Giving a Living to a Life in the Rainforests of Peru

We finally made it to Chazuta, the "city" where we will stay most of the time. Chazuta makes Tarapoto look like a thriving metropolis with many (not all) paved roads and throngs of motorbikes flooding the street. Chazuta can be described as a little town on the river with a main unpaved road (avenida chazuta - how appropriate). There's a plaza at the end of the street with a greater variety of stores. There's a back road that parallels avenida Chazuta and serves the residential area. Of coarse there are more roads and facets of the town, but those are just the main roads.

The hotel is probably the most luxurious place to live in the town. Running water is only available early in the morning or at night. What makes this place so luxurious is the fact that the bathrooms have actual toilets (like a toilet bowl and a water tank). To compensate for the lack of running water, the hotel people put a big bucket under a single spigot which seems to be the only one that has water throughout the day. When you're done using the toilet, you just take a small bucket of water and pour it into the toilet bowl to flush (unless you're the lucky first user of the day).

In Chazuta, prices are even cheaper than in Tarapoto. You can get a full meal for 3 or 4 soles: roughly 1 to 2 dollars. Another unique Chazuta experience is when there was a blackout (which is not uncommon here). This is where I must give thanks to Uncle Duane for the awesome flashlight (the mini maglight). Of the Nourish volunteers, my flashlight was the brightest, had the greatest distance, and had a candle light option (where you unscrew the mirror/lens head to reveal the LED - very useful for illuminating a room… or when you're taking a "shower" in the dark).

Speaking of shower, since there was no running water from the blackout, I had to do the old-fashioned "scoop from a bucket" routine… in the dark. It was a really humbling experience, and it made me realize how little water we actually need throughout the day… the things we take for granted… I have to be grateful though, because I could have had to take a shower in total darkness.

In Tarapoto, we couldn't really hang up a mosquito net, so I woke up one day with three bites on my left index finger. Needless to say, it was quite swollen. But in Chazuta we can! So yay for that! In retrospect, however, that´s nothing compared to the 50 something bites on my body (excluding my back and neck; I counted). Next time, I´ll consider bathing in bugspray.

The weather is definitely something in Chazuta. One minute the sun is beating down on you from a cloudless sky, and the next grey clouds are saturating the ground with water, and then the clouds go away. When the weather decides that it actually wants to rain, the unpaved streets turn into mud (yay rubber boots!)

Random things I noticed: