Asakiyume mita

Among the books I brought back with me from Letícia was a copy of a children's novel that I found in the common room of our hotel, Aventura en el Amazonas. I started reading it, and it was so charming (and informative!) that I bought a copy when we got back to Bogotá (no bookstores in Letícia). Its dual narrators are six-year-old twins with an indigenous mother and a white father. At one point they climb out the window of their stilt house rather than go through the door, and since I **saw** kids doing exactly that, I immediately fell in love.

Pretty quote:

Seguí mirando ese mundo de cien verdes distintos en medio de la lluvia ... ¡qué hermosa es esta ventana de selva con cortina de lluvia!

I continued looking at that world of a hundred different greens in the middle of the rain ... how beautiful, this window of jungle with its curtain of rain!

The other is the dissertation of a scholar we met at the Instituto Amazonico de Investigaciones Cientificas SINCHI, a supercool research institute. ("Sinchi" is a Quecha word meaning someone knowledgeable in plants.) She studies "terra preta"--the famous "black earth," created by indigenous people in ancient times. Her research seems really holistic, looking at microbes in soil and their interactions with plants, especially cassava/manioc/yuca--the staple in Amazonas--and she works with indigenous communities, and I'm just so excited to read her work.

... We had wanted to investigate the institute, but what actually prompted us to, on the day we did, was being caught in a rainstorm. We took shelter there, asked if it was all right to look around, and Dr Peña-Venegas kindly took time out of her day to talk to us about the institute and her work!