July 18. After a breakfast of fried plantains, scrambled eggs and star fruit juice from the garden, I went with Adelina to a meeting in the cultural center in Pucallpa. There was a small exposition of paintings by Pucallpa natives, but the main event was a three hour lecture about exportation, complete with multiple powerpoint […]

Follow the road that goes along the edge of the Laguna de Yarinacocha, take a sharp right down a dirt path through tree until you get to a clearing. This huge space is overhung with big trees and contains a still where two men grind up sugar cane, press it, cook it for a few […]

  July 17, the day following our arrival in Pucallpa, was an open slate, because my linguist companions were still waiting for their professors to show up. Carolina is enchanted with everything that has to do with the selva, or jungle, she chats with everyone and is eager to explore new places. She helped me […]

I started to get nervous about missing my flight to Pucallpa as we sat stuck in traffic on the way to the airport. “Oh good! It’s just an accident” was the verdict, and indeed, an accident was somehow better news than an actual traffic jam, because before too long we had wove our way around […]

    Shipibo-Konibo art, incredibly complex and fascinating, can be summed up with the word “kené”, meaning the designs, or patterns that are inscribed, painted, embroidered, woven, beaded, dyed, glazed, tiled onto every available surface: houses, textiles, ceramics, wood, and skin. The word itself, is closely linked with the idea of language and writing in […]

I’m twenty-six years old and I own three crappy cell phones, only one of which seems to work (rarely) on this continent. Maybe this has to do with the fact that they were bought on three different continents… I was hoping that I could simply get a Peruvian SIM card and put it in my […]