We haven't updated the journal in a while simply because nothing has
happened lately. We are still in the noisy, crowded and dirty city of
Pucallpa. It is literally at the end of the road - for now. From
here it's all river travel, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean if you are so
inclined. Someday soon they will build a road to the Brazilian border to
connect with theirs that runs through the Amazon basin. It's too bad
because that's just one more nail in the Amazon's coffin.
Our job with Instituto del Bien Comun is less than we had hoped. The
boss doesn't seem to care that we are there, there is no work space for us and the project is pretty much a busy work thing. Once we downloaded
their photos (13,000) onto our computer we worked pretty much from our hotel
room. It's spacious and air-conditioned. We finished our work
today, or rather Connie did. Only
one person at a time can use the computer – thank goodness we brought our
laptop because they don't have one and they have no photo software – so my job
has been running errands. The photos we have been working with are
depressing, too. Not the quality, although they basically suck, but the
degradation of the forest they show. One estimate we read predicts that
only 15% of the Amazon rain forest will survive until 2040! The culprits
are illegal logging and "legal" logging concessions, unchecked
petroleum exploration and the attendant spills, mining concessions and over
fishing. The indigenous people who live in the Amazon aren't helping.
They use the river as their own personal garbage dump, something we have
seen across Peru, even in prosperous towns and cities. It's like the US
before the Litter-Bug campaigns when we were kids - "Give a hoot, don't
pollute". The hard thing about volunteering isn't so much the work,
it's keeping up your spirits. Sometimes it seems so futile. You do
what you can but wonder if you are accomplishing anything.
We have met some nice people at IBC and our Nature Conservancy contact
is wonderful. The only real
excitement we had was visiting the Shipibo village of Patria Nueva last weekend
and that was with a totally different organization, Pronaturaleza, not IBC. My mosquito bites have almost stopped
itching!
So we gave our notice today (the pay wasn't that good, anyhow!) and bought one-way plane tickets to Iquitos,
deeper into the Amazon. Iquitos is the largest city in the world
(400,000+) not accessible by road, the Juneau of South America. We
considered the 3 to 5 day boat trip up the Ucayali, factored in the bad food,
heat and mosquitoes and decided $95 was a fair price to pay for the flight.
