Tales and Titbits of Voluntary Work in the River Villages

Tales and Titbits of Voluntary Work in the River Villages
By Jim Hammond

I floated down the Napo River to Island Iquitos over two months ago with the intention of getting stuck into some voluntary environmental work. And that’s exactly what I did. Two months, one monkey, a Charapa accent and easily one million plantains later I realise that I’ve only had a small taste.
This city in the very heart of the Peruvian Amazon is full of opportunities of all sorts. Indeed this is the Wild West. There are opportunities to make any dream a reality here, there is money to be made, but there is also poverty and hardship for many people. Unlike the Wild West, there are plenty of kind hearted people working to alleviate this poverty, and, happily, there are less shootings here too. There is a huge variety of organisations working in various ways to make life better here. To give a few examples, there are NGOs (ONGs in the local language) who educate street children and give away free books, who supply safe drinking water to remote river communities, who put on festivals celebrating local fruits, who organize marches for school children to voice their concerns about global environmental problems, and there are NGOs setting up managed forests for sustainable extraction of lumber.
The acronym NGO stands for Non-Governmental Organisation, and was coined in the forties by groups who recognized that business, poverty and environmental destruction often go hand in hand with governmental policy. An NGO is a group who works to help improve quality of life in any way, but is not funded by any government source. Generally NGOs are funded by rich individuals offering large sums, or poorer individuals giving small sums. Businesses may sponsor NGOs from time to time, or supply funding privately, but this does bring up questions of impartiality – the NGOs may work to further the interests of their corporate sponsors, making them no better than George Bush’s oil government, or to be fair, any better than most of the worlds governments.
There are many reasons to work for an NGO as a volunteer. There is the aim of improving living conditions for the poor, and of improving conservation efforts in this, the most ecologically diverse region of the planet. There is the aim of righting some of the wrongs that have been done to the Peruvian peoples. There are personal benefits to be gained – the pleasure of meeting a variety of local people and learning about their cultures, an opportunity to learn the local languages and experience life as it is lived by the local people, and all for a lower price tag than paid by the tourist.

The first NGO I worked for here is called APECA (www.apecaperu.com) – Association for the Promotion of Education and Conservation of the Amazon. For a small fee covering transport and food I spent two weeks helping in the work and living out in comfortable surroundings about 100km upriver from Iquitos. Their base is close to a town named Tamishyacu, and living with me was Pablo, the boss, Misaiyel the groundskeeper, seven dogs, one blue macaw and one woolly monkey named Rosa. In the pond lived a number – maybe eight – river turtles of small to medium size, and one Charapa – a giant river turtle of a metre in length, and nearly the same width. I saw the charapa twice during my stay, once I was walking alone and spotted him wallowing and staring up at me, the second time I was walking with Rosa the monkey when she stopped dead still and pulled my clothing to get my attention. She had spotted the charapa and we both stood watching it bask for a few minutes, before it swam away. Charapa is, incidentally, the nick name Peruvians apply to those who live in the jungle.
The work for that time consisted of building water tanks in a number of small villages – on average communities of one hundred people – based along the Amazon river. Every village has a school with a tin roof which the government build in a recent effort to spread the benefits of education. However, by no means does every community have a teacher to work in the school. Undeterred, we made use of the schools by rigging up guttering to the tin roof and collecting the rain water in our newly built tanks. Most of the houses have thatched roofs of palm leaves – very unclean for collecting drinking water. The work also consisted of explaining to people why it is important to drink clean water, and how to keep the tanks and gutters clean. It is not generally known that dirty drinking water from the river leads to parasites and diseases such as colic, and where it is known, it is accepted as a fact of life. The concept of contamination through human and animal effluent or through disposal of toxic wastes such as batteries, motor oil and household bleach is even less known. It is normal to throw all litter in the river, or to bury it. Either way, the dangerous chemicals enter the water system, and into the food chain. For example, the mercury from batteries enters the river water, is absorbed my microorganisms and plants which fish eat, the fish are then eaten by bigger fish which are then eaten by humans. Even low concentrations of mercury can lead to irreparable kidney and brain damage, and limited neurological development of children, both in and out of the womb. The villagers were always friendly and welcoming, pleased that I had come to their communities and keen to show me a little of their lives. Neither did I feel that I as being treated over-well, as if I were a rubber baron or a petrol boss, a dangerous foreigner to be appeased at all costs. Many people initially regarded me with suspicion, but once I introduced myself and we talked a little I was always welcomed as one of their own, and never treated as a dollar sign. Quite the opposite to the experience of the Plaza de Armas!

