Tres dias en Arajuno y Shikulin

I left on a Sunday night to arrive in Arajuno, so that in the morning we would be able to head straight out to the community we would be visiting and half enough time as it would take the whole day. On Sunday night we stayed in the second floor of the nurses house, which was in the process of being converted into a hostel, I think mainly for student travelers. Arajuno also had an airstrip, which used to be the only means of entering and exiting, except for by foot. They had constructed a stone-paved and now vehicles could

The next morning we woke up, gathered the supplies we needed, and a truck took us to Rio Arajuno, which we would need to cross in order to go to the community. Our purpose there would be do vaccinate all dogs for rabies. I paired up with Amanda and we were led into the jungle by Antonio and Paulina. The community we were visiting was a Kichwa community named Shikulin.

Trying to cross the river wasn't difficult; however, by the end I had managed to fill my boots with water and soak my socks. By the end of the hike my feet were completely raw and I my skin was split in a bunch of places. The hike was a bit hilly, but nowhere near as difficult as my hike into th Shuar community, Uwijint. One time we had to cross a log (makeshift bridge) that was about 30 feet long and hanging over a small river and mainly stones. Upon arrival to the community we took a break as we waited for the families closer to the community center to bring there dogs for vaccination. I took a look around at the school, which housed 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. They taught the children Kichwa, Spanish, and I think English and German, but how much I was not sure. In school, the kids also learned how to do daily survival activities, such as hunt, fish, and cultivate plants.

While Paulina was doing the vaccines, I took time to play soccer with the boys and we ended up playing two matches in boots in thick mud. We then hiked down to the river, where Antonio crossed by himself to vaccinate the dogs of a family that lived on the other side.

I took time to splash around in the river. When he returned we headed back towards Arajuno, passing by three more houses where I was able to vaccinate some of the dogs. At one of the houses the owners weren't home and the dogs were scared. We tried to lure them out with food and they would come but when we tried to grab them, they attacked. On one such occasion, the dog bit through the glove I was wearing and into my hand. Needless to say I was a little scared of possible rabies and so I have been getting the vaccine at Hospital Voz Andes, where I have done a few rotations.

Anyways after hitting up the remainder of the homes, we headed back and rested for the remainder of the evening. All-in-all we spent about 7 hours out hiking and vaccinating dogs.

The next day in Arajuno was spent in the Subcentro de Salud. It had been pouring rain that morning and the electricity was out as well. Not more than a minute after our arrival, an emergency patient was rushed in. He had been working that morning, cutting logs or poles with a chainsaw, which slipped out of his hand and sawed into the knuckles and his left hand. One of the knuckles had chipped and everything was exposed. We used headlights and flashlights to improve the seeing conditions for the doctor. I helped clean the wound and held the hand as the doctor quickly closed up the two major openings so that the kid could be rushed to Hospital Puyo, about an-hour-and-a-half away. The kid was freezing because he was soaked and didn't have any clothes to change into so I gave him my t-shirt. Shortly after they rushed him off. I was told that he was going to a Hospital for X-rays and tests and where they had more resources to better operate on his hand, but where there was only a general surgeon. The truth of the matter is he probably would never have full function of his hand again.


I walked around and took some picture of the clinic. There was an emergency room (very dirty), a sala de partos (birthing room?), where there was both a seated bed and a vertical rope for those who wished to be standing when giving birth (a very common practice in indigenous communities), and finally the dentist's office.

The remainder of the day was spent doing patient consults. The doctor at the Subcentro allowed us to play an active role in the checkups and diagnosis of the patients. I listened to lungs, looked at throats and ears, and when he asked told him the drug regimen required for the specific patient (namely how much the patient needed, based on a book he had on his desk). After examining each patient, he would ask what we thought it was and then tell us whether he agreed or not. The diagnoses seemed quite superficial and at times as if the doctor was just going of past history or the symptoms the patient emphasized. This is pretty common at Subcentros as they do not have any diganostic tools and can only prescribe basic medication. We left that afternoon for Puyo. When I arrived in Puyo, my housemate, Yoland, told me that there was a rotation scheduled to go back to Arajuno and educate the community on how to prevent malaria. So we signed up and the next morning headed back out to Arajuno--this time in the back of a truck. The ride was beautiful; however, by the end my butt was sore and my back bruised from bumping on the truck so much. Futhermore, the pesticide container was leaking liquid into the bed of the truck the whole ride!



