Season's Greetings!

Here's sending out our warm best wishes for Christmas, Yuletide, Solstice, the New Year and whatever other festivals you are enjoying from Martin and Lourdes from our little corner of the Amazon jungle in northern Peru.

We stayed in Sauce this year for Christmas (last year we joined our extensive family in Lima) and joined in with the 'pastorale' on Christmas Eve in which children and youth enacted the Christmas story with a distinctly jungle flavor starting with processions all around the community which included Maria (Mary) riding on a mule led by Jose (Joseph) and accompanied by many angels, shepherds and kings.  Also in attendance were Gypsies and 'Nativos' (children dressed up as indigenous amazonian tribespeople).  I can only imagine that the gypsies are a holdover from Spanish nativity plays brought over during Peru's colonial past.

Many different groups converged on the Catholic church in the Plaza de Armas (main square) of Sauce and put on small dramas of the Christmas story in front of a nativity scene inside the church. Our dogs Bondo and Bondette wandered in amongst the actors which got a bit embarassing so we decided to leave at that point.  They are delightful dogs but mostly uncontrollable.

Personal news is that we are soon going to make the move into the house we have been slowly building for the past almost four years.  It's far from finished but now has a liveable bedroom with bathroom and the beginnings of a kitchen so we plan to spend New Years Eve in our new house.

Greetings from the heart to all our friends, family, ex-volunteers and supporters.  We welcome all visitors to come see us in Sauce during 2015.  We hope to have our sailing catamaran back in the water over the next few months following an extensive upgrade which has taken far longer than expected as these things tend to do.

What a hoot!  Jungle Santa with helpers.

Jungle-style Mary and Joseph.  Looks like Joseph has been celebrating....

Inside the Catholic church with saints,'nativos', angels, Santa, kings and shepherds and some dreadfully out of tune singing.  Winchester Cathedral this ain't!

A time to flourish

Lourdes has commenced a new weekly radio show here in our community of Sauce.  It goes out for an hour on Sunday mornings starting at 8 AM and is called 'Un tiempo a floricer', - a time to flourish.  Accompanied by some inspiring music she talks about education, child development and tackles some challenging social issues such as teenage pregnancy, the culture of 'machismo', rape and human sexuality in general.  She ends each show with a fairy tale.
She has received good feedback for bringing some rather taboo issues into the light of day, the first step in  hopefully effecting change in some positive directions.

Lourdes reads a fairy tale with our friend Edison at the controls.  He's aptly named as he's the local electronics genius.

'Andador' for Jondey

Jondey is five years old and has spinabifida.  His parents are of limited means so we arranged for him to be fitted with orthopedic shoes.  He also needed a walker or 'andador' to support him as he learns to walk but all the commercially available walkers offered here were too big.  So I made him this wooden push model that also doubles as a cart for his toys.

Amazon birthday cruise

Turning 60 feels like quite a milestone in life, more so than 50 I feel.  We decided to celebrate my October 25 birthday by cruising down the river Huallaga from Yurimaguas to Iquitos on one of the commercial river boats to see how our local river joins with other tributaries, most notably the Marañon, to eventually become the mighty Amazon some distance upstream from Iquitos.

Iquitos, with almost half a million inhabitants is the biggest city in the world with no road access. You can only get there by air or by river.  Lourdes and I had both flown to the city before but neither had approached by river.  We figured my birthday was a good enough reason to finally make this
journey a reality having talked about it for years.

We rode in a 'colectivo' taxi from our local city of Tarapoto 3 hours east to the river port of Yurimaguas, one of the few towns with access by road in Loreto, Peru's largest province and found the 'Eduardo V' riverboat with a sign indicating that it was to leave the following morning.  However it actually took 3 days to load all its cargo before we finally set off.  Here are some photos of our journey down the river and a wild Halloween party on the night we got to Iquitos.

Lourdes making some last phone calls before we headed downstream out of cellphone range for 3 days.

The top deck was cleared of passengers to make way for a chicken corral!

The tiny cabin was OK at night but an oven during the day, hence the hammocks on deck.

My new Kindle which miraculously arrived from my brothers and sister right before we set off.  I read lots of books during the trip.  What a great device, although I have to say I still prefer printed books.  But now I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century and am now a thoroughly modern bookworm.

Eating the standard breakfast/lunch/dinner of chicken and rice which was slightly strange as there were at least 1,000 chickens installed on the top deck behind me.

Old hippie couple.  Halloween at the hip Karma Cafe in Iquitos on the night we arrived in town.

Performing a few old favorites at the Karma Cafe.  The ghoul behind me is our friend Joss, the owner.

Craft revival in Sauce Peru

Making baskets and other items from the leaves of the bombonaje palm tree is something of a dying art these days as it is so much easier to buy containers made of plastic.  But in our Friday craft gatherings for senior citizens we are helping to revive this craft and also pass along useful traditional skills to the younger generation.

Fine baskets, hats, placemats and other items can be made from the leaves of the bombonaje palm shown above.

Welcome new volunteers to Estrella de Sauce

Ronja helps Zarca who is deaf learn to communicate.  Zarca can write well in terms of copying but... she can't read.  We are working to help her really communicate through writing and not just copy the letters she sees.


