Foto Story: A day in Belén

To give you a bit more of a visual understaning of my life and work in Iquitos, I’ve put together the following story of pictures from an afternoon workshop in Belen. Though I spend most of my time at La Restinga, I go here twice a week in the afternoons to do workshops with the kids, mostly around issues of child abuse and exploitation. As I hope I’m able to portray through the pictures, Belen is an area of great poverty, but it’s also so much more than that. Working this kids gives me so much hope and joy, and I wish you could all get to know them. But for now, the pictures will have to do... By the way, you should be able to see most of the pictures in larger size by clicking on them. This is also true for all the other pictures on this blog.

Above: Arriving in Belén in the afternoons, we are always met by a drastically different sight than what we see downtown Iquitos. Belén is both its own city as well as part of the larger Iquitos. The whole area lies much lower than the rest of the city, so the houses are built on stilts. When the river rises, which it will in a few months, the streets are filled with water and the only way of getting around is in caoes and boats. Here's a boat in construction.

As we walk through the neighboorhood, on the way to the community house where we work, we usually see lots of the kids on our way. Here is one of the educators, an Italian volunteer, Alessandro, greeted by Wellixer, Justin, and Franklin - three of our most rambunctious but wonderful boys.




Some of the kids, and Carmen (another educator) and I laying down to pose for the camera.


Katty (12) flashing her beautiful smile.










Carmen and Wellixer goofing around..

Victoria taking a break and smiling to the camera. This day's lesson was about stragtegies for coping with sexual abuse, and here the kids are drawing their ideas for how to respond to different types of abuse.

As I've described before, several of the houses in Belén don't have a fourth wall. This is the house accross from where we work.

On this particular day, we decided to go visit Giler, one of the participants in a young leaders program in Belén. He lives right down the street from the house where we work to the kids, and this is us sitting outside, getting to know his family and some of his neighboors while we waited.

Giler´s little sister looking curiously at us...

Carmen doesn't know how to swim, so she was smiling with fear and joy as we set out.




Turns out Carmen had reason to be scared. There were so many times we thought the boat was about to tip over, including in the moment when this picture was taken (not incidentally while I was trying to steer...).





The sun setting down as Giler steered us (including his two younger sisters in the picture above) safely back to the shore.


As we headed home our day was made, if possible, even better by the sight of a beautiful rainbow rising out of the dirt roads.

The day Liz Tánia found lice in my hair..

As 12 year old girls so often do, Liz Tánia, one of the girls at La Restinga, loves playing with hair. This particular morning she was braiding and poofing my hair when she suddenly let out a small scream at the discovery of a small insect crawling out of my hair right above my ear. She called another girl to come over and take a look, and before long they found another one...and another one...and another one. Yup, you guessed it. I have head lice.
I have been having itches in my scalp for a long time, but when I asked Elin (my roommate) to check my head about a week ago, and she didn't find anything, I figured my scalps was just irritated by the perfume from the shampoo or something like that. Oops.
"MIRA, la muchachona tiene piojos," Liz Tánia shouted after the discovery, and soon I had a small team of people picking lice out of my head (loosely translated: "LOOK, the tall girl (which btw is one of my more popular nicknames) has lice!). Hoping that a lice shampoo and a serious round of cleaning of the apartment and our clothes will do the trick, and that my tiny friends will long gone in a few days... :)

Last minute Christmas present? Make it a good one..

To those of you out of ideas or still looking for Christmas presents, here are some suggestions for sustainable and life-giving gifts. Just click on the text in blue (note that some of the websites are in Norwegian):

• www.levebrod.no -- Gi en gave av haap og framtid for de som trenger det ved aa stotte Strommestiftelsens arbeid
  
• www.mittklima.no -- kjop klimakvoter for aa veie opp for aarets flyturer, bilturer, etc.
  
• ELCA Good Gifts -- ELCA's Christmas gifts
  
• Lutheran World Federation -- consider supporting this important ministry
  
• Gaver Som Forandrer Hverdan -- gi en biodiselplante, en gitar, eller en gjeit gjennom kirkens nodhjelps kreative arbeid
• Econation's ideas for sustainable christmas presents
• Gronn Hverdags julegavetips
  

From HIV to HOPE

December 1st, as many of you know, was the World AIDS day. Though everyone, regardless of age, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and lifestyle can be affected by HIV/AIDS, the fact is that persons in the sex industry (and in particular younger women) are much more vulnerable to becoming infected. Here in Iquitos, there are exceptionally high levels of child exploitation and prostitution, which contributes to the fact that Iquitos is the city with the second highest cases of HIV infections in Peru.