The first purpose of the trip was to educate the community members at a meeting that had been setup in one of the public buildings. We showed up over an hour late and so everyone was already at lunch! So instead we headed out on a walk with Darwin, one of the field researches for the Malaria Center and looked for larva and pulpa and breeding grounds for mosquitoes.


In that very toilet, we found a mosquito larvae that was, I kid you not about an inch long. Apparently it will eat other mosquito larva. There are also specific bugs that each mosquito larva, a good natural approach to keep malaria mosquito numbers down. After about a two hour walk where we saw some neat things, snail eggs and snails, but not many mosuito larvae, we returned to the meeting room just in time to catch a fumagation. They didn't cover anything or move anything, just asked the family to get out and walked in a sprayed.


We decided to take a bus back because the truck was too much and it ended up breaking down because of flat, which delayed the return by about 30 minutes. And that was all for Arajuno!

Weekend in Tena

So the whole group of CFHI kids in Puyo went to Tena, about an hour-and-a-half away from Puyo for the weekend. We stayed in a small resort owned by a 25 year old Dutch guy named Martin. Our main purpose there was to go rafting. We spent a whole day rafting on a couple rivers. Since there were so many of us, we were split up into groups. My guide was a 27 year old dude from Quebec who left home about two years ago to see Australia and Asia. His plan was only to stay away for a few months, but ended up hearing about place after place and decided to keep his trip going. In order to afford his travel he worked in camps, led hikes, rock climbing, rafting trips, anything he could. In Ecuador, he found this job as a rafting guide. His name is Gyllam but he went by Guillermo so that people could pronounce it. Anyway he was a pretty sweet guide and we did tons of neat things along with river throughout the day. I didn't bring my camera and therefore wasn't able to take pictures, but a couple of the girls brought waterproof cameras, so hopefully I get my hands on those pictures somehow. At the end of the rafting trip, which with lunch and all was about 7 hours, there was a bridge that crossed over the river I'd say anywhere between 40-60 feet above. Some other people had already jumped off the bottom tier. I climbed up to the top tier of the bridge, following my friend Chris, and without any rope or anything jumped off. WOW!!!! I had no idea what I what to expect. About two seconds after I started flailing because I hadn't hit water yet-it was a long fall, well longer than I figured it would be. This was definitely more exhilirating than my other bridge jump. Oh yeah I forgot to mention. When I climbed up to the top tier and was positioned, a truck of natives passed me and one of the girls said to me "Tu vas a morir", translation: "You are going to die". That was comforting I thought, turned back around and jumped.

Shell (24 de Julio), Hospital Voz Andes y Casa de Fe´

Friday I woke up early as usual and took the bus to Shell, the next town down from Puyo. My first scheduled visit was to Hospital Voz Andes, a Christian missionary hospital. I arrived where I found myself entering a morning meeting amoungst the doctors. This is typical in hospitals. They will talk about a set amount of cases and at Voz Andes, although I am not exactly sure about how they do it in the States, the residents will go through each case file. On top of being a group discussion, it is suppossed to help the residents learn and adjust their practices. After the meeting I tagged along with a Dr. Martin from Texas who was on-call(not seeing patients) and therefore passed me on to another Dr. Dueñas. Since it was a Friday, he was only had patient consults in the morning. We saw about six or seven patients. Dr. Dueñas focused in family medicine, so he sees a variety of patients with all sorts of different illnesses and needs.

