Clarification

I wrote a recent blog about some of the mothers in our health program. I think that the things mentioned were less than complementary--the pigs wandering through the house, the parasites, the naked children.

I did not put into words the compassion and care of these kind women for their children, the warmth of their hearts, their generosity to us and to their neighbors.

They are soccer moms, too. Although they walk to the games, and sit on in the grass instead of in comfy, portable, side-line chairs, they are still there, cheering.

They wash the uniforms, the fill the plates, they help with the homework, they chase the chickens and turkeys up into the trees so they won't get lost in the night.

There lives and their homes may be different from mine, but they are good people, good neighbors, and I am lucky to know them.

Sabbath afternoon

We're sitting in the big meeting tent, having a Bible study. It is a hot and calm Sabbath sfternoon, the breeze has been blowing through the central tunnel of the tent, and we are having a good discussion about judgement and the close of probation--just me and Carly.

Jen walks up. Jen lives next door, a tiny boy of nine who looks like he could be six years old. He has wide eyes and an easy, crooked grin. Jen likes to hang around us, watch what we're doing.

As Jen stands by, and we take notes in our journals, some bigger boys pass on their bikes. They yell and whistle at us, and say some words I won't repeat.

I watch Jen's reaction.

He looks down at the ground, and shakes his head, like a wise old adult, shunning the foolishness of youth.

Carly and I exchange a look, rolling our eyes. We're used to it.

"Ellos son feos," says Carly, and we laugh.

And then Jen laughs, too, and we are pleased to see he agrees.

Do not use an aerosol can as a hammer

(When Carly locked the keys in the other room, she had to scale the wall to get them, thus providing a good picture of our kitchen/storage/closet).

Siesta, the period of an hour or two after lunch when everyone sits around and does nothing, was wrapping up, and Carly and I were preparing our paperwork for the afternoon visits. I invested in five minutes of housecleaning in our kitchen/storage/closet. We still had a little wall space left, so I decided to tack up one of the posters we had made featuring last week's memory verse.

I dug through one of our duffles for the baggie of tacks and nails, then looked around for a suitable hammer. I grabbed our super sized aerosol can of Repel, 40% deet, thinking, "It looks like metal, so it should make a good hammer," and ignoring the "WARNING, Contents Under Pressure," message, printed neatly across the bottom.

You would think I would have understood, it was even written in my mother tongue.

I raised the can and swung. Wham, Wham, WHAM, POW! There was a deafening explosion, and suddenly a thick fog of bug spray filled my field of vision as it hissed in every direction around the room. I was spooked, and befuddled at first as to what had happened.

I lept from our kitchen/storage/closet, spraying can still in hand, then hurled it into the dirt yard.

Bug spray drenched my khaki shrts, the walls of our room, and the poster.

"Well," I thought, "That wasn't one of my brightest moments."

And so I learned that an aerosol can was not made for use as a hammer, just like I learned last week that a giant 100 floor puzzle was NOT made for 100 children. Maybe I can just leave that scenario to your imagination.

A big handful

Tonight we read the story of David and Goliath with the kids, then made David and Goliath fingerpuppets.

It seemed like a very simple process. Carly and I had already made copies of all the David and Goliath templates, then cut them out ourselves. All we had to do was distribute them to the kids to be colored with crayons, then tape them in a round finger puppet loop when the coloring was finished.

When we have story time, after the singing, all the kids sit on the fat steps of a concrete amphitheater in the plaza, and we stand at the base, our own concrete stage, reading out loud, as loud as we can.

Then the kids come down and spread out over the big cement patio to color. It is very hard to divide them into groups, then sit them down, and then have them wait their turn to be passed parers and crayons. You will remember that we have around 150 kids every night, and there are just two of us.

The kids think that if they are not standing right in front of you with arms outstretched, trampling your toes, they won't get their share. So no matter what you say, they follow you around in this tight pack.

We found the best way to address this is by playing a game called "Grupos."

"¡GRUPOS DE UNO!" I will yell, and all the children will miraculously separate themselves across the plaza, being careful not to touch anyone else.

"¡GRUPOS DE TRES!" and with screeching and clamoring they arrange themselves in little packs of three people.

"¡GRUPOS DE UNO!" back they go into their individual spaces.

We do this for a few rounds, and when they begin to tire and lose energy, I bark, "GRUPOS DE OCHO, y después, SIÉNTENSE." The kids find groups of eight, and sit, sometimes even in nice circles.