La Restinga's approach to this issue is broad and includes everything from education, to workshops, to theatre, to visual arts projects. This year, one of the highlights was taking part in a campaign against discrimination towards people living with HIV. All the kids got t-shirts that said VIH (HIV in spanish), and were given the chance to change that word into something like VIVO (I live), VIVIR (live), or VIDA (life). This was to send the message that getting HIV is not neccesarily a death sentence, and those who are infected are not just sick people, or case studies, but living human beings. After everyone had made their Above: Having a blast at the hospital with Luis and Julio

own shirt, we went to the regional hospital, where we split into groups and asked the medical personal if they wanted to be part of the campaign. If they accepted, we put the VIH shirt on them and painted symbols and words on it while talking to them about how they could work to stop discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS.
This was super interesting, because there is still a lot of fear within the medical community (some medical personell still insist on putting on gloves before examining a HIV patient, which is of course ludacris, since HIV cannot be spread through physical touch). The campaign turned out to be a huge success, and we had a ton of people coming up to us asking how they could get involved. When we ran out of t-shirts, some people (including patients at the hospital) came up to us insisting that we paint directly onto whatever clothes they were wearing (see picture below).

Above: After we ran out of t-shirts this man asked if we could paint onto the t-shirt he was wearing that day.

Aside from this event, La Restinga has been working all throughout the month of November, dealing with issues of sexuality, gender roles and gender identity, abuse, trafficking, and STIs (sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS). I got the exciting challenge of co-teaching a weeklong workshop with an overview of all of these issues with some of the younger kids (10-13yrs), which was really interesting and but also daunting. The average age of first sexual intercourse in Iquitos is 14yrs (and in some isolated parts of the city it's as low as 12yrs), which is scary and heartbreaking (especially because sexual abuse definitely lowers the average). Given all the health risk associated with this, it's extremely important to start talking to the kids about these issues at an early age.

Picture above: As part of one of the art works promoting the use of condoms to protect against HIV/AIDS, one creative teenager made a copy of Munch's infamous scream-face. If you look closely, you´ll see the same face happily trapped inside a condom.

So what am I actually doing here?

I realize that I have yet to tell you anything about my job description and what I actually do at La Restinga on a daily basis. This is partly due to the fact that my job description changes all the time depending on how many other volunteers are here and what the greatest needs are. But I will do my best to give you a basic idea of my schedule and what the everyday life is like here.

Pascual helping Betman, who has just learned how to read.

Elin and I usually get up around 7.30 and arrive at La Restinga around 8.30 each morning to help out at Aula Movil. This is a homework help program (most of the kids go to school in the afternoon), but there are always other workshops and projects going on. Each month they choose a new theme to work with, and for the last month we have been working up towards the World AIDS Day on December 1st with the theme Sexuality and HIV-AIDS. I'll write more about this, and our celebration of December 1st in a later post. The homework help and workshops usually lasts up until 11.30 or noon, when we all have lunch. There's a strict rule that everyone has to finish their food, which could seem odd because the portions are huge and there are kids and youth in all different sizes and ages, but this is usually not a problem since this is the only meal some of the kids get consistently every day.

After lunch, we slowly disperse (the kids go to school and I go back to the apartment). Two days a week, I return in the middle of the day to go with the team to Belen (a poverty stricken part of the city) where we have a separate project with at-risk kids and youth. Here we work as health promoters, and our workshops are centered around the prevention of sexual abuse and explotation, HIV-AIDS, and STIs, and promotion of healthy behavior, self-esteem, and personal hygiene. Taking part of the planning and execution of this project is definitely some of the most demanding, but also the most rewarding work here. It is so fun to plan and be part of the planning process and figure out how we can best reach the kids, but really hard to put it into practice, because of countless challenges, including lack of attention (keeping a group of hyperactive kids interested for a full 2 hours is like a mission impossible), lack of attendance, lack of place to work (when we arrived on site last week, we were surprised to find that the roof of the building had been removed, which, in 100 degree heat made it impossible to work, so we had to cancel the next two sessions until we had a roof over our heads). Needless to say, I'm learning to be flexible.

Good friends: Angela and Lucero are always together when they're at La Restinga.

After returning from Belen, we make dinner in the apartment, which is always an adventure. Elin and I love trying new things, and with a market full of unfamiliar vegetables, fishes, and fruits, we've had lots of exotic (though not always that tasty) dinners. Then, at around 7pm we return to La Restinga to help out or particitpate in different workshops (including juggleing classes, making t-shirts, capoeira, moviemaking, danceclasses, theatre, and much much more). The workshops usually last till around 9pm, but sometimes people keep hanging around late into the night telling stories and talking. These late night talks have made for some of my best memories so far. I especially remember one of the first nights when a group of about 10 of us, including Puchin (who is one of the founders and basically the second father to all the kids) were gathered around the table eating a late night meal. Everyone was laughing and making fun of each other in such an intimate way. In that moment I realized that La Restinga is not charity, not a project, not a center, but simply family. And I am so thankful to feel part of it.

