The hardest thing I have ever done

Just thought I would take a minute to describe some of my work this week. Part of our mission is a farm about 45 minutes from Yurimaguas. The goal of the farm is three fold, support the Shawi with agriculture development, support the Hogar with food, and disciple and train men of God in the process. This week the focus was on food for the Hogar. At the Hogar we eat a lot of yuca. For those of you not familiar with yuca (just like me a week ago) it is a miracle food in the jungle. Grows well in heat, can take a lot of rain or drought, can store in the ground for three to six months, pest resistant and high in calories. It might be the perfect food for the jungle (God's kind of amazing like that). So we decided to grow yuca at the farm.

We began by clearing an area for the yuca and then we needed to plant some yuca. To do that we had to make a trip to a Shawi community to get some yuca starts. On Tuesday morning two of the workers at the farm and I loaded up in the new furgon and headed out to a village called Segunda Jerusalem.

About an hour and half from Yurimaguas we stopped along the side of the road took off on a foot path through the jungle. I realized that my companions were wearing sandals and thought it strange to wear sandals in the jungle until we had walked about 200 yards and came to a river. 

There was a dugout canoe tied up on the bank but as it is the dry season now it became obvious that it was easier to walk across the knee deep water, hence the sandals. They had to wait for me to take off my boots and socks and then wait some more for me to put them back on on the other side of the river. I felt I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing but that was only the beginning.

We walked past some houses through a papaya field and a pasture and back into the jungle for a while till we came to a little clearing. 

There in the clearing was a small elevated house. One of my companions said, “there are dogs,” as he reached for a large stick. The other ran for a tree and prepared to climb. I decided it would be smart to follow suit and ran to a tree as well. We yelled at the house but no one answered. So my companion just held the dogs at bay with the large stick while I was trying to decide how to climb the tree. After a few minutes a Shawi woman appeared from the jungle with a large basket of produce. She called off the dogs and went directly into the house. She didn’t speak much Spanish but one of the guys I was with spoke Shawi. They talked for a few minutes and he apparently explained that we had spoke with her husband the day before and he said we could have some yuca starts. Her husband was away at the moment but would return later she said. She invited us up into her house where we sat on the floor while she served us a large bowl of chapu one by one because she only had one bowl and she waited till one person finished until taking the bowl and refilling it. It is custom for the Shawi to always serve a drink when a guest comes and it is never water. Chapu is a drink usually made of over ripe plantains and it is thick and sweet so I was looking forward to my turn. But I was surprised when she handed me a large bowl full to the top of red juice with white stuff floating in it. It was not what I had anticipated and it smelled terrible. But at this point I had no choice. Culturally the worst thing I could do was decline the drink. They only offer you their best stuff and to turn it down is very offensive. It could end a relationship and they might never talk to me again. So I tipped up the bowl and took a drink and it was as terrible as I thought. The first sip hit my stomach like a ton of bricks and I had an instant stomach ache. Despite my desire to gag I tipped the bowl again while everyone watched and downed the whole thing. It might have been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

After the drink we all grabbed machetes and followed her out into the jungle. 

We walked for quite a while through corn fields and plantain fields and patches of jungle till we came to her yuca field. Yuca grows like a tall skinny tree about nine-foot-high and what we needed was the trunk, called yuca poles. We cut the trunk off at the ground and trimmed the branches until we had a pile of nice straight poles. While we were doing this the woman cut some plantains from a nearby field and piled them beside our poles.  It was explained to me that this family was Christian and as they don’t have much money they often tithe in food. The plantains were her tithe to us to use at the Hogar to feed the woman and children. What a blessing!

After we had collected the poles it was time to harvest the yuca. Yuca grows in tubers underground and can be as much as two feet long. In this field there were old trees still growing so we had to harvest the yuca by carefully cutting out from among the roots of the trees. It was painstakingly slow and difficult. As the hours wore on and the jungle sun baked us I realized this might have been one of the hardest things I have ever done. 

Finally, we finished and had three piles; plantains, poles and yuca. I asked what are we doing with the yuca, hauling it to her house? “Oh no,” the guys replied, “she is giving us the yuca too.” It was then I realized we were at least a mile walk from the road and we had to cross a river with many heavy loads. My day was only beginning.

On the first load out the lady stopped me at her house and offered me another drink of chapu. At this point I was so hot and thirst that it actually did not taste that bad, I only gagged slightly. Trip after trip we carried poles, then plantains, then yuca. Finally, on one of the trips we passed the man returning home. He insisted we stop at the house for more chapu and a chat. By the third bowl I think I was growing accustom to the taste. Then he served us lunch. A steaming bowl of fish soup, made with dried piranha with a side of yuca and plantains. Luckily I sat at the edge of the house so I could sneak bites to the dog sitting below me. I think now I am his best friend. Also they had pet parakeets that ate the yuca off my plate, I didn’t stop them. 

After lunch the man offered to help us carry the rest. He easily carried twice what I could, barefoot, and twice as fast. On our last trip out we stopped by another neighbor’s house where of course we had to drink some more stuff. This time it was yuca based but just as terrible. When we arrived back at the furgon we found lemons and more plantains donated by other Christian neighbors. It is amazing to see people with so little give so much. We had about 500 pounds of yuca, 200 pounds of plantains, yuca poles, and a bag of lemons. There is no way we could use all this food at the Hogar but we donated much of it to some families in Yurimaguas who lost all they owned in a house fire. Bouncing back down the dusty dirt road to the farm, reflecting on the day, it was then I decided that it was the hardest thing I had ever done.

Continued:  The next day we cut the yuca poles into one foot sections and stuck them in the ground where they will sprout and grow. We planted the yuca only to find out we didn’t have enough poles. So we returned to the same village on Thursday where a different neighbor offered us starts. The only problem was that it was much farther from the road, at least an hours walk, and the food was worse. Also it had rained and the river was four feet higher. I ended the day much more tired, with a touch of heat stroke and a lot of food poisoning. Not to use the term flippantly but that was for sure the hardest thing I have ever done.