Judging Cultures and Belief Systems To Improve My Own: Part 1

I've gone through three stages in my life of judging culture and spiritual belief systems.

Judging other cultures 1: Non-Judgement

The first stage of judging you might call 'non-judgement': without deep reflection, I accepted the Methodist Christianity my parents brought me up on, going to church each Sunday when they decided to go, secretly grateful to have my Sunday morning back when they chose to stay home. I had a deeply spiritual, euphoric experience reading about God's love in “The World's Religions” by Huston Smith while on a 3 week-long Boy Scout canoeing trip in 8^th grade, and this kept my faith for a while longer.

Then…

Judging other cultures 2: Accuracy of Beliefs

In my junior year of college, I asked a question with which I couldn't square my faith: if I'd been born into another family, wouldn't I believe just as firmly in what those parents taught me as I do in Methodism? And so what evidence was there that my parents happened to be the right ones in judging religious truth?

Within a year, by the fall of my senior year, I finally identified as atheist, and felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. I could finally square all my beliefs about the world with a) my actual observations and b) my understanding of how religion has been used to manipulate masses of people for the benefit of the manipulators. I no longer had to avoid considering certain questions, or feel uncomfortable considering them – I had felt cognitive dissonance, and ending it felt so empowering! What a breath of fresh air.

So I had my new judgement of religions and cultures: I supported cultures and belief systems to the extent that their beliefs matched observations of reality. I never claimed to have any sort of objective perception of reality, or that anyone could, but I felt that a culture which demands believing in things for which there was no evidence at all (that I could identify) should surely discredit a belief system and lead to people abandoning it. These beliefs included life and justice after death, an all-powerful all-knowing supernatural being who occasionally stirs things up down here, the universe being born 6,000 years ago, etc.

I felt pretty good about this position. But now I feel differently.

Judging cultures 3: What are the effects of your beliefs?

I've settled on a new framework for judging and learning from cultures and spiritual belief systems: does your culture encourage and empower you to a) understand your needs and b) express yourself to others and listen to them in order to c) meet your needs effectively?

About 5 years ago, I started seriously trying to understand power, politics, economics, fraud – the large-scale human world around me. I saw a supposedly science-based, rational society making incredibly foolish, short-term, corrupt decisions, lying and bribing and numbing and drugging and bludgeoning and educating itself into submission – in short, not acting very rationally despite priding itself on scientific, rational understanding and decision-making.

About 2 years ago, I moved to Earthaven Ecovillage and met a girl who verbally, lovingly warns and calms down flowers before she transplants them – and I met a lot of other people like her. I shared the story of observing an otherwise sane-seeming person talk to a plant here.

Within a few months, I identified as pagan, and eventually as animist. Animism, to me, is the belief that everything in the universe is alive, at all scales, and I do not really distinguish between living things and non-living things in my spiritual relationship with every thing, but acknowledge my connection to the whole and all its various parts at all scales.

This actually seems rational enough: is rain alive? Maybe not, by some definitions, but I'd sure better not do anything that would scare the rain off, leading to drought! How about snow? Same thing! How about rivers? If I poison them, or dam them, or fill them, surely I harm myself and other more-obviously-alive beings to a great degree. Same with ocean currents or global or regional carbon or oxygen cycles: alive or not, an environment hospitable to human life requires them in something like their current state, so I would seem wise to treat them with the same respect as I treat more obviously living beings upon which I depend.

The difference between some large molecules and certain viruses and other semi-alive particles is minute, and the question of 'is it alive or not?' seems irrelevant: all is part of the web of life we find ourselves in upon this planet, in this universe, and the balance of life, including climate, in which humanity evolved to be most happy ought to be preserved for our long-term happiness and prosperity. Life depends on non-life, such as the sun, so why distinguish? Let us acknowledge a profound dependence and interrelationship with all of everything and seek to preserve the balance humanity evolved into.

Along with this 'rational' explanation of my feelings, I've begun to feel an emotional/spiritual attachment to life, to the world, a deep love for its beauty and complexity and especially the vision of developing a mutually beneficial relationship with it. Sometimes I talk to plants, and yes, sometimes I still feel sheepish doing it. But I also feel joyful as I learn to accept their gifts and care for them in turn. This desire for a loving, joyful, mutually beneficial relationship extends to fungi and animals, including other people as well.

