Welcome to the Neighborhood

This is where I’m staying -- Hospedaje El Pirata. I’m renting a furnished room on the second floor for 200 Soles a month. That’s roughly $75. The key was to find a place that would charge me like a local and not a tourist. To do that, you gotta network, likeso: The lady who runs the Hospedaje, Maria, is the nextdoor neighbor of the mother of the girlfriend of my friend, Cesar, who is the cousin of the former schoolteacher of Kris, a Peruvian whom I met at Jimmy’s Gringo and Latino Friends conversation group at Border’s Bookstore on Colony and Sharon, in Charlotte, NC.

So now I have my own place, safe and secure, to keep my stuff while I’m out in the jungle. I have my own bathroom with a spacious shower. A cold one twice a day (and they’re all cold ones) and I can live with the sweat. I have a king-sized mattress that feels like there’s some cardboard in it. I take one of those showers, dry off just a little, turn on the fan, lay down butt-ass naked on my one sheet and I’M DONE.

As far as lighting goes, it’s par for the course: there’s that same, single fluorescent bulb in the center of the ceiling, jutting out crookedly, nakedly, like the conspicuous balls of every un-spayed, rabid dog sleeping in the middle of every unpaved backstreet of Iquitos. I miss lamps. Reading without a lamp in such stark lighting strains your eyes and probably makes them age faster. There’s not much sensitivity to ambience or lighting here. At night, houses are only slightly less dim that outside, where weak gold and white shades outline the silhouettes of people dozing in rocking chairs or drinking Pilsen around little plastic tables which they drag out into the street. Lamps must be considered an extravagance, or just undesirable, because nobody has them. And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t difficult to find one.

I started thinking about the lack of lamps as a reflector of a lack of reading culture. “Nobody reads here,” an older ex-patriot friend tells me. “Not even at the doctors office. The doctor doesn’t give a damn about your time, so they wait for hours to see him, but nobody brings a book.” To be fair, Peru’s literacy rate has been rising consistently over the years; 92.9% as of 2007, according to the government. I heard about a study that showed the average Peruvian read more books per year (50) than the average American (30).

But Iquitos is different. The whole region of Loreto is different. It’s like a Central American fiefdom attached to a cold, proud, conservative Andean nation that pays it little attention. It’s literally a backwater. The unemployment rate in the city is 65%. Who knows what it is out in the jungle. The only mandatory schooling goes through sixth grade--and even that’s not free.

While considering all their historical disadvantages, which can never be overestimated, it does heed us to note how the people of tropics have a different culture. Many historians and anthropologists consider the dramatic change of seasons in temporal zones like Europe and Asia as the catalyst for the long-term planning that gave birth to civilization as we know it. Tropical lands, however, are basically the same all year round and extremely abundant, so abundant that their native peoples were subjected to half a millennium of rape, pillage, slavery and murder known as colonialism. Anyone who has studied indigenous groups knows that life for hunter-gatherers involved no more than three hours of work a day. The jungle is full of food. It was our evolutionary womb, and it provides. Even in the slums of Belen, when you see the yucca, the plantain, the corn, the camu-camu, the mango, the sugarcane--all of which grow basically in your backyard, and the hordes of imposing chickens strutting at your feet, you realize that, while these people may be malnourished in certain respects and certainly suffer from parasites and disease, no one is going hungry.

Consider this suppleness of the land, consider the complete vacuum of jobs and finally, the withering heat, and it should come as no surprise that there’s a whole lot of chillin’ that goes on. It’s hard for me to imagine the average Iquiteño passing his evening in a stifling bedroom, pouring energy into an activity that essentially demands solitude. Especially when you recall the scene I described playing out on block after block, night after night. Tropical cultures are more communal. Families sit outside their front door for hours. Neighbors visit and stay deep into the night. And man, can they talk. They probably have as many long conversations in a year as the average web-addicted suburbanite has in a lifetime. And hours of conversation can be just as stimulating as reading a book. It’s a different medium, the original medium: storytelling.