They have learned that this means the coloring time is about to begin.
The love coloring more than anything else. They will sit and wait for the crayons, but there are still some kids who will get super grabby when you put a big handful of crayons down in the middle of the group--the kids who reach out really fast before you can say greenbean and roll 90% of the crayons into their personal coloring space.

Sometimes I have to reach down and take their arms firmly in my hands and we have to have a stern little talk about sharing. I'm getting pretty good at this talk.

All of a sudden, they are done coloring, and they are ready to have their puppets taped. All of them--100 shoving kids who think the tape will run out unless they are standing on your feet, breathing in your air.

"HAZ UNA FILA, POR FAVOR," I yell. Make a line, please. Make a nice pretty line.

And they do, sort of. But not really.

Sweet Lemons

Deidamie taught me how to eat sweet lemons with salt. "Why have a sweet lemon if you're going to salt it?" I asked.

She shrugged. "That's just the way we eat them!"

We laughed together, and I watched so I would spit the seeds out on the dirt in just the right way, even though I lacked that gold tooth to add the special sparkle.

Deidamie has a sister named Iliana, who lives farther down the mud lane, and both of their families are in our program. One day this week when I stopped in for my daily visit to Iliana's house, Deidamie was there too, swinging in a hammock made from a recycled fishing net with a baby on her stomach. Iliana sat on a little wooden bench nearby, tucked back in the shade.

I wanted to remember that moment, their tranquility, the heat, the peels of oranges littering the ground.

Deidamie is 42, and Iliana is 36. Both of them are grandmothers.

Liliana lives on the other far reaches of town, in a tiny house with her husband and their seven children. Both Liliana and her next door neighbor, Lidia, are in our program. Lidia only has four kids--Natalia, Marcos, Ever, and Lorgio, but her in-laws and her three nephews also live in her house.

Whenever I am visiting at Lidia's, the new piglets come and go through the front door, rooting around in the mud of the floor.

Liliana has a two year son who is always naked, I have never seen him with a stitch of clothing on. The whole family had some serious parasite problems, and when we treated the two youngest boys with anti-parasitic medications, they had worms exiting through their noses and mouths, as well as the other end.

The very calm mother informed me of this the next day. She addressed the situation with composure. "We found worms in their bed this morning," she said, "and they have been coughing them up all day." I think I probably would have flipped if my kid had worms crawling out of his nose.

We have another family in our program in are quite fresh from a Shipivo community. They speak Spanish shyly, and with a distinctive accent. The women aren't too stressed about wearing shirts. When Carly or I make our rounds at their house they often tie traditional beaded bracelets or necklaces on us. One day they gave me a necklace with a crocodile tooth.

Ciro and Emita

The hospedaje where we are staying is managed by a kind elderly couple, Ciro and Emita.

Ciro wears pirate pants every day--trousers that have been roughly trimmed into capris with a pair of scissors, then cut into big fringes all the way around. I know one else who has pants quite like this, and since Señor Ciro has three or four pairs, I'm curious to ask after the inspiration for his style. But I'm too shy, and afraid, perhaps, of a miscommunication that would hurt feelings.

Emita is a tiny little lady, who puts up with Ciro's off-color jokes and faithfully feeds her chickens each morning. She stands on the porch and calls them, a different call for the hens, for the rooster, and for the chicks, and then she stands there and laughs as she watches them eat their corn.

Emita sings all the time, dear little songs about children and heaven and how much she loves Jesus. I love her sweet, wavering voice, seldom on tune, cheering us through our day.

When I am old, I want to be just like that: singing songs and feeding my chickens.

Ciro and Emita are obsessive about sweeping their yard. They have a dirt yard with a fence that includes the two hospedake buildings, the outhouses, and the shower shed in its reaches. The fence also includes a handful of bread fruit trees, who are always shedding a half-orange, half-green leaf in the wind.

Down comes the leaf, and over to its resting place rushes Ciro or Emita, broom in hand, to sweep it up. They make tiny piles of these leaves, then burn them in the yeard. The smoke filters into our room and makes our eyes smart, or gives breakfast an odd flavor.

We missed them when they went on a trip to Pucallpa for a week. We have only known them a month, but they are an important part of our existence in Masisea.

