The Carretera

Chillum has gone to Cuzco and left me his motorbike, a Yamaha 150 that goes just about anywhere. On Saturday I decided to take it out for a ride along the Carretera, the highway that connects Iquitos and Nauta. Cruising along the Carretera is a popular pastime on the weekends here, as it is a beautiful meandering drive through gently rolling hills that open up to reveal endless green stretches of jungle, and pocked here and there by small hamlets and roadside fruit stands. It’s also about the only place where you can get away from the constant traffic and congestion of the city and enjoy the feeling of the open road.

I head out through San Juan, up over the tallest hill in town, from where you can see far enough to check what kind of weather is coming. It’s blue skies over Iquitos but menacing grey clouds towards Nauta.  I keep going past the airport and a cluster of open structures where wood and building supplies are sold. On the right, there’s the big public pool facility, an Olympic-size pool with a sculpture of actual Olympic rings on a tower that can be seen from the road. Then there’s a couple of huge warehouse facilities and maintenance hangars, and little restaurants where locals are sitting outside drinking beer and having lunch. Hand-written signs are everywhere along the Carretera, humble bodegas announcing their wares—cold beer, lunch menu, fresh fruit, cigarettes.

There’s some institutional facilities along this stretch also—a religious hospital, a police compound, a field research station maintained by the local university, a modern, brand-new school that appears to be a joint Peruvian-Italian project.  There’s the place where they keep the manatees, and just past it at a curve in the road, the mysterious Spanish colonial house with boarded up windows. It’s an enormous rectangle of a house, built right up on the road, and looking out over a bluff in the back with a magnificent view of the jungle. The guardians live next door in a simple thatched-roof house, and every time I pass it I wonder what the story is with that place. It looked like it was grand once, it was clearly built by an owner with a vision, and it’s still beautiful even though it looks occupied now only by shadows and ghosts.

So many of these houses along the Carretera have either exceeded their useful life, or were never finished in the first place. They are the once-weres and the coulda-beens.  Seems like about half the houses in Iquitos are coulda-beens. Brick foundations without roofs, no windows or doors, frozen in time from the moment the owner ran out of money or time to complete it. And there they sit, surrounded by the vitality of the city, simply taking up space.

The air gets perceptibly fresher the farther away you get from the city, and the smog of trucks and buses is replaced with billowing expanses of pure oxygen. The scents of the jungle pervade the road, and a convection of warm breezes seems to follow in my wake. I’m several kilometers outside the city now, and instead of heading further down the road I turn off to the right towards the University of the Peruvian Amazon and the Amazon Golf Course. I drive by the golf course slowly, where the only sign of life is a couple of locals kicking a soccer ball near the clubhouse. The Golf War, as many locals know, is a fascinating saga all unto itself that could one day be taught in business schools around the country as a cautionary tale about doing business with friends, and a primer on how the best laid plans can go pear-shaped before your very eyes. It’s Rashomon with sand traps, an epic moral fable in which corruption, lies and betrayal are only the beginning. I hope to tell the whole story one day in greater detail. But since it’s still unresolved, that’s all I can really say about it right now.

Bordering the golf course there’s a couple of shipping containers with windows, and a fence around it, and then past that on the left a shimmering lake stocked with fish like gamitana and paiche. Ducks and turtles are everywhere hanging out by the lake alongside a healthy population of capybera, giant water-loving rodents the size of pigs. They wander around, grazing, without a care in the world. The restaurant is open and I stop to sample the paiche before moving on. I notice that most of the Peruvians here are well dressed, and many have arrived in cars. They are from the city, people with money.  And at 20 soles ($7) for a plate of ceviche, it’s not cheap, but it is about the best ceviche I’ve had in Iquitos.

Further down the road things get rustic quickly. There’s a scattering of houses and villages, chicken farms behind walls made of corrugated tin sheets tacked together on posts. Across the road there are smaller operations, where the people sit on the raised platform of their house overlooking perhaps a hundred chickens, living right among them all the time.  Some of these places don’t have doors, or windows, or proper floors, but almost everyone has a TV. And they sit in groups watching soccer, drinking sodas or beer and just passing the day. Out in the country you can look right into people’s houses and so many are just sitting there watching soccer on TV or sitting in a chair or walking down the road eating a piece of fruit, not doing anything in particular, just living.

