We left Manaus at the crack of dawn and by the time our boat arrived in Tefê, night had fallen.  It’s the dry season and being so, we had a few hang ups along the way.  Our boat ran aground three times, catapulting all of us, including the cooking cook, into the air.  As we gathered ourselves up off the ground, she gathered the potatoes, onions, and pieces of chicken.  Some made panicked bolts for lifesavers, some grasped their rosaries and made promises to the man upstairs, and we just sat there quietly observing the chaos, knowing there lurked the possibility for a long swim. Luckily, the Amazon adventure stopped just at the possibility of disaster and the boat kept on moving.

We played games and made toys in three riverside communities here.  All of them were situated in the Sustainable Development Reserve of Mamiraua, a genuine ecological sanctuary preserved and cared for by the people who work for Project Mamiraua.  This project develops social and environmental research within a 1.1 million hectare area, right in the heart of the Amazon, that is to say, in one of the many hearts of the Amazon.

When our speedboat made the pass from the Solimões River into the Japurá, we began to comprehend what awaited us.  We were received by a flock of herons and the curious surfacing of pink and gray river dolphins. The untrusting eyes of alligators also looked on as we passed by.  Not too much later, we were welcomed with complete trust by Sr. Joaquim, the father (in some form or another) of everyone in Boca da Mamirauá. Sr. Joaquim lives in a floating house and we were his neighbors for a week, floating in a house next to his, both houses buoyant on the enormous trunks of Açacú trees. From the screened windows of our house, we could see the smashed noses and lips of kids that anxiously looked in awaiting playtime.  Beyond them, in every direction, was a spectacle of river dolphins, monkeys, alligators, and birds. Every morning at six on the dot we were awoken by a King Fisher that sat on our roof making a sound that reminded us of an old fashioned typewriter manipulated by a “no-funny-business” secretary and amplified a hundred times.

The setting for our play time was in the shade of two humungous brazil nut trees that took root on the banks of the Japurá, and it was there one morning while we were playing “Mamãe Polenta” that one little boy declared silence among the shouts of the game so that he could better hear the distant screeches of and Acari, the most elusive species of monkey in Mamiraua- its hair white and puffy like a groomed poodle, its face bald and bright red. The game paused, everyone listened, and then claimed in unison “There they are!”… a troupe of them in a fruit tree on the other side of the river.

When we went to the Community of Juruamã, on the Solimões River, we met some boys that proved commonplace what we thought to be impossible:  one can hunt flies and crickets with a bamboo gun that shoots Tucumã spines with a vine spring. Months before, we’d met an old man in Curiaú, a quilombo in Amapá, who had reminisced about such a feat, but it had been 30 years since he’d last seen anybody do it.  So it was only in Juruamã that the myth turned into reality, as we witnessed these boys not only catching flies with these precise little rifles, but tying grass on the flys’ bums and releasing them back into the air with a message that practically read, “Crafty Boys Play Here.”

In Vila Alencar, the third Mamiraua community we visited, we learned with 9 and 10-year-old girls how to take the bark off a spiny plant called a Jauari so they could weave mats that people use to sleep on.  We also learned how to make balls and dolls from Aninga, a plant that has a consistency somewhere in between Styrofoam and watermellon.

All in all, we spent exactly 21 days in the Mamiraua Reserve, playing, eating fish, and sleeping with the sounds of a vibrating jungle.  And of course sharing hugs with all our new friends that had agreed to the playful partnership we’d proposed.