Jens's Adventures in Peru - Part II

Nieva is a fascinating combination frontier town, river town, small town, jungle town. It has a plaza with the Catholic church just up the hill. Much of the town goes along the Nieva and Marañon rivers with the main street just behind the houses that line the flows. Yesterday´s rains have made the river rise all day today, with some participants in the
workshop expressing concern about getting home after dark: too many trees and branches float down and can´t be seen in the dark. The afternoon activity in the plaza was a women´s power volleyball game.

This is native Amazonian territory - a large percentage of the population is native, though there is a good mestizo population and a few foreign NGO workers. Also the police who go jogging and yelling in rhythm at 6:00 a.m. up the main street. And a few govt. folk. A sponsor of these workshops is the Ministry of Environment, thanks to the wife of Robert
Vincent who is moving up those ranks.

This morning after our potato, yucca, and egg breakfast, Jorge and I took a motorized dug-out across the river to an NGO office where the workshop is being held. The room is a thatched-roof building open on all sides in the local style. Butterflies and dragonflies buzzing through, with chickens under the beautiful chainsawed hardwood floor.

The workshop has been unlike any I´ve done before. Most of the participants are native, and four speak very little Spanish so we do a lot of translation. I used to think AVP is about as cultureless as you can get in this sort of work, and I still feel this way, but that doesn´t mean it isn´t cultureless. It took the first three rounds before everyone caught on to what Concentric Circles was about, not ´cause anybody is slow, but rather, it seems, because who would ever think of arranging a way for people to talk together in this way? Nevertheless, the topics of violence/non-violence, communication, community, conflict resolution, are of intense interest to the group. There have been a number of comments as to having to bring this up in the community.

Peru has handled their native population very differently from Ecuador, mostly neglected until recently, with much less development, until recently, and now with a very forward thinking, I think, approach of helping many groups register their land as communal land that is not accessible to development. Hence the uproar earlier this year when Alan Garcia suddenly had some laws passed allowing oil companies to move around looking for their black death.

Among the group are some Apus, community leaders, who are listening carefully and making great comments. It is clear they deal with conflicts all the time and really want to talk about this stuff.

Have to go to dinner, more yucca, I´m sure, and there are many folks waiting for this computer. I do want to thank you all for the birthday greetings, much appreciated, and I wish you were either here or there were other ways to share time with you in this setting. Jungle rivers are something else, muddy yet clean, flowing, yet calm, fringed in huge
trees, sandbars that disappear quickly, traveled by noisy and stealthy canoes.

Much love, and thanks for writing,

Jens, pop, that guy.