La Restinga as seen from the outside. The banner across the heart says "Creo en ti", which means "I believe in you."

Belen baptism

The seasons here in la selva (the jungle) are pretty much non-existent, as the climate usually stays around 95 degrees farenheit or 35 degrees celcius all the time. Unlike in Norway, where you always need to bring extra clothes and be prepared for a sudden change in wheather, a pair of shorts and a t-shirt is usually always all you need here. However, we are now entering into the rainy season, which means that within just a few seconds, the weather can change from completely dry to torrential downpur.

We got our first taste of what this looked like when we first came with to a workshop with 3-5th graders in Belen, an area of the city where the majority live in poverty or extreme poverty. On this particular day, we had just spent hours making paper kites with the kids, and just as we were wrapping up, the rain started pouring down. As is the case with most of the houses in the area, the roof of the house where we were gathered is made of straw. It’s really fragile and must be replaced every few years, but most people don’t have enough money saved up to invest in a more sturdy and safe roof (even though this would of course be much cheaper and safer in the long run)**. Anyway, this particular roof was pretty old, and had large holes all over the place. So when the rain came down, large parts of the room (including many of the childrens’ kites) became soaking wet. Seeing the dissapointment in the kids eyes as they ventured out into the torrential downpour outside, I wondered if even a single one of them would be able to bring their kite home safely. But when we left the building a few minutes later, the kids had apparently already forgotten about the kites, and were running around laughing, playing football, and enjoying the coolness of the rain. Thank God for children's ability to just move on and find something positive in every situation...

Above: A typical example of what the straw roofs look like

**This makes me think of the eternal problem of the poor: the lack of capital. Because most banks don’t want the business of poor people (the cost of handeling their business is greater than the gain), many poor people have to accept loans with APR as high as 200% because it’s their only viable option. In other words, the life of a poor person may be far more expencive than the life of middle class. Many microfinance institutions, however, are giving many poor people new opportunities by providing collateral free loans, both for building private businesses, but also for other needs, such as housing. Learn more about how Stromme Foundation uses microfinance to eradicate poverty by clicking HERE.

Floating down the Amazon

After having spent less than a week in Iquitos, Elin and I were invited to come with Pascual and Willy (two young leaders at La Restinga) on a weekend trip to Requena. Since Iquitos is technically an island, surrounded by jungle on all sides, the only way to get to Requena is through a 15 hour long boatride on the Amazon. Impressed by the incredible warmth and hospitality of the people here, and intrigued by spending the night on the river, we accepted right away, and a few hours later were streched out in our hammocks on the top deck of the lancha (boat).
We had an absolutely incredible weekend, but rather than giving you a long list of what we did, I just want to describe one of my favorite snapshot moments from the trip for you:

The view from the hammock

It is 6pm, and I’m stretched out in my hammock, admiring the lush, green lanscape as we slowly float down the Amazon. The sun is slowly setting behind the majestic clouds, and the fresh breeze from the river alliviates the humidity of the air. Though the deck is crammed with people and their belongings (including a small cage with live chickens right behind me), I’m filled with a sense of awe for the vastness around me, knowing that I am surrounded by miles and miles and miles of largely untouched jungle. In the hammock next the me, Elin is sitting upright, smiling and chatting with the young girl that’s brading her hair. Behind her, is another group of other curious kids surrounding us, one of them slowly tracing her fingers up and down my bare calfs (not sure if she is fascinated by my leghair or just wants to cuddle). The kids listen intently, and laugh from time to time, as they observe the spanish lesson playing out before them. Jenni, the 40-something woman in the hammoc next to me has made it her mission to teach me spanish in the course of the next few hours, and we move systematically through my notebook of vocabulary words.

Jenni and I in the middle of our session

”Re-co-no-cer,” she says slowly. Reconcer. ”To admit or aknowledge” according to my vocab list. Next she gives me an example of how to use it in a sentence: ”Tengo que reconocer que hice algo...” I quickly write it down. We continue with the next word: tacacho – the name of a typical Peruvian dish made of grilled platano (a non-sweet banana) mushed in pork grease. Sounds strange but is actually delicious. Jenni tells me that if I ever come back to Requena, she wants to show me how to make it. She even writes her phone number in my notebook, and says she means it seriously. I believe her. The sincerety and geniune warmth of the people here makes me feel at home, and as we curl up in our hammocks go to sleep a few hours later, it feels like I’m curling up to family.

Elin looking out over the bustling bay as we arrived in Requena at 7am

Floating houses outside the bay in Iquitos