From the Amazon to Quito: A little bit about Humanized Births

Well, after a long hiatus from the blogosphere, it's time I do a little updating about some of the exciting work I/we have been up to with Jungle Mamas. We are on our second round of birth apprenticeships with three Jungle Mamas participants at the fabulous Clinica la Primavera (the first round of participants are pictured above with Dr. Diego Alarcon, founder of the clinic). 


First, I would like to provide some contextual information about Clinica la Primavera. It was founded by Dr. Diego Alarcon and his wife (and an incredible doula), Lili Ruales.  They started the clinic because the existing westernized birth model is one that disempowers the lived experience of the mother, baby, and father, medicalizing a very natural process by placing all power into the hands of doctors and hospitals (who are so often bogged down by protocols and procedures that they forget the human element).  They work with mothers and fathers-to-be from early on in the pregnancy in establishing an emotional and loving connection among all individuals involved, with the primary goal to eliminate the mother's fear so that the birth process is safe and removes the possibility of trauma in the experience. Their approach is called "el parto humanizado" or the "humanized birth," and has garnered international attention from people as famous and revolutionary as Robbie Davis-Floyd. She has published an excellent and useful book known as _Birth Models that Work_ and will soon be following up with a second volume that includes a chapter featuring Clinica la Primavera. If I were to ever find myself pregnant in Ecuador (and may that not happen for a *very long* time), I would most certainly put my faith and birth experience in the hands of the doctors and doulas of Clinica la Primavera. I would most certainly (and have) recommend it to friends and colleagues who are/will be/have been pregnant here in Ecuador. 


So, having such a wonderful reputation both recognized at the local and global levels, the alliance between Clinica la Primavera and Jungle Mamas seems a perfect fit. One of the goals in the program I work for is to empower both Achuar men and women with the birth experience and to provide them with the information necessary to assure a safe birth and an informed response in the case of a birth emergency.  From the Safe Birth and Family Health workshops we have conducted in the Achuar communities, there have been a handfull of people who have stepped up to the plate and are actively attending to the births of the people in their communities. These people have shown commitment and an ability to attend births, hence we have been collaborating with Clinica la Primavera by sending these people to do birth apprenticeships (and to get more hands-on experience).

The Sounds of Home here and there

Sitting in the café with friends,
listening to the upbeat cadence of a Bird tune
pulsating through the room, whiskey's fiery tongue
tripling on the triplets of the sharp brassy jazz sound.
Tap
Tap
Tapping her foot on the floor,
ticking her nails against the icy glass
Right on the two and four.
Transported back to a time
When, as young children, 
Instead of kissing behind the bleachers
They inhaled their sandwiches
with great anticipation
of the collective groove they would soon create
Oh the room, how it percolated
with yeahs! And woos!
Bouncing off the foam walls
As each one ripped through their solo
That brass section is gassy!
Here comes the sax soli
And the rhythm section has the groove in the pocket
Traveling, winning awards, and infecting audiences
Giving them a grade-A soul vaccination
Every Tuesday after school,
the children made a maiden voyage to Oaktown
In search of a higher groove
To find hours and hours of harmonies
Among all ages all colors all religions
This voyage, though they did not know it then,
Would take them beyond their years and time together
Across oceans and through different foreign tongues
Sometimes in faraway places
yet always reminding them, bringing them back home
Back to the Bay


She sits and things - how marvelous it is
To be hearing the sounds of home faraway
here in this little enclave high in the Andes
She is caught up in nostalgic thoughts
and syncopated movements 
When someone opens the door,
causing the maroon mist of memory to disperse
She is transported forward to the present
Back within herself, hack to her foreign body,
Her foreign nationality
Who are you and where did you come from?
She wonders, half asking herself and half asking the newcomer,
Who has been caught up in the whirring frenzy of arrival
The tranquility of the dolphin's dance has rudely ceased
She looks into the glass, focusing on the rhythmic clinking
Tlink clink of the ice cubes along with the cymbals
The golden glow of the whiskey gleaming in unison with the horns
The room reharmonizes to incorporate the new stranger
and a new sound is born
Transforming, shifting, and undulating to somethin' else
A new feeling, a new affect that is easily read upon the face
Dissonance and resonance ring through
Hitting dep going beyond the boundaries of physical space
the right chord payed at the right moment,
with the right intention and the right feel
Can change a person forever
Can move across the cultural valleys flowing rivers of languages
Can fool you into thinking you are home
She sat listening and absorbing the waves
Strangely transfixed
Enchanted by the prelude to a memory
opening up countless possibilities
Countless places countless faces
Thanks to the maiden voyage of a dream
A dream that is fleeting and yet never dies. 
A dream of home near and far.

