The ongoing survey saga
Trip Start
Jun 01, 2008
1
5
Trip End
Jun 13, 2008
Pucallpa,
Peru
Friday, June 13, 2008
We landed on the evening of the 3rd in Pucallpa to be greeted by a heavy rain, an ominous sign considering the next day we were scheduled to make the flight over the village. The weather gods debated among themselves for some time the next morning before deciding for sun. So we left the runway shortly after 3 pm with Bryan, Bernardo (the village´s jefe) and Jains (his assistant) along for the ride. It was the first time either of them had been in an airplane. The trip was breath-taking. The Ucayali with all its curves and sinuosities, is a living organism.
We collected some 700 photos of the villages territory and an hour and a half´s worth of video, all of which will be linked to a discrete GPS position. Bryan´s resourcefulness in this whole process was - as always - invaluable. (welding together a camera mount, planning the technical details of the photo sequence, setting up the system for data collection, all went off seamlessly) To Bernardo´s distress however, we discovered the eastern reaches of the territory to be heavily encroached upon by settlers moving south from Masisea, apparently with the full support of the authorities.
That effort completed, we turned towards defining the boundary of the property. We had spent dozens of hours over the last year poking at this, teasing information out of various sources, testing and tossing various hypotheses, until that one fine day in March when the solution crystallized by itself in front of our eyes. It´s one thing though to believe you have it right, and another to convince authorities who probably have different ideas of where those boundaries lie, and who may well have different motivations than we do for establishing those boundaries. How would I react, I found myself wondering, if some smart-ass surveyor from, I don´t know, Japan showed up at my doorstep to tell me (in Japanese!) that I´d gotten the boundary to one of my surveys all wrong?
We started this endeavor by meeting with Mario Osorio with the Instituto del Bien Comun, and a host of others from a bewildering assortment of organizations, both governmental and non- on Thursday the 5th. The IBC is an indigenous rights organization who have been working with Bernardo for some time prior to our arriving. Mario from the beginning was our advocate, and honestly without his presence, I seriously doubt we´d have ever made the inroads we did on this trip . . . To condense a little, a day and three meetings later we had a general agreement on the methods we used to establish our boundary, and a commitment from both the Ministry of Agriculture and COFOPRI to accompany us to the field, a feat roughly akin to taking five fishes and five loaves of bread to feed the throngs.
So now comes the easy part, the part that Bernardo has been so looking forward to since I first met him. Marking the boundary corners and taking a charge of a hundred or so machete wielding Dinamarcans to hack a boundary line out of the jungle. Friday afternoon, after a six hour jaunt up the Ucayali with all the magic and life the river holds, we arrived at the village. The traditional pageant of arriving in the village and the dancing that followed lifted my spirits just that much higher. We all pretty much watched Friday night turn into Saturday morning with not more than a blink or two of sleep.
There are inevitabilities in the jungle. One of the immutable ones is that plans cannot possibly go off as designed. Five or so seemingly unrelated (to surveying) events conspired this time to reduce 4 days of surveying to two. The major one of these was that COFOPRI, unbeknownst to us, had decided not to come. That was a blow because it is necessary for them to be on the ground for a boundary to be officially recognized. Francisco Sifuentes from the Ministry of Agriculture arrived on Sunday, a day later than planned, and other minor to middling crises arose. While none of this was lethal, it did take a toll on Bernardo I think. Last year through all that happened, he was smiling and positive throughout all of it. This year lines of frustration crossed his face at times, and I suffered with him. He is so passionate in his quest for improving the lives his people both in his village and in the wider Shipibo community, that you cannot help but want the same.
In the end we were only able to reach two of the four corners and mark only a short section of boundary in the critical northeast portion of the territory. In both the northeast and northwest corners of the property, there are settlers who claim they have title. Equally important though was the meeting we had with COFOPRI and the Ministry of Agriculture on our return to Pucallpa. They have agreed with our assessment of the boundary, and they have been made aware of an issue that they had no idea was going on (encroachment on the communal territory). They have assured us that they will act to stop any additional incursions on to the territory. I am cautiously optimistic that they will work with us as we move forward with this. The complexity of this issue grows the deeper you burrow into it. But rather than being disappointing, it´s exhilarating in some perverse fashion. And the progress we have made in this visit is really astonishing when I look back at it.
I would like everyone reading this to recognize that none of the progress we made could have been done without Faith Sternlieb and my brother Tim. Faith is one of those annoying people who is able to get completely inspired by the sunrise morning after morning after morning. Her laugh and spirit and her passion are infectious, which is good, because she needs all of that to offset her singing voice! I well with pride, but at the same time am a little envious, of having a sibling like the one I do. Growing up he was the older brother who I wanted to fashion my life after. Now in the middle years of my life, I just hold tremendous respect for him for cutting the path that he has for himself.
Both Faith and Tim served as translators on this trip. And it has become abundantly clear to me that knowledge of spanish is one tiny prerequisite for that calling. Those things that make a human being extraordinary make up the rest of the requirements.
Pucallpa
June13, 2008
