agouti soup

Well...I survived my latest trip adentro. And, as always, it was a bit of an adventure. The objective was to work in the chambira palm nurseries that we started in May. The Waorani utilize the new leaves of the chambira palm in their handicrafts. They actually hand-make every last centimeter of string before they even begin to weave anything. It is an incredibly labor-intensive process. Soooo...the idea is that we are constructing the nurseries in order to start thousands of chambira palms and other plants that produce seeds used in necklaces which will later be transplanted in and around the Waorani. Thus, the prime material of the handicrafts is not depleted, and then the women don’t have to spend hours searching for the prime materials. That’s the idea, anyway...

Rather than organizing a big expensive production, a small team of five of us from the Waorani Women’s Association was scheduled to work in the communities. Yet even though it was less people to coordinate we still left Puyo on the hora Ecuatoriana...about 3 hours later than we had planned. We had to drive around picking up stuff that people forgot (oh, like, little things like their backpack of clothes for the weeklong work trip). Then we had to play tetris to get all of the food, supplies and people crammed into the double cab truck.
This meant that by the time we got to the community of Menepare there wasn’t much we could do besides check the status of our previous work sites, and set up camp, and by then it was dark. The promising thing was that the place we were staying had a gas cosineta, which is a four burner stovetop, in which to cook. This made food preparation much quicker than having to build a fire. Even so, we got zero work accomplished the first day.

The following day we spent all morning chopping down the vegetation that had grown up around the plants we had transplanted. They say things grow fast in the rainforest. I am a witness. Finding some of the plants was difficult as everything was really overgrown. And everything is so green...and quite difficult to differentiate what is what to the untrained eye. I was constantly having to ask my companeras if a particular plant was a weed or something we wanted to keep.

After a half day of machete-ing a large area in the intensely hot equatorial sun, we took a much deserved lunch break. The last time that I was in the community was in May and the weather was dramatically different. At that time, it was constantly raining. No, I take that back, it was constantly pouring. For this trip, the sun was out in full force. Any movement made you sweat, thus after machete-ing for just a few minutes I was soaked. I am proud to report that my machete skills have vastly improved as a result of this trip. I have the blisters to prove it. The bigger accomplishment was that I didn’t hurt myself, either with my own machete, someone else’s...or by falling on it...or any number of the branches and logs that I had to be constantly stepping over. Despite my disappointment with how run-down everything looked from the last time I was there, it was weirdly satisfying to do some serious manual labor. Moreover, it was good to escape the office, which, due to some personality conflicts, has become a rather stressful place of late. Our plan was to visit two communities...but based on the amount of work we had left to do, but also because of the fact that the river was low (oh...and a small detail of there not being any motorized canoe available) we decided to stay in Menepare the entire time. It was a lucky move for me...as I will get to later.

Over the next three days, we weeded, staked, planted, transplanted, and re-planted previously transplanted plants and trees. We hauled hundreds of pounds of sand in feed sacks at least 450 meters from the river to the nursery, filled hundreds of bags with a mixture of dirt, compost and sand, planted seeds (after I went on a 4 hour hike with two of the women to collect the seeds) and then put tags on all the plants. It was a lot of work.

One day while we were out working one of the waorani men from the community went fishing. He came back with a bunch of fish strung up, what looked like a drowned rat, and a live turtle tied to the same line as the dead animals. The rat-like animal turned out to be a black agouti, called a watusa in Spanish and pëne in Wao terero. Those of you that know Spanish will probably notice that a similarly pronounced word in español, pene, means penis. This made our dinner conversation most interesting when my host served up agouti soup. A fun loving group, no one could resist the wordplay of saying, “te gusta el pëne?” and inserting the word pëne into every sentence. Ahhhh what fun...talking about who likes, who ate, and who is going to get more pëne...

Okay now moving from a linguistic to a biological note: black agoutis are in fact in the Order Rodentia...along with two other interesting rodents found in these parts, the paca and capybara (which is the world’s largest rodent.) And, no, the latter two are not (yet?) part of my growing list of bush meat consumed. Agoutis are cool (alive) because they are important seed dispersers in the rainforest. I guess they gather seeds that fall from trees and then take them different places to bury them to essentially hide or store them, then promptly forget where they put them, thus providing wider dispersal of seeds through the forest.

