Sunday, October 10, 2010

jungle.

October 5-7, 2010
Well, I had written in my journal for these days so that I wouldn’t forget what happened and I could blog about it. Unfortunately, my journal was in my backpack and was stolen with the rest of my belongings. :( So I’m going to try to recount the events of these days to the best of my memory. :)
Day one I was feeling really yucky. My stomach was bubbly and I had a headache, and that is never a good combination when you are about to head out to the jungle for 4 days. We left the house at about 9 and headed into Pucallpa to Peru Projects base to get on our boats and head out. I think we ended up leaving at about 1 o’clock. Our first village was a 3 hour boat ride through the winding river, we had a very small, short clinic there and then packed everything back up and headed to the next village to spend the night so we would be ready early the next morning. This whole afternoon I have just felt like poop, and I probably didn’t give everything my full effort… Oh, and I have to put this in- I had my first jungle poop in this village. Go ahead and laugh, you really have to be in the jungle to understand. Haha :) By the time we got to the second village I just wanted to crash right there on the sand. Steph and I got our tent set up and I literally fell into bed- well, I fell right onto my thermarest. :) We woke up the next morning and we were absolutely parched. We decided to put our water filter to good use, so we headed down to the muddy river. We started pumping the water but our filter wasn’t working. Disappointed, we headed back up and went on a water hunt. Don’t worry, we found some. Haha anyway, we ate breakfast and walked thru the village to the building where we were having the clinic. We set up like usual and had a pretty average clinic day. Nothing too exciting happened- we haven’t had a surgery in a while which has been a little disappointing. Haha. After we were done, we packed up and carried our stuff back down to the boat. Jenessa and I were trying to carry a huge trunk on our shoulders with a number of other random items on top of it. We tried to bend down together with the trunk on our shoulders to pick up a water bottle and epically failed. We started giggling and then neither of us could get up and the trunk just fell on the ground. Haha :) Thankfully, a nice local came and helped us out and carried the trunk the rest of the way. As we were about to leave, Chris and Caleb found a monkey. They had been threatening to buy one since we got here and they bargained with the people in the village and bought a stupid monkey for 40 soles. All of us girls were so mad. We kept telling them that all it was going to do was make a mess for them to clean up and be annoying. Monkeys belong in the jungle- they’re not pets. Anyway, they didn’t care about what we had to say and the bought the dumb thing anyway. It was now time to head to the next village so once again we piled into the boats and headed out. To this point none of us had taken a shower and we were all feeling pretty smelly. So, what to do but jump in the river! That’s exactly what we did. Our driver just stopped and all of us grabbed our shampoo and soap and took a bath in the river with the piranhas. :) We got to the last village in the evening and set up camp in their school. Steph, Jenessa, Hanna and I slept out in this open air building where Hanna and Jenessa strung their hammocks and Steph and I set up our tent. We all slept really well until 5:30 in the morning. This village had a little town square deal and it had loud speakers by it. At 5:30 am some crazy guy gets on the loud speaker and says Hola like 50 times and then starts playing some music really loudly. Oh, I was so upset. I hate alarms- this was worse than an alarm. It went on for a good 15 minutes. Ugh, I was mad. Haha. But anyway, we got up and made some breakfast. Dr. Shayar bought a piranha and decided to fry it up, so I had a bite. I mean, we were living in the jungle, I had to live it up. haha :) we started our clinic at 9 and went straight thru into the afternoon. We saw all the people that wanted to be seen, and it went really well. Steph and I were the only 2 in the pharmacy but we kept up surprisingly well. Here comes the next funny story. We had a free afternoon so all of us girls decided we wanted to go bathe in the river because we were feeling really grimy. One of the local ladies had told us about a “nice” place to bathe. So, we gathered our things and headed down there. The “nice” place to bathe was a piranha filled lagoon. Hahaha :) I won’t go into too much detail, but it was a very memorable bath. Haha.
I think that about sums up the gist of our trip. When I got back I examined my poor little body. It had been deprived of nutrients and eaten up by bird-size mosquitoes. I bet I have over 100 bites all over my body. It’s very unfun, I itch all over. I’ve been applying generous amounts of Chiggerex all over my body. Haha :) But after just a couple days of being at home, there’s no need to worry about it being deprived of nutrients anymore. Haha, we eat good here. :)
Anyhow, I think that’s about all I’ve got for now. :)

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