After a few weeks of this construction work, I moved on to another NGO, Rainforest Conservation Fund (RCF), specialising in environmental education for children of the river communities. RCF also have a reforestation project using the mighty Aguaje palm, and are integral to the running and maintenance of the Communal Tamshiyacu Tauhayo Reserve. My main work here was planning an educative trip to five of the communities where RCF work, entitled “The Importance of the Forest”. We settled on the idea of a puppet show for the children, and got to work making puppets of sloths and monkeys, parrots and anteaters, to name a few. The aim of this project was to explain to the kids that the jungle is a finite resource and essential to their way of life. Although this might seem obvious, these children have never had need to question the jungle, and have mostly no concept of any other type of landscape or way of life, having never seen television, read an atlas or even been to Iquitos. We travelled through the five communities performing the play for the children in the mornings and for the adults in the evenings. The children were rapt by the show and couldn’t wait to have a go at colouring in smaller pictures of the animals we had used. This was particularly true in the village of San Pedro where there has been no teacher for six months and the children have had no sort of education. People do not have colouring pencils in their homes, so the children never get an opportunity to draw. The children’s poor faces fell when I told them how Britain had once been a forested land full of wild pigs, fish, eagles and wolves and that now it is a land of concrete where we have to buy all our material needs from other countries. What I did not tell them was that my country had used up all its resources to build vast armies that conquered one third of the world, and that we still use the remains of that empire to ensure that we can buy all the goods we need at an unfair price, and that we also ensure those who work to produce our food, metals and clothing will stay poor and desperate enough sell at dangerously low prices.
I was surprised to discover that most of the adults knew about global warming and that the forests soak up carbon dioxide and other pollutants – and that these pollutants are produced by the excessive consumption of other societies. The adults knew that animals had receded further and further from the villages as the settlements have grown, and that hardwood trees are scarcer than before. They knew that for the balance of animals and plants to be preserved, the land must be managed. What they lacked was the "know-how" to put this into practice. They did not know how to manage the land, how to establish what sustainable levels of resource extraction could be, and they did not know how to practice their farming techniques more sustainably. What was missing here was not the desire to help the environment, but the education to achieve that aim. The Communal Tamshiyacu Tahauyo Reserve is an excellent example of what can be achieved. Set up 17 years ago by RCF and the communities of Chino, Buena Vista, Diamante, 28 de Julio and San Pedro, the reserve is relatively small, but at 322,000 hectares, it is certainly not to be scoffed at. The reserve is home to anteaters and tapirs, various felines, 13 species of primate and covers some of the ground in which the world’s only Red Faced Uarakis live, and there is even an international primate research centre in the region. The communities have produced for themselves a list of rules and regulations regarding the reserve – no products may be sold that have come from the reserve, and a strictly limited number of animals may be hunted monthly from the reserve. Each community has a hut next to the river where an older member of the community is always watching, watching to check that no traffic of illegal poachers or loggers comes through. The communities are very proud of what they have achieved, but all this is in danger as petrol company prospectors are due to arrive soon.

