Reflecting on the Trip during my long plane ride home

Well the sun is setting on my adventure in Peru and although I am ready to come home, I have had an experience of a lifetime. I have met 18 incredible individuals who have taught me so much and challenged me every day. I have seen the sun rise and the sun set on the Amazon. I have learned rudimentary Spanish. I have seen flocks of Macaws fly above me and monkeys high up in the canopy. I survived being evacuated from a boat after getting dysentery. Although there were moments that we wanted to jump off the boat and boycott the professors for giving us to much work, it only made the trip that much more of an amazing experience. The three courses I took were definitely challenging, each professor shaking the foundations of our beliefs; challenging us to look for alternatives and solutions to the current human predicaments of huge global inequality and environmental degradation. What was frustrating is that the more you learned about it, and saw the reality of both of them for yourself in the Amazon the more everything ended up being more complicated. We had a final presentation at the end of the course to do that tied everything we learned together and the solution that my group came up with was to eliminate conservation, definitely a radical presentation since one of our courses was on conservation. We thought that the very existence of a term such as conservation makes the alternative of extraction acceptable. That the existence of areas of conservation justifies the over-exploitation of the environment everywhere else. We have all driven to Banff and along the way you see the areas of clear cutting and the concrete plant just outside the gates. Well, it was definitely an ambitious presentation but in the end we did quite well. At the end of the trip they had a reception for us, and they had the “alternative nobel peace prize” for the best presentation of the trip and our group won!
I don’t think I can full appreciate what I have learned and seen over the last month. It will take some time to sink in. The time in Iquitos from the last time I wrote is a blurr. Between getting the presentation ready, finishing up my daily assignments. But we did find time to go out two times, once for my roommates birthday and the other for the last night of being all together. That was a really fun night. We were having out classes in a bar during the day, and they had arranged with the bar owner to decorate the bar for us, they gave us a special of 2 for 1 drinks and they brought in a salsa dance teacher. It was really fun. The group of individuals that went on this trip got along so well. With 18 students you expect there to be clicks and arguments, but there wasn’t any of that. We are already talking about a reunion next summer house boating with everyone... seems fitting considering we’ve already lived on a boat together !