home

I'm back home in New Mexico after quite the journey. I left Iquitos for Lima on Sunday. On Tuesday night I went out with my lovely clown friends--went for sushi and ceviche (or both at the same time) and dancing, and then packed and went to the airport at 3am. Flight at 6am to Miami. Stuck on the runway in Miami due to Airforce 1 landing. Missed my connection in Dallas. Stayed a night there. Shared a hotel room with a lovely lady from Lincoln, NE. Arrived yesterday at noon (Thurs.) and then I worked the overnight shift starting at 7pm....it's 6:22 am now, and I'm teetering on the point of delirium.

I'm glad to be back to the comforts of home--I must admit that my last day in Peru, I enjoyed the comforts of a manicure, pedicure, and massage by a blind guy (just the massage part...the others sound scary blind) for a grand total of $20. Granted the massage was sort of like being slapped with massage oil and groped, but it was a chance to rest (or something). Now back in NM, I am very happy to eat some corn tortillas, take a warm shower, sleep in a comfy bed, happily throw toilet paper down the toilet, drink the tap water, and kiss my boyfriend :)

clown pictures borrowed from friends:

clown bus

belen

painting

Cositas

Little bits:
On my last day of the Belen Project, I went out with a vet from Lima and a couple other curious clowns to help vaccinate dogs for parasites and mange. Next year she is hoping to come back and spay-neuter them, which would be faaaabulous. No more stray, mangy, sad looking, skinny, mean dogs roaming the streets! In the afternoon we had a massive parade of clowns and of the children´s work the the ¨streets¨of Belen. The kids paraded their puppets, masks, dances, and other art works they had created during the past 2 weeks. We ended in a large field and danced, had music, awards for the cleanest street-district, etc etc.

I went to a photo exhibition on petroleum extraction in the jungle. Everyone was rightfully horrified by the gulf disaster, but what´s worse is that this kind of oil disaster is happening unnoticed all over the world, specifically in Africa and South America. It is happening in small communities, and in hidden or forgotten parts of the junge where the media doesn´t bother to go. Entire tribes of people and vast ecosystems are being destroyed. Completlely destroyed. And nobody is doing anything about it. The photo exhibit showed people´s bodies mangled by the toxins in the water, baby´s in small boxes for coffins, lakes of petroleum pouring into the virgen jungle, and whole communties swallowed up in the destruction. Furthermore the people in the communities did not earn a thing from the exploitation of their land which they can no longer use in their traditional ways. All the profits go back to the governement and the foreign oil company. This was a very scary thing to fully see and understand...to know that this continues right now at this moment and nothing is being done about it.

On the positive note, we worked a lot this year with a group called La Restinga, which is thriving in Iquitos. It is an organization for street kids--that is the kids who work out on the streets, selling gum or cigarettes or handicrafts. They are given an opportunity to learn dance, paint murals, play, learn computer skills and other skills to help them in their life, and most importantly a community and a safe place to be and create. The group also brings to light community problems like the prevalence of child prostitution and violence in schools by the school teachers to the students. Every May 1st they do a procession through the streets with the icon of a street kid on their shoulders to show their respects to the children of the streets and to display a piece of irony in respect to the processions people do in Peru to saints, but do not do anything to help living people, the living and suffering children right before them in the streets every day.

so much more to write, but so much more to do...

iquitos iquitos iquitos, iquitos de mi corazon!

Well, I haven´t really updated since I´ve been here as I´ve been so tired/busy/enjoying things too much to sit in a sweaty internet cafe. The other morning just before I woke up, I was apparently was so tired that I slept through a small earthquake...nothing was disturbed in the tiny temblor, but you´d think I´d at least awaken for it. Too much clowning, too many meetings, too many late nights at Nikaro (a bar that we take over when we´re here), though I´m not sure if I can say too much dancing...dancing here is a cure-all for the clowns, and it´s amazing how no matter how little sleep you get, it´s really always better psychologically and physically to go out and dance a little than to sleep a couple extra hours.

Today we clowned at a prison with three parts--men, women, and young men, which was great but highly depressing. The people were all so lovely and normal, and human...it made me sick that they had done some thing in the past and were now living behind bars for some amount of time, only to be released as if nothing happened in some years....especially sad is the young men who are wasting their youth in a cell.

