Our house in Iquitos

Originally written for CoolWorks.com

For the last 4 weeks we stayed in Iquitos – world’s biggest city without road access – which is located in the middle of Peruvian jungle.

Our main host was Pilar. This girl we got to know through Egle – a Lithuanian girl, which used to make a research about shamanism in the Peruvian jungle, and now is working on other projects and ideas in Peru.

Everything was happening in a house on a crossroad. Neighborhood is neither very poor, nor rich. Houses are mainly built of wood or bricks. Our house is a corner building on the junction of two streets, made out of vertical wooden boards. The roof is covered with wavy sheeting, so if the sun gets hot (and it gets really hot), the house becomes a sauna. In such moments our tent should only be entered by a sauna-lover from Finland. The main door of the house does not have any lock. Only a small metallic latch, which is carefully pushed towards the door every evening by the house mother señora Maria. Additionally, she also moves a small table in front of the door. Just in case…

Everyone entering the house is welcomed by a cemented living room. Here almost every evening our host Maria and her friends are playing Bingo. Around 10pm gather 4-5 female smokers and for the next 3 hours one can hear continuously the announcement of numbers. Randomly somebody shouts “BINGO!” and the winner collects the money, which is put on the table of each players. The idea of Bingo is to cover the announced number on the table of numbers you have. Each woman has about 12 such tables, thus the game is quite intensive. If there is a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row of covered numbers, shout “Bingo!” because that means you win. The lots of numbers are covered with corn seeds in Maria’s house. Bingo seems really the hit over here in Peru. Even on one of the boats we took along Rio Napo, people were in Bingo-Fever, blocking a complete entrance and exit area while putting their corns on the numbers shouted (and this until late in the night).

Let’s get back to the house. During Bingo episodes the living room is decorated with 4 small tables, amply sufficient space usually occupied by children during daytime. Next goes a 12 meter corridor that leads to the kitchen. On the left and right side of the corridor are separate rooms with walls made of wooden boards. There are two rooms on the left and three on the right. Half of the corridor is cemented, another half consists of pure earth. Two rooms have ground floors as well.

In one of the freshly cemented rooms we squeezed our tent and tried to make ourselves comfortable. It is important to sleep under a mosquito net here, and our tent does well protecting us from insects. To tell the truth, there are not so many mosquitos here, but still, they might appear randomly. Doctors say that there is not much of malaria in the city, but Dengue fever is a very common infection Iquitos citizens suffer.

There are 5 rooms in the house. All of them occupy around 36 square meters. Three rooms have the size of 2m×3m, the other two a tiny bit bigger. We live in the small one. The second is quite empty, furnished with a small bed, and occasionally equipped with a sleeping and gurgling 2 months old chicken. The third is Pilar’s room. She has a bed and a TV.

Maria and her husband Serapio sleep in one of the bigger rooms on the left side. Alcoholic Serapio is always happy. When his wife is deeply disappointed about him (he was sober for a year, and one months ago had a relapse) she hits his right cheek. Instead of feeling angry, Serapio offers her his left one, too. A clever trick to make Maria smile, because she does hit the other cheek with pleasure. In such moments they sometimes both disappear in the small backyard behind the kitchen, where chicken are swirling around, and Maria starts pulling out Serapio’s gray hair. Even though the owner of the house is everyday drunk, members of the house are always friendly to him, feed him, express their concern about his health in a happy, often funny way, in other words they take care of him as if he was a baby. We didn’t observe any serious conflicts nor fights, only that Maria likes to hit Serapio with a lid of the biggest pot or her strong hands on his tiny back (she is much bigger than him). But it is a minor issue.

Finally, the fifth room hosts Pilar’s sister Maribel, her husband Carlos, their 12 year old daughter Carolina and Carlitos, the 9 year old son. Maribel’s husband works as a night guard, so he mainly sleeps during the day in the cemented and better ventilated living room. Maria and Serapio are his parents.

In the back of all the rooms, you arrive to the kitchen with a long wooden table. It looks like in the last couple of years it has absorbed everything: water, oil, human saliva and a sufficient amount of chicken shits. A smaller table in the corner hosts the potable water. The bare kitchen floor is made of red earth. Actually it is very practical. If you still have oil in the pan just pour it down on the ground, nobody cares. Not mentioning water or rests of food being dropped on this earth. Some of this stuff is happily eaten by chickens who often break into the house via the bathroom.

In front of the kitchen we have a toilet combined with a washing place. It is a cemented space of about 6 sq.meters with a broken shower curtain. The back wall of this bathroom is made of a Maggi poster and few random wooden boards. It also works as a separator between us and the neighbors. The shower is represented by two big plastic bowls filled with the water from the plastic pipe.

The back wall of the house is made of horizontal wooden boards fixed with 8cm space between each other. This space is sufficient for the smallest chickens to sneak in. Behind the back wall there is a miniaturistic yard (6m × 5m), where 10-12 chickens are in charge. Every morning these birds make fiestas on the kitchen table, mark right on it their territory, and check the situation in the living room.

They enter the house by flying over the wall, which separates the toilet and the back yard. When we go to make breakfast, we are not surprised anymore if there are feces on the table. Chickens like to check out the pots with the food of the previous day. The view is rather disgusting, but in a week or so one gets somehow used to it, and does not mind any more to cut his vegetables on top of it.

Before finishing this story, few more observations from the life in the house.

• A couple of times we saw Maria catching a chicken, pulling one of its feathers out, and cut it into half. One part was thrown on the kitchen floor, and the other one she soaks shortly into liquid in a green soda bottle (we guess, it is spirit). And then, guess what? She starts cleaning her ears!
• We cook here on a gas stove. Gas is very expensive in Iquitos. Here 10kg (about 15 liter) empty bottle is exchanged with a full one for 33 soles ($12). In Ecuador the gas bottle is almost twice bigger and costs around $2.
• Pets. As you probably understood, there are lots of chickens in this house. However there is also a 2 months old, very special chicken. In the yard none of the other birds liked him. Other chickens would start kicking its ass, picking his feathers… The only solution is to keep this poor chicken inside the house. The problem is that there is no dedicated place for him to spend a night. So he slept on the chair in the kitchen, in random dark places of the house, or even on our shoes. Once I got up very early, when the sunlight was just coming out. The visibility was poor. I kept my shoes and brown socks in front of the tent. I looked that direction and it seemed that one of the socks fell down from the shoe on the floor. I grabbed this sock, and it started to complain. It showed its real face and escaped from our room. It was that poor chicken! I woke him up and even scared him. I was so sorry…
• 

  the house cat

  One more frequent guest in the house is a gray cat. She is a loner, and does not seem to belong to anybody. At some point in the past she started to appear in Maria’s kitchen, and was started to be feed by the house residents. To tell the truth, everybody is happy to have her around, because since her appearance, mice are not of any problem anymore.

• Locals drink water directly from the plastic pipe in the toilet-shower. We did not want additional parasites in our intestine, so we were buying 18 liter bottles with purified water. It is the cheapest way to get such water. It costs only 2.5 ($0.85) soles to refill the bottle and for us both it lasts at least for 2 days. In Mexico the same stuff was twice as expensive – 16-18 pesos ($1.60).

So, that was our house for the last 4 weeks. Here we got sick, were cooking vegetarian meals, were dying from the heat… But all this is already the past, because recently we have arrived to Lima with our first ever hitch-hiked airplane.