Jungle catamaran update

I'd like to thank Andres Sergeant, mi sobrino (nephew), who came and helped out with our educational project for two weeks before heading up to see the wonders of Machu Picchu and thence on to the US and back to the UK to start his higher education at York university.  He also helped me and German Andres prepare these hulls for putting in the water which involved the gruelling task of putting in literally thousands of screws to mechanically attach areas where the fibergass had unglued during over a year in the tropical sun.  Then the screw heads had to be embedded in autobody putty and fresh gelcoat painted over.  Nasty but necessary work.

Launching day finally.  This involved 8 guys including don Alquelino the boat builder and his little hand trailer.

Wow!  They float!

 

 

 

Visiting our Shipibo friends

How a year flies by!  Now we are just about to say goodbye to our two young German volunteers who have done an excellent job receiving children and senior citizens at our Estrella del Sur educational outreach program and helping out in the local public school here in Sauce. Last month they went on an overland adventure by bus to Pucallpa which involved many hours of rough road travel and crossing a river on a makeshift ferry.
In Pucallpa they met up with Lourdes who had been in Cusco and together they went up the Ucayali river four hours in a typical amazonian riverboat to our small school project in the village of Ceilan.




 

Here's Freya doing traditional embroidery with Shipibo girls in the classroom we built two years back.

And here's Andres sliding down the creek bank with some boys.  Later he told me the Shipibo visit was the highlight of his time in Peru.  It's certainly a whole world apart, something increasingly rare in this time of advancing cultural uniformity.

Lourdes with Exhilde and Elias who founded Ceilan 35 years ago.  The embroidered designs reflect Shipibo culture's ongoing close connection with the world of the spirits.  These are stylized images of visions and songs perceived during traditional nighttime ceremonies.  Noya Rao is the name of the healing center in Ceilan where we have our 'escuelita' and is the most powerful, mysterious and elusive of the plant spirit allies in the pharmacology of Shipibo shamans.

WATERFALL!

Yesterday volunteers Andres, Freya, Andy and myself hiked to this waterfall only 30  minutes from my house.

Making a start

Three days ago we started the remodeling job on our new Waldorf-inspired community outreach center here in Sauce, Peru.  We are beginning with the necessary basics; new plumbing pipes and the foundation for what will be the bathroom.  Because of humidity concerns the bathroom is to be built of bricks but the rest of the planned structure that will comprise of a classroom, two bedrooms for our volunteers, kitchen and clothes washing area will be built of 'kincha', a traditional building material in this part of the Amazon basin that is essentially the same as the old English 'wattle and daub' whereby mud is applied to a woven wood matrix to make the walls.  It's a tried and true method that is eco-friendly, cheap and we like the soft aesthetics of the earth-tone finish.  These walls will be topped with the traditional palm-frond roofing.

Maestro Simon and helper putting in plumbing pipes and foundation for the bathroom.

We are making an effort to make the whole stucture wheelchair friendly as we plan to be able to accomodate both volunteers and community members with disabilities in the future.

An open letter

TO ALL GOOD-HEARTED CITIZENS OF PLANET EARTH.

The 21st century belongs to us. We the people. There are grounds for optimism, we are waking up.  They are few, we are many. And they are shaking in their boots, hence the increasing repression and mind-control.  Hanging on to an outmoded paradigm with bloody fingernails.  It's got to go, has to.  We are increasingly seeing through the Great Lie.  What is the Great Lie?

 Selling arms to both sides and posing as an angel of peace.

 Keeping an unjust economic system alive after it has clearly died.  Time to pull the plug.

 Pretending there is democracy while converting the system to a one party kleptocratic dictatorship.

 Emphasizing illness when it's health that we all want.

 Orwellian distortion:  War is peace, hate is love, bad is good, slavery is freedom etc.

 Lies after lies, you know what they are, fill in the blanks yourself........

It's time to build a whole new world based on values of mutual caring, equality and support for basic human needs, not control and cynical manipulation. Let's find a way to bring kind people to the fore and retire the psychopaths.  They have had their day.  And not just human needs either, support for all life forms in this amazing planetary ecology.

A perfect world?  Unlikely.  But it could be a whole lot better than this.  We are all individuals and we are mostly kind, good and caring.  We are all inherantly powerful and we all know there is something dreadfully wrong in our society.  For a start, it's all gotten way too big and bloated.  Time to downsize across the board.  There is enough for all, but heading for smaller units is generally the way towards fairness; ask anyone who has given the matter serious thought.

George Orwell said, look to the proles, and he was on the right track.  But I would say, look to the indigenous.  Terence McKenna talked about the archaic revival.  Yes, but it's got to be totally modern as well.  Modern but with some ancient essential understandings that are now being increasingly backed up by cutting-edge quantum physics:

  All is connected.

  All is conscious.

  We are each made of atoms.  Each atom contains mind-boggling power.  We are all
  tremendously powerful but mostly don't know it.

  This place is just one of many dimensions.

  Circles over hierarchies.

  We are eternal.  We came from somewhere and we go back.  Want to call it the Zero Point Field?       OK by me.  The Kingdom of Heaven?  The Void?  Nirvana?  Fine, whatever.


 The essence of all is love.


There is much to be done so we must proceed slowly  -  The Buddha

Thanks for all the help

Also the good wishes and positive feedback.

Heading to Germany

During the first week of June I'm off to Germany where I have been invited to attend a conference about volunteers.  I will also be visiting the offices of Freunde der Erziehungskunst Rudolf Steiners to talk about our Estrella del Sur projects in Peru and to thank them for helping us make the step of aquiring a building site for our new center in Sauce.  This help was in the form of an interest-free loan.  We are really happy to finally get a place of our own that we can shape into a very welcoming educational and social center for the community.

 Here are our volunteers from Germany, Andreas and Freya, in front of our newly aquired building site in Sauce.  It measures 11 meters wide by 20 meters deep and is one block away from the lake.  It is a different site than the one we first looked at back in February.  We had problems with the price which kept going up. The new site is just a few meters away and is better in that it has a large sports area behind it which will give the children more room to play.
We would like to thank our friends who responded to our appeal for help to buy a permanent home for Estrella del Sur.  Shortly we will start remodeling this traditional jungle-style building using funds kindly donated by various friends to double its size to create a classrom space.  We also plan to build two bedrooms for our volunteers, a bathroom with shower, a kichen and dining area, gardens, a playground and a covered area for woodworking and other crafts such as candlemaking.
We welcome visitors.
We also welcome the donation of more funds so we can complete our remodeling project.

We have recently started  Friday workshops for senior citizens 60 to 80 years old from 3-5 pm which is attended by 20 people.  We offer weaving, embroidery, knitting and other crafts.  We encourage participants to tell their personal stories and it has been interesting to find out more about 'the old days' when Sauce was a much more isolated place and there was a lot more magic.  Several report seeing mermaids in the lake when they were younger, also balls of fire, which is likely because the whole area is seismically active and it seems to have been more so in the past.  After a glass of fruit juice and a piece of cake the participants go off home happy.  This is the first such gathering offered in Sauce for older people.  Lourdes is glad to have all these new friends.