Disclaimer: These are our personal thoughts and opinions; they do not represent the beliefs of the United States government or those of the Peace Corps

Monday, August 5, 2013

Rollin’ On the River

I sat under the soiled black plastic tarp, the rain seeping through the multitude of puncture holes and tears and dripping down my neck. What am I doing here?

The small, rickety boat swayed violently beneath me. Light streamed through the cracks in the wooden planks that composed the sides. I grabbed the sawed off plastic motor oil bottle from the bottom of the boat and began to bail out the water sloshing against my rubber boots. Please get us out of this river as soon as possible…

Outside the cover of the tarp, a man labored ineffectively to chop through the tree branches that blocked our path to Pedregal. Due to relentless, driving rains that had started nearly a week before, the river had risen so dramatically that bridges, pastures, and houses were under the muddy, swiftly flowing water. The branches we were trying to pass through were not fallen limbs, but rather tree tops. …and please, please, PLEASE let the spiders stay outside of the boat!


After weeks of planning and preparation, my colleagues and I officially began work on the SPA project. One week before, we held the first of our training sessions in Pearl Lagoon for the community health workers of Nueva Esperanza, La Fe, Brown Bank, and Kahkabila. We then made our way up the lagoon to Pueblo Nuevo as the rains descended upon us. Now, we were trying to finish the first series of trainings in Pedregal, but it appeared that the weather was against us. We had passed the better part of the morning crossing the lagoon in a large, slow-moving passenger boat. The storm clouds gathered, darkening the sky, while we fought the current to crawl up the Pachy River toward the tiny village of Pondler. There, we transferred to a small boat (but not before first killing a spider the size of my hand that had made its home inside) and began the 3-5 hour journey to Pedregal.

An hour in, we got stuck. There was simply no way to clear the path. Seven hours of travel, and we would now need to turn around and head home without reaching our final destination. Then, as if adding insult to injury, the rain began in earnest.


After landing in Pondler, my colleague and I took turns bathing in a small washing shed using fresh, cold water from a well. The rain gradually abated with the setting of the sun. We sat together on plastic chairs with the boat owner and his family in the darkened living room of their board house, dining upon coconut bread my family had baked the day before and freshly-made, soft cheese called cuajada. Then, we strung our hammocks in the store room and fell asleep.

The next morning dawned with clear skies. We packed our hammocks and made our way to the river bank, where we picked up the same slow-moving boat and returned to Pearl Lagoon.


You might think that the journey I’ve just described to you was a failure. I suppose in one way it was – we were never able to complete the last training, and have had to reschedule it for September or October, when the weather is likely to be drier. We also used a sizeable amount of our grant money purchasing gas that we will not be able to recover. However, I would not call this a failure. Taking trips like these allows me to see new parts of the Pearl Lagoon municipality, meet more of the community members, and spend quality time with my colleagues. This experience has also taught me how valuable this work really is. When our more rural communities become cut off from the rest of the world, we must rely on the community health workers to keep the inhabitants healthy and safe. If our trainings aid them in this work, it is worth every córdoba and every minute we spend bouncing along the lagoon, floating down rivers, riding on horses, and swinging in hammocks.

Oh yeah, and there’s all that fresh cheese.

Word of the week: inundación - flood

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