I pass a lagoon, a local swimming hole full of kids playing and swimming. This is what the community is doing on a Saturday afternoon, and this is a part I recognize from life in the States, it’s the vibe of a public pool on a summer weekend. I think back to my life there, to the frenetic pace of the working world, how human ambition is encouraged, even indulged in the pursuit of wealth or power or fame.  I’m still living that life in my own head, albeit on my own terms, but driving down this country road in the jungle I feel so far from that way of being in the world. The people I see in these backwoods hamlets have very little, and most do not appear to be doing much to change that. It’s a whole different approach to life. They are merely living, I can see, and living the life in the rhythms that come naturally.

That may sound like condescension, but it’s merely an observation about the way life happens among the rural poor. Clearly there is work being done, houses built and resources gathered, or else they would starve. And no one here appears to be starving. There are signs of small-scale industry, beside the chicken farms there are women assembling piles of jungle fruit in wheelbarrows, and then loading it into a motorcar to take to the city and sell in the market.

It’s the contrast between the ambitions of the modern world, and the languorous, parabolic rhythms of the jungle, that is so striking. I am a tourist in this world.  The Carretera whisks you from the city to the country, with no suburbs in between, and you can travel from the first to the third world in the space of a few kilometers. Perhaps it’s because it is siesta time, when people pass the heat of the day in the shade, and a somnambulant calm descends over everything. But there’s just nothing happening out here. Maybe that’s why everyone has a TV.

Further on I pass the University of the Peruvian Amazon’s facilities, a complex of administrative office buildings, classrooms, and agriculture projects in various states of development. It’s Saturday so there’s no one here, and it adds to my sense that time is standing still. There’s a restaurant near the university complex (really just brick buildings carved out of the jungle along the dirt road) and peering back there I can see that it is open. An old señora in a rocking chair is fanning herself in the shade by the back door. Other than her, the place is dead empty.  The image hits me with an ineffable sadness, and I keep driving without looking again.

Finally the road turns towards Zunguracocha, but I continue on into the agricultural compound, where the road turns into a grass path, and I come to a high bluff overlooking a turn in the Nanay river. End of the road.

I cut the Yamaha’s engine to take in the scene. It’s a postcard-perfect view of the Nanay, which snakes past beneath my feet. The low hum of birds and insects, mystical incantations lost to the world. I follow a half-completed concrete walkway along the edge of the bluff until it stops . . . so this is it, I thought, remembering the Shel Silverstein book I loved as a child. This is where the sidewalk ends. Beyond it there’s the hidden life of the jungle and the endless void. It’s the edge of civilization out here, the threshold of the human footprint. I hear the sound of oars, and see a lone fisherman passing in a dugout canoe. He is gesturing to the banks and talking to himself. I watch him pass, slowly with steady strokes of the paddle, and he’s gone.

A blur of dragonflies and hummingbirds. Huge aguaje palms and the sound of monkeys in the canopy somewhere far away. Spiders and lizards and flies, oh my. Life is everywhere. The diversity of plants here is astounding. Everywhere I look, I want to look closer. It’s all alive, it all has a function, it’s all connected. But the rain’s on the way, and it’s getting late. So I turn back towards the Carretera, to my comfortable house, to my internet access and my library and, yes, my TV, back to the feathered nest of modern life.

The Carretera is only 90 km. from Iquitos to Nauta, but turn anywhere from the main artery and it grows infinitely longer. It winds along through the jungle, nearly outside of time. As I trundle back towards the main road, I see the city with new eyes. It’s but an island where the artifice and drama of human affairs plays itself out, while the jungle extends in every direction, a vast sea of life incomprehensible in its variety and complexity of miraculous biological creations.

Riding out on the Carretera on a lazy Saturday, you can practically taste the incredible natural diversity of the wilderness, a casual reminder that it’s always out there, and always has been.  Somewhere further back there on the shady slopes of history, all people were connected to it, but now that memory has faded like a dream we’ve already woken up from.

Lost and Found

Seems like I lost about two weeks to dengue, the first week taking care of Corrina, and the second week letting Corrina take care of me. But happily we have both made a full recovery with no more bizarre complications or side effects.  And thanks to the dengue diet, I shed four pounds (about 2 kg ) in seven days.