Then they came back, and as Carly and I did paperwork, we listened to Emita sing a little song in the room next to ours.

"I'm glad she's back," said Carly.

Me too.

Peaceful

Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders. Deuteronomy 33:12

You have rescued me from death; you have kept my feet from slipping. So now I can walk in your presence, O God, in your life-giving light. Psalm 56:13

La Huelga

This week, the Department of Ucayali is on strike. A department here in Peru is like a state back in my country. Imagine what would happen if the state of New York went on strike. No teachers in the schools, no doctors in the hospital, not a store open where you could buy food, not a car on the road.

Transportation has come to a halt. We're stuck in Masisea because there are no boats. Doctor can't got to 38 in the truck because people will destroy it and him if they catch him on the road. If you ride a bicycle into town, rocks will be thrown at you. The airport in Pucallpa has been taken over. 60,000 people are marching in protest in the streets every day.

The strike is causing many problems. Businesses are not allowed to be open, motocars are not allowed to drive, no one can make money, no one can buy things like rice and toilet paper, no one can take more money out of the bank.

We're at a standstill. There are lots of problems because the hospital is closed, and all the doctors and nurses are on strike, too.

The word in Spanish for strike is huelga. The word "huelga" has been written in grafitti along with the word "indefinida" and "26 Junio," all over walls and buildings and schools in the city. The stike will go on, we are told, until a compromise is made.

The "h" in "huelga" is silent, and I have had a hard time learning this new word because it has too many vowels, and an odd combination of consonants, and feels like something soft and slippery in my mouth.

There is, as of yet, no sales tax in the Department of Ucayali. It is the poorest department in Peru, and the only one that doesn't yet have a sales tax. The national government of Peru wants to now institute a 20% sales tax on everything bought and sold, from boats to chewing gum.

Thus, the strike. The Ucayali citizens don't want to pay a sales tax, and have said that they will strike until the president of Peru, Alan Garcia, changes his mind.

I'm not usually too interested in politics. But we have families in our health program who haven't had food for two days now. They have sent some of the men folk on a trip to walk 8 hours into the jungle to their community where they have yuca and fish available.

It makes me sad when people don't have food to eat.

In Pucallpa we hear that the members of the Adventist churches are eating "out of the common pot." There are families who are starving, and so the church is organizing meals where everyone eats together and shares what they have to make the food go farther.

I hope the strike ends soon.

Heaven

I find in myself a desire which no experience can satisfy, the most profitable explanation is that I was made for another world.

C. S. Lewis

Don't bite me

The bugs are bearable if you wear long pants, long sleeves, socks, shoes, and cover yourself in a generously thick layer of deet. Even then, they bit us right through our pants.

Even worse than the mosquitoes are the huge blood sucking flies, although I must say that as time goes by we are getting better and better at stopping them in their tracks with a deafennig smack before they have chance to take flight again.

The locals here have turned bug smacking into an art--they can grab the right flies out of the air without looking and snap them dead between their fingers. We find this quite amazing.

Masisea has reported six cases of malaria in the month of June, and Carly and I are taking our bitter anti-malaria pills each week religiously. Malaria medicine day is Sabbath, and because the tablets must be taken with a full stomach early in the day, we remind ourselves never to go to Sabbath school without first taking our weekly dose.

Trapped

Carly and I have a problem with little kids who are always coming and idling outside of our kitchen/storage/closet door. They watch us intently. They eye our every move. They are cute and all, but we'd like to eat our oatmeal without an audience, thank you.

So we're always trying to come up with creative ways to tell them to go away. Usually, whatever we say is useless. They continue to loiter, no matter what clever expressions we invent. I told Carly that we need a sign that says, "No Loitering" to hang on our door, in Spanish, or course.

This evening, we told some kids to scram, in so many words, while we were cooking dinner. Then we shut the door to help them get the idea. We heard then hanging out. We waited.

A minute later we tried to go out to fill our pot with water. We found the door locked--from the outside!

Those punksticks had locked us in, then wandered off! We weren't too distressed, actually we thought it was hilarious. Except the we-can't-get-out part.

We could see through the big cracks in the walls that the brethern were moving around over by the tent, and finally Miqueas came over close enough so we could yell at him to rescue us. He was very surprised and also amused to find the two of us locked up in our own room.