Here's a key element to animism though: whether a person arrives at the belief system through 'rational' means or a spiritual or emotional love, the person will develop a deep respect for the soil, for animals, plants, weather, humans in their own and other cultures – everything, including the things and processes upon which that person depends for their health and happiness.

But! With this deep respect, does that animist come to feel the need to defend these things? Does this person defend the trees from loggers, the rivers and forests and unlucky communities from miners or frackers and their toxins, and attempt to stop industrial warfare and the radiation, poisons, and mass-suffering that results?

I recognize my own well-being is tied in closely with the trees' and the animals', the cleanliness and availability of river water and air, and so I understand the need to defend these in order to defend myself and friends and family. This love compels me to act in a meaningful way. I identify with the land; preventing pollution benefits both of us. I empathize with people who are suffering, exploited by others, similarly.

And so I've discovered a new question for judging cultures and spiritual belief systems: does your culture encourage and empower you to a) understand your needs, b) express yourself to others and listen to them in order to c) meet your needs effectively?

I can finally stop caring whether Jesus really existed

It's not the belief that matters, it's the attitude compelled by the beliefs and all the conditioning the culture provides.

Do you believe in Jesus? If so, let's imagine two possibilities:

1)  You believe you're helpless to stop the evil in the world; you can only believe strongly in Jesus and believe that he'll return someday to make things right. He'll also, in the meantime, bring justice to the present evildoers after their deaths, and after you die he'll reward you for your belief.

2)  You recognize that Jesus/God work through you to do good in the world, and thus it is incumbent upon you to act to bring about profoundly positive change.

Clearly one perspective preaches helplessness, the other empowerment. Two months ago in California, I attended a methodist Christian sermon that preached the disempowering version exactly. I almost stood up to interrupt the sermon and preach the opposite!

Another Jesus comparison. Here are two perspectives a church might teach:

1) You are sinful. It is in your nature as a  human being; we all tend towards evil and require the church to save us. Morality is black and white and context is irrelevant, meaning there's no room for your personal judgement in determining right or wrong. For example, alcohol is bad in any quantity under any circumstances. Belief in Jesus and following the dictates of the Church are your only hope for escaping God's punishment after death for your sinful nature. Yes, some bad people are causing evil in the world, but never forget how sinful you are when you reflect on others.

2) Jesus taught that we should work to end unnecessary suffering.  It's not always clear how to do this effectively, but your responsibility to yourself, your community, and God is to work with compassion to seek effective ways of ending this suffering. There is no perfection, as every action comes with costs, including opportunity costs. Mistakes and occasional failure will be the inevitable consequence of a process of intense personal growth. Rather than feel shame at failures, celebrate and reflect on them, as they are opportunities to learn and thus channel Jesus' love more effectively in the future. Recognize that Jesus was only a model, and cannot give clear-cut directions for every situation, so learn to judge for yourself how to bring about positive change based on the principles and values you hold dear.  Serve God through working personally to achieve the same goals as His Son.

I met a missionary in Peru who firmly espoused perspective [1] above, making him one of the most disempowering people I've ever met. And Peru and Ecuador were full of disempowering perspectives!

One last Jesus comparison, about the prime goal of His followers:

1)  You believe in Jesus, and your primary duty is to grow the number of people in your belief system and live by the Biblical strictures you've learned. You donate much time and money to proselytizing.

2)  You believe in Jesus, and you recognize the most profound way to serve God is to preserve and celebrate what He has created. If God ordered Noah to place a pair of every animal on the ark to preserve them, who are we to cause them to go extinct, each species' extinction a creation of God dead for all eternity? You take responsibility as a Christian made in the Image of God to defend God's creation, and you fight for clean air, clean water, river and forest preservation, clean, non-toxic (including non-GMO) food, etc.

I've had fun engaging with proselytizing Mormons who approach with the attitude (1) above, only interested in increasing their number of followers. It feels gratifying watching the wheels in their brains spin rapidly when I offer the second attitude.

Do you identify as atheist? Let's imagine two possibilities:

1)  You take the cynical, if defensible, view that we're toast. The environment's toast, no group of well-intended citizens will stop state violence and surveillance, any large-scale social change will only make things worse, resource limits and environmental degradation ensure mass death is in our future, etc. This could lead you to hunker down, solely insuring the safety and comfort of you and yours, or perhaps it leads to a “get while the getting's good” attitude.

