I wanted to write some posts on my trip to the jungle to live with Rosa and her family. I have struggled to know what angle to bring to it. I am concerned in presenting the reality of life for them because I know that my western eyes bring so much presumption about their life.
This week has been eye-opening for me in many ways. We have spent time with the Shipibos often. We have made countless trips to the jungle city of Pucallpa; we have travelled to the inner jungle and visited and stayed in several communities. We have 6 students from the jungle currently in our school and we had Rosa living with us for three years. We have had much exposure to their culture (their beliefs, their language, their handicrafts, their views on the roles of men and women, their traditional ways of hunting, their adaption to city life and how colonialisation has affected and transformed their ways of life both positively and negatively,) but we still have so much to learn.
When foreigners come to Peru to visit or to live, for the first few years at least, their stomachs are delicate. For that reason and also because of group size, whenever we have visited the jungle we have stayed in a nice, simple hotel. It has air-conditioning and a swimming pool and more importantly it is secure with all the phones and laptops and cameras we bring. When we stayed in the inner jungle community of Calleria and took the children two years ago, we took our own water and food (including 2 live chickens!) and cooked for ourselves to avoid getting sick.
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| Rosa and lunch back in Jan 2012 |
I can’t believe we have lived in Peru for 7 years and this is the first time I have stayed with a Shipibo family. (I know that that is also because I have small children and this is also the first time in 7 years I have been able to leave them for a week. Mark and I did stay in an inner jungle Spanish community back in 2005 before we had kids.) It is amazing how just living with them for a week has helped me understand where they come from and to begin to see things properly through their eyes. I am so grateful for this opportunity to be here and observe how normal life looks for them. Just as when people come for mission trips to Peru they often see a sped-up version of our lives and not a normal day-to-day living, it is fascinating for me to see how they live when we’re not in town with a mission team doing a conference or having meetings all day.
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| Rosa - due to give birth any day - that's why I'm here! |
THE FAMILY HOUSE
Rosa’s family’s house is a nicely built wooden house with concrete floors. They have a table and chairs, a sofa, a couple of beds, a stove and a refrigerator. On all appearances they look to be doing fairly well. But it is their son who has built up the house and Rosa's family live pretty much hand to mouth. When I arrived they smiled and laughed about how we would all be having an early night because they hadn’t been able to pay the electricity bill and so we would be going to bed with the sun at 6pm!
Rosa’s parents told me they were ashamed to have me in their house because they were afraid it wasn’t good enough for me. They told me they were worried I would get sick on their food, and they were embarrassed that they have no bedroom to receive me in. (I knew this beforehand so I brought a tent and blow-up mattress which works perfectly against the mosquitos which is parked in the corner of their living room.) They felt bad that they have no bathroom and that we squeeze through a hole in the neighbors fence to use their toilet. The toilet is an actual toilet with a wooden fence you can see through around it, some of the holes covered with sacks, and you fill up a bucket with water and throw it down the toilet to make it flush.
I felt bad that they felt bad.
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| My bedroom! |
As westerners we can be so tempted to feel sorry for people who live in circumstances we are not used to. I think part of this is that at first contact we can be shocked by how different people live without the things we are used to. We can feel the need to solve the problems we perceive and fix them. One of the things I noticed soon on arrival was that they had only enough (non-matching) plates and mugs for the family. A couple of the mugs had lost their handles. My immediate reaction was to want to go out and buy them a simple set of crockery that wasn’t broken and to ‘fix’ the solution. But then I realized that they might not bothered by eating out of mugs with broken handles - as long as they had a mug. I wondered if buying them some crockery would also be taken as an insult that the things they had weren’t satisfactory for me personally. In the end, Rosa ended up breaking a plate and so the situation was becoming increasingly desperate! I spoke to Rosa about it and she seemed to think her mother would be pleased so I decided I would buy them a small crockery set as a thank you for having me to stay.
HANDICRAFTS:
I decided I want to get involved what they were doing when I first arrived to and it seems that much of the day for the women (and in this household also for Rosa’s Dad because there is no other work available) is spent doing handicrafts. I know the basics of sewing but I was intrigued by all the different stitches they use in their handicrafts so I asked if I could do one of the basic ones to learn. They handed me a black cloth circle and Rosa showed me what she called the easiest stitch. Looking carefully at some of their designs I could work out a couple of the other stitches, but Rosa was always able to show me an easier way of doing it, and give me hints on how to knot the thread (they use a finger rolling technique) and get rid of the little knots that turn up as you are sewing (they know just where and how to pull the thread to get the knots out). As a westerner growing up going to school with classrooms with 20+ kids, I have been taught to be independent and to not ask for help unless it is really necessary. I soon learned that my asking Rosa to show me her way of doing it, after I had a basic idea of how the stitch should look, always gave me hints and tips that I wouldn’t have worked out on my own and saved me having to undo my stitching! It highlights for me once again the importance of relationship and humility in learning and the importance of interdependence over independence.
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| My Shipibo handicraft |
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| This is a pot Rosa's 75-year-old grandmother made and sells for s./3 (80p / $1.20) in the town centre. She asked me to buy this pot off her so she would have enough money to get the bus into town to sell her pots. The paints are made of crushed up stones. |
My circle took about 6-7 hours to do. They can finish two, sometimes three a day and they receive just s./3 (80p, $1.20) each. That explains why they eat so simply and hadn’t paid the s./45 (10GBP /$15) a month electricity bill! Rosa’s parents didn’t seem upset or angry that they had no electricity, they just got on with life without it. They were grateful that they had food to eat.