Travel

We woke at 2:50 in the morning, brushed our teeth, and loaded our stuff on the back of Kely's moto. I was surprised at the fierce army of mosquitoes that were attacking, even at that hour, and was thankful for my long pants.

The little dirt road from Masisea to the river port is 8 kilometers long. This is a trip of about 40 minutes in a motocar. We had been traveling for about ten minutes when Kely stopped the moto. His front tire was flat. We inspected it with our headlamps.

There was a tack stuck into his tire.

"There's not much work right now," Manuel explained, "Other drivers ambush other motos in the night, to steal the work away."

Kely took off at a rapid walking pace for Masisea again, and we waited in the darkness, rubbing our eyes and swatting at bugs. A few motos went by. The peki pekis start leaving the port at 4:00 am for the four hour trip to Pucallpa.

I wasn't planning on learning how to change the tire of a moto, but now I know how.

We started off again. I remember feeling very tired, but we were so excited to go to Pucallpa to communicate with our families.

A little while later there was a loud crash, and we looked back to see that the large plastic basket of Manuel's dental supplies had fallen off the back of the moto. It had been tied, but somehow came loose.

Boxes of gloves, bottles of alcohol, blue drapes, and ampules of lidocaine littered the dirt road. We all piled out of the moto to help clean up. Hundreds of dental needles had spilled out of their cartons.

"You know," Carly said to me, as we put handfuls of needles back in the basket, "I sometimes wonder if things like this happen for a reason. Maybe we just weren't supposed to catch that first boat. Maybe God is protecting us from something, and he just needs a little extra time."

I smiled.

He's got the whole world in his hands. I can travel a long, long ways from home, but still be safe in his protective grip.

Progress at Km 38

Work continues on the septic pit.

The newly constructed sheep corral and sheep hut.

We still lack a second water tank, but the tower is finished. Carly and I use it for secret meetings.

Some of our friendly lawn-munchers.

Soon we will have lot of little lemon and orange seedlings to plant, thanks to our greenhouses.

Masisea

I haven't learned how to drive a moto yet, but one of the families in our health project has promised to teach me.

Andrea's house.

Carly at lunch with "The Brethren," Manuel, Felipe, Domingo, and Miqueas.

This tiny plane brought the doctor to Masisea for a mobile clinic day.

When the river bed dries up, the villagers transform it into a rice field.

My cup runneth over

There is not a day when I come back to our place of lodging with my shoulder bag lighter than when I started out.

Our project for healthy families takes me on a long pilgrimage up and away from the center of the town to a neighborhood called Barrio Alto. Along the way up the hill I pass by the house of Hilda, a Jehovah's Witness, who always yells, "God bless you, friend!"

Hilda often trots herself over with a gift of toronja, Peruvian grapefruit. I love toronja.

Then a little farther up on the right past the bridge is Tomasa's bakery, with her house attached to the side where she lives with her elderly sister. Tomoasa makes wonderful dense cake, sometimes banana and sometimes orange. I stop and buy slabs of it for our supper, 50 cents a person, and Tomasa throws in a bunch of my favorite type of bananas, manzanitas, for free.

These people have nothing, barely enough rice to feed their children, and yet they won't let you leave their homes without a gift of some kind of fruit from their backyard.

Carly and I have a wooden crate in the corner of our tiny kitchen room, and it has been heaped with fruit all week. We can't keep up. We have a mountain of toronja and naranjas (oranges), for making juice, we have three gigantic papayas (which we don't really care for, but eat anyway), we have sweet bananas, green plátano, and six golden coconuts that one of Carly's families donated, then hand carried to our hospedaje for a special delivery.

We are overwhelmed by their generosity, and trying to think of ways we can give back. Tomasa said we could use her oven as long as we shared our recipes (we want hers, too), and I think we're going to bake brownies to give to our families. But somehow, brownies just don't seem to hold a candle to a fresh jungle coconut, heavy with sweet milk.

I just feel so blessed to be here, blessed to walk these dusty streets in my flip slops and wave at the little old people who sit on their porches all day long, watching people like me walk by. I love the village life.

Kids

The first night we did a children's program we had 40 children. They didn't know there was going to be a program. They heard the singing, and they showed up. The next night there were 70 kids, and they next night we handed out 100 stickers to 100 eager beavers, and ran out. We now consistently have 120 kids at our program each night. I usually go to bed somewhat hoarse, and always exhausted.

