Preparation, Preparation, PreparationThe Final CountdownEl Mercado Mira FloresLa SelvaChipaotaThe First Leg: Chasuta to YurimaguasPacaya Samiria ReserveThe way to Iquitosto LeticiaThe Slow Boat to ManausDifficult Questions
 | RainforestPartnership |  | 2009 Trans-Amazon Expedition |  | Difficult Questions |
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Jan 26 2010, 03:26 PM
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Santa Fe, United States, New Mexico
We had been staying in Chipaota for the better half of a week, living and working with the men and women of the community and trying as best we could to assimilate ourselves into the daily ebb and flow of life on the river. Early on a question came to mind and stuck there until I asked it and the answer I recieved did not clarify, but rather complicated everything.
Chipaota is a native community of thatch huts lining a mud path. It has no electricity, no running water and no connection to the outside world save a couple wooden canoes with outboard motors. It's on the right side of the river.
Chazuta is a town of cinder block houses along paved streets. It has electricity, running water, cable television and a road that connects it to the thriving city of Tarapoto. It's on the left side of the river
In Chipaota they drink from the river.
In Chazuta they turn on a tap.
On the second to last day of our stay in Chipaota, I asked the teacher's wife the question.
If you could, would you move across the river?
Absolutely.
You would leave this way of life, this connection to the land, for cable?
Of course.
When people from home ask me about people from the river they want to hear stories about the virtues of a life lived simply. They want me to conjur images of smiling people who have nothing, but are happy in their simplicity. They want fables about the noble savages naked and naive on the banks of the Amazon.
What they get is the dark honest eyes of the teacher's wife when she gave me an answer that I didn't want to hear.
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I wrote this a few days after we left Iquitos, almost a month after our stay in Chipaota. In Iquitos we met lots of foreignors who came to there to shell out their few hundred dollars, take a three-day jungle tour, visit a "native" village, and come back with stories of how simple, and innocent and happy these rainforest natives were. One could say that this is nothing more than a bourgeois tendency to romanticize poverty with notions of unfettered simplicity and to confuse the chains of necessity with the nobility of choice. That it is merely a way to ease the discomfort one who has options feels when in the company of those who do not. And that would be fair. Yet I couldn't help but find myself revering the beauty I though I saw in what could very reasonably be called destitute poverty. I admired the tenacity and rawness of the human spirit when the human spirit is engaged in the simple work of surviving. Maybe those were just my own bourgeois sensibilities.
I loved living that simple way of life on the Amazon, and when I left for Antigua, I sought it out again, feeling more comfortable sharing the work and the company of a poor farming family in San Antonio, than the company of the tourists and ex-pats that walk the streets and fill the bars of Antigua.
I chose the simpler life for a while because I saw and knew and could come back to an upper-middle class life in the United States. But maybe that appreciation of the simple can only come through having the choice to take it. How do you answer the teacher's wife? How do you tell her that those material gains only come at the great loss of culture, of purity and beauty? How can you make someone appreciate what they have for what it is, when what they have seems so beat and dirty and poor when they compare it with what could be had on the other side of the river?
I spent a long time living in the shadow of these questions, and I still really don't have an answer.
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