You might be wondering how people in the jungle keep themselves clean without electricity and running water. It is quite tricky I can tell you that. And mostly we are pretty dirty. During the day you can´t avoid sweating lots and then everything is covered in mud and dirt. Which means that your clothes are too. People here change their clothes at least twice a day and in the evenings, just before the zancudos come out is the best time to wash or bathe yourself.
We have a little space in the backyard, where we bathe- bathing (banar) here means to get a bucket of water from the spring and pour it over yourself bit by bit. Then you soap yourself up and wash the soap off. It is ok but I always have black water coming off me, when I take a proper shower on the weekends in Iquitos. The other way to bathe is to walk to the nearby river and just swim there and soap yourself. Quite fun too.
Other than that they have a real problem with dental care here. Nobody has a tooth brush and if they do they don´t use it. Everybody over thirty has hardly any teeth left and even the kids have rotten teeth. It is quite sad to see and I really don´t know how they handle the pain they must be in constantly. Alex bought a bunch of toothbrushes and paste before she left and handed them to me. That was quite cool, because I could give them to my family saying they were from Alex. That way I wouldn´t offend them.
I am happy to see that all family members apart from Angel are using their toothbrushes now. I think it helps that I am walking around openly brushing my teeth. They have been observing me curiosly for the last weeks.
A lot of kids have skin rashes and allergies from the polluted air and water around here. We need to walk so far into the jungle to get fresh water because the Amazon is totally polluted by the local Oil company "Petro Peru" which has they raffinery just a mile down the river from where my community lives.
Apart from that almost all of them have nice little lice colonies living on their heads, which is probably natural if you run around the jungle all day. I wonder if I will get them too..
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