As I near the end of this trip, I get to start to draw some closure on this experience and I’ll tell you it’s been a wild ride. Since the last update, I had a chance to visit a really great school that provided the students who are privileged enough to attend a hands-on, authentic, community-based, learning experience at the Asociacion Pukllasunchis. It literally was a utopia of an environment where all the kids were happy, and it’s an inclusive environment for students who have special needs. It’s unlike what’s present in the States and is even rarer for people who live in Peru. It’s my hope that everybody has an opportunity to have something like this in the future. But to avoid the education conversation because that one is always a problematic work in progress, I wanted to talk about my experience going to the Amazon very briefly. 

I suppose this is the part of the experience where I reflect on how “green” I need to be. The neighborhood I grew up in Philly, Southwest, is one of the neighborhoods with the least amount of trees in the city. My block had one tree on it for like 15 years, then it was gone and my block has no trees. The environment and caring about it was a sad and non-existent reality for me. So, when I found out that I had a chance to go to the rain forest, and not just any rain forest, the Amazon, I kind of had no idea what to expect. 

As we went from Cusco to Pilcopata and made the 7 hour trek from the high mountains, over 13,000 feet, to the Amazon, about 2,000 feet, I was simply amazed by how amazing Earth was. For a moment, I was feeling like I was on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic combined. I watched Life one night in HD on a Friday night to relax and enjoyed that, and I’ll tell you, the Amazon is just like what it was on TV. The Magic School Bus and Ms. Frizzle’s teaching about the water cycle all made sense. I saw small trees and big trees, round trees and fig trees (I tried my best at a Dr. Seuss; there’s probably no fig trees in the jungle). In any case, it was a sight to see. 

Not only was it a sight to see, it was a roller coaster of a ride. Going from 13,000 feet to 2,000 feet requires several important aspects: 1.) Faith in Jesus (or your spiritual beliefs - I just shared mine) 2.) A great driver 3.) Great breaks on your vehicle 4.) Patience. If you’ve had an opportunity to watch Ice Road Truckers, my trip was like this. There were cliffs we drove past that I thought death was eminent if we were a foot or 6 inches closer to the edge. In any case, we did make it. As much as I built up the drive, that wasn’t the highlight of the trip; what was particularly important was what I learned from the communities living there.

The purpose of our excursion was not to be tourists and simply boogie on down to the jungle, it was to learn about indigenous communities there. In 2015, believe it or not, there are still communities of individuals living in the Amazon who have had no human contact. With the help of an anthropologist here, Waldo Maldonado, we learned so much about the impact of globalization, capitalism, climate change, political change, and various forms of human interaction on these communities. Without going into all those details, and to keep this post relatively short, these communities have to deal with the fact that the rest of the world is putting their existence in danger. When I asked Waldo what he looked hopes and fears were for these communities which which he works and often lives, he said, and I paraphrase, that the earth continues to exist; if we destroy the planet, we destroy their livelihood and existence. This became increasingly real as we visited the Huachipaeri community, after a 5 mile hike into the Amazon from Pilcopata. 

In all, I think this was an eye-opening check for me to remember that what I do in Chicago or Philly impacts my fellow brothers and sisters all over the world, from Cusco to Pisac and Pilcopata. We live in a vulnerable time and there’s lots of crazy shit going on. For the most part, I focus on the intangibles about human existence, like making sure people feel safe in the skin that they’re in with the constructions of identities we have, like race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. One of the areas that I don’t do as great of a job, is thinking about the earth, Pacha Mama, as it’s referred to in Quechua. Many indigenous populations have had a great respect for the earth and that’s something I learned from them that our current and “modern” society lacks greatly. If we don’t learn to respect the Earth, there won’t be a home for us to live and that’s a sad truth.