 A year seemed to just fly by and suddenly we find ourselves saying thank you and goodbye to our wonderful volunteers Axel, from the Black Forest and Katharina from Stuttgart in Germany.  At the same time we now welcome new volunteers Marlene from Berlin and Ronja from Wuppertal who have already adjusted from the usual culture shock of travelling from Germany straight into a small amazonian community on the shores of a beautiful laguna.  They say they are already enjoying the challenges of working with our various groups of children at our Estrella de Sauce center and our weekly club for senior citizens.  They both express an appreciation for our lovely tropical scenery, the abundance of fresh fruit and the friendliness of the people here and they are participating in our weekly local radio show.





Marlene with baskets made in our weekly crafts club for senior citizens

Mystical sites around Lake Titicaca







Robert Powell dwarfed by huge rock formations near the Amaru Muru portal

In early September I joined a tour put on by the Sophia Foundation and led by authors Jorge Luis Delgado and Robert Powell in the altiplano of Peru and Bolivia.  Twenty five participants from the USA, Europe, Australia and Peru (me) visited the islands of the Sun and Moon, Taquile and the Uros floating islands in the south end of Titicaca.
 And along the shore of the vast, high-altitude lake we visited such ancient sites as Sillustani, Tiawanaku and the inter-dimensional portal of Aramu Muru.
We held ceremonies at each site we visited having to do with reconciling the energies of the Eagle of the north and the Condor of the south invoking a healing for the injustices and exploitation suffered by the Andean people from the conquest and colonial period all the way up until the present day.


On a fast boat to the island of Taquile

Jorge Luis Delgado writes in his book 'Andean Awakenings' how he was guided in a dream to discover this ancient portal.  Here he prepares the site for a ceremony using palo santo incense and the feather of a condor.

 

Travels in England, Wales and Germany

With new grandson Mikka at the Berlin Wall

Our friends Benoit and Hubertus gave us a wonderful tour of Dresden.  The highlight for me was seeing the Sistine Madonna by Rafael

In July and August Lourdes and I went over to visit friends and family in the UK and in Berlin and Dresden.  We had a very typical British tea party with the Seligman side of my family kindly put on by my sister Cath in her garden in Winchester.  This was closely followed by a large barbeque for the Stevens side held at Leaze Farm, Lechlade near Oxford.  Fortunately it was a lovely hot day.





Lourdes in the front at right a bit overwhelmed by so many Stevens!



Mural and improvements

One of the attractions of the location of our 'Estrella de Sauce' headquarters building is that it backs onto a sports ground.  But up until recently we had not taken advantage of this feature.  Over the last few weeks with the help of our volunteers, the children who attend our classes and workshops and a local mason we have added a concrete patio/sidewalk to give access to the sports area, opened up and renovated the back gate which was previously nailed shut and painted a whimsical mural of 'la laguna' with its boats and denizens.

Our volunteer Axel from the Black Forest in Germany with children after a day spent painting our new mural

Special children

In April Lourdes was asked to oversee a new program in Sauce for children with 'habilidades diferentes' - Spanish for different abilities.  The municipal authorities were paying for an organizer for the program but this organizer really had no idea how to set up the program and asked Lourdes for help.  Subsequently a building was found and twelve children with 'handicaps' such as down syndrome, cerebral palsy and deaf/mute started attending morning educational and therapeutic classes three days a week.
This is a big step for a rather remote rural community where special needs children have mostly been neglected in the past and is a sign that Sauce is generally moving forward in some positive directions.
What is interesting is that as soon as Lourdes took on the extra load of running this progam with the help of our wonderful volunteers she recieved news that our Shipibo friends in Pucallpa have decided to close our Waldorf-inspired educational project that we set up in 2007.  This was because the principal teachers in the program have been invited to Canada for an extensive period.  It was painful for us to bring this project to a close but at the same time it frees Lourdes up to be able to concentrate on this new endeavor in Sauce.  Doors close, new doors open....

Oscar is a lovely boy but pretty wild.  He's now learning some social skills in our special needs program.

Lourdes doing therapeutic work with Sindi who is paralized on her right side

Cris has cerebral paralysis but made this necklace with Lourdes.

Work goes forward in Sauce

In our 2 hectare horticulture project called 'Fundo Skydance' we now finally have running water after various hassles with the municipal authorities.  Here's the official Sauce backhoe digging the trench while Bondo supervises...

 

 

 

 Here is a photo of Dan and Donna Facor's wooden lakeside house which nears completion.  In front is the experimental sailing catamaran 'Estrella del Lago' undergoing a refit which called for raising the vessel up on blocks to allow for some hull repairs with fiberglass and epoxy.  We are also repainting the hulls in tropical bright colors and replacing some balsawood deck boards.  What a faff (British for lots of work), but gotta do the maintenance and upgrades or the boat becomes unsafe.  So it goes.....

Shivver me timbers mateys, there's that rascal Bondo again up on the forward deck!!

Slightly Steinerian door by me into almost completed ground-floor bedroom.  Bondo again!

New shower with glass blocks.

 

 

Blackie in my woodshop

 

Green polycarbonate roofing over second-storey walkways.