Dear Friends,

As always, I hope this letter finds you well. I can’t believe I’ve been here 6 months already, I only have 4 and a half months left until I leave on the 1st of August. I am leaving one month early to meet up with friends in Peru and travel during August. I still don’t have any plans or know what I am doing after, let’s see what life offers me.

You may remember me explaining the carnival traditions here in my last letter. Well I got to take part in a ceremony in a local village. It was a lot of fun! I drove the van to the village, parked up and we all hopped out the van to see the locals covered in mud and dancing around the palm tree umisha. They started to come towards us with the buckets of mud and we all laughingly screamed and ran back to the van. We all debated whether we wanted to take part and decided we had to, so we left our valuables in the van and some people stripped down to underwear or just t-shirts and we went back to get covered in mud! The people were lovely, so welcoming and inclusive, including us all in the dances and individually taking us up to the umisha during the axe ceremony. They said they were so pleased we joined them and that they didn’t think we’d join in. They introduced us to a seed called achiote, which looks red and furry/spiky and when you split it open and smash the seeds inside under your thumb it turns into red dye that they spread on their faces and invited us to do the same. We continued to dance until it was time to cut down the umisha, which they first covered in mud and beer. As explained in my last letter, they really did go crazy for the plastic prizes attached to the palm once it had been cut down . I still don’t know the reasoning behind the mud, but someone said it was just because they had it there, so why not?

A couple of days before I had passed through a village and seen a little fayre with toffee apples, so I gathered up the volunteers and we went to enjoy. It was very sweet, when we arrived lots of the local children that I pick up for education sessions on Saturdays ran up and hugged me and held my hand to the fayre. There were a couple of games including ring toss and a games where you pay 10 cents to flip the coin on to a table with numbers from 10 – 90. And if it landed on a number you win that amount of cents back. I tried with the ring toss, to no avail.

This month I have done the reserve walk, to translate, twice. The second one was slightly more successful that the first one, as on the first one I came back with a rash on my leg that turned into blisters the next day and gradually got worse. It seems to be phytophotodermatis, a chemical burn from plant sap that reacts with UV light to blister. Despite trousers, socks and boots, a mystery plant made contact with my ankle. It looks a lot better now, but it’s still pretty shocking.

The day before the first reserve walk I went to the local pool to relax on my day off, having a lovely day reading by the pool, eating salad and drinking cocktails with a couple of girls from the center.

We also went to a fancy floating restaurant on the Amazon, were I had pasta with a bread roll shaped like a dolphin (very cute) and a really delicious piña colada. Unfortunately it started to rain really heavily so we were all ushered inside and couldn’t make use of the pool! I think I’m acclimatising, as I have been feeling cold recently, despite it still being nearly 30C!

But that’s it for this month, work hard play hard, eh?

As always, I miss you all.

Lots of love,

Joss xxx