A couple days before I clowned at a general hospital. I had a beautiful moment with a Polish clown named Psemo. He was blowing up balloons for people to draw faces and figures on, and he came over to a guy I was talking to. The guy had only recently sat up; when we walked in, he seemed uninterested. Psemo handed him a balloon and the guy started to smile a little. He then handed him a marker to draw on it and we realized that the man didn´t have the fine motor skills to do anything but scribble fine lines, so we had him hold the marker as tightly as he could and I moved the balloon around on the marker to draw a heart, a star, a flower, and to write his name: Alejandro. The old man was beside himself with joy, smiling hugely with his near toothless mouth, and moving his treasured art work around with his hands. Sometimes I just feel like I´m wandering around dressed up in silly clothes, but that was one of those moments when I realized ahh yes, this is what we are doing here!

much more to come about the parade, vaccinating dogs, and petroleum in the jungle...

clowning in iquitos

oh my, it´s only the 4th day and I am exhuasted. Day 2 was a clown parade through the shit and trash filled streets of Belen. Day 2 we started with the dance, music, and art workshops, house painting, and clowning. So far we have been to an orphanage, market, a home for pregnant teen-agers and their babies, a home for children with HIV, an adult mental institution, and a couple other places for children. (Day 3 and 4 were more workshops, painting, and clowning which is the norm schedule)

One night I got to have dinner with Patch and 3 other clowns, which was great. At some point I thought of the old question: if you could have dinner with anyone in the past or present, who would it be? Wow, how fortunate am I to be able to fulfill the possibility of such a questio! Of course if I could pick someone out of fiction, it would probably be Zorba the Greek, who Patch and I talked about while painting a house. We also discussed how until this year no medical school in the world has taught a course on compassion--what should be the most fundamental aspect of being a doctor or healer. He has challenged medical schools in 68 countries and only one--a university in Lima--has taken him up on the challenge, so he will be helping develop the course. We also talked about a community he recently visited in Portugal called Tamera, who has been intentionally living life in a communal way and experimenting in living without jealousy for 40 years. cooooooool.

Last night we did karaoke, which was of couse hilarious. They have both english and spanish songs with words---the only problem with the english is that they don´t have the actual music, just a cheesy keyboard/synthesizer thing. So needless to say, singing Born to be Wild is just not the same without the psychedelic music behind it...I also sang Pappa Don´t Preach.

in short: making lots of good friends. Sweating lots. Eating lots of fried bananas and drinking amazing jungle juices like cocona and passionfruit. That´s it for now! xo Ro

somos piratas (pirates)

Finally our pathetic little shipwrecked souls boarded the boat: Edwaudo III on the 31st. The image of us being on a deserted island was further dramaticized by the villagers yelling ¨viene una lancha! viene una lancha!¨ (a boat is coming!) when they saw the approaching boat in order to tip off the ladies and kids who run onto the boats to sell their various food items--fried fish, crackers, cake, fried bananas, etc--to the passengers.

It was 11pm, so we boarded the boat, put up our hammocks in the dark, and went to sleep. Waking up the next day floating down a river in a boat jam-packed with people wrapped up and sleeping side by side in hammocks felt surprisingly normal and peaceful. It was like waking up in a beehive or perhaps as a bat, hanging upside down in a cozy cave nook. It really is amazing how orderly and un-anxious it feels having so many people and so much going on in a relatively small amount of space. On 2.5 floors there were at least 150 people, 16 cows, one giant dolphin-looking fish which someone had sold to the boat via their canoe one day, some turkeys, and an unknown number of chickens, (no llamas unlike our first boat). With the wind from the boat, the temperature was quite comfortable.

Three times a day, the small kitchen would bang loudly on a pipe to alert everyone that the meal was ready. Everyone would grab their bowl or plate from home (or the street market) and run to get in line. Most meals consisted of a healthy portion of rice with some chicken and a boiled banana. The food was usually sold to the boat by people in the villages along the way who would approach the boat in their canoe carved from a tree trunk and stacked full (FULL) of bananas and other staples. The voyage was really pretty incredible--for about the equivalent of $25 you got meals, ¨housing,¨ and transportation for 2.5 days. There are even showers--albiet, just a spicket with likely river water coming from the ceiling just to the side of the toilet--but the cold water felt wonderfully refreshing. One has to be creative to figure out where to hang a towel, socks, soap etc, and how to do things like squat above the seatless toilet, hold a roll of toilet paper, and hold your pants up so that they don´t get wet from the filthy floor.

