BENEFACTIVE

BENEFACTIVE

 I am very glad I was given the opportunity to have my children's book ,which for the English language edition I am translating the title to be My Bones only Groan Now -- Tomorrow is Another Day.

For the uninitiated ,this book written so many years ago when I was a mere child seems to offer so much hope for a terrible disease that is cancer of the blood.It develops in the bone marrow, the soft spongy center of the long bones that produces the three major blood cells:white blood cells to fight infection; red blood cells that carry oxygen and platelets that help blood clot and stop bleeding.When a child has leukemia the simplest answer is that  his or her body begins to produce white blood cells that do not mature correctly and  begin to crowd out the other cells in the child's body.Cancer with many side effects occurs. The Official name for this illness is Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. 

You can read about ALL in a medical text or glean what a precocious 6 year old has to say about the technical aspects of the illness inside these pages.The illustrations are my own as well, made,of course, when I was that young girl.

But this book was written more than 20 years ago and I am happy for its continued success and the comfort I have come to learn, through the correspondence I receive, the book provides for child and parent alike.

I encourage all parents to have their children speak about their illness into tape recorders and have their children draw pictures when they are feeling well of the things that are happening inside and outside their bodies. The idea would be that someday soon, just as the methods of treatment are changing for the disease so too I will be replaced with someone new carrying the torch of hope. For what began as a personal form of expression about what I was feeling at a particular point in my life resounded loudly for others and to be frank I am ambivalent about it. Every new letter I receive carries with it the responsibility for that child's illness and I devote a good portion of my life to ALL organizations and hospital visits but believe it or not this is the only book I have ever written and my field of study in the university has nothing to do with this great cause. You may , perhaps rightfully so,find me selfish, for I am one of the lucky ones who had a fairly easy time of it and you should know that I keep the small profit the book brings in each year.

But please let your children read my book, it has been proven to be a sure antidote to the depression they all feel, and read it yourself or read it with them. Then start a book of your own. With new methods of treatment should come new handbooks for the afflicted. If you send me your manuscripts I will edit them for you as I speak English well, but as you know it is not my native tongue.

My publisher informs me that the American edition of this book should reach its first readers at just about the time I will be taking an extensive trip through South America with the highlight I hope, to be a visit to the Amazon Rainforest.I will probably not visit any children with ALL. You may think this too to be selfish, but while no one could be more sympathetic to the children who suffer from this horrible disease, I find myself in need of an escape from my personal history."History,"as the Irish Writer James Joyce once said, "is that nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I will never awake,I'm sure, for no one ever does, but it will be fun involving myself in the histories of other people and other places -if only for awhile.

So may your children be well.May you as parents be allowed to recover too.It may be hard to believe this at this moment but peace will return to your life.

THE TEXT ABOVE REPRINTED HERE BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER.COPYRIGHT LONG BOAT BOOKS 2001.



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In the country of Ecuador, on its equator, in its Amazon Basin lies the town of Francisco de Orellana ,perched above the banks of the Napo river. This tiny municipality has as its main thoroughfare a service road for an oil pipeline which extends throughout the entire length of the country of Ecuador destined for a refinery on its Pacific coast many hundreds of miles away.

The capital for a government registered province, in which daily a crush of colonos arrive (landless mestizo and mulato poor seeking a place to clear rainforest and in so doing become rightful owners of the land)who are constantly at war with the nativos (semi- nomadic Indians who claim traditional rights to virtually all of the land in the Amazon Basin), the grimy little hamlet of Francisco de Orellana is nothing more than a random cluster of rusty tin shacks with red earth byways alternately composed of dust and filth ,or muck and mire ,depending on which days or weeks have scorching sun and which have torrential rain. Both conditions oppress,intimidate,and do not relent and are not to be confused with business as usual in the meteorological life cycle of the tropics. The locals- and there is some confusion as to when someone becomes a local-but the people who have no other place to wretch but this Amazon backwater ,treat their weather tribulation as just another sign of Purgatory ,yet another unexplainable act of the Christian God in which they fervently believe ,even though they know about Science.

The vests-with-many-pockets-Gringo-scientists tell them as they pass through this tiny port on their way to make studies down river. The reason, they all say , is that they have cut down their rainforest , miles and miles of it, stretching outward all around the town as they mistakenly thought they were"civilizing" the land by the removal of all traces of jungle.Yes the African Palm oil plantation that employs some of them did cut down 20,000 acres single-handed. And of course the oil company. But every citizen ,every former colono ,who slashed and burned as much land as he could and planted the low quality coffee that only occasionally bore fruit is largely responsible. If you put all that land together it would be much much more than the Companies destroyed.The citizens shrug.How did they know ? No one told them. What could be done now ?

