The Selva

(Those who wish to view my photos of the jungle and are not on facebook should go to this link. Not all are actually my photos--my camera ran out of space pretty quick so I included some of Stephanie's photos also.)

http://duke.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2061893&l=bf9dd&id=1313457

My apologies to all that it has been two weeks since I have visited my beloved blog. These have been perhaps two of the busiest, craziest, weirdest weeks in my life. I have visited the Amazon, bathed in a river, eaten more rice in one sitting than perhaps in an entire month of life back in home, given myself semi-serious burns to the face with a hot pepper, gotten food poisoning, gotten over it, and translated for two doctors seeing 84 children in one day. This is why I haven’t blogged.

As this is far too much for my already-long blogs, I’m going to try to take it in bite-sized chunks. First bite: the Selva.

First some background: Stephanie and I are here as Duke Divinity students for our summer internship. The school has a relationship with a Peruvian Methodist pastor named César Llanco, so they send students down to help him. César is brilliant (which the District knows), and therefore highly overworked: he’s the chaplain of the very large Methodist high school, the head of the ecumenical seminary, and the pastor of a local church. He also coordinates most of the work groups that come in from the U.S.

Stephanie and I teach classes at San Pablo (the ecumenical seminary that César heads) and also at Probitem (the local Methodist seminary). Both seminaries charge very low tuition, and hold their classes at night since most people have to work during the day. In an attempt to offer a seminary education to rural churches, both seminaries also have extensions into various towns in the jungle. Teachers travel from Huancayo and give a week-long or weekend-long workshop to the extension churches in the jungle.

This past weekend, Stephanie and I went to a town called Pucharini as part of the extension program of Probitem (the Methodist seminary). The plan was to give two courses over the weekend: I taught intro to the Old Testament and Steph taught pastoral leadership. Most of the students in these classes have little to no education. They can read, but many have not finished high school. Thus we were encouraged to keep the level very simple, and not to lecture for too long at a time. (Which is, by the way, the only reason in the world I’m qualified to teach an introduction to the Old Testament. Keepin’ it simple.)

So here begins the real story. Friday morning, Stephanie and I packed ourselves into a fairly large bus and headed out on the five hour bus ride to La Merced, a main town in the Upper Amazon. If you ever find yourself on a busride in Peru, try not to go during the night. In the first place, I’m never really sure that those drivers (who are already taking the turns several hairs faster than I would) can actually see the road. But in the second place, you miss possibly the most incredibly view in the world. The trip from Huancayo to La Merced begins in the sierra, passing hundreds of dry, rocky mountain towns spotted with cacti and eucalyptus. The people raise cows and potatoes, and their faces are damaged from living far too close to the sun, making a 30-year-old woman sometimes look 50.

As the road goes lower, the mountains start to be covered in vegetation. We started passing entire mountains that were terraced, crop fields cut into the sides of incredibly steep earth. Many times, there would be a house built into the side of a mountain, alongside the terracing. We could see people going up and down the mountains to work in their fields, people who apparently lived their entire lives on a sharp incline.

We were surprised that the mountains never actually stopped, they just started to be covered more and more by thick vegetation. As you move into the jungle, the temperature changes and the mountains green, but the landscape doesn’t flatten in the slightest.

We arrived at LaMerced, ate lunch, and wrote another hour to Pucharini. Because the area is so mountainous, the road follows the river. Towns, then, spring up alongside the road and spread up the mountainside. Pucharini is one of these towns, with about a mile of houses between the river and road.

As soon as we stepped out of the car in Pucharini, I started having flashbacks of the 3 months I spent in rural Nicaragua. Same houses, same food, same weather, same beautiful scenery, same endless stream of curious children. I remembered suddenly what it’s like to not have any sort of distractions (or even communication with the outside world!) all day long. Everything moves a little bit slower. We would spend the hot afternoons just sitting in the shade and watching the river because there was really nothing else we needed to be doing at that time. It’s an entirely different—and not altogether unenviable—style of life.


Stephanie and I stayed with a family of 5 in Pucharini—Moises and Ruth, and their children Sadith, Dan, and Brion—who let us have one of the 2 bedrooms of their thatched house. Like all houses in this area, one side of the house was built open to the river, to get the breezes during the day. The rest of the house was simple wood with a dirt floor and a few windows. It’s actually a very practical design and it works wonderfully to keep cool during the day.

We taught all night Friday and most of the day Saturday. The classes actually went quite well, attended by a few students and a horde of local children. We discovered quickly that lectures could not hold attention very long, and we soon learned to intersperse them with group work and storytelling. Stephanie and I both learned a method of storytelling at Duke called Godly Play, which proved extraordinarily useful with the group.



I remember when I was a little girl that I would sometimes watch Disney jungle movies and then pretend for the next week that my bathtub was an Amazon river and my bed was a hammock in a treehouse somewhere. As we were bathing in the river Saturday morning (and by bathe, I mean rinse off face, legs, hands, and hair), I was a bit shocked to realize how close I’d gotten. This place really was a paradise of sorts. Children make rafts from palms and spend the afternoon playing in the river, people pick their breakfast off the tree every morning, and children pick flowers to put in their hair Sunday morning. Despite the fact that I was absolutely filthy—the natives know how to keep clean in rivers, but Stephanie and I were a constant mess of sunscreen, repellant, sweat, bugbites, and body odor—it was a little exciting.

Of course, I don’t mean to over-romanticize things. Stephanie and I were bitten by every kind of insect in the book, and slept on beds that were probably alternately used as torture devices. On a more serious level, the community is struggling with poverty, lack of education, sanitation issues, domestic violence, and devastating environmental change. It’s just interesting to me that those things are paired with so idyllic a location.

Saturday evening we lost a game of volleyball to some Peruvian girls. Apparently a requirement of being Peruvian is being freaking incredible at sports. We were on a team of four, and at first our teammates were excited about our height, thinking it would surely make us win. Little did they know…

Sunday morning we rode a little cart attached to a motorcycle up the side of the mountain to the church. The church is a simple concrete building, perched to overlook the mountains sloping down into the river. The kids put flowers in our hair, gave us fruit off the trees, and played Stephanie’s camera until the service started. Because the church is almost half children, we spent probably the first 45 minutes of the service singing songs that involve lots of clapping, jumping, and sometimes turning around.

As we were waiting for a car to come take us to the bus station, Brion—the youngest of Moises’ children—set to work trying to amuse us by throwing a chick in the air and watching it flap its wings as it fell to the ground. Sadith brought more flowers for our hair, and asked if we would ever come back. We said we would like to, but in all likelihood—probably not. As we drove away, I found myself wishing we were wrong. Maybe someday…