But enough about dengue.  We’ve already moved on to other problems. Like for instance the rat problem. A rat was slipping under the crack in the door at night and eating chunks out of things like plantains, avocadoes, and potatoes. We got a cat, a kitten really, and the kitten promptly caught one little mouse outside, and that was it. They say you’re supposed to starve cats if you want them to be good hunters, but I didn’t have the heart for it. I fed her fresh river sardines, since here in Iquitos fresh fish is actually cheaper than cat food.

The cat quickly learned where the fish was kept, and she would follow me to the kitchen and harass me every time I opened the fridge. She begged as shamelessly as a dog. I had to remind her she was a cat, and cats are supposed to have a little restraint, a little dignity. But she didn’t get the message, and I decided I’d rather deal with the rat myself. So I gave away the cat and sure enough the rat came back.  We started blocking the crack under the door at night, so the rat got bolder, and made daytime sorties whenever the door was open and unguarded.

The other night while I was watching the Super Bowl, I looked in the kitchen to see the rat perched on top of the door, doing some recon.  I grabbed a broom and it ran under the fridge. I blocked the door and then chased it back into the back bedroom, around the room a few times, then back to the kitchen again, Keystone Kops style, until finally I caught it under a bucket. I wanted to toss it over the wall alive but Corrina said it would just climb back, so I whacked it to death with the broom and tossed it into the field in front of our house.

That was Sunday evening. Tuesday morning, I looked out the front door to see a vulture perched on the curb. It was peering into the tall grass, a study in concentration. It stood motionless for several minutes, then flew one small circle around the scent, to further pinpoint the source. Then it landed and found its prize—the dead rat. I sat there watching it eat, totally impressed. This vulture had isolated and tracked down its scent from the sky, and was able to sniff it out all the way to the source without ever seeing it until he was right up on it.  And unlike the vultures in the market that go after easy pickings like discarded fish scraps, fighting one another constantly, this guy had his meal all to himself.  Talk about lack of dignity in the animal kingdom, I can tell you with certainty that vultures have no dignity.  And they could care less.

I was wishing for some object-location superpowers like that recently, as we had a curious lost and found incident here. Corrina is nursing and this has been a source of stress and contention—she feels trapped by the baby’s feeding schedule, so to help free her from the rigors of constant nursing, I bought her a nice manual breast pump, an Avent Isis. These things are not cheap, but we started with a cheap breast pump and that quickly proved itself utterly worthless. This thing worked like a breeze for a couple of weeks, until one day she was cleaning it in the kitchen when a piece went missing, a round rubber valve about the size of a nickel. We looked everywhere for it, turning the kitchen upside down before finally admitting it had vanished from right under our noses.

More stress, more arguing, as the breast pump sat there out of commission, useless without the rubber valve. A couple of days passed.  Then one night I was reheating some soup on the stove, and as I ladled it into a bowl, I looked in the pot and there among the veggies was the missing piece. It had fallen into a bowl of chopped potatoes on the kitchen table and traveled as a stowaway from there right into the soup!

We reassembled the pump, but it had lost suction. I thought maybe living in the soup for a few days had warped it, but it’s made to withstand boiling for sterilization, so I couldn’t figure it out. More stress. Finally I went to the company’s website and saw that I had been assembling it wrong. An easy solution after all. I returned home like a conquering hero and announced I was going to fix the breast pump. We retrieved the parts from the container where the housekeeper had sterilized them a few days before. The rubber disc was not among them. It had gone missing again. I couldn’t believe it. Again we turned the kitchen upside down, and again it was nowhere to be found. This time I figured, if it was in the last place I would ever look before, that’s probably where it is now. I looked in the soup on the stove, but no luck. I looked in the sugar bowl, in the silverware drawer, in my pockets, under my eyelids, every little impossible nook that it couldn’t possibly be, and it wasn’t in any of them.

I don’t know what conclusions to draw from this. It’s like the universe is taunting me. That little rubber disc just up and disappeared, twice, what the hell? I finally found myself standing motionless in the kitchen, trying to sniff it out in the tall grass, like the vulture. But it was gone for good. Maybe a rat took it.

So I broke down and ordered replacement parts online from the States, so we can finally have some peace. Amazing how a little missing rubber piece can cause so much fuss. Ironically, it was a lack of a certain piece of rubber that created the need for a breast pump in the first place.

