CaptionsPat, Cornelia, Don and Tom
Floating village on the Amazon
Market day in Iquitos
Young girls in their village
What an experience! The life along the Amazon and its tributaries was a journey into another world, a world where the main source of transportation is a dugout canoe. The children are happy playing with marbles and bottle caps and are lucky to get their equivalent of a 5th grade education. Their houses are on stilts because their land is flooded 2 months of the year. The lucky ones might get electric 2 hours per day from solar energy, but the houses have no bathrooms, not even an outhouse (just a jungle). The principle job of the men is to provide food, mostly by fishing and a little hunting. Fish, plantains, and yuccas are the basic foods here. The woman are busy with their children, washing clothes in the river, hauling water from the river, cooking, cutting the grass with a machete, and making handicrafts to sell to tourists. Despite all of this, these are very happy people.
If you think the men have it easy, you haven’t seen them work. We watched them construct the foundation for a lodge renovation. They carried all the sand, water, rebar and water up a steep hill from the boat on their shoulder, a human conveyor belt. They dug the foundation with a shovel while wearing flip flops, but they never stopped smiling. Their only construction tools were a machete and a chain saw (they cut raw wood to made concrete forms). Without electricity, power tools are useless.
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