run by 1 woman. Ahh!
More pics below of recent adventures:

Check out the body paint! A thank-you show from our hotel for our work in the community

A snake for the parade/show made out of recycled trash. Check out the long tail of painted plastic bottles and bags

Two of my dance students after the big show

Jitterbugging with Patch at Nikoro

Our work in Iquitos/Belen

Follow the link to see a documentary about our awesome work in Iquitos/Belen:

Gesundheit/ Bola Roja en Belen 2009

It´s in Spanish but there will be English subtitles to follow...

Clowneando

Clowning with my beauties

Well, I´ve been here for almost 10 days in Iquitos. I´ve clowned at a children´s shelter, a respite center for special needs kids, a mental institution, and a market-place. Tomorrow I am going to a prison, which should be interesting. I have also been painting houses in lower Belen, a town that floods during the rainy season and the people travel by canoe and live in the upper level of their homes (Don´t ask me how they deal with the mold ?). I have also been helping out with a garden project and dance workshop. Needless to say, it´s been pretty busy.

Every night we break into 10 ¨families¨of 8 for meetings, which involves debriefing about the day and planning for the following. I am lucky enough to have Patch in my group along with clowns from Peru, France, and the US. There are also clowns on the trip from Argentina, Colombia, and Italy. We wrap up on Sat with a clown parade and a big performance by the kids to show off the art they created out of recycled trash, their percussion ensemble (drums also recycled from trash), puppetry, and dance. Then I am going back to Lima for a Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) conference.

In other news I have eaten a mountain of platanos (basically bananas...but I feel that one word cannot possibly do justice the wide variety of banana like treats that platano encompasses) in so many wonderful forms...fried, boiled, in tacacho (a ball of mashed bananas with bacon), juiced, grilled, etc etc. YUM

This is where we went to buy plants for the gardens we planted

You have to love a truck full of clowns. See also the moto-cars

House I painted and 2 of the people who live there

Iquitos

I made it to Iquitos and am with Patch and the group officially...clowning around in this crazy jungle city, painting houses, teaching dance classes, and eating a mountain of jungle fruit ;)

Pictures and more to come...

i don´t believe in germs, i don´t believe in germs, i don´t believe in germs....

I attended a dance class recently that made me wonder if perhaps the people of the jungle evolved with additional ligaments and small muscle groups. The way these people can shake it is beyond the imagination of my poor body...and I´m no stranger to shakin` it. The class was at a gym so it was intended to be a workout, and that it was. The tiny yet muscular Peruvian man--and I ask you, how do you tell (especially when dancing) the gay latino from the straight latino?--lead the hour long class of gyrating, shaking, humping, kicking, turning, and pulsing. There were several occasions in which we were literally stradling the floor and pulsing our pelvises (aka humping). Another favorite move was placing our hands on our knees, legs spread wide apart, and pulsing down to the ground and up again while he yelled at us to ¡pulse! ¡pulse! for 30 seconds or so. Ahh, que loco!

Then once I had swat all the liquid from your body (no AC of course), I naturally wanted some water to drink. There was a big container of water that I saw people drinking from with small plastic cups, so I asked where the cups came from and I was told, ¨just those,¨ meaning there are only 5 cups and you share. Oh. Silly me. I realize that germ theory is in fact a theory, and that not everyone believes in it--and trust me, I am not germaphobe--but the idea of sharing water cups with every sweaty person at the gym had simply not occurred to me. Alas, I made note of my American germaphobe thought-tendencies, deciding not to honor them, and grabbed a glass after someone set one down.

Which brings me to some other noteable germ moments. And again, I wish to inform that I feel for the most part that my American germaphobe tendencies (and trust me, we are way out there in terms of germaphobe lunacy in respect to any other country in the world) have been cured by spending a lot of time in cultures with different theories concerning illness. But I do believe that harmful bacteria in large amounts will cause illness, especially if your body is not prepared to battle the little buggers. The only reason I`m even slightly skirmish right now is because I had that shot of Pennicillin G which killed all traces of my precious healthy flora that I had been culturing for weeks specifically so that I could come here and eat whatever I wanted off the streets. And now I´ve found myself with a cold because of it. Oh well. Here are some of the other bacterial observations:

• With my cold, which people like to joke is¨gripe porcina¨ aka swine flu, no one is hesitant about drinking out of the same glass as me or giving me bites of their food with their utensils or touching my snotty kleenexes.
• There clearly has not been a public health push for washing hands, at least in Pucallpa. There is usually not any soap to be found in the bathrooms: public or private, nor is there soap in the kitchen, which is more disturbing to me.
• I went to the market to buy chicken with Maria, which involved selecting our live chicken, picking it up and poking and proding the poor thing, and then a man took our chicken by the feet and brought her back to the alley to slaughter with his bare hands. The chicken returned dead and defeathered, and a woman hacked into her, breaking her pelvis and removing the insides for us to inspect (on a dirty table). The chicken and the parts were then put in a plactic bag, and Maria put the slimy thing in her shopping bag atop the produce we had just bought. Meanwhile in the market, Maria is petting animals, children, etc. Then we took the food home and prepared it again without washing hands. Yum.
• Though I am unphased by this by now, if you buy a roadside juice or hot drink, they either do not wash the glasses at all in between customers (but do usually give each person a new straw) or they wash it some nasty looking water. Same goes with street food in plates or bowls. I don´t care though...I only got parasites once last time, and I survived! I ain´t quittin my love affair with street food! I just love pulling up a chair or standing at the stand and chatting about the day with other people who have stopped for a treat.