Almost exactly 20 years ago, September 9th, 2005, to be exact, I stepped on board a flight that whisked me away from the secure, safe and reliably predictable first 18 years I’d spent on this earth.
Three months after sitting the Leaving Cert, when most of my peers were returning from post-exam holidays and making final arrangements before embarking on university life, I set off for South America.
In many ways September 9th was the day my journalism career began. With no mobile phone and limited access to a landline in my new Peruvian home, I kept a weekly blog of my experiences working with children in Iquitos, a city deep in the Amazon jungle, accessible only by plane or boat. In 2005, writing a blog was still a novel endeavour, at least within my social circle.
It offered a young, aspiring writer the blank page to share her ideas and experiences without (too much) judgment. These were the days before angry keyboard warriors. Let’s be honest, the small number that did exist had no interest in the idealistic musings of a Dublin teenager.
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Social media and smartphones had not yet taken over our lives. Facebook only became available for a small number of Irish students in 2006. Before this, we occasionally logged into the slow-moving, clunky Bebo on our parents’ desktop computers.
Households lucky enough to own a computer often relied on a modem connection. In short, people’s lives were not yet posted in real time, communication could truly be cut off and one could genuinely disappear into a jungle and rely primarily on letters and care packages containing newspaper cuttings for contact with the outside world.
Each Saturday, after a week of homework clubs, music lessons, toddler nappy changes and poorly dubbed movies, my fellow volunteer and I took a motor-taxi down the dusty, unpaved Avenida José Abelardo Quinones to Iquitos’s Plaza Mayor, where we spent two sweaty hours writing emails and blog posts and catching up with family members on MSN chat.
From there, we headed to the bustling Belén market to pick up our papaya and mango supply for the week, often stopping by the bank or cinema lobby to avail of the cool, air-conditioned air pumped into only a handful of city centre buildings.
While temperatures rarely exceeded 35 degrees in Iquitos, the daily humidity hovered between 85-90 per cent and our electric fan broke early in the year. My teenage body was forced to quickly acclimatise and two decades on, I still enjoy my deepest sleeps when visiting hot climates.
The heat wasn’t all bad – it forced us to explore the tributaries of the Amazon in long wooden canoes with newly found friends, seeking out swim spots where we spent afternoons munching on fried plantain and sipping glass bottles of Inca Kola – a bubblegum-flavoured, highly addictive, yellow soda that remains a staple beverage across Peru.
The twice-to-three-times-weekly power cuts, often leaving us without light or running water, were just another quirk of jungle city life.
I was undeniably homesick – for my parents, my sister, pasta and Dairy Milk. I was confronted with grief for the first time in my young life, mourning the loss of my grandmother while her funeral was held in a Dublin church thousands of miles away.
I kept getting sick and ending up on a drip in the crowded and chaotic local hospital (they eventually discovered a parasite had set up camp in my gut). But yet, I loved it all.
Earlier this month I spent 36 hours in Manchester with the two women I shared that year with. The Mancunian I lived with, another naively idealistic 18-year-old who was forced to become my unofficial carer during those regular hospital visits, is now an emergency transplant nurse. There was prescience in her caring abilities.
Our conversation over those two days meandered between children, pregnancy, miscarriages, housing costs, job struggles and relationship grievances. All the topics you’d expect a trio of western white women in their late 30s to discuss.
But every now and then, our chats would diverge in a different direction, to recollections of hiking through landslides, drinking in bars hanging over the banks of the Amazon, hallucinations caused by our daily dose of Larium – an antimalarial drug that was subsequently withdrawn from sale – and being abducted by a gun-carrying criminal gang in the Bolivian capital of La Paz on the eve of the election of Evo Morales in 2005 (this actually happened).
I prefer not to reflect too much on what might have followed had a female police officer, who happened to be walking by the vehicle we’d been held in, not knocked on the window.
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And then there were the seemingly more mundane tasks of life in Iquitos – the weekly routine of caring for young children abandoned by their families in the “Aldea” where we lived and worked.
“Do you remember we used to walk the kids on a Sunday to the local prison to visit their parents,” asked my friend, recalling a memory I had totally erased from my mind.
Even today, the names of those children, some of whom were adopted outside Peru to countries around the world, names such as Orlando, Danisa and Luis, remain imprinted in my mind. Forever associated with the smiling faces that greeted me every morning for 12 months.
We also spoke of our admiration for our parents who allowed their teenage girls to quite simply disappear abroad. Years after my return, my unceasingly stoic mother admitted she cried herself to sleep for weeks following my departure. We 1980s millennials were not yet privy to the phenomenon of helicopter parenting. Lucky us.
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