The story of the turtle is almost as interesting as the agouti. Sadly, the man who caught it had drilled a hole in its shell in order to tie it up so that it wouldn’t escape (this sucker was fast! I’m not sure what kind it was...a yellow spotted Amazon river turtle, perhaps). It tried to escape several times. At one point it was literally pulling all the dead fish and the dead agouti with it across the floor until someone tied up the menagerie of dead and live animals to a post. It was hard to witness, really. It was such a beautiful animal. I wasn’t quite sure if its destiny was going to be the soup pot or the illegal animal trade, but it was clear that it wasn’t going to be a family pet there. Anyway, one afternoon we went back to the house where we were staying for lunch. As we were slowing preparing the food (by this point we had run out of cooking gas, so we had to resort to the woodfire method, which greatly slowed down the whole process) I noticed that the turtle was gone. Tied to the string where the turtle had been just a few hours earlier were two pieces of paper. My colleague Antonio (the newest member of the Waorani Women’s Association technical team) picked them up and read them. One said, “Los turistas no pueden llevarse animals vivos de la selva o de los rios para afuera.” (Tourists cannot take animals from the rainforest or rivers). The other paper read, “ademas: hacer huecos en el caparazon de las Tortugas y charapas: les deule como si estuvieran hacienda huecos en los huesos” (plus, putting holes in the turtle’s shell hurts them as if you were putting holes en their bones). Wow. It turns out this very young German tourist/student who was hanging out at the house waiting for her ride had decided to “take the turtle for a swim” a not so thinly veiled excuse to liberate it. It was a seriously balsy move on her part. A part of me certainly empathized with her, I mean, I hated seeing the poor thing tied up. But, at the same time, it was, well, rude, and not so culturally sensitive. An ethical dilemma fo’ sho. One I have found myself in countless times here…trying to balance my strongly held beliefs that have been formed from a Western point of view…with the reality of a culture that has very different norms. This girls actions were clearly outside of those norms…and the Waorani were pissed. The guy spent a good part of the day fishing (WITHOUT using barbasco poison…so I can only imagine he was spear fishing) and brought back enough to share with the entire group, and then this chick messes with it and tries to make a political statement or something. I don’t know. Maybe those reading this from the comforts of an air conditioned office will think my logic is wacked (especially those that know me at all). But, life in the jungle is…different. In so many ways. It it has f’ed with my head, that’s for sure.

Around mid day on the last day we were in the community, I started feeling sick to my stomach. I took a break to lay down in my tent, which I think made me feel worse since it was so miserably hot. So I got up and walked to the ecological toilet that we built in May, which was at least 250 meters away…clear on the other side of town, essentially. Let’s just say that I used it more that day than the entire community had in 3 months. By late afternoon I was alternating between peuking and shitting (sorry, TMI!) Not a pretty picture…. Especially since the house I was staying in was basically an obstacle course. So, when I had a bathroom emergency, I had to unzip my tent, grab some t.p. walk across a wood plank from one elevated house to another, the climb down a steep, unattached ladder, and then dash off into the bushes (as there was no toilet at the house where we were staying)…all without trying to attract an audience. One time I didn’t quite make it and I projectile peuked in the bare dirt patch outside their house, which if it were in an American suburb would constitute the area we call a front yard. Nice. My crew kept fussing over me, asking if I wanted them to call to have the car come early to pick us up. I was determined to tough it out. But after the 6th time they asked me if they could call I gave in and handed them my phone. They walked off to the spot down the path where there is a rebar post where we could catch a faint cell phone signal. I went into my tent and passed out. The next thing I know, I hear a horn honking and a vehicle approaching. I scramble to find my headlamp and my watch. It was 12:15 a.m. The truck was there to take us back to Puyo. So, in the middle of the night, literally, we packed up our stuff and headed back. But not before my final peuk. Miraculously, I was fine the next day. But I decided—definitively-- that I did not like the pëne.