Wednesday 3 July 2013

Day 2 - Tribes and Tributes

Raj reporting in, 21:14 here in Iquitos and it's been some day. As aforementioned, we had a day of semi boredom, saved by Mrs Bateson though, shoutout to her. Due to a strike in Iquitos we were not able to do the work that we had planned to do, so instead, we had taken a boat and sailed about 45 minutes down the tributaries of the Amazon to see the Bora tribe.

It was an interesting experience, we had trekked a little way into the riverbanks and found several huts, inside were some reptile skins as well as alot of trinkets. We sat down and leader of the tribe spoke to us about the history and origins of the tribe, how due to other tribes eating them in Colombia they were migrated. Following this some of us had a dance with the tribe members (Pictures soon to follow, damn it was fun) and we bought some trinkets and then left to the floating balsa wood houses in another tributary. 

This was a little bit of a culture shock, Here especially there was a great lack of hygiene, all the houses were floating on the river, however this meant people had to use that river for everything, and I mean everything, it was a shock to see what were used to in comparison to this.

We returned to the Hotel due to impending strike and Mrs Bateson had a great idea of a tribal contest, so we had fun making our own tribes, tribe dress, logos and etc. 

After each group had performed on the stage where we eat, we went to our reflection time in Mrs Mitchell and Mrs Bateson's room, todays theme was Risk, as opposed to yesterdays Journey theme. It was a good laugh for the most part, we had a little exercise about telling the group our;
Favourite Sandwich filling
A fun fact about ourselves
And a risk we have taken recently. 

We also met Ray, a peruvian priest-doctor who works within the Parish here in Iquitos and listened to him tell us of the major problems plaguing the city; AIDS, Poverty, Crime Incidence on the rise. He also had discussed the beginnings of the Churches influence in Peru, as well as Iquitos of course, and it was a very interesting discussion. 

All in all I think that today was a good day, despite yesterdays orphanage, where we still had fun playing games with children, I think this was really, well for the most of us, a real exposure to poverty and obviously had an effect on most of us during the boat rides between places.

Raj

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