Amazonian adventure

It all started with motorized dugout canoes and a Huaorani leader who offered to take us to Tepapare, her community in the Ecuadorian Amazon. When we asked how long the trip would take, we would get no firm answer. Time was measured in bends of the river, not in hours. Like a prisoner being walked down death row, as perhaps some of us felt, we were in someone else´s world, following their rules and not knowing exactly what lay ahead.

As teachers of a program for American students, we had planned ahead, but these plans, like our well-rehearsed emergency strategy, soon fell apart. When we arrived after many hours in the thatch-roofed community of Tepapare we found that the poisonous snake kit had already been used. Also, they told us nonchalantly, the radio didn´t work so we wouldn´t be able to communicate with other villages, or the airbase, in order to evacuate someone who would probably get a snakebite.

The Huaorani wanted to teach our students about their way of life. The girls learned how to harvest yucca, with the eventual plan of making saliva-fermented chicha, a barely alcoholic beverage. The boys were to master the male tasks of felling trees to clear the land for the next yucca crop, along with the sexier arts of spear throwing and blowing poison darts. However, no one realized how hot and humid it would be, and how many bugs, including malarial mosquitos, would be flying around the ax-slinging boys. Disaster seemed imminent as trees fell in unpredictable directions, nearly crushing our young students. One by one girls and boys faded away, complaining of heat exhaustion or insect-induced rashes.

The rules kept changing, and the incongruous remained the only constant. We had been told by our supervisor not to let the students climb anything. However, when someone offers to teach you how to climb a tree that has no branches, it seems like a skill worth acquiring. Only as students were wrapping vines around their bare feet did we remember the suddenly obsolete cardinal rule that students must wear shoes at all times.

On our last night I found myself shielding my female students from Huaorani men dressed solely in loin cloths made from tree barks, chanting loudly and lustily thrusting their pelvises towards us each time the circle passed by. Even after days of acclimating to new experiences, we were still unprepared for this Huaorani version of a Chippendale dance. Afterwards it was our turn to share a traditional song and dance from our culture. But what was our tribal ritual? The only dance we all knew was the hokey pokey. Laughing and feeling utterly embarrassed in the middle of the Amazon, miles from electricity, pavement, and any other populated community, we shook and gyrated our bodies according to our foreign customs. The night ended with a hearty laughs and applause on all sides, but we were all certainly ready to say goodbye to Tepapare.