My days were spent falling asleep reading in the hammock, sleeping in the hammock, and waking up from sleeping in the hammock. I also spent a good number of hours sitting on one of the benches around the perimeter of the boat, staring out at the trees of the Pacaya Reserve--fully pregnant with coconuts and aguaje. The illustrious pink dolphins swam by in packs at times. At night, we played cards and fought off the mutant jungle bugs. I was happily surprised to meet a good number of travelers on the ship with whom to share the experience, from England, France, Spain, and New Zealand.

I wish I had pictures, but alas....no camera anymore :( I felt moderately reminded of my semester at sea--storm and all one night, except of course the accomodations were slightly less comfy on this short trip. All in all, I would DEFINITELY do it again!

Laguninos somos!

I have officially arrived in Iquitos after quite an interesting journey. I am busy with clowning activities and helping out with bits of organization--you wouldn´t imagine how long it takes to print a document and then make copies of it...

Segundo and I finally got on the boat on the 29th of July at 7 am and arrived to a jungle community about 9 hours down the river called Lagunas. We decided we weren´t in too much of a hurry, so we`d stop and spend some time in the community, and hop on the next boat that went by (there`s usually a couple per day).

Well. The boat we wanted did not end up coming until about 60 hours later. So in the port of a small ¨town¨with radio phones, electricity from 6pm-midnight, and an obsorbident about of sun we sat and drank beer (Segundo) and coconuts (me...6 of them in fact), waiting like shipwrecked passengers on a deserted island for a boat to pass. One did pass during that time, but we decided not to embark because that company has recently run a boat aground and we were not looking forward to swimming at night (with the wildlife of the Amazon). That first day, my deodorant literally foamed out of my armpits, perhaps as a refusal to the futility of it´s given task. After that, I simply stopped bothering with it.

We passed the time in the day sitting in front of a store, chasing shade. That´s basically all the locals do during the day too--hang around one of the public phones, fan one´s self/swat bugs with a towel, eat aguaje and spit the shell on the ground, pick bugs out of children´s hair, and shoot the shit. The sun is strong and there isn´t much shade which seems rediculous for the jungle, but this poor little area was cut clean for this poor little town. It has dirt roads that are half full of rice drying in the sun on big tarps and homes built of thin plywood and leaves. The people look dispondent during the day--the sun seems to completely rob everyone of their mentality...at least until night falls and the music and TVs come on.

At night the people become animated and everyone hits the streets. I enjoyed the activity of peering into people´s wide open windows or standing in their doorway to catch the volleyball game or Peru´s version of American Idol on one of three channels on a snowy TV screen. The houses are very open and the people do not seem so concerned about modesty. I walked by at least 2 houses and saw people fresh from their showers lounging about in their undies or towel. There are also several soccer games being played in the streets with men of all age groups.

I felt like I was loosing my mind several times throughout the day (which stretched for hours), but then clarity would come and I´d laugh my head off at the hilariousness of reality. I couldn´t even read because it was so hot that I couldn´t wrap my brain around the words, and I frankly was not motivated to do anything but sit. Sometimes we took walks...very slowly...with with no where to be or go and the humidity creating a dense obstacle in our path. In the late afternoon on 2 of the 3 days we took dips in the river, which helped immensely. We also befriended 2 kids. One was named Milagro and she sold empanadas de yucca and fried chicken and fish outside her family´s home. The other was Gomer, whose name alone gave me reason to smile every time I saw the (truely gomery) kid. He is 8 years old and he hangs around the same store that we did. He wore a T-shirt that had clearly been passed down several times from the US, with OBGYN Associates written across the back like a jersey. Like all the kids (and many adults) he was barefoot.

At last we boarded a boat at 11pm on the 31st. My last note of Lagunas was that even the bugs are lazy there. They hardly move when you swat at them, though I did somehow acquire a fair number of mosquito bites....

more to come about the boat ride (amazing!) and the bliss of being back in Iquitos with my clowning family from around the world.

beso de payaso!