FOOD:
This is also the first time I have eaten Shipibo day-to-day food. Whenever we have eaten with them before we have always asked them to cook fried food for us to avoid bad stomachs. I was really challenged by a verse I have been talking to my kids about in preparation for our travels in August which says ‘eat whatever is put in front of you.’ (Luke 10:7) I have been trying to put my faith in action and believe that if God says we should eat what is given to us, I need to believe that He will protect my body.
The food that Rosa’s family eat is simple and based around carbs. Breakfast is a grain of some sort (flour, wheat germ or rice) boiled until soft in water. Sometimes there is some bread. It is eaten from a mug with a spoon like a soup.
Lunch is meat or chicken if available with large quantities of rice or spagetti and often fried banana.
Snacks, if eaten at all are fruit from the trees or whatever someone has going. I bought a watermelon from the supermarket so we have been enjoying that. Sometimes coconuts are taken from the trees or other jungle fruits when in season. Currently there are no fruits in season in their garden.
Evening time left overs from lunch are eaten or fried or boiled plantain bananas. Last night Rosa’s mother prepared a sweet porridge-consistency dish from mashed boiled up plantain bananas.
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| Boiled sweet plantains |
I have to say I wasn’t sure how the food was going to be so I did bring some cereal bars and biscuits with me and I am drinking bottled rather than the boiled water they drink, but I really felt that part of understanding life for them was just receiving the food that they were eating.
SECURITY:
Another thing that has surprised me, in so much as I never really recognized it before, is the lack of security in the house. This is it:
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| Roca - he sometimes barks when someone comes to the door |
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| Front gate with no lock |
Their house has a door, but on one side there are no windows and a door which just swings open so the house is totally open to anyone who wants to to walk in. The wooden gate above is ‘secured’ with a piece of wood held across it at night but during the day anyone can walk in and anyone who desired to get in at night could easily too.
The other evening the family left me in the house whilst they went across the road. Meanwhile a man knocked on the door. I knew it was important to answer the door else they might think no one was in, so I went but I didn’t recognize the man and didn’t want to open the door. Fortunately Rosa’s dad showed up at that point. He asked the man who he was looking for and he wouldn’t answer and quickly got into his moto and drove off. Rosa’s dad reckons he was checking to see if there was anyone in the house to come and rob it.
Rosa’s parents laughed as they told me stories of people who have come into their house before and stolen things. Once, Rosa’s Dad told me, they brought 15 branches of bananas home (we are talking each branch needing to be carried by 1 strong man separately) and left them just inside the gate. When they woke up in the morning, all the bananas had gone! Another time they came home and someone had stolen their gas bottle. At other time, when the house was left unoccupied for a while, they came back and ‘everything’ had gone. Another time, he told me, an opportunist thief had stuffed a saucepan full of clothes off the clothes line and ran off. They were caught in the street and the neighbors found not only items from their house but also from other houses in the street too! Rosa’s dad was telling me that if people are caught then often common law is applied - the thief is tied to a post and stoned and beaten up until someone takes pity and calls the police and they taken away.
Now in some ways, they don’t really have many ‘valuables’ in their house - the fridge and oven are probably the most valuable items, so investing in high security is not necessarily of highest importance for them. Rosa’s Dad did tell me he would like to replace the wooden fence with a concrete one though and I think if other foreigners are going to stay with them in the future with valuables then it would be a worthwhile investment. Thankfully they only told me stories of opportunist rather than violent crime, but seeing as I still have a few days left sleeping in their house I didn’t ask about that! Meanwhile, I am taking my laptop, phone and camera with me wherever I go and just praying that God will protect me! Not sure if leaving them behind or taking them with me is more risky…?!
DAILY LIFE:
Here are some other pictures of life around the house:
The neighbors children are in and out constantly. They come and sit up close to me and stare at the computer screen whilst I write or my phone when I read. Although I find it rather distracting having someone reading over my shoulder, as you can imagine, I actually love that their culture automatically brings children into everything the adults are doing. They are included and participate wherever they can. The children help to wash a needed pan or are sent on errands. They communicate messages between the neighbors and help out. They come and play / torment with the ‘cat’ that has been brought to hunt the rats. I think some of the rats are a bit bigger than this little kitten!
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| We have called her Cleopatra. She tries to meow for food but it is pretty pathetic. |
There is a hose for running water and everyone fills up the buckets and then uses them for washing plates and clothes and showering. It’s simple but it works. It is easy to see why people can get sick though - large buckets of water are left out in the sun without lids on where it is easy for mosquitos to breed (I have seen health campaigns in Lima telling people to cover water tanks to stop disease). Buckets that are still half full are filled up again continually, so there is often left over water in the buckets time and time again. I wonder if it is lack of education, habit or lack of lids that means this is the norm for both Rosa’s family and the neighbors and I presume many other families.
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| The family built a 'shower' before I came - it is a wooden raised platform with a plastic sheet around it. You take your buckets of water in with you and let the water fall through the planks of wood. Provides some privacy - I am thankful! I really fine with bucket showers as long as it is hot - I hate cold water if it is cold! |
So, my time in the jungle has been very different from our usual action-packed mission trips but I am really grateful for this time to see what 'normal' life looks like for Rosa and the Shipibo families we work with. I am grateful to be able to spend hours writing (I am working on a book as well as other bits of writing I haven't had time to do in Lima.) Both Rosa and I are struggling a bit being patient waiting for her to give birth, but I am making the most of the space I have here to really have some time to retreat, think, rest and write - something I haven't had the luxury of doing for such an extended time since Daniel was born nearly 8 years ago!
