Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Maijuna and the Bora: a comparison

After the Maijuna Congress, we traveled to Nueva Vida, one of the four Maijuna villages.
Nueva Vida is different than Brillo Nuevo, the Bora village we visited on our last expedition. Here´s how:

Brillo Nuevo: Each family has a latrine. Behind the school, there are four “upgraded” latrines with ceramic toilet seats.
Nueva Vida: We pee and poop in the woods behind the house. As I crouch, the pigs encircle me and grunt. Then they dig their faces into my excrements.

Brillo Nuevo: Everyone drinks clean water from a well. Some bathe with rainwater collected from the school´s roof.
Nueva Vida: Everyone bathes in the river. They wash pig and cow poop into the river. They drink from the river.

Brillo Nuevo: There are pigs, but I never saw them because they were corralled and separated from the village.
Nueva Vida: The pigs, dogs, cats, roosters and chickens all live under the house. The lawn is a muddy, poopy slush.

Brillo Nuevo: Everyone speaks Bora amongst themselves.
Nueva Vida: Everyone speaks Spanish. The older generation knows Maijuna, but most of the children never learned their parent´s native tongue.

Brillo Nuevo: There´s a school with five teachers that regularly hold class.
Nueva Vida: There´s a teacher, but he rarely bothers to visit the village. He lives in Iquitos and collects his paycheck there. The children here have not gone to school for three years. They spend their days playing soccer, fishing, chucking bottle caps and splashing in the river.

The Maijuna know what they´re missing out on. They want their children to drink clean water and go to school. They want change, but they´re not sure about how to bring it about.

For the last several hundred years, foreigners have played with the destinies of both the Maijuna and the Bora. Strangers enslaved them. They grouped them into villages to better control them. They made them believe in a god and a book that was not their god, and was certainly not their book. Foreigners told them what was right and wrong. They stripped them of their culture, and then they left them.

Looks like the Maijuna were destined for the shorter end of the stick.

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