We continued our expedition on this brand new day in the upper Amazon in Peru. After a splendid breakfast, we visited the San Francisco community. We had a blast watching and experiencing firsthand how people live nowadays in this vast area of the upper Amazon region in Peru. Our visitors marveled at how the little things in life that we take for granted can mean so much to other people in a different environment.
The highlight of this cultural visit was that today the town was celebrating a festivity, and most of the inhabitants were getting ready for the occasion. We were so lucky to be able to visit this community on such special day! In fact, we had a once in lifetime opportunity to observe all of the preparations for the festivities. Many villagers were busy in a hut cooking food for more than three hundred people.
Lots of children came out to celebrate, wearing their best clothing. Some of the kids were walking around with their native pets as well; one little girl was holding a juvenile Brown Capuchin Monkey in her arms. Just like kids in cities have cats and dogs, children in the Amazon have native animals as pets. Our group of guests this week were part of the celebration as well, for they were invited to join in a communal house to observe a traditional folkloric dance to the rhythm of ancestral music played by a local band. All were beautifully ornamented and were wearing colorful rainforest traditional clothing used in the past by the “Yagua” culture.
We had a brief but emotive encounter with a welcoming committee formed by Minga Peru, which is a non-profit organization, founded in 1998, whose mission is the promotion of social justice and human dignity for women and families in the remote rural areas of the Peruvian Amazon. Minga Peru has been developing various projects in the area, with goals that include the technical training of mainly women and community members in agroforestry, crop cultivation and the construction and management of fish ponds, which has proved to be invaluable to increasing the economical sustainability of many people.
Just after about half an hour after we came back onboard from visiting San Francisco Community, we had a very special celebration of our own. The ship momentarily stopped its navigation and was floating around the famous confluence of the Marañon and Ucayali Rivers, which is the geographical place from where the Amazon River takes its name. We toasted the event with a local Amazonian drink!
In the early afternoon, before disembarking to visit our next visitors’ site, we had a photo presentation with our photo instructor Linda Burback. Afterwards, we went swimming in an idyllical lake, Clavero. It was a lot of fun. We came back just in time to continue with the rest of the activities planned for the afternoon, which included skiff rides and kayaking to further explore this spectacular area. Another fiery sunset was a golden finale for another unforgettable day in the Amazon.
