San Martin - Village Life

I can't believe we've already finished with 3 field sites! Time flies in the field.

On the break in between Nueva Esperanza and San Martin, some of us decided to go to a butterfly place, a mariposario, a little ways down the Nanay River. It actually turned out to also be a rescue/rehabilitation center for any rainforest animals that have been confiscated by the Peruvian police,  so we got to see a lot of interesting animals, like a coati, capybara, ocelot, jaguar, and many species of monkeys, including some endangered species and pygmy marmosets! Unfortunately, I forgot my camera that day, so I'll have to steal some pictures from someone else and upload them later.

San Martin is a community on the Nanay River. We drove to a port about 40 minutes away, and then took a 2 hour boat ride down the river. In this community Judit and her crew usually stays in the schoolhouse because the town is small and they only use like 2 of the 4 rooms. However, when we arrived we found out that the teacher had locked the doors of the school house and left for an indefinite period of time, so the children of the community hadn't had school for a long time.

We stayed in the two rooms to the left!

One of the village's families lives right next to the schoolhouse and have become very close with Judit over the years (this is her fourth year doing fieldwork). So close, in fact, that last year when the mother had her 6th baby, she named it Judit! As such, the children would constantly hang around whoever was on their day off and would get very excited when the rest of the crew got home that day. It was fun to hang out with them and most of us got pretty close to them. I left the older girls some of my clothes when I left, and their only son, Pablo (Pablito to us!) is the one who scaled the sides of the schoolhouse to open the doors from inside for us.

Cesi, Silvana, Elizabet, Pablo, and Mima, I think...

I think this is how you are supposed to pose in Peru

Pablito and baby Judit!

Baby Judit and mama!

Our crew split up into each room, and we stored gear in one room and food/kitchen utilities in the other. Judit bought a small portable burner so we could make hot water at our leisure (we drink a LOT of coffee/hot chocolate in the field, it's kind of ridiculous). It's always nice to stay under a roof because then you don't have to worry about the rain as much, although the windows in the school building did not have glass. Most of the houses actually did not have walls, they were just open platforms.

There was some drama in the beginning because the boss of the park reserve has been spreading nasty rumors about Judit for reasons unknown (and denied every time Judit talks to him), so the president of San Martin told the villagers that Judit had to pay a 150 soles fine for any birds we killed in the net, and that she had to pay a villager to accompany us everyday to monitor our activities and make sure we were researching in the appropriate areas with the correct number of nets and not doing anything harmful to the forest. Which is ironic considering that the villagers themselves often exploit the rainforest unsustainably (e.g. cutting down the largest trees to sell for lumber). In any case, we were forced to pay a "vigilante" to accompany us on the days we opened nets. Most of the villagers didn't really care and weren't very interested in this job - we only paid them 20 soles for a full day (10 soles on the half days), and it was a huge waste of their time. They usually just sat around, bored, while we worked and sometimes also sat around, bored, for 10 hours. It's not in the villagers' best interest to be unkind to us, because we leave them things and Judit hires the women of the village to cook for us, so she's bringing in a source of income. One of the men, though, was kind of a dick about it and argued more fiercely when we had the discussion about the vigilantes. He is also one of the villagers we found out was illegally logging in the forest, and we saw a puma and ocelot pelt (that he illegally hunted) in his giant house which also has a satellite dish (probably bought with his logging profits). He's called was Don Rafael, but we called him Don Asshole.

For some reason this looks wrong to me...

Anyways, other than that awkwardness, life in the village was nice. The schoolhouse had toilets we could use (they don't have seats and you flush them by pouring a bucket of water into the bowl, which didn't always work so well...) and next to the schoolhouse was an outdoor pump where we got our drinking water and bathed.

While we were in the village, we met two men from Spain who were working with the sweat bees here. They were transferring colonies of honey-producing bees to boxes that they made so that the families here could produce and sell honey, as part of a community service-type thing. We got to watch the process, which is very interesting because nobody really studies these wild bees. Luckily they didn't sting. They honey they produce is really unique-flavored - the first hive's honey was a mixture of sweet, spicy, fruity, and a little tangy. The second hive was a different species of bee, and their honey tasted a little more like the honey we are used to, but still a tiny bit spicy.

They put the main hive part in these boxes, and then put wax and honeycomb in other layers stacked on top.

There was also some personal drama going on among the volunteers, as certain people are starting to not get along as well. It hasn't affected me personally (I like everyone here!) but it has been causing some strife among the group, which is unfortunate. Despite this, we have been getting really close with each other and are like a little family. The last few days at San Martin we started to lie around and make shadow puppets after dinner with our headlamps, and we have a lot of (nerdy) bird-related inside jokes. I'm going to miss these people a lot when I'm gone!

This was actually from back between Km28 and Nueva Esperanza - photo by Oona.