19.) 06.08.08 a normal day in the jungle

I guess it would be interesting for someone who hasn´t lived in a jungle community to know what a "normal" day here looks like. So here it goes:

I get up at about 6 am with the sunrise, but about an hour after all other family members (just because I can). Everybody is busy in the mornings organising stuff for breakfast, cleaning up, getting water, making a new fire etc. I brush my teeth, throw some water from the rain-tubs in my face and try to make myself useful. Usually I will go and fill up the drinking water bucket for the family at the spring in the jungle. Most mornings one of the girls, either Deysi or Rosa accompanies me and carries some water too. We joke and play one the way there and usually they show me some kind of new insect or fruit I don´t know yet.
When all the morning "chores" are done, we have breakfast together, the whole family. We have a very light breakfast, mostly a cup of coffee and some banana soup or a piece of bread you can by at a nearby house.
After breakfast and cleaning the dishes, I study some Spanish, help the kids with reading or some other school stuff and prepare for the class in the afternoon. Then on some days we would go to the chacra and work with the machetes clearing bits of forest or gathering Yucas and fruit.
On other days we would go fishing or washing clothes in the river which can take up to several hours.
Around 1pm we have lunch, which is the biggest meal of the day. We usually have two or three types of carbs - rice, yuca, platanos, or pasta with meat. That pretty much fills you up for the whole day. After lunch we chill out in the hammocks for a while before class starts.
At the moment the kids have school holidays, which means that my afternoon class is the only class they have. A lot of kids show up, I guess because they are pretty bored and don´t have too much else to entertain them.

We always have a lot of fun in class and I think I will really miss the kids here. They are great, so open and friendly.
After class I usually go play with the kids- either football or "discovering" which includes running through the jungle and looking at strange animals and plants. They would run ahead and bring some fruit or animal for me to check out. I teaches me a lot about the jungle.
Most days we go swimming after that in the nearby river or to the sirens waterfall, where you need a big group of people to go to be safe from the siren.

I heard that the siren is actually not only bad, but that she can help especially young men and in things related to music. So if a young man wants to be a musician he would bring his musical instrument to the place where the siren lives and leave it there over night for her to bless it.
Quite cool.

I take my soap to whereever we go swimming and it has become some kind of ritual for the kids too to soap up alltogether. Last week we couldn´t go swim in the usual spot because they had just caught a gigantic electric eel. We just arrived when they pulled it out. It was about two meters long and neck thick. They told us not to swim there, because they thought there was a second one living there.
Kind of scary to think that we had been swimming there the days before. Aparently these things can electrocute (notsure if i spelled that right) you easily, if you touch them.
By the size of them I totally believe that.

In the evenings we come back home and have a little dinner, which usually is some kind of banana or rice soup and coffee.
I thought the other day that here I probably eat half as much as I usually would, but I am hardly ever hungry. I don´t think I eat more than 1200 calories a day and I would totally be starving under normal circumstances. But here it is fine, maybe because of the heat. I never feel like eating too much.

So then after dinner around 6 or 7 it gets dark very quickly and we light some petroleum candles and chill out in the hammocks. I usually read or draw some more with the kids. Angel and I smoke a cigar and we have fun watching little Perci trying to dance, when we clap our hands.
I learned a lot from these people about how a family can work together.
They spend so much time together and have so much fun. It is really cool to see how they have so little but so much more emotinally than a "civilised" family. If I just compare it with the amount of time I got to spend with my dad when I was little- he went to work in the morning and came home late at night. So we only saw him for dinner and on the weekends. Which was probably more than many kids, because we always did cool things together as a family on the weekends.
Here family has a totally different meaning. They are a close little community, that works together and one is dependant on the other. But apart from a lot of work, they also have so much more spare time together, where they just sit around, sing and laugh and tell stories..
I like their way very much.

At around 8pm we all go to bed. Which sounds early, but by that time you are totally shattered, believe me..