A town in need

Deepa Bharath

Chapter 2

Journey to the Jungle

The jungle had a heartbeat. A rhythm. A pulse.

It was uninterrupted by the noise of traffic. It was unbroken by

speech. It was untouched by the long hands of modern civilization.

The rainforest seemed like a tightly knit plush rug thrown over

acres of hills and plains. Its rich fabric was slit only by muddy

streams and rushing rivers and its green majesty was broken only by a

stray hut here and a few shacks there. It almost seemed as if a

nickel thrown from above would have landed on a treetop.

The muggy jungle heat sapped the senses. Sweat-drenched shirts

stuck to backs like magnets. There were no roads that led anywhere.

No grocery stores, supermarkets or post offices. The only humming

came not from motors or machinery, but from the nonstop buzzing and

hissing of mosquitoes, crickets and other unidentifiable, invisible

denizens of the deep jungle.

This wilderness has been Cesar Takup’s home for 82 years. Takup

lives in Tukupi, a community of about 1,500 people, named after him.

The Shuar chief, a war hero who has fought more than 30 bloody

battles during his time, now wears a T-shirt, slacks and a Yankees

baseball cap, probably handed to him by missionaries who work with

the indigenous populations in the jungle.

Takup is barely 5 feet tall, but seemed to stand taller when he

talked about how he used to chop off enemies’ heads after a battle,

shrink them and sell them as trophies to tourists and passersby.

“But we haven’t shrunk a head in Tukupi since 1973,” the chief said reassuringly.

Takup’s face bore faded tattoos and his teeth were as brown as the

rubble under his feet. And yet, when he smiled, his eyes smiled.

“When I was a child, I worked here,” he said in his native Shuar.

“Now I’m very old.”

The average life span of a Shuar Indian is 47. Takup beat the

odds, but others in his town aren’t as fortunate as their chief.

Tukupi’s travails

The community is plagued by diseases, infections and the problems

that come with living in a hostile terrain. Each resident of Tukupi

is hit with malaria every year. Hepatitis B, gynecological problems,

snake bites, machete injuries and arthritis are rampant while more

than half suffer from hernias because they perform hard, physical

labor.

Vicente Shariana, who was born and raised in Tukupi, returned to

his hometown after getting a degree in nursing from the University of

Cuenca. The 45-year-old nurse single-handedly operates a clinic out

of a log cabin in Tukupi.

His office, crowded with several village people, had a large table

and chairs whose arms and legs were coated with layers of rust. On a

four-tier shelf in a corner crisscrossed by cobwebs were about seven

boxes of medicines, two half-gallon bottles of distilled water and

about 15 small bottles of medicines used for injections.

In another dusty alcove was a steel shelf bearing a short-wave

radio. That radio, powered by solar batteries, is Tukupi’s only means

of communication with the outside world other than sending out human

messengers.

Shariana is employed by Ecuador’s Ministry of Health.

“I don’t get paid much,” he said. “But whatever I do comes from my

heart.”

The locals from Tukupi and several similar communities either

walk, travel by canoes or on rare occasions take a bus to get to

their destination.

“Transportation is a huge problem,” Shariana said, speaking in

Spanish. “They fall sick, they simply have nowhere to go.”

The wait is over

That’s why they have waited a long time for the Plasticos team of

Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian nurses and surgeons to arrive, he

said.

More than 80 people walked for days from their communities to the

team’s clinic in Tukupi. Team members arrived in a bush plane from

Macas. That airplane, which can carry up to six people including the

pilot, landed on a 50-foot mud strip in Tukupi. A bevy of villagers,

including Takup’s second wife, greeted the visitors.

There were no strange looks or uncomfortable faces in the crowd as

team members walked toward the nurse’s office. Shariana handed

Plasticos team leader Larry Nichter a typed list of prospective

patients and their ailments.

As the surgeon scanned the list, he shook his head.

“When they see a doctor, they think I can treat all the diseases

in the world,” he told Shariana. “But I can’t do that. I’m a

specialist.”

Many who came to the clinic were hopeless, Shariana said.

“They’re disappointed because they had walked for days to come

here,” he said.

Picking patients

Nichter selected 7-year-old Maria Aukaush after examining more

than a dozen hopefuls. Maria had a lump the size of a golf ball on

the back of her head. Her long black hair, which cascaded down her

shoulders, camouflaged the growth quite well, but Nichter said it had

been infected several times.

Aukaush had come to the clinic with her grandmother, Eugenia

Aukaush. They had walked one whole day through a jungle trail,

clearing their path with a machete, to get to their destination.

Maria’s mother was sick and had to stay home with the rest of her

children, the grandmother said.

As nurse Virginia Burns pricked little Maria’s fingers to draw

blood to measure the level of oxygen, she looked on without as much

as a wince or a grimace. She looked at the rivulet of blood that

trickled from her finger and then looked up with a smirk.

“Does it hurt?” nurse Kathleen Fodor asked.

“No,” she replied softly.

Maria goes to a school in her community where she learns English,

her grandmother said beaming.

As the team concluded its clinic and started walking toward the

river to take a canoe to Morona for its next clinic, they bumped into

Angel Tsanuimp, a teacher at the local school.

It was as if the 20-year-old professor’s right eye was peeping

from behind the abnormal growth of blood vessels that hung from his

face. The giant, purple mass was obstructing his vision.

Nichter picked Tsanuimp as his second patient from the clinic.

“I can remove the growth near his eye and that will help him see

better,” the surgeon said as he examined Tsanuimp along the muddy

path that led to the river.

A river of tears

The canoe with team members then traveled upstream on the Rio

Makuma, a small tributary of the Amazon. The motorized canoe hummed

its way across the river inhabited by piranhas, anacondas and

crocodiles. It was a three-hour journey to Morona.

But in Morona the team looked around and saw no patients.

“The patients are waiting in a place 30 minutes from here,” said a

man who was in another boat by the river.

It was close to 3 p.m. and team members needed to catch the last

flight out of the jungle in Morona by 4.

“We can’t see the patients,” Nichter said. “There must have been

some miscommunication. We may end up being stranded in the jungle for

the night.”

So team members piled into a truck that happened to be waiting

near the river. The truck set off on a bumpy ride down a jungle path.

“It seems like a Disneyland ride,” said Burns as she flashed a

nervous smile. “But we don’t know how it’s going to end.”

A few locals sat in the back of the truck. Team members stood in

the back as they hung on to railings on both sides. The truck made

stops like a bus, picking up and dropping off people.

In climbed fishermen with metal boxes filled with their catch. Two

other men dragged in large catfish and a sack of bananas. After about

30 minutes, the truck crossed the river on a ferry.

There was no clinic, but as team members stopped to rest near the

river and wondered about how their schedule could have gone awry, a

couple passed by with their daughter, a burn victim with deep scars

on both her legs.

“It was a gasoline accident,” her mother said. “We had heard you

were coming. But we didn’t know where to go.”

But Nichter determined that he could not perform surgery on the

5-year-old girl to get rid of the scars because she “had no problem

with functionality.”

“She was using her legs normally,” he said. “Even if we did

surgery, it wouldn’t have helped to reduce her scars because it was

spread over such a large area.”

Team members then hiked for about 30 minutes before they reached

the airfield in Morona. If they had walked a little slower, they

could have missed their only way out of the jungle; luckily, they

made it.

As the bush plane took off from the jungle, a giant rainbow arched

across the twilight sky. The sun was a huge, orange ball in the

western horizon. Nichter and his team knew when the sun rose again,

they would be in scrubs walking into the operation room -- ready to

change appearances and lives.