When it rained the locals had the custom of calling the condition "winter" and when the sun shined hard it was "summer" and now the old timers said that there was a lot more summer than winter and winter came when it always used to be summer. But so it went and they adjusted merely making small talk about the long summers or the torrential winters when there used to be summers . Sometimes their feeble crops withered and died and sometimes they were washed away when it rained so much that the river flooded its banks. Only to the surprise of those who have not known the gnawing clench of this brand of poverty, these changes had little ,if any ,impact on the daily lives of the residents the municipality of Francisco de Orellana.These people, for the most part lived so far below the poverty level that reaching abject poverty would have been a goal to strive for- if they had any goals.

The town is distinguished by its name. A not well remembered explorer began his exploration not far from here and some Ecuadorian cartographer with an historian's brushstroke perhaps , chose to dot the map to honor the man some 50 odd years ago when the town was barely a settlement , when oil riches were unknown, when a baptism of grandeur could have been meant as an encouragement. Now the name mocks more than tributes, but nonetheless it is the only point on the entire earth named for the Spanish Conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, whose plunder mentality,by comparison with his peers, was moderate. He was a man of bright intellect and this may have been singular among the Iberian illiterate, bloodthirsty, mercenaries, who came to the new world in search of riches to be won solely by slaughtering all those who stood in their way.

Curious circumstances, one day near Christmas of 1541, led Orellana to begin a journey of adventure and exploration which is perhaps unequaled in human history on earth.Orellana and his compadres fought many battles along the way against enormous Indian nations out to destroy his tiny band who gallantly defended themselves with their rapiers of Toledo steel , the several arquebuses that made a great noise but rarely shot accurately and the dozen crossbows which were effective but slow to load.

The Conquistadors' modern technology and Orellana's cunning ,coupled with his linguistic abilities, somehow just barely matched up to the giant nations of Indians who fought simply with bows and teeming arrows , blowguns with poison darts,and spears, who used the stretched hides of manatees as effective shields against the strange bearded creatures with steel hats who passed through their waters.

Orellana ,although little known for his feat, is by far the most heroic explorer of all time for, against all odds, he was able to voyage down, navigating more than 4000 miles of wild, mysterious, dangerous and ultimately glorious rainforest and by so doing discover the greatest river on our planet, the Amazon River.

The voyage would never be repeated by anyone . The vast nations, entire civilizations would be gone before the next voyager could repeat his journey. Not even Orellana himself could repeat his discovery although he died trying.Within 200 years after Orellana's voyage the many millions of people who lived in the Amazon died out. He was the only person to see and recognize the real El Dorado that did exist in this abundant rainforest and in a large measure he caused it to disappear with the smallpox or measles the tiny European band brought with them.

Europeans had some resistance to measles and other domesticated animal associated diseases like influenza but the Amazonians had no domesticated animals and somehow could live in close proximity to each other without becoming ill. They had no such experience with contagious disease and for just one of them to contract it was like dry straw on a wildfire.

Conquistador Hernan Cortes was the first: bringing a single African slave from Panama or Haiti to Mexico for his conquest who arrived on the shores of Mexico with pustules all over his body and deathly ill. The Aztecs had never seen a black man. A few came close to examine him. Thus Bio Terrorism unwittingly began and overcame the Aztecs and Mayans faster than Cortes could annihilate them with conventional weapons.Francisco Pizzaro hastened the spread of measles, that was already coming from Mexico anyway carried by indigenous traders, with the meer presence of his contaminated men rapidly killing millions of Incas in the Andes of Peru. The cultures of the New World were wiped out, tens of millions of them, by this new form of terrorism. Orellana, without knowing it, played his lethal role in the mass extermination brought on by the Spanish Conquest and although not a ruthless mercenary by the standards of the time, achieved the same results: the decimation of yet another highly advanced New World Civilization.

