Who's that? Oh, that's just a man with a hundred year old rifle, a dead anteater and a pile of bananas...

One of the views on the way

Sorry that I've been so mia, I really wanted to blog about my trip with two friends to the SIM cabin last weekend (where my friend and I found a hill, climbed it, and discovered a prayer garden at the top overlooking the entire lake and all of the rolling hills), but I got caught up in stuff (aka sleeping and being lazy because sometimes the computer is a bit slow). But I just HAVE to blog about my past two days, because it was the experience of a lifetime and was such a huge blessing from God.

I finally got to go to the Yuquis village! Now, I've gone to villages before, last year, when I went to Honduras with a program with my university, but this was entirely different. Let me start from the beginning.

Starting to get jungley

Getting to the village was pretty much an adventure in itself (worthy of approximately 30 photos). Because it was so secluded, we had to keep switching vehicles, so the trip went like this:

7:00-11:00am: Take a trufi (sort of like a mix of a taxi and a bus) to a small town, where we had lunch. It was really amazing, because as we were driving along, I could see the trees changing from foresty to tropical jungley. Cochabamba is approximately 2000m higher than the Yuquis village, so it also got a lot more humid and sweaty (but it didn't take very long to get used to it).

One of the raised houses I saw on the drive

12:00pm-12:30pm: Take a taxi to a place in the middle of nowhere.

Dead end  (beginning of the river)

The motorized canoe

Marilyn and Miguel

12:30-1:30: Take a taxi to a place even more in the middle of nowhere. When we stopped, I was quite sure we were just at a dead end, but then Marilyn declared 'We're here!' to which I replied 'This is the Amazon?' (this is a paraphrase, by the way. I have a bad memory.). Basically, when I looked across the river, it was so flat, but Marilyn and Miguel (who is from her church and lived with the Yuquis community for 7 years) explained that every summer, the tides come up and push back the land on our side, but also recede from the opposite side, which was why the opposite side looked so barren and just had grass.
1:30-2:00: Wait. And by wait, I mean take more pictures, and comment frequently on the multi-coloured butterflies.
2:00-2:30: Take a motorized canoe thirty minutes along the river to the village

Butterfly!

When the little motorized canoe came, we piled up our stuff and chugged along, and I took more pictures. And yes, this is actually the beginning of the Amazon forest, although the river was not the Amazon river (there was one other river that connected this one to the real Amazon river).

Chugging along  (the scenery and the driver)

Entrance to the Yuquis village

When we arrived, I was so in awe. I recently read a book given to me by SIM called 'The Condor of the Andes', which talks about Wally Herron, a missionary who travelled to the Bolivian villages in the 1920s. I swear, everything I saw (except for the surprisingly violent movie they played in the evening) seemed straight out of that book. Which is where I am going to explain the title of this blog. All of the men hunt with these rifles that look like they are from the colonial days, and one man came back with a dead anteater and a bunch of bananas. I didn't get a picture of that, but I did snap one of a dead macaw that apparently tastes better than chicken.

The community has no more than 30 families, and a ton of kids (I would guess maybe another 30 or 40). Because the Yuquis community is known to be nomadic, they still don't really live in houses, but rather tents or small huts. I think that families shared huts/tents, because in the morning, I saw a lot of families grouped together in the same huts. When we got there, they were having a meeting with the school teachers (all of the women were there, as well as the teachers), so we waited in the community center/guest house. We also got to do a bit of wandering, and met a lot of the kids. There is this crabapple tree that was behind the community center, and about 7 kids aged 6-11 were monkeying around in it, probably up to 40 feet high, dangling on the very ends of the branches and jumping up and down to make the apples fall down. I was transfixed for quite a while because it was so impressive/highly dangerous.

Community center during the meeting

Community center with the monkeys (kids)

Some of the kids

It was so huge!

One of the huts

When the meeting was over, Marilyn gathered all of the women who had children aged 6 and under together, to talk about a program that she was hoping to start. The older children get one good lunch a day through the school, but currently, many of the younger kids are malnourished, because they don't have the same program. As a result, Marilyn was hoping to start a sort of daycare center for the little kids, where they could get a lunch, and also have some intellectual stimulation. The idea was received very enthusiastically, so the next day, we went to check out the old church, in the hopes of cleaning it out and coming back to renovate it and make it more child friendly. After the meeting (sorry I'm kind of jumping around), we handed out milk powder to the women, then made dinner (egg sandwiches) for the kids who were watching the movie outside the community center.

