5th UPDATE
Tuesday 6th April.
After having some coffee and bread, we left Lethem at 8 am with Lena fully loaded. This time we were heading for the savannahs south of the Kanukus, staying nowhere near a hotel for almost a week; therefore we needed to be well provided with food rations and water. It had been raining heavily during the night and the air was once more clean and fresh. We have been getting quite a lot of rain since the Dutch team arrived: people comment that the rainy season is early this year but we keep blaming our colleagues from Holland for the bad weather!
At about 15 miles from Lethem, we had a flat tire right in the middle of an old wooden bridge! Fortunately, Jason is an incredibly skilful mechanic and in less than half-an-hour Lena had a new wheel and we were on the road again. We stopped on the way to have something to eat and discuss everyone’s responsibilities for the work to be done during the next few days: Ray, as usual, is doing the camera work, assisted by Jurgen, the sound and photography man, and Sherwin, who is helping with both sound and the small digital camera. Terry is responsible for sorting out all the logistics and also for making sure that we are all well fed to keep our energy levels up. Sharla, the Wapishana member of the team, is taking most of the digital photos that you can see together with the daily reports and helping me (Silke) with the background research for the documentaries. As you can probably guess, I am also responsible for writing our reports.
Early in the afternoon we arrived in Potarinau, a beautiful Wapishana village surrounded by fields with cattle and wild horses, palm trees and a river which makes a perfect bathing place. We talked to the touchau in order to arrange our accommodation and proceeded to the nearby village of Shulinab.
Shulinab is another beautiful Amerindian village, the only Macushi settlement in the south savannahs, where we found most of the people working together in the construction of a new nursery school. Amerindian houses are built with adobe bricks and ité palm thatched roofs. The villagers were working hard, chatting cheerfully and drinking parakari (a drink made by soaking fermented cassava bread in water for a few days) in between shifts. Men or women, everybody was working; even little children were helping by carrying bricks. Parakari is a very important Amerindian drink, offered to visitors as a welcoming gesture. It has mainly a sour taste, but it can also be quite sweet. It could in fact be described as "cassava beer" and it can certainly make one quite drunk, especially if you are not used to it. I find it very difficult to refuse it when someone offers it to me (which is almost every time you visit an Amerindian village) but fortunately I often manage to find Terry and pass it on to him on the grounds that, unlike me, he is used to drinking it!
We found Vincent, one of the vaqueiros that we had interviewed at the rodeo, and took some shots of his family and home: his baby son was sleeping peacefully on a hammock inside the house and kept warm by a small fire while Vincent’s wife was preparing lunch outside. We also interviewed one of Vincent’s sons, a 15 year old boy who wants to be a vaqueiro, like his father. Aldwyn is a very friendly and chatty boy: he told us many stories about riding horses, chasing cattle to put them in the corral and even trying to catch mattires, wild cows.
After visiting Vincent’s house, Sharla and I went to Meriwau, a village which lies about 10 miles further south from Shulinab, in order to make filming arrangements for the day after. Meanwhile, Ray, Jurgen and Sherwin interviewed Shulinab’s touchau who told them about the Amerindians’ concern about logging and mining concessions, including Vannessa.
At sunset we were back in Potarinau enjoying a simple but nourishing dinner that the touchau’ s wife cooked for us: cassava and beef stew. Soon afterwards we put up our hammocks, hung the mosquito nets and went to sleep pretty exhausted after a well earned bath by the river side.
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