2)  You study the history of exploitative human systems and study why some societies are exploitative and others not. You recognize that even if you do not immediately see a way to 'win' and end the exploitative social systems currently dominating, you see that the only way to find a solution is dive in with others and seek out a solution with the attitude that we can live better than this, and we must if we wish to pass a happy, healthy life on a  healthy planet on to our children. You accept the wisdom that the opportunity for making things better often does not exist until we create it, and you decide to work with other caring people in order to create that opportunity for meaningful change and then seize it.

So I have learned that I really really don't care if Jesus lived, or whether you're Protestant or Catholic or Islamist or Jew or Scientist or atheist or consumer.

What I care about is: do you understand your and your community's needs, and do you have the wisdom, strength, compassion, and open mind to work effectively with others to meet those needs?

In your culture, is Jesus presented as disempowering: the only source of salvation, the only source of ultimate justice, the only possible savior? Or is he a model for us to follow in our own lives, an example of someone who risked and eventually, painfully, gave his life to fight exploitation, including attacking the financiers of his day, to rid his culture of unnecessary suffering?

Same with Allah. Same with Buddha or Yahwey or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Does your culture encourage selfishness, disconnected or short-term thinking, baseless hope, unthinking obedience, numbing of feelings of compassion, self-hate, isolation from others, inability to know your own feelings or needs, inability to compassionately listen to the feelings and needs of others? Or does it encourage active awareness of yourself and the social and ecological world around you, and encourage you to work productively with others to make meaningful change?

Prelude to Part 2

So... what exactly are our needs? And how can I judge others' needs, especially if I don't know them intimately? How can I know what needs people actually have in common and ensure I'm not just projecting my own feelings or needs onto others? How do I distinguish between different sorts of needs, such as the need for a big house vs the need for shelter? What insights can I safely draw from observations, and what practical lessons can I apply to my own life and community?

I'll share my reflections on these questions in part 2.

Fermenting Miso to Prevent Radiation Sickness

I just learned that miso, a traditional Japanese fermented soup, aids the body in expelling heavy metals and radioactive elements, both very toxic things.

Here's an excerpt on miso's anti-radiation properties from Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation:

One specific health benefit of miso is the protection it provides against exposure to radiation and heavy metals. The research that verified this was conducted in Japan in the wake of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and grew out of the observations of a Nagasaki physician, Dr. Shinichoro Akizuki. Dr. Akizuki was out of town the day of the bombing, and the hospital where he worked was destroyed. He returned to Nagasaki to treat survivors of the bombing. He and his staff ate miso soup together every day and never experienced any radiation sickness, despite their proximity to the fallout. Dr. Akizuki’s anecdotal account of this experience led to the finding that miso contains an alkaloid called dipicolinic acid that binds with heavy metals and carries them out of the body. In our radioactive world, we could all do with some of that healing.

Miso; image not mine. I'll make some someday - it takes months to years to ferment good miso.

The more I learn about fermenting and the various benefits and tastes of different fermenting traditions, the more excited I am to make it part of my diet. I just made my first kimchi recently, and I've got wines and vinegars coming soon!

Update: I wrote this before I saw Dmitry Orlov's article on the risk of nuclear meltdown in the 19 nuclear reactors in Ukraine as the looting and deindustrialization continue there. I may accelerate my miso-making plans...

Super quick visual tour of the last 9 months: part 3

This is the third and final quick tour of my time in S. America seeking indigenous community. Here is part 1, and here is part two. I didn't take the pictures, but they represent things I saw.

Visual tour part two ended with my decision to experience a full, extended fast in mid-late July. I first looked for a site on the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) in Lake Titicaca between Bolivia and Peru.

Isla del Sol

Red circle shows where the Lake and Isla del Sol are between Bolivia and Peru.

The Isla was a no-go for the fast. Back into Peru I went, and back to Satipo.

Late July, Satipo/Atalaya again
Now I go crazy for a bit, considering going deep into actual wild jungle to do the extended fast and pitching my tent somewhere no one else is. To hell with mosquitos, natives, marxist revolutionaries, peruvian military overflights, miners, loggers, and other obstacles; I wanted to fast in the wild.

