“This isn’t just about this spill, or the last one, or the next one that will happen when the pipe breaks again because it will as it always does,” said Tania Ines looking out over a reflective Marañón River from the open thatched-roof house where she, her husband and their four children live in the center of San Pedro, a Kukama indigenous community deep in Peru’s northern Amazon. She crossed the room with a pace indicating endless time, collecting a crying baby at the other side and returning to sit at the edge of weathered steps. She looked as though she were waiting.
“The water is ruined – we’re all getting sick from it,” Ines turned the fussing baby from one hand to the other. She told me he had been suffering from diarrhea, likely due to the contamination of one thing or another, as everything seemed to have been touched. “I gave him a bath in the river water and he’s had stomach problems since. It’s the same with this one,” she pointed to the infant’s sister peeking out from behind Mama’s legs. “…with all the children really.”
Be a Seed for Change 
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