My mom gave me the idea of doing vignettes about what I have been doing in my placement, since there is honestly too much going on to write down, or even think... So here goes:
The Marvels of the Amazon
Although I have a lot of bug bites, I have a rash in the
crook of my left knee that is red, itchy, and bumpy (a lot like hives). I
showed this to my host mom, Yolanda, and she immediately diagnosed it as from a
butterfly. A butterfly... A pretty butterfly has caused this incredibly itchy
rash on my leg. Only in the Amazon... She explained that the powder that is on
the wings causes the rash, although I have no idea how this could have
happened. It is in a rather awkward spot. I told her I had medicine for it, but
she went outside to her garden anyways.
She came back with a few large, deep green leaves which she dipped into
some hot water. She worked one into a paste on her hand and then rubbed it onto
my rash. She explained that the plant has penicillin in it and they use it for
stomach pains, infections, and stomach ailments. She told me that they don’t
need medicines from the pharmacy because they have all the medication they need
in the plants around them. It definitely worked, and I didn’t been my anti-itch
cream. This I thought was extremely interesting. The Amazon produces weird
insects that cause crazy reactions, but it also produces the cures to these
reactions. It shows the power of indigenous knowledge about plants and their
uses, and also shows that nature thinks of everything. Why need to buy your
medication when you can just get it from a plant outside your back door? This
is obviously something that Western culture has lost is its quest for
modernity...
A Break From Work
Hacking through the Amazon with a machete. This is what
Kinti and I did to reach the underground spring that pumps up the water that we
use for coffee production. Well, he did the hacking and I did the slipping and
sinking into mud up to my shins.
My coordinator’s son, Kinti, asked me after a few hours of
boring work in the sun if I wanted to see where the water comes from. I, of
course, said yes – anything to get out of the hot son and monotonous work to
have a bit of adventure. This water flows from a black plastic tube into the three
big blue barrels that we have set out to catch water for our use with washing
the coffee cherries and beans. It is always flowing, except after a large
amount rain the night before makes it stop, the reason why, I now know. He led
me to a path into the jungle and we flowed the tube that was lying beside us,
sometimes spewing a faint mist of water from a hole somewhere in the plastic.
This path led us gradually, and sometimes steeply, up a hill. I had to use the
trees for support with all of the mud, wondering if the bark was going to give
me a rash... but I risked it as falling into the mud was something I didn’t
want to do. At two points, my foot got stuck almost up to the top of my rubber
boot in mud, which I had to tug out by pulling with all my might on a tree, all
the while with Kinti laughing at me. There was another point where there was
such a steep decline that opened up into a cavern below and I was afraid I was
going to fall in if I slipped. Kinti told me that a few days ago when he was
running to fix a hose, he had almost fallen into a cavern. When we reached this
point, it was obviously why. I had to gingerly step down the steep, muddy
incline and hold onto things in order to stop me falling into a cavern 20 feet
below... About 20 minutes later, we reached the spring. There was water gushing
out of a hole somewhere in the rock which flowed into a cement catchment area.
It was really neat, and he said because there was so much sand produced by the
spring, there was a crab living there. He tried to coax it out, but I wouldn’t
come out either if someone was jamming a machete into my hole... He told me
that the sand that is produced here gets churned up something fierce when it
rains (understandable) and it clogs the pipes. Luckily, on the way back, I
didn’t get stuck again, although I did get my cream coloured work pants rather
caked in mud, much to Kinti’s enjoyment. He emerged with barely a speck of mud
above his rubber boots. How he managed that is beyond me... All in all, it was
a fun end to a boring day working in coffee processing.
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