I do another round-trip between Satipo and Atalaya in a pickup for 8 hours, looking for a place to just get out and walk into the woods for the fast. I get super sick. A really nice family, whose father I met on the truckride, takes me in and gives me food and a place to sleep for a few nights, saving me from a hostel.

Back in Satipo, I decided to play it a little safer and met someone whose brother owned a chakra, a small farm in the mountains with an unused shed I could stay in. I last a week there fasting before the ants get to me, and I head back into the friendly hostel in Satipo, continuing the fast there. I felt great but weak; I've never packed my gear so slowly before in my life (instances of extended procrastination aside).

Early August, Satipo: The fasting was wonderful. I had nothing to eat nor drink except filtered or boiled water for 2 weeks, and never felt hungry once. 2 years earlier I wouldn't have thought it possible, now I want to fast again and truly finish it. Unfortunately I chose to cut this one off early.

On fasting day 12, after much reflection, I decide to end the search for natives and return to the US. I planned out a way to learn lots of practical skills in Peru in the remaining 2 months before my visa expired, and with a feeling of catharsis, went to bed feeling excited and relieved with my new plan.

Next morning, I met a dude who promised to take me into a real native community. Change of plans again! I'll write more about this guy, Mike, and our time together. If you want a preview, watch a video of him here. He'd visited and supported the Ashaninka for over 3 decades with a deep humility and love for them. We got along great and are still in touch.

But for now, I had 1-2 weeks before he would help me enter an Ashaninka community. Having met a lot of locals in Satipo, I heard lots of complaining about pollution, corruption, crime... you name it. And everyone described a feeling of helplessness. So in my last week, I tried my hand at political/social organizing and create an event, "Neighbors improving their community" (Vecinos Mejorando a su Comunidad). More in a later post, but I invited bunches of restaurants to contribute food/drinks, got free fliers donated, invited probably 200+ people... interesting time. Even had a meeting with the mayor, which roughly corresponded to the start of a 2 week period with, um, flatulence issues. Either I successfully quieted them or the mayor pretended not to notice.

Separately, I got back into knitting, and spent a lot of hours at it and learning from others. Super interesting, more on it later.

Mike gets back to Satipo early with a new friend he'd made, Darlene. The three of us become quick friends during a pickup truck ride to Oventeni, a native community but not the one Mike planned to take me to. We become friends in part because I had uncontrollable flatulence as we traveled in the pickup cab together, and this resulted in much suffering and laughter. Oventeni, like Infierno, had a heavy colonized presence. The natives there seemed in rough shape, having been pushed out of the fertile valley and high into the mountains. Mike, Darlene and I were invited on a 3 hour trip into one of their villages where I got to witness them discussing financial difficulties. They wanted funding to help build a path they could use to get their cacao to market, but only one bank was available and wanted to charge 11% per month for the loan.

Too much to share here in a small recap. Beautiful time and wonderfully generous people; this was my first visit to an uncivilized native community. I ate yucca and wild hunted animal of some sort baked in the ashes and dirt under the family fire and had my first peorentsi, their fermented yucca drink; a rich meal indeed. The community was Ashaninka, similar to the groups I stayed with later.

It also was the first time I met Ashaninkas wearing their native robes. Most were a grey base color with colorful vertical stripes, but a few wore a deep forest green and I found them incredibly attractive. 

The pin shows Satipo; to the NE is Oventeni; east is Puerto Ocopa and further NE is Atalaya.

Late August, into the Ashaninka territory:
While not social organizing, and while not knitting or learning Ashaninka vocab or meeting other Ashaninka or aggressively practicing my Spanish or or or, in that week before entering, I bought tons of gifts for the Ashaninka. Machetes, files, fishing gear, cloth and thread, sling shots, etc.

I won't even try to do the time in native communities justice here. I went in, it was great; exactly what I hoped to experience going to S. America. Mike and an old friend of his Gillian entered with me but left after 1 week, leaving me there for another 1.5-2 weeks with no other non-natives. It was the real deal. I love those people.

Words can hardly describe how powerful this experience was, but I've already started drafting some essays about it. More to come.

I traveled to/from the native Ashaninka territory in a longer version of a boat like this.