They are energetic and attentive and a little wild. They love to sing, and they love to color even more. It has been a challenge since we carefully planned our six-week program with copies and activities for a maximum of 50 kids each night. But every minute is worth it. Whenever they burst into the Spanish version of "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus," which is "He Decidido Seguir a Cristo," I feel like crying tears of joy.

Fruit

Bethy Luz

There is a lady who idles at the hostel where we are staying whose name is Bethy Luz. Bethy is 25 years old and she is fitting to burst with the pregnancy of her second baby. Her due date is in two days.

"But this one will be late," she tells Carly and I, "I can tell."

We sit and chat with her on the narrow little porch of the hospedaje, looking over the plaza of Masisea. It is dusk, and our view of the plaza is from the backside, a slanting downward sort of view.

We slap at mosquitoes, smearing the blood over our shins. The sphere of Betty Luz's belly is imposing. She shifts awkwardly around it, uncomfortable.

I try to think of anything I can give her. In this corner of the world, prenatal care and prenatal visits are almost unheard of.

We do have a few cartons of women's vitamins, which come in the form of foil wrapped chocolate cherry flavored chews. They are a donation item from the United States. Our Peruvian Doctor makes fun of them, this extravagance of American culture.

For the same amount of space and weight, hundreds of compact, bitter multi-vitamin pills could be sent down, instead of these sweet vitamin-enhanced candies, which turn into goo in the jungle heat, and come in clumbersome cartons of 60.

Or better yet, the kind people in donation countries could send chickens. Chickens to lay eggs that could be traded for fruit or vegetables to give pregnant mommies natural vitamins. Chickens to produce more chickens to be sold to finance an education or put a tin roof on a house.

But for today, we have chocolate vitamins. They may seem frivolous in the face of so much need, but Bethy Luz accepts them with sweet appreciation. For this moment, it's the best I have.

For sale

In Masisea there isn't a central market location. Instead, the market roams the streets. The townspeople put the fish or oranges or coconuts or tamales in big colorful plastic bowls and then put the bowls on their heads, then they wander the neighborhoods, yelling out an announcement of whatever it is they think you want to buy.

Kids come to the fenced yard of our hospedaje all day long to display their wares. One lady drops in with fresh milk from her cow in glass bottles and fresh bars of white cheese wrapped in clean 1-ply sheets of toilet paper. We’re scared of the milk, but the cheese is yummuy.

Quite often when the fishermen return from their morning catches, they spread a piece of plastic down in the plaza and display all their fish. This provides an excellent lesson in fish anatomy, as some are ceremoniously cut open to display their gooey insides.

I also enjoy watching the crowd that forms—the neighbors and store beepers and chacra workers all gather around in a big circle and begin their fish bargaining.

Arrival

Somewhat dazed after a five hour trip in a leaky peki peki.

"We will call this new land 'home,'" they said.

Our friendly hospedaje, "Anita Isabel."

Carly eats breakfast in our kitchen/storage/closet.

Where we live

We live in a tin-roofed shed that is infested with bats, rats, and cockroaches. The rooms are so small that when you walk in the door to our room, one person must pass around the door, then shove it back before the next person can squeeze through.

There is only space for a twin bed, which Carly and I are sharing, and a teeny tiny table. Our personal stuff is literally stuffed beneath the bed. The room is smaller than a walk-in closet, and costs $0.45 a night.

We also have another room that houses our trunks of children’s programming supplies, medicines for clinic, health program supplies, and our stove, rubbermaid bins of food, (thus-far rat proof), and our dishes and cooking supplies.

To eat our meals we sit up on the trunks which are stacked on the mattressless bed frame, resting our feet on the bed’s edge.

The rats scurry from room to room of our dusty habitation at night, chirping. The bats chirp, too, a higher pitched squeal and a flutter of wings. Carly and I hear them and cringe, then laugh.

Where else could we live, so very close to nature?

The yard of this hospedaje houses eight or nine stray dogs at any given time, not to mention the chickens, ducks, and roosters. Pigs and sheep also come and go at their own free will.

At night we tuck our mosquito netting very tightly around our mattress. This is a precaution not only against the mosquitoes, who seemed to show up in plague force in the dry season, but also to prevent the entry of our resident rats and bats.

I am well adjusted to sleeping all tucked up in the layer of filmy netting, and I know I will miss the security of its transparent walls when I return to the States.