Some Firsts

Special Note again: We had a rough night "sleeping," making the internet challenges even more annoying. We're posting a night report now and will try to update later if we get back on soon . . .

 January 8, 2026              

We survived our first night sleeping in hammocks in the oca: at least most of us did. Well, we all “survived,” of course, but “sleeping” was an entirely different matter. For one thing, our committed video crew, who got an admittedly late start (after 10pm) on editing their work, ended up staying up until around 1:30am to finish their piece. They were aware that  they could have pushed completion to today, as we hadn’t worked out our posting plan yet, but they just got in the zone and were enjoying themselves so much that they kept it up. It's not unusual for the video team to have a later night than everyone else, but this one was probably beyond the call of duty. 

As for the non-video folks, they had a special audio experience, as they got to see how our overrepresentation of snorers/sleeptalkers would play out in this space. And oh! It played out! We will keep the names to ourselves, but we have one supersnorer in our midst. It took some time for this perpetrator to really get going, but once there, we were all very much the slaves of this person’s log-sawing cacophony. Because it had taken a bit of time for the person to get started, we had some hope that the snore-production would taper off at some point. Ha! Silly us! NO tapering here!

The exhausted video crew came in when they came in and joined in the torture chamber that the rest of us were already enduring. One of the non-snorers reached the end of their rope and went to the bathroom, perhaps just to get a break from the sound. (Though, as that person reported, you could still hear the snoring far, far away from the oca.) When that person returned, Shawny used the opportunity to get the scoop on who the primary offender was and got up to take action. We carry a range of different snoring remedies in our med bag, so we started trying them one by one. We have those nasal strip things (so we applied two to our noisemaker) and we also have some stickers that hold a person’s mouth closed while sleeping; we added that ingredient too. There are a couple of other things to try, but we couldn’t locate them in the dark in the middle of the night. Isabel got up to help locate earplugs for all of the miserable inhabitants of the oca, and then we waited to see if these remedies would work. They did; but only briefly. Shawny eventually coaxed the primary snorer onto their side (which is harder to do than you might think in a hammock), and lo and behold: the person was quieted! 

Once the person was quiet, the room largely shifted into REM sleep collectively. Unfortunately, that shift meant that a whole series of people who had not yet really been asleep started snoring instead of our main violator. But by some miracle or perhaps just total exhaustion, they all fell quiet for about two hours from 4 or so in the morning to 6 or so. That’s not enough sleep, of course, but we were happy to take anything we could get at that point. 

Our plan was to wake up the breakfast crew at 6:30, the rest at 6:45, and then have breakfast at 7 so we could get to the worksite by 7:30. We largely kept our plan. The workers at the camp were laughing with us about the loud noises emanating from the oca in the night, which they compared to a huge version of these noisy little monkeys around here that are called zoguezogues (pronounced “zog zog”). 

It was not the night (or morning) that we might have dreamed of (ahhh, dreams . . . what do those feel like again? We forget . . . ), but the important thing was that El Snore-o Supremo actually responded to suggestions and worked with us to remedy the situation while the rest of us giggled through it all, realizing that any other option was counterproductive. There is a practice here of taking a midday break (like what we think of as a “siesta” in Spanish); here it is called a “sesta.” We will try out some of the other remedies that we brought along now that we have found them. Surely we will find a way to make it so that everyone can sleep, whether midday or overnight. We think that if all else fails, after the workdays that we have planned, we might find that no amount of noise will be able to keep us from sleeping. We shall see. 

After breakfast (eggs, ham, cheese, and many forms of the locally grown root vegetable mandioca, or manioc), we headed for our first worksite to try to reclaim the community garden and chicken coop from the elements. It was a cloudy morning, so we were able to go to work in our mandatory closed-toed shoes but also in long pants and long sleeves to help protect our skin as we cleared brush. We became a productivity machine, making progress even faster than we might have predicted, especially in our sleep-deprived state. 