Mid September, Atalaya: I start feeling feverish but don't think anything of it. I leave the natives by boat for Puerto Ocopa, weeping repeatedly for the beautiful community and wilderness I'd found and relationships I'd made, and for how that experience reinforced my vision for the human community and natural space I seek for myself and others.

I enjoy a 5 hour bumpy truck ride to Atalaya which includes a 3 hour intensive debate between myself and a Christian missionary. More on this later. I get sicker...

...and sicker. Mornings are great. Afternoons I get a ridiculous cold sensation; I literally bundle in several layers of shirt, sweater, jacket, then bundle into a blanket and go out into the jungle sun, and I still shiver strongly from cold. This lasts a 1-2 hours each afternoon starting between 12:00 and 3:00 PM and is followed by a bad tension headache until 11:00ish PM. I get diagnosed and treated for malaria and a liver infection when I finally go to the hospital 4 days later. Checkin' all the boxes on the jungle experience.

A mosquito. One of'em got me! Actually a lot bit me, but one of'em had a special surprise in store. I'm surprised it took 10 months to get a nasty bug.

I start recovering and head back to Satipo, said goodbye to my friends at the hostel and elsewhere, and head back to Lima to stay with my friend Darlene for a week. Darlene's work kept her too busy to spend much time with me sadly. Only remarkable thing here was that I experienced several minor earthquakes, including one while reading an article on earthquakes.

After 11 months in South America I fly home and arrive 10 days before my family expects me due to a communications mistake. Whoops!

I'll fill in the gaps in these visual tours in future essays.The time inside and out of the native communities was a period of intensive study, introspection, dreaming and growth. More on all this, as well as what's going on now, in future posts. Thanks for sharing this with me.

When giving a gift: pleasure either way

Have you ever had the experience where someone offers you a gift, and it doesn't suit you for some reason, but you do not feel comfortable letting the other person know this? Perhaps you do not find the clothing attractive or fitting or have no use for the tool or nick-nack, but you suspect the giver would be offended or hurt if they found out?

It seems a major route towards the feeling of being trapped by your material possessions, where “your things own you, you don't own them.”

I plan to give a few hand-made knitted and fermented food gifts over the next few months, and I've been considering how to avoid this issue. I'm considering saying this as I offer the gift:

“I hope this brings you happiness. If you think it would bring someone else more happiness than you, then I offer you the pleasure of giving it to them.”

In this way there is no emotional trap, there is only pleasure – either the pleasure of use, or the pleasure of giving, or perhaps both over time. I like this especially with handmade gifts because there's no pleasure of returning the item to a store for cash back ;)

Super quick visual tour of the last 9 months: part 2

This post is part two; here's part one. Again, as I didn't have a camera, these images are all from other sources, but represent what I experienced.

I believe the super fast visual tour left off with Seaver and me leaving Lima for La Merced towards Satipo, Peru in early June. Here's a map reminder:

The pin marks Satipo, Peru.

Backing up a bit: Our friend Jess left us to return to Canada in late May as Seaver and I returned to Lima..

A quick comment on Lima: I found it an ugly, trashy, polluted, brown, dangerous, unaesthetic, impoverished, loud, inhuman place. I'd only visit a friend there or use its airport.I met many kind people, and I hope they can escape soon.

Lima as I remember it: brown on the bottom, grey (foggy/cloudy) on top. A few richer areas managed a nicer facade.

Late May / Early June: While stuck dealing with health and bureaucracy troubles in Lima, Seaver and I decided to have fun trying to hustle some money up. So we get the ingredients to make a bunch of caramel sweets which we then walk around Lima selling for a Sol each (about $0.30). We end up meeting some fun people, including 1-2 who even donated a sol without taking a sweet. The cost of the ingredients compared to the total profit and time involved really highlighted the thin profit margin a lot of the street vendors and others live on. Time is not highly valued here.

Early June, La Merced: We get to La Merced which turns out to be as unattractive as every other town in Peru. They get more tolerable as they get smaller though. It didn't help that our hostel room window overlooked a big prison compound; I've learned enough about prisons and faux justice; I didn't need the constant reminder of all the human suffering right there. If you think prisons have anything to do with justice, or are anything other than misery factories and profit centers, this is a decent article to read with good research. I doubt Peru's prisons are any better than the US's.