Marilyn handing out milk powder

Kids and milk

The eggs we made for dinner

I was trying to crack the eggs with one hand, but it didn't go that well

Going to sleep was an adventure in itself. There used to be rats, so we had to set up tents upstairs in the community center to keep them out. After they got the two house cats, the problem sort of fixed itself, but still, to be safe...Criss (my co-worker) was bitten once, so I did not mind the extra precaution at all. After about half an hour as well, it started pouring. And I mean literally pouring. The center had a tin roof, so it was pretty loud. So anyways, that was pretty fun.

Marilyn with Dinah and one of her kids

The next day, we weighed and measured the children aged 6 and under, so that Marilyn could keep track of how healthily they were growing. One of the mothers was cooking food for the school and was too busy to bring her baby to the clinic to have her weighed, so she let me bring her over. Her name was Jocelyn, so I laughed to myself that Jocelyn was carrying Jocelyn. Only no one else really got it, because I am incoherent enough in Spanish when I'm not laughing. We weighed maybe 11 children in total, and then handed out this cereal nutrition stimulant package to the mothers. Since the morning was pretty relaxed, we also had a chance to talk to the mothers and just hang out with the kids.

Like chancita (baby pig)

Dead macaw!

Thank you so much for your prayers about Spanish learning! After 3 weeks, my Spanish has gotten so much better, so much so that I was able to do some things independently (like weighing children, explaining how the nutritional packages work, and just talking to the local people). This has been a total blessing, because I was able to get to know some of the women on my own.

One of the women (I don't think I have a picture of her) was named Dinah, and she stood out to me for two reasons:
1. Because I actually saw pictures of her wedding from three years ago.

These are cacao beans (for making chocolate)

2. Because she is the same age as me. She's turning 20 in August, and is already expecting her third child. I just thought it was such a blessing to have that sort of age connection. She was really sweet, and her kids were super cute as well. Her oldest son (who is 3), was helping her prepare a milk formula for her other baby, and kept on yelling things like 'Is this the sugar? Is this the milk? I can't find it!' across their hut. We're going back in two weeks, so I'm really praying that I would keep practicing my Spanish and for an opportunity to talk to her for longer, because I think we could really encourage each other (she's also a Christian).
Her oldest kid is actually hilarious though. When she was cleaning the church, he was grabbing these nuts off the ground and chucking them straight in the air. He also showed them to me, and when I asked him what they were for (playing or eating), he said 'Jugi jugi' (I made that up, but it started with a 'J'), which means 'for throwing' in the Yuquis language. I don't think he really understood that I didn't speak it.

The biggest prayer request that I can think of right now for the Yuquis community is for a leader. At the moment, there is no declared leader in the community, which makes it really hard to come to decisions, and also to maintain order at times. As well, it is very difficult to see spiritual progress if there is no one able to be a spiritual leader.

Anyways, there are a bajillion other things that I could write about (I journalled for eleven pages the first night), but I will be returning there in a few weeks and will update on them some more then!

Prayer requests:
-Leadership in the Yuquis community
-The new program for the little kids, and specifically that the mothers would be motivated and disciplined in keeping it running
-Continued strength and energy to learn Spanish

Ciao ciao!
Jocelyn

P.S. I have to write about one last thing that happened before I left that in retrospect, was just so random and hilarious. As we were leaving, a man came up with a set of bow and arrows the height of myself. This was our exchange:
Miguel: Do you want to buy these?
Me: What are they?
Miguel: It's a set of bow and arrows. How much does it cost?
Man: 25 bolivianos (around 4 dollars). It would make a great gift.
Marilyn: Yeah, would you want to get it for your boyfriend for his birthday?
Me: There is NO WAY that is going past customs.
(We stare at it for a few seconds)
Marilyn (to the man): Maybe you can make a smaller set.

I don't know if a smaller set would make it past customs either...