The Importance of Intuition in Jungle Work

Intuition. Are you listening to it? Oftentimes not. How can we, when we keep our world so full of preocupations - the internet, world events, social mundanities/obligations, work, stress, etc? It's somewhat akin to a little candle; sometimes we're able to keep it lit and other times it gets blown out by the winds of distraction. Sometimes it flares up and burns bright, reminding us -- "Hey! I'm here!" amidst the darkness of quotidian chaos and confusion. There are times when we willfully blow it out because the message it brings is far from what we desire. We force it to shine a certain way in order to bring light to shadows that shouldn't be revealed or to bring darkness to those that should be in the clear.

Last week, I was reminded just how strongly that little light can burn and how the choice to recognize its existence can potentially cost you your life. On Monday, I was going to canoe down the Copataza river with a co-worker, one carved out of a tree trunk to visit various indigenous communities along the river. It had been raining very hard throughout the province of Pastaza, causing many rivers and their estuaries to rise and shake their fluid fists at their shores and at the trees.

We drove to the community of Miraflores where we would lower ourselves into the canoe and navigate the river. A paved road led us to what seemed like the middle of nowhere and we suddenly come upon a community of Kichwas and mestizos (colonists or colonos). We walk to the iver and our jaws drop as we observe that the river has reached above the tree line, and not a single boulder or stone under the surface was visible. Looking at the river and its muddy texture reminds me of the chocolate river from the movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, except not nearly as inviting or sweet. We all looked at each other: the gringa, the kichwa, the achuar, the mestizo and said "there's no way we're risking our lives in that!" The plan was to return at dawn the following morning to see if the level had gotten any lower.

On the drive back in the pouring rain, we discover a young indigenous leader had just passed away, and I was reminded of the time that I was trapped in Pumpuentsa for 30 hours because the airplane could not land in the community due to torrential rainstorms. We had given away all of our food and were going crazy with anticipation and doubt. I had never seen it rain so hard. Just that day, a young man had died in a neighboring community after taking floripondio (the plant datura), which is a plant often used for spiritual journeys and drowning in the river. A friend of mine from the community told me that whenever a strong person dies, it will usually downpour the next day to represent the energy of that person making its full circle from life to death.  The death of this indigenous leader must have been the cause of this rainstorm, one so powerful as to cost the lives of 14 other people and disappearance of 3 people in flash floods in Puyo, Pastaza. It was a day of reckoning with mother nature. The fluid forces of water had made its power and superiority known to everyone, and our excitement for the Amazon adventure was reduced to a desire to retreat back to the mountainous and welcoming cradle of Quito.

Back in Puyo, we visited the Achuar federation's offices (NAE) and conversed briefly with one of the leaders. He says: "It's not worth it. One shouldn't force trips in frog season" (aka don't have grand expectations for plans into the jungle when it's rainy season). That stuck with us. And so the great adventure was suspended for another season, one where the frogs would not come out to mock us as we struggle through the current.  I was incredibly disappointed. Our adventure was going to be fantastic - we were going to Achuar communities to talk about sustainable fish farming and the social impacts of oil extraction and exploitation, in addition to hunting peccary (and eating it!); truly a different type of jungle adventure. But thinking back to the Achuar leader, it really is necessary to not have high expectations in the jungle of your plans carrying through. You never know what kind of curve ball nature is going to throw you, and it's best to be finely attuned to your intuition and to pay attention to the signs around you. Fir this trip, all signs were pointing to "do not enter," and thankfully we were listening.

Working in the jungle requires patience, flexibility, and a keen sense of intuition. If you don't have one, you certainly learn to cultivate it, because not listening to it could mean an extra several days trapped in a community without food, or worse, trying to rush flying out of that community in bad weather and risking a plane or canoe crash. And if some sort of a complication results in your plans getting destroyed, you have to just shrug "oh well, that's nature." This is the general attitude that people have and it's a pretty good one; for if you don't have high expectations and if you pay attention to your intuition, perhaps you will be able to negate disappointment altogether. A valuable lesson learned indeed.

The Nightmare of Deforestation, Oil, and Toucans

I just have to write down this one dream because it left me feeling quite unsettled this morning.

I dreamt that my colleagues, some friends, and I went on a brief trip to some very remote part of the jungle. It wasn't too remote in the sense that you had to get there by airplane, but there was a road, that once you walked a bit off the pavement, you could see the most beautiful primary forest. It was a preserve of some kind and I was here with these people specifically with the purpose of enjoying it's rare beauty.

