Road to Makuma

The guesthouse was only a short walk away, but we only had time to drop our main bags and deposit the groceries in a rusty refrigerator before changing into our boots and heading off on foot for the town of Achuentsa, where my first patient lived. As we headed out the door we saw the 3 dozen eggs we had so carefully packaged and transported lying smashed at the bottom of the porch steps. A skinny brown dog named Rambo looked sorrowfully up before tucking his tail between his legs and slinking away. Shirley, the cook at the Makuma guesthouse surveyed the damage with her hands on her hips.

“I think we can save them”, she said.

In no time at all she had whipped out a spatula and scooped the unbroken egg yolks off the pavement and into a yellow bowel. The 3 second rule suddenly had a whole new meaning. As I was quickly to learn, absolutely nothing was wasted in the jungle. Shirley had been in Makuma for 5 weeks and was helping to provide for the Hedlands, who were trying to finish a project translating the Bible into the Shuar language.

Makuma is a village inhabited by the Shuar Indians. The Shuar are a sub-tribe of the notorious Jivaro warriors, who were famous for their practice of shrinking the heads of their enemies after battle. Although many peoples through out the world have taken the heads of their enemies, the Jivaro are the only ones to practice head shrinking. The shrunken heads are called tsantsa. In addition to the Shuar, the Ashuar, the Aguaruna, and the Huambisa are also sub-tribes of the Jivaro .

The name "Jivaro" shares its roots with the word savage. This named was originally assigned to the indians of the South East orient of Ecuador by the first European explorers to become aware of their existence. Jivaro is the name that linguists and anthropologists have assigned to the Amazon tribes who share the same language with slight variations in dialect. The historical center of the Jivaro was in Macas, Ecuador. Makuma is three hours by foot from Macas. After the Spanish conquest the Jivaro migrated south, eventually occupying territory in what is now Peru. Currently the Jivaro occupy nearly seven-and-a-half million acres of jungle land along the Peru-Ecuador border.

Currently, Florence and I were migrating east on the jungle trail, led by a young girl with a 5 month old baby wrapped in a red shawl and slung around her hips. She was guiding us over the muddy path to the home of Esteban Sando. I had first met Esteban in the hospital about 6 weeks ago. An expressive man, with wide gesturing arms and a constant toothy smile, he had been paralyzed by TB of the spine over a year ago. He had been receiving TB medication and was experiencing an amazing recovery. When he first began treatment he was bedridden and unable to move. When I first saw him in the hospital he had recovered strenth in his arms and legs, but had no coordination and had not walked in a year. We walked down the hall that first day jolting from side to side with the aid of a walker. I gave him coordination and balance exercises and promised to come see him in the jungle as his next hospital appointment was 3 months away.

We had two crutches with us to trial with Esteban and Florence quickly got mired in the mud and lost both crutch tips in the muck. The recent rains had caused a bog of mud on the path. The villagers placed long tree trunks into the mud to raise themselves above the sucking clay. They were adept at skirting along these slippery balance beams carrying not only children and babies, but their produce and parcels too. Florence and I weren’t quite as agile and it took us 1 ½ hours to go the normally 45 min distance.

We arrived at the home of Esteban with 3 skinny dogs and a large gobbling turkey in full display. The turkey edged toward us snorting air through it’s beak and making threatening head shakes. I’d never been stalked by a giant turkey before and kept my distance. We were ushered into the open air frame and thatch of the kitchen where we sat down to talk with Esteban. Smoke poured through the blackened doorway of the back kitchen where Esteban’s wife Rosita was cooking in typical fashion with a sooty pot sititng in the center of three burning logs. My eyes were stinging from the smoke and my throat was burning before we were shown our quarters. Uncharacteristically, Esteban actually had rough wooden frame beds complete with a sheet, a pillow and a blanket depicting tweetie bird and Sylvester the cat.

Dinner that evening consisted of chicken soup with yucca and a banana drink. Dinner finished we found the trail to “El baño sin casa”, “the toilet without a house” ,or more specifically “hole in the ground”, and settled down to await the morning.