One of my favourite places so far on this trip was our time in the Amazon. We spent 6 days in a jungle hut and we had great adventures everyday. The pictures of the animals we saw are on my parents' blog tab.

I am writing about a special part of our Amazon adventure on my blog because it is exactly what we are covering in my Social Studies unit at school and I want my friends at school to read it.

We spent one full day visiting some of the little villages along the river. These people have very different lives than what we do! In the first village we went to, we learned about their culture and traditions and the food that they eat everyday. These people are hunters and gatherers and farmers, they are not nomadic.

They do not grow wheat and so they do not eat bread like we have at home but they do make something that tastes a lot like bread from a yucca plant. We went out to the garden and pulled up a yucca tree and then found the yucca vegetable under the soil like our potatoes. It is important to peel the skin off the yucca carefully because under the outside skin is another protective skin layer with cyanide in it, this keeps the insects from eating the yucca.

We grated the vegetable using a sheet of metal with holes poked through it and then the village girl showed us how she squeezes all the juice out of the vegetable so the pulp that is left is dry. We then sifted it over a screen and it became just like flour. Then she cooked the flour on a fire and it turned into a big thing that looked like a pizza crust.

When it was all cooked we could put tuna fish or jam on it to have as our lunch.

A traditional hunting method we learned about was how the Amazon villagers shot blow darts out of a blow pipe. The darts had poison on the ends that the villagers would get from a small frog called the Poison Dart Frog. They captured the frogs and would keep them near a fire and the frogs would start to sweat out the poison on their backs and the villagers would carefully collect this poison to dip the darts in. The frogs are really small but 1 frog can make enough poison to easily kill 5 Cayman (alligators) and even people. We did not see one of these frogs though.

We got to practice using a blow dart gun. It was pretty heavy and hard to hold up to aim properly but the darts would shoot out a long way. We used coconuts and bananas for our targets.

We left the first village and took the river boat to another village community. Here we were able to meet a real live Shaman who is like the doctor or spiritual leader of the community. He could not speak English so our guide translated what he said.

There is a Shaman in every village community and it takes them 15 years to study to become a Shaman. They mostly learn about all the medicinal plants in the jungle and then they become experts in hallucinogens. It was strange to us that it would be so respected in a community to have a leader that regularly boiled tree saps to see visions but this is a very important and respected role here. (This was not seen as an addiction or substance abuse.) Children are introduced to hallucinogens when they are 10 years old.

The Shaman could identify sicknesses in the people of his village through his visions and then he would identify the plants in the jungle that would help them get better.

The Shaman we met had 8 children and he had 25 students that he was teaching about the Shaman ways. Only one of his students will become a Shaman one day but all the others will learn about the history and value of this role.

The Shaman do not use any books and they do not have anything written down. He teaches his students through story telling.