To list a few, we saw a patient with hyperthyroidism(?I think that is what it is called) who had been on vacation for a weeks and hadn't taken her pills and as a result here situation worsened. We also saw a patient who had come in to get stitches removed from her big toe on he right foot. An older man who was having problems with weight loss, but hadn't been diagnosed with anything, had a prostate exam. I watched the doctor put a gloved finger up an older man's bottom. I was a little shocked, but I guess I need to get used to it, as I am going to have to do it atleast once in med school.

On a side note, I talked to some of the other members of my program and they were telling me that it was common for gay male doctors to volunteer for the position in med school. Apparetnly in med school students practice on other doctors, because only a doctor really knows how to properly perform one, and as so it is the best way for students to learn.

Anyways...the in patient process is different here in Ecuador. I do not know about everyone, but when I go to see my personal doctor, he has his a handful of rooms, where each patient will meet separately. The doctor will then come to your room and each room should be cleaned afterwards before another patient comes in. Here, the doctor's office is the appointment room. The sheets are never changed, I assume because it is impractical and costly, but I am not sure why. So an old man with a prostate exam wipes his butt on the bed sheet and then a kid lays on it and puts her hands all over it and such. I guess they haven't had any problems with it, but it just doesn't seem sanitary enough to me.

I was also able to participate (observe) the doctor perform two ultrasounds that day. One was on a patient who was determined to have appendicitis and was set to be operated on. I had never seen an ultrasound done before and I was able to gain some insight into how the technology works and how it is applied. A probe is placed on the skin where waves are sent through the skin and down into the core of the body. A grainy, black-and-white image appears on the screen and it takes a little bit, atleast for me, to get oriented to the fact that as you move down the screen, you aren't moving down the patients body, but further into the core. After seeing the appendicitis patient, Dr. Dueñas told me that he would probably be scheduled for surgery and so I made sure to find out when as I am extremely interested in surgery and had never seen an appendectomy before. I then found the surgeon, Dr. Eckehart Wolff, a German trained surgeon who had been working at the hospital with his wife for some 20-or-so years. He was very numb to the experience, as he had done it a million times, and chatted about various topics. He told me that appendicitis was a recently new illness to this part of Ecuador and that cases were higher in Quito and more developed cities as there was more fast food and greasy food available to the population. He also told me that he was at the hospital when the first case of appendicitis occurred in Arajuno. Arajuno is considered the final frontier before the jungle and has only recently had a road built to access the town (a stone and pebble road however). Before if you wanted to get in or out, you have to spend over ten hours just hiking or be able to afford a plane ride in. Also present was an American anasthesiologist from Texas who told me step by step about what his role was and what he was doing and so on. The surgeon was incredibly fast in performing the surgery, it only took him thirty minutes and towards the end the anasthesiologist noted that he was a little behind in the drug regimen he was delivering to the patient becasue he didn't expect the surgeon to finish that quickly. The surgeon then left and I stayed with the anasthesiologist to watch the wake-up session. The patient would wake up for a minute wiggle around in pain and then pass back out for a few minutes. This went on for a little but and I left before he was fully awake, but I am pretty sure it was all under control.

After surgery I grabbed a quick lunch and then headed over to Casa de Fe´ an orphanage located in Shell. Kids are there for two main reasons, either their parents can't be finacially responsible for the children or in the sadder case, the kid was born with some deformity. In indigenous communities, it is a common practice to dispose of a deformed child as he/she will most likely hinder the rest of the family/community. I arrived just in time to head off to the park with the older and more capable kids. I chased them around, played on the jungle gym, went down all the slides and pushed one kid on the swing. They were all adorable children and even in the light of their situation were full of love, energy, and hope. You might not think so, but these kids were just as happy or happier than a kid with his parents might be. After the park, it was movie time and so all the kids sat down under the covered area where they watched Sleeping Beauty in spanish.


I took this time to head off to the little kids room, where a dozen or so kids were just hanging out with the other girls. Alot of the children here had birth defects or developmental problems. The little girl in the pink, was out to get me from the start and spent the whole time I was there giving me hugs, lots and lots of hugs. Another girl, who had two club feet (one which had been amputated) and who couldn't speak, but understood everything kept asking me to comb her hair and then would mess it up and ask me to come it again. It was truly powerful experience, mainly because they are children and I hate to see children be treated as such from the beginning of their lives. However, it is nice to know that someone is there to take care of them.
There I met up with two other girls from my group who had been there all day.

