Quehueri'ono Part III

We pick up today’s post where we left off yesterday…recounting my recent trip adentro with the Waorani Women’s Association. Our protagonist was stuck on the side of the Via Auca oil road with 30+ women waiting around for our ride (canoes) to the community of Quehueri’ono…. At some point in the morning a canoe finally pulled up to the bridge and the Waorani leader Moi gets out. Notice I said ONE canoe. After some negotiating with Moi (he claimed he didn’t know anything about our trip and only came to the bridge to make a phone call from the guard station…) he agreed to take a boatload of women to Quehueri’ono. Of course everyone was jockeying to get on the first canoe. They decided they would send all the women with babies first. “Hey, anyone want to lend me a kid for the day?” I joked. It turns out, there was one seat left on the baby boat. Manuela motioned for me to get in. I turned to my friend Noemi who I know really wanted to get moving and offered her the spot. Manuela then overrode her and said, “No, I send Susan.” Ok. She’s the boss. I quickly grabbed my backpack and slid down the slippery bank and into the front of the canoe loaded down with Waorani women, each with a baby in a sling around their shoulder or small child by their side. Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, I was really lucky to have got that last seat…

We ended up taking off around 10 a.m., leaving the other group behind to find their own way. The first half hour of the trip we motored past colono (colonists, mostly Shuar) settlements along the river. Although the houses weren’t visible from the river, I could tell that we were not in Waorani territory because of what was planted in their chacras (gardens). Finally we entered Wao territory, which was actually marked with a sign, part of a project to delineate the borders of their territory. Over the course of the next 5 hours or so, we motored up the Shiripuno River, making stops at a few Waorani houses along the way to say hello and to eat their food and drink their chicha. I goofed around with these two kids who were sitting behind me. The girl was at first scared of me, but eventually warmed up. When I wasn’t playing with them, I was scanning the banks for critters. I was excited to be able to see some cool wildlife, including a caiman, an agouti and a sunbittern. Always happy to see wildlife actually alive…rather than on a plate in front of me… It was slow going. The river level steadily dropped throughout the day and by the end of it we were having to go really slow to avoid hitting logs. One of our stops was at the new Huaorani eco-lodge outside of Quehueri’ono operated by TROPIC in cooperation with the Waorani community. I got to peek around a bit. It looked very nice, but it didn’t look very new. The wood had a time-worn look to it… a testament to how quickly things erode in the rainforest, I guess. We finally pulled up to the community in the late afternoon, unpacked our stuff and hung out in the school building waiting for the canoe to come back with some food that TROPIC had donated for our workshop. After we unloaded our stuff, one of the women said that there was a boa by one of the houses and asked if I wanted to see it. YES, of course! As long as I can keep a distance… She led me through a wooded area to where some of the houses were located…and there in a grassy by the house was a huge boa constrictor. And it was not happy. Evidently one of the men came across it while he was working in the chacra and brought it up near the house so others could gawk at it too. A group of kids kept throwing sticks at it, and one of the boys had a red t-shirt on the end of the stick and was taunting it. I got to witness the speed and the force of its jaws (and just how wide it can open its mouth) when it went after the t-shirt. I took another step backward. The comical part was watching the Waorani try to call a chicken that was wandering dangerously close to the boa. Meanwhile, one of the same boys came over to the house where I was loitering outside of, and showed me his gigantic pet rhino beetle. I know it was a pet and not just some straggler because he actually had a string around its leg. A beetle leash, so to speak.

That night I helped make dinner for our group, which consisted of rice, pasta and tuna. For breakfast the next morning we made rice with sardines and oatmeal drink. That’s all we had to work with. Cooking took forever because it required wood fire cooking…which required walking really far to get firewood. The women gave me a huge basket of wood to carry. I think they did it just to watch me struggle with it. The basket had a strap to put across your forehead, with the basket balanced on the small of your back. I walked like that for a couple hundred meters until it felt like a vertebrae was going to be compacted and crushed in my neck. I then grabbed the straps to take the pressure off my neck and continued walking until I saw some teenage boys who were willing to carry the wood for me. Whew! Quite a workout, really. The next challenge to the cooking spree was the fact that we did not have any spoons OR cups. Like any good Peace Corps Volunteer I improvised. I made a makeshift spoon out of a drink box, while the women just used their hands. For cups, I washed out the sardine cans and then filled them with the oatmeal drink to offer to the women, yelling “sardine juice, sardine juice, get your sardine juice for only 25 cents,” which they thought was hilarious. (They are an easy audience.) We made an extra large batch of rice and sardines in anticipation for the other group to come. They never came. So for lunch, we ate MORE rice and sardines and drank more oatmeal drink out of sardine cans. For dinner we ate more rice and canned seafood, again making extra in hopes that the other group would show up. They still did not show up. I was starting to get very worried about them.

During the day, I had tried to organize the “baby boat” group to have at least a mini-workshop (the trainers were among the group that were left behind waiting for the other canoes). I led what I thought was a good session with them where we talked about the importance of good quality handicrafts and we rated some of the things they had made. I also worked with them to collect information for a project I’m doing to document the natural materials (bark, leaves, roots and nuts) they use to dye the fiber. Interestingly, I have often found that my Spanish flows when I am talking among other non-native Spanish speakers for some reason. I am embarrassed to say that my wao-terero is still non-existent, however.

So, despite the transportation challenges in getting to the community, and the fact that we didn’t have much food or utensils… and the fact that I did not having any of the materials I needed, nor were the trainers there… despite all this…I was actually having a good time.

But things changed the following day (to be continued).