The Friends Project

 “Amazon: A Fragile Balance” is on exhibition at Ock Hee’s Gallery in upstate New York, in Honeoye Falls.The show includes images from my time living with colonists in the Brazilian Amazon who had a plague of mosquitoes on their land and were protesting for help in a roadside, makeshift camp (1991) and my time helping researchers in Peru, trekking in the forest, catching caimans to see what they had for lunch and launching health care and wildlife management programs in remote communities.Images explore the culture, the beauty of the forest and the wild of one of the few places left where nature, not man, is in control. It compels us to explore man’s struggle to co-exist with nature and what impact we have on the environment, and what can be lost.Several images feature communities that are recipients of the work The Friends Project does, including the Amazon Animal Orphanage (care for a baby howler monkey), Nueva Esperanza (window screens, a latrine, safe drinking-water program, shoes for kids) and Belén (school supplies).I’ll post some photos later of the images.

I will be creating four individual posts with journal entries, a story or two and photos specific to each person or organization that received the money.

That’s real soon. Today’s June 6. So bear with me.

In the meantime, here is a synopsis.

NUEVA ESPERANZA – This tiny village of 194 people sits perched atop a red-bank cliff on the remote Yavari River in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. It is a day’s boat ride from another community and two days to one that has a store, lodging or any other services. Brazil, and logging concessions, are across the river.

As part of a volunteer group with researchers, we visited the community to help with the wildlife management program and to help launch a health initiative. The scientists are helping the residents hunt monkeys, wild pigs, game birds and other animals sustainably and want to provide better medical training and better sanitation. Malaria is a huge problem here. The homes are simple, with holes cut in the wood for windows. There’s a nurse’s station, but having a nurse practitioner there or medications there is hit or miss. For $300, we have paid for the installation of screens on all the homes in Nueva Esperanza. Come dusk, most families stay inside and this will protect them.

My friend Pablo Puertas, a researcher who specializes in community work, is organzing this now that i’m gone. A carpenter will install the screens in July and sent along photos.

BELEN

Iquitos is the largest city in the world that’s accessible only by plane or boat. It is in the Peruvian Amazon, and the hub for the region. More than 7,000 people live in Belen, a slum on the western side. In flood season, the river gets as high as the stilts the wooden homes are built on. The water is their bath, their swimming hole, their washing pit, their garbage and their latrine.

When the flood waters recede, what isn’t washed away stays behind in the muck. The city’s poorest are here, traveling in canoes and on elevated wooden walkways between homes, stores, churches and schools and the crowded Belen market. You can find anything here from carved up 8-foot caimans to medicinal plants and hand-rolled cigarettes. Schools are free, but children must bring their own supplies.

At the Instititucion Educativa Primaria Secundaria de Menores, says Principal Lilia Coral Puertal, that often means that they come empty handed. Parents often can’t afford to feed their families. With $90, hit a local “libreria” and bought 100 notebooks, pens, pencils, sharpeners, colored pencils and other supplies – enough to outfit 48 kids for some time.

Lilia said another traveler had visited there a month earlier and brought backpacks. “It is truly a blessing,” she said.