On the bright side, beautiful mountains with trails and streams surround La Merced, giving it a lovely 'hugged by mountains' feel. Seaver and I enjoyed our first forest hike in a long time, eventually finding a lovely waterfall, which I stood under nude. No picture of that, sorry :( Here's a picture of the river near La Merced:

Perene river near La Merced, Peru

Early June, Satipo: La Merced felt unpleasant even considering moving away from the prison, and we hoped to find a much smaller town in Satipo and perhaps meet natives there. Off we went!

It was funny, we looked at little street map of Satipo that claimed to be up to date; it showed about 5-6 roads and dirt paths going out the side. That must have been 30 years old.

Satipo was several dozen square blocks that looked like this. Way cleaner / less trashy than many other towns though.

Satipo was the first place we visited where we noticed a lot of stares. Tourists like us seemed pretty rare. We got more stares later in Atalaya, but the first impression here wasn't too welcoming. Still, we find a great hostel with outdoors space and grass and trees, and the owner sets up a little stove kitchen when we ask. I'll get to know him and the staff much better later.

After a lot of consideration and discussion, Seaver decides now to head back to the US in time for the Firefly wilderness skills festival. He buys his airline ticket and we decide to enjoy the next 2 weeks together without looking for indigenous particularly, knowing Seaver wouldn't join me there anyway.

Mid-June Satipo, Atalaya, Iquitos

So we spend an evening playing the cooperative video game Age of Empires III for the equivalent of $2 each. Then off to Atalaya, which can be reached by a very bumpy dirt road by pickup. I later learned 75% of the ride can be done by boat for cheaper. For now, we choose the back of the pickup which cost half the fare for riding in the cab.

8 hours in the back of a pickup. Not any more comfortable than it looks, but great views!

We arrive in Atalaya to receive even more stares from locals than in Satipo, and lots of heavily armed military folk on the main corners. Time to move along. We head north on the river for a day, where we board a cargo ship.

Then we take a 3 day 'cruise' in a cargo barge, one of the 'Henry' line of ships. Now, I didn't expect a busy boat, perhaps with a few other travelers snuggled up against big boxes, our fare free money for the operator.

A "Henry" cargo ship from the back.

Two "Henry" cargo ships with their characteristic colors. The ship I took was like the left one.

One whole deck was reserved for human carg-, I mean, people. Luckily Seaver and I boarded early and got good spaces.

Another view of the hammocks aboard the Henry ship.

They really packed in the people. They also fed us alright, and we met some interesting folks. This trip took us along the Ucayali river which eventually became the Amazon River by our last day.

Iquitos... I feel silly and whiny saying this again, but what a sad, dirty place. The largest city in the world with no road access, it's got >300K people packed into a tight tight space, and is mostly supported by ugly, violent and dirty resource extraction. I've never seen markets packed with stalls in such tiny spaces, and it was the dirtiest market I saw in S. America.

Iquitos near main "Belen" market.

No exaggeration here; this is what it looks like after the market closes or is shut for a day, and the rain just makes it nastier.

Not all of Iquitos was this bad; the rest of the town was mostly like the rest of civilized Peru. Two signs of poverty that Iquitos was in rough shape: 1) Often in a crowded market in other Peruvian towns, a main store would exist in a concrete building and then a stall with a tarp ceiling would jut out onto a sidewalk in front of it. I literally saw stalls in this market 4 deep, spilling onto the middle of the small road. 2) With the desperate search for a living, hustling got really difficult. It was common to see the concrete-store food vendors sell bags of crackers by the 10 pounds, then see a street vendor sell a hand-wrapped bag of 10 crackers, then see another vendor even poorer sell the crackers individually for a few cents. Food was also quite cheap but heavy on the white rice at the low-priced end.

Late June, Lima, again: Seaver and I enjoy a pizza and beer on our last night traveling together, taking it back to our hostel on the roof. The next morning we wish each other well and part ways for the time being.

No more pictures or rants about Lima.

Late June, La Paz, Bolivia: I go to Bolivia just to return to Peru and get a new 3 month visa. I had trouble in Bolivia, losing access to my debit card until my bank could send a replacement, and totally lucked out. I'll be forever grateful; I was in a frustrated mood at an internet cafe dealing with computer troubles and bank troubles, and a man and womanoverheard me and stepped outside. Unknown to me,  this married couple discussed how well America had treated them during their stay and how they wanted to repay it, and decided helping me would be a good Christian thing to do. The woman called her mother for another opinion. Eventually they invited me to sleep in their home that night and set me up with some cash for the week, as I didn't have enough for a hostel for the time it would take the bank to send the card. I'd planned to offer to work-trade at a hostel while I waited, but what a relief to not have to worry about that.

Seriously, the family invited a stranger into their home, then gave him (me) cash and accepted my promise to return with repayment once my card arrived. They invited me back for dinner anytime, and I dropped by half a week later with a surprise meal I'd made, and then again once I had the money to repay them. The woman had a look of relief and gratitude when I gave her the money; I could tell it was important to her to help me, but she'd felt stress over giving a stranger cash like she did. I was glad to make friends with the family, not least for the stress and hassle they saved me.

At this point, I desired a rest from all the constant pushing and learning and meeting people, and I decided to seek out a place to do an extended fast.

I'll end part two here; visual tour part 3 will be ready soon!

Meeting a spiritual descendent of a woman Jesus praised

In Satipo, Peru, I met the spiritual descendent of a woman famous in Christian history. One story of Jesus describes him watching people give donations at a church. Various wealthy people give huge sums, and one impoverished woman goes to the box and donates 2 cents, the sum total of her wealth. As I learned in Sunday School, Jesus says that though others gave more, they gave a small proportion of their wealth and gave so that they could be seen as generous, while this woman had given everything and with no thoughts for appearances. Jesus said he appreciated her offering far more than the others'.

I met a man just like this woman.

Here's the story: I got it in my head, with a week to go before entering an indigenous community, to try my hand at social / political organizing. Perhaps I'll share the whole story another time, but in short: many local Peruvians had expressed frustration with their society and said they felt helpless to respond to its problems like crime, trash on the roads, pollution, and especially corruption. I organized a gathering one Sunday morning with breakfast and lunch freely donated by local restaurants where locals could come, eat together, do a work project together to clean trash from their roads, eat again for free with more donated food and drinks, and hopefully make connections with other caring citizens so they could begin to address their common concerns about their community.

I went all over the town with fliers (designed by me and donated by printing shops) and received a huge outpouring of gratitude and excitement. As I went through the market inviting people and their families, I was given so many gifts: coconuts, many bananas, apples, whole lunches w/soup, mangoes, drinks, and more - I kept a list of my gifts, and it ended up quite long! And almost everyone excitedly promised to come and bring their family, as well as put up my flier in their market stall.

Tired after pitching the event for several hours one afternoon, I walked back to the hostel along the main road and stopped at a roadside juice cart. I recognized the man who ran it, having walked past him many times. About 5'6", he had a thin scraggly beard and his wrinkled brown skin showed he received a lot of sun. I knew this also because he only had one large faded umbrella for cover, and this covered the customer's stools so that when the hot jungle sun really beat down, he would be completely exposed. Only the customers could have shade. And he sold frozen fruit drinks with ice he kept in a cooler for 50 Peruvian cents per drink: the equivalent of about 15 US cents each.

Asking for a drink and sitting down, and I started sharing my project with him and invited him to participate. He said he really liked the event idea, and wanted to participate, but he could not leave his drink cart. Sunday morning, the day of the event, was a big sales period for him, and he could not afford to miss it.

While inviting people, I remained sensitive to how incredibly long hours these folks worked, and for how little money each day. It seemed common to assume tall white foreigners were rich, and so all afternoon, while inviting others, I had been searching for a graceful way of replying to this objection that acknowledged the other person's needs and circumstances while avoiding any potential triggers or offensive assumptions.

I responded, "I appreciate that. However, many neighbors here who work long hours also deeply desire to find other caring people with whom they can improve their community, and I know they would love to meet you and become friends. Then you could bring real change, rather than wait for politicians."

I'll never forget his response. He looked me in the eye and said, "I am a slave to this cart. I cannot leave it."

No one else had explicitly acknowledged that level of economic destitution to me. I looked back at him, smiled, and nodded my head. After a minute, I said thank you as I got up to go. I don't know whether I was thanking him for his openness or the drink. Maybe both. I pulled out 50 cents and handed it to him.