Orellana and his men ,perhaps just a single carrier, perhaps many, unwittingly brought a deadly virus to its final solution.Estimates range above 5 million people once populating the Amazon but research has just begun to prove this. Conventional wisdom of the past concluded that Orellana's written account of the nations that lived along the Amazon , some as large as 25 miles in length living in close quarters one to another, were pure fantasy and that the Amazon could only hold small semi nomadic groups. Now that theory has been refuted. Archaeologists finally believe as Orellana described, great nations of peoples ,lived in close proximity ,with cultures as advanced as the Egyptian Pyramid makers.They built not with stone for the most part but engineered vast canal systems and broad highways and terraced cities with a class system, High Priests and Sacred Rulers and like all Amerindian peoples they were worshippers of the sun.

They had precious stones such as emeralds, the source of which have never been discovered and ceramic pottery as fine as Orellana and his men had ever seen in Europe. Gold was used in their jewelry,yet no source for it has yet been found.

And how did they eat so well without hunting the land to extinction and feed such large populations without hunger in soil that was almost completely infertile?

Now there are new Conquistadors who have come to the same place where Fransico de Orellana began his extraordinary journey and they too are here to explore and extract. They have brought with them highly sophisticated and specialized technology. These Conquistadors are the harvesters of the great hardwood trees of the jungle and are the deep well-drilling plunderers of the earth , corporate conquerors who have discovered that a single tree might be worth many thousands dollars and that the entire rainforest is floating on a subsurface of oil worth uncountable millions of dollars.

But the technology had served the lean ,young, American well this evening.His first night back in town after three weeks confined to a sickbed,he had bribed the operator of the satellite telephone station, arranged by the Oil Company, where all the oil roughnecks could make cheap calls to Cheyenne, Wyoming or Texarkana, or Bakersfield, to stay open late so he could call Jaipur, India which was 11 and 1/2 hours ahead of local Ecuador Time. The connection was good and matters of commerce were discussed in general terms with a location in Brazil noted by Nate and an agreement to continue discussing what could promise to be a mutually beneficial business relationship. He went looking for amusement.

An avid autodidact in the history of this region, the irony of his measles attack had not escaped him and while it in no way compared to the"break bone" dengue fever he had caught last year down here ,this time his high fevers brought him hallucinations which now amused him in a mystical way...he was a young boy, a member of a great Amazonian nation, The Aparians,they were dying all around him, crying out and falling to the ground everywhere he looked and he saw the marks of measles on his mother and she began to talk to him in perfect English which was a very strange thing and she told him to run away, to save himself. His father lay on the ground. Dead. Covered with pustules.His mother fell .He laid himself on the ground beside them and watched pustule after pustule raise up on his body until he became one giant pustulant that could move and did move ramming into fellow Aparians and instantly giving them the disease causing them to howl and run off.He went after the ones that tried to run away and he caught them. Then on to the next. Faster and Faster ..Until the fever broke after which he quickly forgave his long dead parents for the marooned life they had been heir to which had caused him to miss certain vaccinations and a few other normal American rites of passage.

The night held no promise for rain and in a rainforest where all of the trees have been removed leaving only dust, the hot humid air becomes unbreathable after three weeks. Clothes too big from the weight he had lost,walking, the now lanky American felt his sweat dry quickly as it mixed and caked with the dust. They were due to spray oil on "The Colono Express" again soon to keep this dust down, he knew ,with waste crude from Sacha or Shushufindi, the Petroleum Company's supposed gift to the rusty shantytowns that stretched all along what had once been only a service road for the pipeline. So within minutes, perhaps partly due to his recent affliction ,but mostly due to atmospheric conditions ,he began to gulp for air as if he had been punched in the gut,his lungs fighting with the thieving sooty humidity of a Black Wasteland Amazon night for breathable oxygen -and he gasped twice as hard as he had fifteen minutes earlier for that whore in the clattering tin-roofed chongo. He coughed out a river of phlegm from somewhere deep inside him , a quantifiable reminder of the seriousness of the illness that had just passed.

He was still carrying a good third of a bottle of San Miguel Rum he had been forced to buy there before the three chubby,paint-laden senoritas were paraded before him by the toothless pimp who had fingernails so dirty you could plant trees in them.The place had cement walls, a sign of its profit and prestige and its own generator, clanging somewhere in the back to its own atonal meringue, juicing nothing more than blinking snakes of Christmas tree lights hung in no particular pattern while rats, he surmised, made the tin roof clatter.