Heh.

 

Dengue Fever Blues

There’s been an outbreak of dengue fever in Iquitos the past few weeks, a new strain that has already wreaked havoc in Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. Dengue is a mosquito-borne virus that causes a terrible fever for a couple of days, causes your blood platelets to drop, and in more severe cases it induces internal hemorrhaging. Hemorrhaging usually happens on the third of fourth day, and requires hospitalization. Even with non-hemorrhaging cases of dengue, it takes about a week to make a full recovery.

Official stats show 6,000 cases of dengue in Iquitos in January alone, and 11 fatalities. The numbers indicate that there have been more cases of hemorrhagic dengue in the past months than in the previous six years combined.

There are signs up around Iquitos reminding everyone not to keep any standing water around, where mosquitoes can breed. These signs have increased lately, and then two weeks ago it was announced that the city was going to be fumigating the entire city. They shut down public transportation for a day (that was awesome, actually.) And later they sent crews out on foot to fumigate houses street to street. On Feb. 2nd, the Loreto regional government declared a health emergency in Iquitos, with cases expected to increase this month and public hospitals already challenged to handle the demand. As of today, politicians in Lima and Iquitos are still squabbling over who should pay for all of this, even as hospitals in Iquitos await a transfer of funds to combat the outbreak.

The city has set up a free triage center at Santa Rosa hospital, a sprawling, decaying Spanish colonial-style gated compound—high ceilings, columns, tile floors, and hand-painted murals. It normally functions as the military hospital. The whole place has a post-colonial Catholic vibe to it. There’s a statue of Santa Rosa near the entrance, and another of Santa Maria behind the main hall, which has military insignias painted on one wall and a mural of Papa Juan Pablo II on another.

lighting installation fail

Footnote: Saint Rose of Lima, as she is known, was the first Catholic saint of the Americas. She was into fasting and vegetarianism, and the attention drawn by her great beauty was so upsetting to her that she cut her hair short and disfigured her face with lye. She died at 31, having prophesied exactly the day of her death. Patron saint of the indigenous people of the Americas, gardeners, florists, and Peru as well as all of Latin America. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Right, so, I took a personal interest in all of this last week when Corrina came down with dengue. We were worried, not least because we have a 3 month old baby in the house. The fever set on fairly quickly, so went down to Santa Rosa and got in line for a blood test, which is done over three days to track your platelet count. The main hall has perhaps twenty beds and they were all full. In the back room was the blood-testing lab. I was glad to find it equipped with modern machines and overseen by knowledgeable lab techs working to keep up with the demand, which was constant.

They took Corrina’s blood and five minutes later gave her a slip of paper with a few numbers on it, including her platelet count. It was 290. On the second day we waited over half an hour for her test results, and it was down to 220 (anything under 100 means mandatory hospitalization). Her fever was full-on. She was lying on the couch with tears running down her face, she was in such discomfort. There is no cure for dengue, the doctors prescribe Paracetamol (acetaminophen) for the fever but you just have to let it run its course. We took our own measures also. I gave her a dose of MMS (http://www.mmsfacts.com/), which is a natural form of chlorine that is somewhat controversial in the States for its purported ability to quickly kill off of all sorts of microbes and parasites in the body, just like putting chlorine into pool water. (They claim it attacks only germs, viruses and bacteria harmful to the body, but leaves friendly bacteria alone.)

On the third day we waited over an hour for the test results. They told us that new arrivals get top priority, which makes sense. So we sat there amidst a milling crowd of other Peruvians waiting outside the lab. Little details floating by—the triage nurse doing all the paperwork manually, the open laptop on his desk serving no apparent purpose. The rotting ceiling in the doctor’s ward, the peeling paint, shredded window screens and crooked doors housing high-tech equipment in the blood lab.  The brand-new scales that were in use, though no one had bothered to remove the tape and bubble wrap. The place was an aging grand dame dolled up in new couture.