We all stayed in a hostel (kind of ironic) and woke up the next day to go get bus tickets back to Quito. I decided to go for a run down the road to buy the group tickets. It was easy at first, I was running with great ease and speed, but then I came upon the choking traffic of dump trucks, logging trucks, and oil rigs whose exhaust affected me so much that I nearly passed out and almost got hit by a truck. I finally reached the place to buy tickets (which looked a lot like the main street for this suburb of Quito called Cumbayá). I had to search for the tickets in between music records (curiously, I found the tickets in an album recorded with John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders called "Meditations" which in real life, I've been listening to). I run back to the people in the hostel and we all decide to walk to the bus station, which is probably a mile away from the hostel. The group sort of separates, and I'm walking with an unfamiliar person when we come upon this beautiful little plot of semi-deforested land. We are sad, but all of the sudden we see that there are two beautiful toucans and two puffins (totally not found in the Amazon, but whatever). They are sitting there, disaffected by the seemingly recent absence of trees. It was almost as if they were saying: "so what if our trees were cut down, we are still beautiful." I continued to walk with the stranger and we finally caught up with the rest of the group, still somewhat reeling from the beautiful and extremely rare sight we had stumbled upon (where I work in the jungle, you don't see toucans because they have gone so deep into the jungle. Someone told me that dreaming of toucans is a sign that some very positive change will happen, usually having to do with the heart).

The group is walking when suddenly the road forks off and ends in a chain-link fence with barbed wire. We continue along the non-fenced-in path and realize we are lost. The path ends and the view at the end of it is terrifying. We are standing on a small mountain (el monte) and overlook what should be beautiful and untouched primary forest. As we look down into the valley, we see bubbling pits and men digging with machines to create new ones. Illegal oil excavation and extraction. We realize that these men are "oil poachers" (that's what we called them in the dream) and if they realized a bunch of environmentally-conscious Ecuadorians and gringos were watching them, they would probably shoot us on the spot. We keep walking until we reach another dead end with yet another group of oil poachers. This happens several times until we reach a different fork in the road, where there are a bunch of gringo children playing with a piñata and having a picnic with their wealthy parents. By this time we are exhausted and fearing for our lives, so seeing these people brings us great relief. Two little girls run up to us and we ask for help. In their seemingly unaware and naive state, they point us to another path that will get us back on the road. It is blocked and we must climb over the tall barbed wire fence. When it is my turn, I almost cross it, when suddenly a gigantic purple and venomous centipede jumps out at the place where I am putting my leg and I narrowly escape a very sad ending.

We make it back to the bus station, silenced by the shock of seeing so many oil poachers. I just kept thinking: "what the hell do we do about what we just saw?" This was a place that was supposed to be legally protected by the government as un-excavatable territory, and yet, it was clearly being destroyed. I think it has to do with an underlying fear that once this road called the Trans-Cutucu comes into Achuar territory (an area that has decidedly kept out oil excavation and extraction) and very very close to the communities I work in, people are going to have to think of new ways to prevent "oil poaching" from happening, and to not get blinded by the short-term wealth that comes along with deforestation and oil extraction. Ugh. What a curious way to start wednesday.

The Other Other

27/1/11
Enter the Other.
One is overtaken by green. An awkward duck couple waddles by, cautiously approaching the anxious and paranoid parrot who is walking sideways. He's struggling to use his beak to grasp hold of a wooden stump. The smell of fresh rain moisture moss curls into one's nose amidst the constant churtling of birds. There's a flash of yellow that catches the eye - maybe it's a parrot that's passing by. The flash and click and behind it there is a pallid and portly German tourist.

Under the tweets and crackling tree and animal life, the muffled lull of a vallenato song can be heard - a sensitive and lonesome male is calling out to his mate for her to return to him. His call is one of remorse, a tone distinct and unique to his species - "I may have wronged you, but you are my everything." The female joins him in his call in a harmony a third above his tone and eventually gives in to the call of her unfaithful mate, thus committing themselves to an endless cycle of betrayal. Such is the mating pattern of this human species.

By maintaining a most quiet and disaffected disposition - careful to not give up one's camouflaged position,  one can distinguish the rare, high-pitched call of Western German dialects. The volume is high and seems to be one of great enthusiasm, as the males seem to be discussing the wild birds they have seen and the women proceed to torture the awkward duck couple by chasing them around in circles.  It becomes apparent that this group is about to engage in ritual of exchange and fraternization, which takes place in a wooden container full of hot water - an act that can only take place when actors are partially nude.