La visita a Uwijint

We left on a Tuesday morning for the Shwar community called Uwijint. Shwar tribes only make up about three percent of the indigenous population in Ecuador, but there are more than a haldnful of Shwar tribes and they each have different costums and traditions. In order to get there we were given vague directions: take a bus towards Macas get off at kilometro 51(there are no road markings here in this part of Ecaudor) and look for a man named Ramon, he will show you where you go. So we set out on the bus and I took some shots on the way. The tire pick I found interesting, so I wanted to show it, Ecaudor seems to be overrun by tires, a commonplace for mosquitos to breed and the larvae to develop.


The town we arrived in (at km51) is called Pitirishca and is a small indigenous village comprised of like 10 buildings and a few families. After meeting with Ramon, he pointed us to a house down the road where his two daughter Delfina and Veronica were waiting for to guide us on our hike into the jungle.


The hike began off straight up hill with razor shard, velco like leaves protruding into the half-worn path. On top of the constant hills, there was tons of mud everywhere, and the fact that I was carrying way too much weight (probably about 40 pounds in water, clothes, and other stuff I probably didn't need). Below is a pic of the four of us in the group and our two guides.


The hike seemed to never end, but thankfully we were able to stop a hand full of times to rest. Our guides didn't seem to even be phased and on top of that didn't bring any snacks or water. On the way I stopped and took some pictures, while we were entering the jungle, we were only barely piercing the cortex. Later we were told that if we even tried to go further in, we would probably be killed or something nasty because the deeper inhabitants of the jungle didn't care for outsiders.


I'd like to take a moment to mention that I am the butterfly king! Butterflies are attracted to me and are constantly landing on me. The reason I believe is I taste good. But then again so do they!


So after about four-and-a-half hours, we finally arrived to our community: Uwijint. The community was really small and unlike most others was just comprised of one family. It was located in the middle of a patch of jungle that had been cleared for planting, housing, school buildings, and other smaller things. We spent the two nights there in a Shwar hut. The roof is made of palm leaves that have been dried out and it will last up to 20 years! While the all natural housing was neat, the bugs were not! The first pic is our hut, the second the inside, and the third is a picture of our family's hut from our hut. The smoke is a product of the fire that is constantly running for the purpose of cooking, boiling water, and keeps out the bugs.


Surrounding the house were all sorts of plants, some natural and some brought in and cultivated, but all used for food, medicinal, or spiritual purposes. I only really took a picture of the plantain tree, but I took a bunch of notes on the natural medicines they prepare for specific illnesses.


The Moncayo's(the name of the family we were staying with) have a variety of pets and wild animals that hang around and call Uwijint home. Most are common, but there was one, a wild animal, probably the first ever domesticated that stood out. His name is Tanpish and he looks like raccoon, anteater, who knows what else (I think he most closely resembles an aardvark). They also had a dog and a blue-green parrot. Also running a muck were ducks and chickens. There actually were only a few ducks, but there were 5 roosters, 5 hens, and one of the hens had 5 chicks.



Anyways, we rested after our hike and waited until they called on us to welcome us with La Danza de Bienvenida. The ceremony was performed by two boys and two girls, with a third boy providing the beat by way of one drum. The whole ceremony, Gustavo was explaining to us what was going on and what the purpose of each movement(act) was. After they performed the dance, they asked us to participate with them. The role of the guys was to jump back and forth from foot to foot while making a kind of stabbing motion with the speak towards the ground. The girsl just twisted around alot making noises with the beads they were shaking. For one act, the guys would chant and then for the next the girls would chant, although we didn't do this part, we left the chanting to the kids.



