Past the Surface-Depths of Truth

Past the Surface-Depths of Truth

The last few weeks, I have had a changing life experience with the mobile hospital. Because the mobile hospital has been in Chapare, a jungle area about 4 hours outside of Cochabamba, I have been part of a small group of workers who have been walking house to house in the rural areas that we serve. We are getting family information and medical history in order to help us serve the communities better. This has been one of those experiences that will forever impact my life and has altered, in its own way, the way I see the world. I guess I wasn’t quite ready, or rather caught off guard, to meet the people face to face, that before, had only been statistics in books for me. The weighted true reality hit me, as house after house, I heard stories that were heartbreaking. And not only the fact that these stories were real from people I was spending time with, but the appearance of acceptance or normality to these sub-human conditions made me seek...

 Some of the children from the rural communities sitting on the mobile hospital

This experience left me pondering many things and I left feeling...helpless and deeply saddened. I had been to these same communities a number of times, but now I had an understanding of these places that was beneath the surface. 

 A group of women and many of their young children attending a workshop on health

How often I still only see the surface in my own life and those I come in contact with. One recent example for me was when I was volunteering this last fall at Christ’s House, a homeless medical shelter for men in Washington, DC. I came into the situation with my own bias, ignorance, and opinions about homelessness and what I found after getting past the surface was absolutely incredible. Once I was able to spend time with the men, develop relationships and trust, and hear their life stories, it was able to change my perspective on not only homelessness, but more importantly, superficially labeling anyone without getting to know the heart of that person. It may be easier or keep life simpler to not go beyond the surface, but I believe it leads to a life of illusion and ignorance as well hindering us from reaching our full thriving potential. 

Man on the street staying dry during some rain in NYC

I am currently listening to a course on the lives of Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad, from the Great Course Teaching Company, which I highly recommend, and I am reminded of what was said about the Buddha, “After his first awakening it didn’t bring him peace but restiveness, it was enough to cause him to walk away from his life of ease and comfort. He could have easily stayed within the walls of illusion. He could have done what most of us do when we glimpse our frailties and mortality, just forget about it. With the aid of alcohol and other drugs, cosmetics and surgeries, amusements and sports, mindless consumption and acquisitions, we try to stop thinking about what we know to be true. We do it so well that usually we aren’t even aware that we are doing it. Perhaps this has been the approach of choice for most humans throughout history. Our species has devoted an incredible amount of creative energy to creating new methods to hide the truth from ourselves.” 

I wanted to share this experience with you even though it has been difficult to accept and it’s something I continue to grapple with. As crazy as it may sound, I am grateful for the opportunity to be in these type of situations that profoundly impact my life. It’s just the truth of our reality, and I am thankful to have had my eyes opened to it personally. I hope in some small way I can give back and have a positive impact on the people I come in contact with, because they have impacted mine.
I’ll finish this entry with some words of encouragement for any of you who are reading as well as myself. “I realized that you do not find clarity in the mind but in the heart. And the heart will not speak to you unless you quiet yourself and liberate yourself from such masters as greed, envy, and illusion. But if you can do this you will find, in the stillness that follows insights of wisdom that are obtainable in no other way. You will begin to see things as they really are.”   

San Lorenzo-Beni

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San Lorenzo-Beni

A couple weeks ago I went to San Lorenzo which is a small little community in the jungle (1000-1500 people). It is located in the department of Beni in the northern part of Bolivia. Bolivia is a plurinational country divided up into nine different departments. The opportunity arose when Jonathan, a short term volunteer with International Orphanage Union, told me he was heading out to the jungle for about 10 days to get a Tilapia fish farm started. When I heard he would be flying out the next morning, I asked if there was any more room on the 4 seater plane. He made a phone call to the pilot and I got the ok to join him. Thus began my first ever experience in the jungle...

View on the way down

The hour and half flight into San Lorenzo gave me a taste of the vastness of the jungle. Shortly after we had crossed over the pass in the mountains, the terrain changed quite quickly. Soon, the only thing in sight was green trees as far as the eye could see with brown or dirt colored rivers slicing up the green tapestry. As we started to lower our altitude, I started looking for the runway and found the little open strip of land cleared of trees. We landed in a flattened grassy area and because of the amount of water we kicked up some good mud as well. If it hadn’t quite sunk in for me that we were in the jungle, based on what I saw, it sure did when I stepped out of the plane. The weather in Cochabamba is very nice but mild, and in San Lorenzo we were welcomed with high heat (90‘s) and high humidity. 

4 seater plane

Landing

We brought our stuff to the orphanage, which had recently been built in San Lorenzo, and would be the place we called home for the next 11 days. So after I got a fuller description of our plans, the objectives were to drain one of the ponds on the property, clean out all the existing weeds/plants, and then refill it and plant duckweed. On the list of things to do, was also to catch and kill an alligator (2 meters) that had been causing the neighbor problems with eating a couple of its animals and would be depleting the fish population we would be trying to grow. Lastly, we were to help with some construction on a radio tower that is being finished up and also to translate for the short-term mission group that was coming in from Georgia. 

one of the gator baits-with no success 

Future Tilapia Pond

I want to preface this with a few things about my personality in regards to time or structure. I can be quite unstructured, free-spirited, and have a pretty easy time adjusting to changes. I’ve learned this many times over through my life but specifically through my time spent in other countries. I prefer living in this manner in many aspects of my life and have grown to love the freedom to live in the moment and to except the uncertainties and beautiful surprises that life can and will bring. 