Upon entering this heated space, their weathered and travel-torn bodies are transformed into steamy and red fleshy masses. The volume and pitch of their calls becomes noticeably lowered and they discuss about how they are feeling "grounded," "rooted", and "at peace" with this concept they seem to call "the self." Once their transformation has finished, their tendency to chase semi-domestic waterfowl appears to diminish significantly. For what reason has these rare and foreign species migrated to this land? Perhaps they are in search of something: another mate, to accumulate a set of exotic experiences, objects, and stories to recount to their people, or perhaps it is to find this misplaced "self" (note for further investigation: look into the existence of "self trees").

Exit Other. Enter the Other Other. The Other Other smashes the fourth wall of the Other's stage.

Sitting in this hammock makes me realize just how sunburned and exposed I am to getting eaten alive by mosquitos.  It's been a long day and I've had a lot of time to reflect (that happens here, in "nature") and I think I'll treat myself to a hot tub in the hostel later. It's been a long day - we woke up at 2:30 am to meet with the intercultural health leader of the ministry of health in Macas, the first city founded in the Ecuadorian Amazon - and it's time to relax. I sometimes find myself sitting in a still moment and listening to the sounds of my surroundings. Not living in the jungle or subjungle areas (aka the city of Puyo) on a regular basis, I can't help but find myself exoticizing my environment: insects, birds, and plant sounds - you just can't help but become more AWARE.  I get seduced by the "jungleyness" and forget about the actual context sometimes. It's easy to lose yourself in the little created environments - hostels or parks that are clearly urbanized yet manage to elude you into thinking you're in THE JUNGLE (the Jungle where tigers, toucans, and snakes live) and then you look over to the right and see some tourists taking pictures. For a moment, I had this immediate reaction of "silly foreign people, taking pictures of the 'wild' macaw parrot in the hostel garden, this seemingly 'unauthentic' space of jungleness" and then I remember that *I* am a silly foreigner sitting in the weird jungle space, taking it all in. Even when I'm somewhere else in Ecuador and I see a particularly gringo-ized group of tourists, I tend to think "wow, look at those funny gringos. They stick out like sore thumbs." And I immediately remind myself of the fact that I am a relatively pale-skinned blonde gringa and every time I step into a cab, I hear: "Are you here on vacation? How long? Your spanish is good! What country are you from? Do you have a boyfriend? That'll be $5 [when it should only be 2.50]." Sometimes the "Jungle" makes you forget where you are. Oh well.

Exit Other [somewhat disgruntled] Other.

From the Concrete Jungle to the Cinnamon City

Well, I am back in Puyo, after taking a long [unwanted] jungle hiatus in Quito for over 2 months. I have to say that Quito is one of those places where after spending too much time within the city limits, you viscerally feel it eating away at you.  Some attribute it to constant lead poisoning in the air, the notion that it is at the center of volcanic energy [or vortices for the woo-woo of heart], or that most of its population never leave the city so it's just full of people ready to burst at the seams. I've heard some sayings and seen some graffiti around Quito (largely diffused by some young and creative Quiteños I've come to know as of late) that addresses this sense of latent locura lingering in the Andean city air. "Some are born with luck, others are born in Quito" or "After I kill myself, I wake up in Quito."

This is not to totally cast a negative light on Quito, it most certainly has it's secrets and treasures, but it is so easy to feel trapped by life within the little Andean city and to become blind to the beauty, complications, and different little worlds that exist within the country. For example, it's easy to get in a tizzy over petty social life yet once you leave the reality of the city and become immersed into another, (where, for example, people struggle on a daily basis to not have their children get gravely ill and to keep them properly nourished), you begin to put things into perspective. Not to say that one must feel guilty, but sometimes certain issues become frivolous by comparison. As aware as I have to be on a constant basis about these different spaces, realities, and dreams, I must say that it is difficult at times to keep them in perspective. Spending so much time in Quito somehow left me feeling disconnected with the work I do in the jungle, with the Achuar, despite the fact that I work on planning, organization, and coodinating for this program every day.

So as fate should so thankfully have it, I find myself in Puyo again, embarking on another leg of the Jungle Mama's journey (when I say Jungle Mamas or Ikiama Nukuri, I am referring to the intercultural women and community health program I am working on with the Achuar of Morona-Santiago aka the driving force for being down here...see other entries).  We are here to make alliances with the Ministry of Public Health, specifically their intercultural health branch and to broaden the collaboration with community health and safe birth workshops. This trip will be an exciting one for making alliances and taking important steps forward, so I should be writing with more frequency!