In the main hall, a young girl was in such pain that she cried long, mournful sounds of agony. Her family sat by helplessly watching over her. In the next room a young child was screaming in terror. It was a tough place to have to pass an hour. We spent about twenty minutes watching a cockroach try to climb a wall. It couldn’t do it. I tried to ignore the sounds of suffering around us, the grim ambiance of it all.

the main hall at Santa Rosa

Finally they called Corrina’s name. Her platelet count had bumped up slightly to 224, and it looked like she was turning the corner. It’s hard to say if the MMS helped or not. We gave her some natural remedies as well, the treatments used by people in the jungle, where the only medicines available are plants.  The juice of malva leaves is a well-known fever reducer, and papaya leaves are good for boosting blood platelets. She took both, and they seemed to help.  Within a week she made a full recovery.

Not too long after that, the fumigators came to our street, but we didn’t let them inside because of the baby. We did buy insect spray, and a more heavy-duty mosquito net for the crib, and another for the hammock. Our place is totally mosquito proof in theory, but once in awhile one sneaks in. Corrina hunts them down with ruthless precision.

Meanwhile I was dealing with afflictions of my own. I came down with some kind of funky tropical fungus on my hands that looked like poison ivy. After two weeks it hadn’t gone away, in fact it started to spread. I thought I had gotten it from gardening, perhaps from touching a poisonous plant.  The itching was absolutely insanity-inducing as it spread, and scratching only made it worse. Reminds me of the time my friend got 101 chigger bites on her body and almost lost her mind from the relentless itching. This was like that, only concentrated in my hands. I went to see a dermatologist, who diagnosed contact dermatitis (which, I believe, is what they say when they don’t know exactly what it is) and prescribed antihistamines as well as an industrial-grade steroid cream to use twice a day. It seemed to be working. Then I too came down with dengue, just a few days after Corrina recovered from it.

The fever came on like a plague of locusts. I feel like I might have tempted fate by telling several people about the MMS treatment and saying I didn’t know how effective is was for dengue because she might have started to recover regardless, we didn’t have another case to compare it to. Well, that case turned out to be me. I took MMS on the afternoon of the first day, right as the fever hit, to see if I could head it off at the pass. I also continued the treatment for the dermatitis, applying the hand cream right about midnight right before I fell asleep. I had another dose of MMS on hand, but my instinct told me to wait until the next day to take it.

I awoke at 2am, and something was terribly wrong. My face had blown up like a balloon. My eyes had swollen completely shut, my lips felt like a couple of Vienna sausages, and raised welts had appeared on my scalp and neck. My cheeks were swollen like a chipmunk, even my ears were bigger.  I got up to have a look. It was like that scene in “The Elephant Man” when John Merrick sees himself in the mirror for the first time. Not good.

before

 

after

In the morning Corrina and I squabbled about whether to go back to the clinic. Her mother was saying “you look terrible! You have to get treatment–do it for your baby!”  Classic mom guilt. I had to admit that I was even worse off than I’d been in the middle of the night. We went to the clinic and the doctor said that I’d had an allergic reaction caused by combining MMS with one of the other medications, probably the steroid cream. He gave me a laundry list of meds. The system at the clinic for meds is a la carte. You can buy whatever they prescribe, even shots, at the pharmacy. I bought a $20 dollar cortisone shot and they administered it. Then I went home and slept half the day, until the fever started to subside.

That afternoon Corrina came out to the patio and asked me how I was doing. Well, I replied, I look like a different person, I feel like a circus freak, I have a creeping fungus spreading up my arms, and oh yeah, I also have dengue. So I’d say I’ve had better days.

But it looks like I will recover from all these afflictions, with a few things to take away from the experience. MMS . . . well, it may be useful for a lot of things, but dengue is going to run its course no matter what you do. The creator of MMS claims it is the most important medical discovery of the 21^st century, and says “it remains the most important mineral known to mankind.” The FDA has a different opinion. According to a press release from last July, “the product, when used as directed, produces an industrial bleach (chlorine dioxide) that can cause serious harm to health . . . consumers who have MMS should stop using it immediately and throw it away.” Direct quote.

I learned the hard way not to combine MMS with other medications. I would have been better off not taking it at all. On a more positive note, I found that some traditional plant remedies really work, and shouldn’t be dismissed as mere folk medicine. Malva leaves, for instance, work amazingly well for managing a fever. The malva and papaya approach helped Corrina and I just as much as the pills prescribed by the doctor, if not more.

And finally, I learned that it’s a good idea to wear gloves when weeding unknown plants out of your garden, and asking Santa Rosa to keep an eye out for you probably wouldn’t hurt either.