Dancing like anacondas

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Last week we went to Saposoa, a much more friendly community. We exposed our usual Museo de la Salud, (literally means hygiene museum). This time Eliseo, a new comer in the project, added a part on agriculture, where he explained what fruits to grow and how. Our Spanish is improving rapidly and we’ve also learned a few words in Shipibo. The main event of the trip was another nocturnal tropical storm. This time we were better prepared since we had tents. I had borrowed one from ADRA but Pierre had insisted on taking his own. Unfortunately it could not be mounted indoors so when the storm broke out at 1.00 AM, I had a thought for him from my warm under-shelter bed, although I spent most of the night tackling a new form of "invisible-mosquitoes". At 4.15, Pierre came pleading to my tent for a space! He told me how his own tent had stayed waterproof the whole way through, and it was only when he started floating 30 cm above ground level that he decided to abandon ship. On the way to the shelter he had noticed that the whole community was under water, although thankfully most of it had gone by morning. Apparently the village is flooded by around 1m (3ft) of water every year. We took a night boat back to Pucallpa. The way the two-man crew steer the big canoes down the river in pitch dark is always thrilling. One man sits at the front with a powerful spotlight, flicks in on from time to time to see where we’re going and then uses it to send signals to the pilot, at the back of the boat (with the rudder). At one point we stopped to untangle something from the propeller, and just as we started off again, a signal started coming from a boat that had been hidden in the shadows up to then. The crew swivelled the "colectivo" around and started inspecting the newcomers with the spotlight. As we approached, all we could see was a boat full of bananas and it wasn’t till we were very close that we noticed a family huddled up in hammocks at the front. At that point our own boat was already quite full but the crew didn’t need to be persuaded too long for them take along the couple of tons of bananas. After 30 minutes of fruit exchanging (we were still in the middle of water by the way) and an extra 5 minutes of water dumping (yes most of these boats are not watertight...), we were off again and arrived at Yarinacocha, Pucallpa around 2.00 AM. Saturday night we went to a concert, and as usual we were picked out from the crowd (there is virtually no tourist activity here, so we’re kind of like aliens). This time group made Pierre climb up on stage and he was aloud to chose one of the half naked stage-girls to try out the dance of the anaconda (I’m not joking, it’s the name of the local dance, and its awesome!). The crowd was hugely amused and so was I. I regret not taking my camera but we’ve got the feeling it’s the sort of thing that could easily happen again!

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