June 8th - Day Six

Early in the morning we picked up some members of Ray of Hope in Manaus. Ray of Hope is a Christian Mission Organization that helps the villages and communities off the Amazon River. We headed to a larger village than the one we went to the day before. We participated in a church meeting, in a church that was under construction. The people that live in these communities are a mix of Catholic Christian and a variety of local saints. I am not a fan of the ways in which these missionaries give help to the local villages, because they seem to do it in exchange for teaching them about Christ. Along with this, the missionaries do not try to uplift the natives along with their beliefs and customs, they try to convert the people and make it very clear that they think their traditional beliefs and culture are primitive and pagan. However, Ray of Hope was a little different than what I had expected. They brought along some social workers and lawyers as well as some nurses to help the people in any way possible.

After the church service, we had an opportunity to get a guided tour around the village itself. This village has been around for longer and is much more prosperous than the one we visited the day before. This is made very clear as you walk around, we saw a school, a few restaurants, a bar, some four wheelers and even a car. We met up with the leader of this community and asked him about the waste management in the village. He said that the government sends a barge down the river that collected trash from the village once every few weeks. The school was where the villagers met up with the people from Ray of Hope and we got to see how much they are appreciated by the people in the community.

After lunch we stopped at another village off the Amazon, but this one was much smaller and was inhabited by natives that had, until recently, been in pretty bad shape. The villagers had started abusing drugs and alcohol and were not receiving any help from the government. The missionaries that had been helping this tribe out throughout their difficult times had managed to rehabilitate most of the villagers and had even helped them construct a large community hut.

The villagers greeted us with a few of their traditional dances. The people that were helping them also performed a dance sequence but I preferred the natives dancing and music. Because it was raining, our group could not help the villagers in building their chicken coop and I was pretty disappointed that we could not help them with anything. Though I am sure they can build a much better coop than we could anyways. 

This was our last day on the Amazon and after the village we were headed to an ecolodge off of one of the Amazon's tributaries. We got to the ecolodge around five in the afternoon and did not have much time to look around before dark. The ecolodge was a really neat place to stay because they try to incorporate a lot of nature into their facilities.