Yes, as crazy as it sounds, the entire Peruvian Amazon has recently been divided into sectors and sold off to petrol companies from around the world. Or to be more precise, a good two thirds of the entire country has been divided up and either sold or is under negotiation for sale to petrol companies (For more information about this, see amazonwatch.org and the Oil Concessions Zone map). To make matters worse, the recent Peruvian-North American free trade agreement conceded that North American companies trading in Peru did not have to recognise Peruvian Law – only international law, making national park boundaries and indigenous territories meaningless. Little of the profit made from these sales and the following extraction of petroleum will go to improving the living conditions of the average Peruvian – 49% nationally of whom live below the poverty line, although the percentage in Loreto is much higher. The river villages are recognised as one of the poorest regions of the world, financially speaking that is. But they are not poor in resources or in food, or in happiness or health. But if their environment should be destroyed or damaged, as invariably happens when petrol companies move in (for example, the case of the Achuar people in the Rio Corrientes area), that poverty is very quick to manifest.

My work over the last two moths has taught me that alleviation of poverty, education and environmental destruction are completely interlinked. In a country with a desperate population and notoriously corrupt politicians, it is easy for foreign traders to reap vast profits and leave a trail of destruction in their wake. The first step towards achieving these goals is to educate people and provide them with ways of working which do not rely on destructive resource extraction to feed the global capitalist machine. When the people understand what is going on about them, they are free to act as they choose. And, from my experience they are keen to protect their nature, the source of all their food, all their building materials, all their artisan goods, all their goods for sale, of their medicines, and of much of their pleasure.

It is not only for the locals that this area is important -the Amazon is both one of the most dangerous place on the planet and one which offers the most hope. If the lungs of the world are suffocated - if we destroy too many of the trees - the global climate will spiral completely out of control and any hope we still have of avoiding global catastrophes of melting icecaps, rising sea levels, hurricanes, flooding and scorching barren summers, not to mention a death toll in the billions over the next century will be lost. Conversely, if we can conserve the Amazon, and even rejuvenate the infertile earth of the deforested areas, we can buy ourselves time to effect the changes we need to make all over the world to avoid apocalypse. And moving to the individual level, the Amazon may well hold the key to healing diseases previously thoughts incurable. Cancer and AIDS may become things of the past, diseases to be treated like any other. And the indigenous knowledge of the jungle pharmacy may prove invaluable here, as it has in many other cases, such as in the treatment of malaria or even in the development of the well known drug Aspirin. If we devalue the cultures and knowledge of indigenous and mestizo Amazonian communities to the dollar sign, then who will teach us about these healing plants? And who will guard the jungle from destruction? We, from the richest and most powerful countries in the world could learn a lot from those who live with less material possessions and in a greater harmony with nature. If we want to avoid the global disasters which are looming in the not-too-far future, we have to learn from them.

If you would like to work as volunteer for an NGO, I can offer some recommendations. Some organisations require a small fee (at the very most $300 per month), and offer housing and meals, and sometimes transport, other organisations require no fee, but you must find your own lodgings and food. Some groups work in Iquitos itself, and some in the river villages. For work with children, look for
•    “La Restinga” – Raymondi 254
•    “La Conoa Sin Fronteras” – Raymondi 460
•    “Caritas” – Malecon 260

Or for environmental work check out
•    WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society)
•    ProNaturaleza – Bermudez 791
•    IIAP - Av. José A. Quiñones km 2.5
•    ACCER
•    APECA – 628 Sargento Lores
•    RCF – La Pascana, Pevas.
•    Red Ambiental – Raymondi 363 – for information.

Or if you go to the tourist office on Raymondi they will give you a list of all most of the NGOs who operate here. I have learned so much from my stay and my work here, not too mention met some wonderful people. I hope that by reading this you want to spend a little time doing something similar. To finish, let me tell you about a guy I met who summed up why it is important to do this kind of thing. He was called Eric, and lives about 5 hours away from Iquitos, a journey which costs 35 soles. Young and fit, and a very good footballer, it had always been his dream to play for a club. His football boots are his prize possession, and he is the only person in his village to own a pair of shin pads. He told me that there is no way he can move to Iquitos, let alone another city because his family needs him on the farm, and anyway, they couldn’t afford the journey, let alone rent and food bills for him. So now he spends his free time, when not paying football, teaching about family planning and sexual health, hoping that someone in the next generation will be slightly better off, and they will be able to leave and follow their dream. How guilty I felt at having realised my dream to come all the way from England to the Amazon so easily!