So those were some of the goals we had, and I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to accomplish them given the time we had...And then I learned a little something about life and circumstances in the jungle...

1. Presence not Productivity

I have to say this isn’t necessarily unique to the jungle but it is definitely magnified there. The emphasis or priority is definitely given to people before work. We were invited into so many homes to have juice, fruit, food, snacks, etc. and ended up hanging out and just enjoyed each others company. The hospitality in San Lorenzo was unlike anything I have seen before. In definitely makes it difficult to accomplish tasks, but we had so many great experiences with the people. The culture is a whole lot more about being rather than doing. I was told that half the population don’t have “jobs” but yet they have the necessities for life. When they are hungry they kill one of their animals,(cows and chickens mostly) go fishing in the nearby lake, knock some fruit down from their trees, or pick some vegetables from their garden. This allows them the freedom to spend time with people or doing things they enjoy. I don’t want to romanticize the situation because life is very hard and labor intensive. The processes that take us only a little time in the developed world takes significantly more time, labor, and ingenuity in order to find a way to accomplish the task because of a lack of resources. 

2. Schedule/Time-I have 3 examples I want to share in regards to schedule/time. 

I have to say it kind of became a joke with trying to set anything up or have any idea of what was going to happen for the day. One example of this was our fishing trip that we had set up for Saturday afternoon. Well, when we showed up we didn’t have a canoe because the owner was using it so we had to postpone the trip. Ok, understandable, not much communication but we will go on Sunday instead. Sunday rolled around and sure enough another problem arose. Wow, bad luck to have back to back days fall through, I thought. Well, I guess we will go on Monday, sure enough we were given another reason and told manana (tomorrow). I started to think we really weren’t going to make the trip. Just when I had started to accept the fact that we might not actually go, our fishing trip finally worked out. It was either on the 4th or 5th try. We went fishing for 12 hours with just a line, a hook, and some bait (meat). Between the four of us we probably caught 45 fish, mostly piranhas (very tasty but lots of bones). It was quite the experience, and I wish I could post pictures but I had my camera in my bag at the bottom of the canoe, and I didn’t notice the slow leak fast enough so my camera is currently not working. Anyway, just one example of how trying to set up a schedule was quite challenging.

Time, on the other hand, was not a matter of minutes but rather hours-plural. One example of time...We were told about a group of guys who were going to play basketball at three in the afternoon. We started to walk out to the court and, as usual, we were stopped to talk with some friends. As we were talking we told them we should get going because we were going to play basketball at three. They said, “Oh, they won’t be playing at three because it’s too hot. You should go around four or four thirty.” Ok, so we were invited into their home and hung out and had some juice. A while later we decided to head over to the court for basketball. As we were walking, someone else stopped to talk to us and as we told them our plans they said, “Oh, they won’t be playing until 5 or 5:30.” At this point in time we decided to scratch the idea of playing basketball, because we had also been invited into another families house from the day before. They told us to come over in the afternoon (which can mean anywhere between 12-6ish). We made our way over to this families house and ended up having tea/coffee and empanadas (cooked bread with cheese in the middle). We had some great conversation and ended up walking back to our house in the dark around 7pm. We had spent a couple hours at their house just hanging out. 

Lastly, our plan was to fly out of the jungle on Saturday in the morning to head back to Cochabamba. On Thursday, two days before we were supposed to leave, we received word from the pilot that plans had changed and the plane was not going to be available until Monday. Another example of how quickly things change, of how little importance time is, and also the great acceptance of not being in control.

3. Ingenuity/Difficulties with lack of resources

I have to say the people in the jungle are some of the most resourceful and ingenuitive people I have come across. It is amazing the different ways they reuse materials, fix broken ones, and find ways of making something work without having basic tools or resources. Jonathan and I had a little taste of the experience to be lacking resources that these people live with all throughout their lives. One of our main tasks was to get the fish farm ready and first we had to drain the water. The pump that was suppose to come with us didn’t, so we had to find another way to drain the water. We ended up digging a trench because there was another pond not too far away that was downhill and significantly lower in water level. The trench was successful in draining about 2-3 feet of water but we still had another 2-3 feet to go. We couldn’t do much cleaning of the weeds, because there was still water and we were told there are poisonous water snakes. Onto plan B...We ended up finding two different pumps but had to find a way to get some power to them. We ended up connecting wires to the electric line (there is only electricity for 3 hrs each day in San Lorenzo from 7pm-10pm) and ran them to the pump. Now we also had to find some tubes to run the water through. You can start to see how everything can be very time intensive. After all the work, neither of the pumps worked for reasons we still aren’t sure of. So our main objective of emptying the pond and getting it cleaned out turned into a failed attempt. It was a great experience to learn what its like to have to make things work without having “basic” resources to get the job done and also to experience a little of what the reality of life in the jungle is like. 

I am very thankful to have had the opportunity to go to San Lorenzo and spend time with the people and see a very different way of life. I hope to be able to go back in the future and reconnect with people as well as finish up what we had set out to do. 

random video to give you an idea of the landscape

next door neighbor Cynthia in her house cooking

Stove

Neighbor boys Alvin and Garlin fishing

Kids singing in Church