When I showed up in Iquitos, Peru- a big, busy, noisy city in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon, I was not sure what I was really in for.
A few months back I had received an e-newsletter from Amazon Promise founder Patty Webster looking for volunteers to join a medical trip up the Pastaza River, close to Ecuador. I’m not a doctor or a nurse, but I labored under the conception that perhaps my skills sewing buttons or even a hem could come in handy for the doctors. Patty said they could use my help to translate the patients’ Spanish for the American doctors. I was also willing and perfectly able to clean wounds, wash out lice, and dispense medications according to the doctors’ prescriptions. So I was in!
Patty Webster preparing medication for distribution while patients wait their turn in our temporary clinic set up in a school.
As a paid volunteer, my financial participation was used to get the medication and supplies needed for such efforts and of course to pay my on-site expenses. Each volunteer is also asked to bring anything they can fit in their suitcases- vitamins, surgical gloves, notebooks, pencils- it’s all useful. And so I embarked on a journey, my bag loaded with glasses donated by another non-profit.
All my camera and recording gear was also packed with me as Patty agreed to let me film the journey with the offer I made to create a short film and give it to her to use to communicate their work. For 2 weeks we packed and unpacked our traveling clinic, going to remote Amazon villages who had requested help. There were days it was somewhat calm as when we only had about 20 patients and then there was the day we had about 178- lined up outside the school house (our make-shift clinic) as we tried to see everyone that came.
Our over-packed large canoes traveled with a team of 12 including our boat driver, assistants, cook, and doctors. Eggs perched atop a basket perched on cases balanced delicately in the middle of the boat, and our cook lying across the pile was most certainly a site to see for those watching us go by. Once in a village, I would hop out of the boat ahead of the team to film them arriving, unloading, setting up, and then breaking down, packing, leaving. Other days I would go between the pharmacy and wound care, picking up the camera to film a doctor giving a consultation or another removing a massive infected mass that had grown around a thorn in a little girl’s foot. She was a brave little one!
At night I recorded the sounds of the forest and in the morning would shoot the rising day. Now and again I would find a tree trunk, a stone, or a hillside where I could set up my gear and do a point-of-view piece to capture my thoughts and words. It turned out these pieces would be the production’s narration as the live version of my thoughts were much more real than something recorded later.
Needless to say, being a one person team is intense, but in the end I captured the story. Once I sent all the footage to my editor, the direction all started to take place. Being my first independently produced film, I appreciated his guidance. The result was not only the film, it was the beginning of an organization- this one.
A bientôt,