And he wouldn't take it.

The man who acknowledged being a slave to his drink cart insisted on gifting me the drink.

I felt short of breath and said, "Sir -," and he turned away to serve someone else who'd just driven up to his cart.

When he turned back a moment later, he glanced at me, and I just said thanks and walked away. I received his proverbial 2 cents, maybe in thanks for what I tried to do for his community, or maybe just for connecting with him.

I don't think I've ever received such a humbling gift.

Super quick visual tour of the last 9 months: part 1

Some friends were bugging me to write more back in May-June, and just as I was about to post another update here, I lost access to this email account until I returned to the States. Bummer! Here's a quick summary of March->October, when I returned, and I'll fill in details later...

Mid-March: I left the indigenous family I stayed with in the Ecuadorian jungle; my friend Seaver and I headed to a small town called Pisac. Pisac is full of hippie people... the sort that give other hippies a bad name. I got invited to an astrology class and bit my tongue really hard the whole time.

(none of these pictures are mine, but I was there, honest)

Mountains give Pisac a big hug on all sides.

In case I had humility issues, these ruins are actually from multiple civilizations, each of which rose, left its mark, and then disappeared. Right next to Pisac.

To give an idea of scale, each of those terrace walls is taller than me ( >6 feet!) made with huge rocks dragged from all over the valley.

End-March: My friends Seaver and Jess and I leave Pisac, a small town outside the large city of Cusco, and head for Puerto Maldonado in SE Peru

Cusco, the major city near Pisac, is in south-central Peru. Puerto Maldonado, where I went next, is to the east of it.

April-May: Puerto Maldonado / Infierno. Puerto Maldonado is the sort of city that prompts the comment, "Wow, I thought that last city was the armpit of Peru." Sadly, several Peruvian cities are like that.

Welcome to Puerto Maldonado! The road above actually looks less trashy than I remember it.

We headed to a small, officially designated "Native Community" south of Puerto Maldonado. You know your conquerers respect your culture when they name your town "Infierno" (in English: Inferno, i.e. Hell) and call you "Salvajes" (savages). I can imagine the conversation: "Where did you grow up?" "I'm from Hell." Also, just to add insult to insult, the province's name is "Madre de Dios" (Mother of God). Just like I might say I'm from "Asheville, North Carolina, USA", the name of this native town, translated, is "Hell, Mother of God, Peru." We stay with a local 'shaman', but it's not a super warm place. His spiritual warmth seemed to vary in proportion to the likelihood of us paying him more. Hmm.

Skipping a lot of details... my friends and I thought we found a welcoming native community about 8 hours upriver from Infierno, but we were wrong.  I actually had the proverbial "surrounded by a bunch of angry natives with machetes" moment. After a heated 45 minutes, the 8-9 men and surrounding women/kids decided not to get violent, for which I was grateful. I had it easier than the 2 friends I was with: I at least spoke 6-month-old Spanish and could understand and respond to the natives. My friends' Spanish was poor, so they only recognized that things weren't going great. Which was an accurate recognition.

No boat ride was too long with this view! Now compare this with the picture of a major Peruvian city above.

May: I order a Kindle and coconut oil online which get impounded by the Peruvian government. According to the gov't, I need a medical prescription for coconut oil! Approximately 5,000 doctors laugh at me trying post-hoc to get a prescription for it. Also, Seaver has medical trouble, so we leave for Lima to take care of both these things, though not before meeting a bunch of clown dentists in Puerto Maldonado. Lack of patient understanding and consent is no barrier to intensive drilling for these doctors, no-sir-ee. Happily, we prevent any major/unrecoverable medical errors and things are taken care of in Lima.

May-June: We head east from Lima to La Merced and then Satipo.We'd heard there were less-civilized natives in this area, which was confirmed by a news report of someone finding a body in a boat floating down the river, the body having an arrow sticking out of it. Off we went!

The pin marks Satipo. You can see Cusco and Puerto Maldonado to the south east of Satipo.

[Then our protagonist gets tired and decides to write Part II soon, wherein he does an extended fast, gives up on finding the sort of indigenous community he sought, finds it and lives with wild, beautiful human beings for some time, catches malaria, doesn't feel so good in strange ways, gets better, and returns to the US, among other things.]