The largest tribe of indigenous people in the Peruvian Basin is the Shipibo tribe. I tried to find out online how big a population they are, but there doesn’t seem to be any concrete data. One source says over 20,000 while another says approximately 35,000. But there’s no question that, although the Shipibo people are having to live with one… Read more →
Well, the inevitable has happened… and I was so adamant that it wouldn’t. We leave for our next trip to Peru this week, and I still haven’t posted all the photos from our previous trip. Ugh!! In the middle of all our craziness, I may still try to get everything posted before we leave, so I apologize now for the… Read more →
Block 1A in Pucallpa, Peru. It’s located across the street from where the city began. Back in the day, there were only a bunch of Indian huts, but as the road (singular!!) was built back in the 1940s, the city grew and grew to its current population of over 500,000. In those early days, the Indians (the natives from villages… Read more →
If you Google “Casa Shea Pucallpa”, you’ll find a whole bunch of photos and blog posts that span several years. There are also several accounts of people being chased or attacked by a rather unfriendly parrot. Abuelo. (Or Abuela. Over the years, no one’s been brave enough to flip the bird over onto its back and check its hoo-hah for… Read more →
Onomatopoeia: The formation of a word from the sound associated with the object. For example: sizzle, cuckoo, splat, oink, peki-peki. Umm… peki-what?? The city of Pucallpa, Peru sits on the banks of the Ucayali River, serving as a major port. The Ucayali drains a lot of water from the Andes and then meanders northward, becoming one of the major tributaries… Read more →
Do you know someone with a disability? Maybe someone who’s blind… or wheelchair-bound… or someone who has Down syndrome… or maybe they have some other kind of physical or mental handicap. Now, can you imagine the world without them? Is that an uncomfortable question? It wasn’t too long ago that the Indians who live in the Peruvian jungle (and other… Read more →
Water. How can something so basic be so valuable? And how can something so apparently abundant in some places of the world be so scarce in others? But this trip to Peru wasn’t about a lack of water. It was about a lack of clean water. Water that stimulates life rather than suffocates it. Water that’s free from bacteria and… Read more →
I woke early after just a few hours of overly-exhausted sleep. Fifteen of us had flown into Lima, Peru the previous evening and had been picked up by our born-in-Peru-but-very-American host, Tom. We all bundled into a van and drove a short, chaotic distance to the SAM (South American Mission) House – a tardis-esque type home that’s squeezed between… Read more →
