From SATA-Peru-2007
Day 5 at Casa Matsigenka. Like usual in Manu National Park, our day began before 7 because of all the noise and of course breakfast at 7. After breakfast, we had a special ethnobotanical event. Mateo, one of our research collaborators, is a shaman who let us watch and take photos as he prepared the sacred ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a hallucinogen that is used by the Matsigenka as a way to cleanse their bodies, cure serious illnesses and answer life questions. We watched and even helped as Mateo pounded the ayahuasca plant (a large vine) and a psychotria leaf. We pounded both into small pieces, making the leaves into a smaller form and removing the bark from the vine. After all the pieces of the vine and leaves have been thoroughly pounded with rocks, it is all put into a pot and boiled with water for 6-7 hours. Mateo watched it all day because the brew is considered bad or doomed, if any spills out during the boiling process. Next, we went back to working on our forest plots for the rest of the morning. We needed to continue to take more Matsigenka informants through our 100 tree transect in order to work on more informant variation and identification of trees of the area. I took out a woman named Yanet and her very small infant. She is the husband of Miguel, who is from Tayakome (one of the large Matsigenka communities inside of Manu National Park), and he works at Casa Matsigenka for part of the year. Yanet spoke no Spanish, so it was really hard to communicate to her with my limited knowledge of the Matsigenka language. She also became very tired because she walked over 3 km with her baby in hand identifying 100 trees. She didn’t have much fun, but was eyeing my bracelet the whole time and was very happy when I gave it to her at the end. 5 hours later we were back at Casa Matsigenka and she is most likely never going to go through this with another group (I suspect). It was around 2:30 when I got back and had some lunch. I took a refreshingly, cold shower and relaxed for a bit before beginning to enter transect data from the past few days of work. The rest of the day was relaxing (which I certainly appreciated because we have been going nonstop since we got into the rainforest). We had dinner around 7:30 and then chatted, talking about home and life in general. A bunch of us were up for hours just hanging out and feeling good.
November 8, 2007November 11, 2007
