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...
Friday, August 13, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
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!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
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!
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!
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