The dancing was tiring and afterwards we had our first dinner by candlelight inside Gustavo's hut. The bugs were swarming and I am pretty sure I ate atleast a dozen trying to down my dinner and yerba louisa aromatic water.
As there is no electricity and it was dark, I called it a night.


The next morning I woke up and played a little of soccer with the kids as we waited to see what we were going to do. It turns out that the dog had found a guanta and Gustavo had trapped it in a whole and were going to kill it and have it for lunch. We hiked about thirty minutes into the jungle where Gustavo had already dug out a huge tunnel into the earth, where he planned on stabbing/drowning the animal. While we waited, we built some clay figurines. I made a clay jungle women that I tried to give to Veronica and Delfina, but they denied it! My masterpiece devalued and degraded. Gustavo also let me help him with the hunt. I helped fling out clay that had been dug out and when time came to extract the guanta, I got to get on my hand and knees in the tunnel and pull the thing out of the ground. I had no idea what to expect, but the animal pretty much looked like a giant gopher/rodent. In the Oriente the meat of a guanta cost more than that of a chicken because of the labor in catching and rarity in finding the creatures.


I also got to try Chicha while trapping the guanta. Chicha is fermented yuca based spit that smells rancid and tastes about the same. It was an experience, but I am gonna have to pass on the Chicha from here on out!
We then headed back to the houses, but on the way stopped to cut down a specific type of palm tree that at the top has a part called the heart, which is edible and delicious. They cut down about four trees that were each really tall, probably 5-10 years old. I had to stop to wonder how much damage they were doing to the jungle, but they seemed to have it under control.


We reached the river where I had to thoroughly wash off the guanta so that it could then be cooked for lunch.
I walked into the hut, threw the guanta on the fire, and my nostrils filled with the smell of burning hair--yuk! Gustavo and I then headed to the river to rinse all the clay and mud off as his wife and the other women prepared lunch for everyone. I didn't get to take this pictures, but I want to say thanks to Katie who took the initiative to take pictures of the guanta being cut and cooked for me!


After bathing I hung out with the others and then we ate lunch. Guanta meat is darker than beef and a lot tougher. It had a unique taste and even though I didn't love it, I enjoyed trying it. Gustavo then walked us around his garden and showed us the plants they had and explained what each was used for. The last plant we came upon, was similar to ayahuasca and was used for spiritual quests and for making the most important life decisions--should I marry this person, should I go on a hunt, you name it they used it for it. Gustavo got stuck on talk about this plant for about 45 minutes. He clearly placed a heavy importance on the plant and it was obvious that he had used it many time before and that culturally it was powerful. He said that after about an hour or so after ingesting, everything in the jungle would transform into spirits, who were waiting to help you. He also cautioned to never do it alone and that everyone always went in pairs, one to watch and the other to experience. I do not remember if he said this, but apparently if one person died during the ritual, the other person was killed also, as it was a sign that bad spirits had been released, or something of that nature. SCARY STUFF! After talking about all the plants we set off to fish for dinner. Gustavo, Lucas, and Delfina did most of the fishing, while us gringos swam in the river and hung out. They would trap fish living under certain rocks with nets that had been wrapped around the stone and with a stick to poke through and force the fish out. I was suprised to see that the fish were alga eaters, what we call plecos in the states, and Louis and I have used on occassion to clean our fishtanks.


When we were done fishing, we headed back to rest somewhere as we awaited La Danza de Despedida. The ceremony was very similar to La Danza de Bienvenida. Before however, they painted our faces. If I remember correctly, I was the lion, or some fierce, wild cat. They also dressed us in the ceremonial clothes so that we could be better participants? The clothes were small and the necklaces were made of nuts and teeth, teeth which proded my sides. It was alot of fun though and I recommend going to anyone who gets a chance.


Then dinner!


Then sleep and in the morning the hike back out of the jungle. On the way back, Yoland and I took turns hacking eachothers heads off!

This was is called the headsplitter!

Exhausting!

We arrived back in Puyo to a lovely double rainbow!

Unfortunately we were all burnt out and weren't up for the journey to find the pot of gold!