Our hosts thought that there was about a day and a half of work to be done in re-clearing the area encompassed by the garden and the chicken coop but we found that in about four hours we had managed to get things pretty well handled. The work involved machetes, hoes, rakes, some other weird bladed weeder things, and our hands. Lots and lots of pulling and dragging of sprouts, shoots and weeds with our hands! (Don't worry; we had good gloves!)

Though a garden and a chicken coop might not sound like a very big territory to reclaim, the size of each and the distance between the two meant that not only did we have to clear the functional parts of the sites, but we also had to clear paths between them. We started to develop team identities around our tools, and to guide each other into the best possible methods of using each. The rakers had particular group pride that we all could feel. 

It was HOT by the time noon was approaching, and our plan was to work until about 1:00 or 1:30. Fortunately, we had almost nailed the job long before that time, so we gathered up our tools and headed for the river. It's incredible how wonderful a dip in the river can feel, especially when you have just slightly overdone it for a few hours up until you dunk into the water. We learned a lot about our limits and knowing our limits. No one got in a really terrible state but some of us learned that regular breaks (especially for water) are NOT signs of laziness. People also shook off the evidence of sleep deprivation more than could be reasonably expected. We should have been a messy and unproductive crew today, but we were a proper DIRTy crew instead!

We took a long sesta with some of us doing laundry or journaling while others dropped into a much deserved deep sleep. The plan was to reconvene at the fish food factory in the late afternoon to try our hand at manufacturing fish food, but a lack of diesel fuel meant that we had to do one of the things we do best: pivot. 

We went out to the fish farm and loaded onto two boats to motor out to the cages and see how they work. Then we took a tour of the lagoon/lake (which is really an inlet or something like that) by boat. It started to rain but we were under cover so we just kept on going. Our plan was to go to a special spring that is supposed to have healing properties, but we decided to save that trek for a different day when it isn't raining.

We came back to camp and passed by Dona Odila's home to see the five new puppies that were born there last week. They are crazy cute and stopped us from thinking about anything but adorableness for quite some time. We finally ambled home, had dinner, did our group reflection about the challenges we faced and the things we learned, then did some affirmations about individuals who impacted us today. Almost everyone got mentioned but one person got mentioned more than the rest . . .

 . . .which brings us to the continuation of a longstanding DIRT tradition: induction into the Order of the Purple Bike. Several years ago (2009?) the DIRTies worked in the city of Santarém and stayed in a university camp near the outskirts of town. They decided to get bikes and wiped out almost the entire inventory in the city's stores. The bikes had to be assembled and delivered, and once they were delivered, the group just had to make do with whatever arrived. For the most part, people picked their bikes by size and functionality. But there was a particular issue that stood out: one bike was different from all of the others because it was purple. We wondered how to assign "the special bike," and decided to let people earn the honor of riding it due to exceptional work. From there, the DIRTies started to make a big ceremony out of it with someone new getting inducted into the fictional Order of the Purple Bike almost every day. Even when there were no bikes involved in their daily activities, the DIRTies continued to welcome new members into the Order of the Purple Bike. 

And today, we have our newest member: Isabel! As Shawny and Jesse pointed out, she partially stands out by not trying to stand out. She just works, works, works, all the time, constantly looking out for everyone around her as she does so. She has been our prime organizer, a leader among the med team, a reliable teammate, and a generally hysterically funny person to be around. At the garden today, she weeded so meticulously that Jesse asked her if she had used tweezers. In the snoring nightmare scenario last night, Shawny was moving around alone in the oca trying to keep from waking anyone who managed to be sleeping. She was seeking some of the obscure snoring interventions and was not finding them. Suddenly, Isabel was there by her side, quietly pursuing not only anti-snoring devices, but also earplugs for the non-snorers. And she was cracking jokes throughout the experience, contributing to the giggling in the room and helping to ward off any rage or anger that might have arisen. Isabel is a truly exceptional person and an ideal DIRTy. Welcome to the Order of the Purple Bike, Isabel!