Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 26

La gran ceiba

The kapok tree--Ceiba pentandra, ceiba in Spanish, is one of the three tallest types of tree in the rainforest. I have always dreamed of meeting one because...

When my kids were little, we were given The Great Kapok Tree, by Lynne Cherry. Gorgeously illustrated, it's the story of a woodcutter in the Amazon who falls asleep by a huge kapok tree he's been asked to cut down. While he's asleep, all the creatures (including a human child) who depend on the tree visit him and whisper in his ear about...

Paucar--Cacicus cela--káurë

A lot of what we saw and learned in the Amazon is taking me a while to digest because it's filtered through Spanish: I scribbled things down that people told me, but now in slow time I have to check what I wrote, find out if I heard things correctly and understood them correctly.

I just discovered a wonderful thing. While we were in Puerto Nariño (the other major town, other than Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon)--a town, incidentally, with a large number of Tikuna (Magüta) residents, including o...

painting signs

When we lived in Japan (nigh on 30 years ago--yikes!), the signs at various trains stations, advertising businesses in the towns, were often hand-painted. A dentist's office, an ob-gyn, a grocery store, a florist, etc. Sometimes we'd see someone painting a new one.

I hear from my kids in Japan that now, as here in America, they're mainly printed.

But in Letícia they are still hand-painted. We rented bikes one day and passed this guy, just short of the airport, painting a new sign (I asked him if ...

Wednesday reading

Some more quotes from Aventura en el Amazonas:

En verano llueve todos los días, en invierno llueve todo el día (In summer it rains every day, in winter it rains all day long)

... Or, why I need to go back at the peak of the rainy season and see if I still love it.

And this, from a section where the parents are talking to the children about the children's names (and also about their own names):

Tu nombre es como una cancíon que no acaba, el aqua limpia que corre desde la montaña sembrando vida (Your...

Insect, meet flower

Please enjoy the flying friend on the right-hand side of the picture, coming in for a landing (you can click through to see the photo larger and catch all the details)



And the many many creatures enjoying the nectar of this magnificent bloom



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Wednesday books

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** kid...

Tuk-tuk ride

We didn't actually ride in a tuk-tuk until we were heading back to the airport on our last day in Letícia, but I thought I'd share these very short videos Wakanomori took because it'll let you see the streets of Letícia and how dominated they are by motorcycles (and secondarily: tuk-tuks).

We saw whole families on one motorcycle: a mom and two schoolkids she just picked up from school,* plus a baby asleep on her shoulder. Most people ride astride, but we saw some passengers sitting sidesaddle. W...

inhale, exhale

I learned so much in the Amazon: one, that the river inhales and exhales: when it has breathed in deeply and its waters extend the farthest, tall trees are underwater and the fish feed on palm fruits. Maximum expansion is March. And then it exhales, shrinks-shrinks-shrinks, and temporary islands appear, and people rush out and take advantage of the 40 cm of rich soil the river has left to grow quick crops that can be harvested before the river rises and swallows the islands back up again. The r...

trip countdown

By this time on Friday--assuming no flight cancellations and no sudden-onset covid--Wakanomori and I will be on a plane to Colombia. We'll spend a day in Bogotá, staying at the same place we stayed in 2018, and then we'll hop on a plane to Letícia.

I blocked off this week from work so that I could be free to prepare for the trip, and the result is that I think I'm well prepared ( sovay --I have in fact purchased antiseptic ointment and band-aids, and I can feel the ~ scorn ~ of Markiyan Kamysh), bu...

good works

On Monday, the richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Akhmetov, "said ... his investment company would exit its vast media business to conform with a law designed to curb the influence of 'oligarchs,' a move cheered by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office" (quoting this Reuters story ). This involved turning over Media Group Ukraine's print and television licenses and stopping all online media.

"All online media" includes the volunteer effort I've been part of since March, proofreading translated Ukraini...