His blue eyes glistened by rum the American had motioned to the pimp , aristocracy in Francisco De Orellana,who went into the back and then reappeared awkwardly imitating some royal stooge,overextending his arm in introduction to his bevy of beauties. The 8 or 10 tables -with only one occupied by three boisterous drinkers -all had garishly cheerful red and white checked plastic calico table cloths sticky with dried rum (and who knew what else) and the Gringo quickly chose the black sassy girl with the red and white underwear which matched the tables vaguely conscious that this might be an advertising ploy. The panties barely held her sizable ass in place. She probably came from Esmeraldas, he thought, on the coast where they know salsa music like nobodies business.And he wanted to take her for a dance."No leche en mi boca," she had told him, wagging her finger like a school teacher.

He headed for his riverside hotel then with a sudden realization lunged into an alley he was passing and quickly opened his pants, lavishly anointing his cock with some of the leftover rum from the bottle. He had used a rubber but AIDS was rampant in these jungle hell holes , or as he called them: "Petroleum Exploration Afterbirths",and in his dizzified brain he thought a quick baptism might ward off...whatever there was to ward off.

A dog growled then charged him.He staggered wildly out of the alley tripping on broken souls for nothing that could be used in this oxidized existence in any way went to waste. His feet tangled up in the web of what he imagined to be hopelessly knotted up nylon fishing line and something was crunching like glass or plastic- maybe disposable juice packets. The cur lunged.He smashed it in the head with the bottle as it drew flesh from his ankle.The dog limped away, low to the ground, whimpering as if terribly insulted by his aggression.He sprinkled some rum over his bloody ankle to ward off rabies, and did not wince nor examine the wound closely.He chugged the rest of the bottle in four huge gulps,then screwed the cap back on and laid it on the side of the dust and gravel road sure that someone would find a use for it before the sun was high, or the rain was hard, tomorrow.

A breeze from the river as he arrived at the Hotel Auca seemed to cleanse all manner of things: the whore house,and just down the road from the whore house ,the crude oil waste pit hastily covered with dirt , a technique that had been banned in Texas in the 1930's.And from the front door of the whore house if you were facing it : a right turn and maybe a quarter of a mile to a dead end, spent chromium 6 , used to create presssure to dislodge rocks; it bubbled up and broke its giant pustules in a liquid murk the size of football field. People were getting sick in ways they had never been sick before . Cancer. It was in their groundwater.The Gringo told anyone who would listen to move away,that the new Conquistadors would kill them just as sure as the old ones had their ancestors, but they had nothing and land was free here and for them that was an equation that somehow added up.Abominations, he came to accept ,were the travail of the hopelessly poor. It was a life lesson and he had been naive.He had acted on instinct. Instinct that was wrong for this particular jungle.Oh how he wished he had the nativos instinct of the real rainforest that he could apply to the human world. The ability to stop walking with your next step yet to be taken and your foot dangling in the air knowing that to place that foot would risk the chance to shoot the willdlife your finely tuned ears had heard. Then to lower it in silence and make every motion in the direction of the sound you had heard, silent and expedient.Knowing when to stop walking. When not to take that last step was a big part of true instinct he decided.

So he stopped talking about it. The squatters knew why they were getting sick but according to them they had nowhere else to go. So he shut up. And he saw that a lot of people were glad he shut up. And he was glad he passed through this seething, burbling, brine no more frequently than once a month.He had stopped being naive he told himself.Despite his righteous indignation it was better to keep a low profile anyway.

There were other issues in his life,however, that now intimidated him -sometimes beyond consolation . Decisions motivated by greed.Unlike the instinctual native hunter,he was slowly becoming aware that he had taken that last step that his prey might hear and get away leaving him with nothing but the empty space where it had been. The step a nativo hunter would never take .But he was the distillate North American Gringo for if you knew him for any length of time you would see that he was constantly reinterpreting and reassembling himself in the way the novel geographical expanse that was the United States seemed always to readily allow.Lit brightly from a childhood of unusual privacy and great protection he was experiencing now for really the first time the darker side of life and enjoying every minute of it.So backtracking out of the shadows, lucky that he had broken tree limbs to mark his trail for retracing, He was finding a way out. A way to save himself -and his fortune -he hoped. His instincts about humans ,he told himself ,had sharpened considerably, had just maybe become like that of the native hunter, and in his drunkeness he became feisty for a moment and thought he could handle all comers.This euphoria soon passed.

Anyway he had no problems .Not tonight. The whore and the rum had seen to that.And he was at the Hotel Auca: the only place he'd dare rest his head no matter how drunk he was.It did not take much instinct to arrive at that decision.