The next morning, Lin arrived at Dr. Harwood’s class almost twenty minutes early. The door was open, but no one else was present save for Harwood herself. The professor had arrived only a few minutes before Lin did, and she had her head buried in a thick stack of papers when the petite Asian girl knocked softly on the door.
Harwood looked up and smiled when she saw her. “Ah, Ms. Ming! You’re awfully early this morning.”
Lin nodded meekly. “Yes, Doctor. I did not wish to be late.”
“Sweetheart, you’re early enough that you could cross the quad and still be back here with time to spare,” Harwood said drily. “You don’t have anywhere else to be?”
“No, professor.”
Harwood gestured at the small to-go tray filled with styrofoam cups. “Well, I brought coffee for everyone. Since you’re here first, you can have first pick.”
Lin paused, uncertain. She never drank coffee. Her father forbade it, though that rule didn’t extend to himself. Coffee was an unhealthy, unnecessary distraction. But, yet again, a small, rebellious part of her--the part that years of super-strict discipline hadn’t quite been able to stamp out--whispered that her father was thousands of miles and an entire ocean away. He would never know. What was the harm?
She picked a cup at random and immediately snatched her hand away, hissing in pain. “Ow! It is hot!”
“You have to grab it around the cardboard sleeve in the middle,” Harwood explained, clearly shocked that Lin didn’t know this already.
“...Oh.” Lin glanced at the floor sheepishly and did as the professor advised, but as she brought it to her lips, Harwood stopped her again.
“Try adding some cream and sugar first. Lin...have you never had coffee before?”
Lin shook her head, feeling even more humiliated. “No. Father does not allow coffee under his roof unless he is the one drinking it, and he never drank it when I was around to see. I...I know little of such things...”
“Then I’m happy to help further your education,” Harwood said warmly. “Here, let me mix it up for you.”
She added four creams and four sugars to the coffee, stirred it and handed it back to Lin. The young woman took a cautious, timid sip, expecting it to be bitter, but her face lit up in unexpected delight. “It is good!”
“It should be,” Harwood said with a wink. “I certainly paid enough for it!”
“...Coffee is expensive, doctor?”
“This kind is. It’s from the Amazon. In fact, this particular blend is grown only a few hundred miles from the Aiwaha’s ancestral territory. I thought it’d be a nice touch.”
“Can you...” Lin swallowed. “Can you tell me more about them, please? Are they, um, nice?”
“Oh, yes. The Aiwaha take hospitality--they call it guest right--deadly seriously. A person who is offered guest right is under the tribe’s official protection and cannot be harmed, and they consider it their sacred duty to ensure their guest is shown the proper hospitality. In turn, the guest is duty-bound to respect and honor the traditions of his or her host.” Harwood’s phone buzzed, and Lin caught a glimpse of a smiling boy on the background of her phone. The child looked to be two or three years old, and while his skin was of darker complexion than Harwood’s, he had the professor’s eyes and nose.
“Who is that?” Lin asked.
The professor finished firing off a quick text and set the phone back down. “Oh, that’s my son’s babysitter. She was just texting me to say that he finished eating his breakfast.”
"You have a son?” Lin asked. Her eyes went to Harwood’s left hand. “But you are not married?”
“Yup!” Harwood beamed. “He’s the greatest gift the Aiwaha ever gave me.”
“So he...”
“He was conceived during my first stay with the tribe, yes,” Harwood confirmed. There wasn’t an ounce of shame in her voice, rather it rang with pride. “I have no idea who the father might be. There are lots of candidates, but at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was given the gift of a healthy, beautiful little boy to call my own, and I’ll always be grateful for that. I can’t wait to show Naka-Mur a picture of him. When he’s old enough I’m going to take him back to the village with me for an even longer stay, so he can be in touch with his roots.”
Lin peered more closely at the photo. “He is very cute,” she admitted, though Harwood’s bluntness made her face grow red-hot. “He seems very happy in the picture.”
“He’s very cheerful,” Harwood said fondly. “I’ll always be grateful to the Aiwaha for giving him to me.”
“And you--you do not wish to marry?” Lin asked, more hesitantly.
“I could have,” Harwood admitted. “There was no shortage of men in the tribe who would have been happy to take me as their wife. The Aiwaha do practice marriage, though theirs is somewhat different than ours. But I knew I couldn’t stay. There is still too much work to be done.”
“I would like to marry one day,” Lin’s voice grew soft and distant. “But I would never get to choose who my husband is. My father makes all such decisions--he would never allow me to pick a husband for myself.” And I do not think he is any hurry to do so, she thought glumly.
Harwood narrowed her eyes a little. “He sounds like a real nice guy,” she said sarcastically.
“He...he loves me...”
“Yeah? Sounds to me like he loves controlling you. There’s a difference.”
Harwood’s blunt assessment hit like Lin like a freight train. Her jaw dropped.
“Sorry,” the professor said, shrugging. “I call it like I see it.”
Lin wanted to say something, compelled by long years of strict discipline to try and defend her father, but she could not find the words. Instead, she took her seat as the other students began to arrive.
“Welcome back, everyone,” Harwood said, smiling as she began the lesson. “A quick update before we get started: I’m pleased to say that Aisha’s boyfriend--”
“Husband,” Aisha corrected with a grin. “We got the paperwork done yesterday and got hitched at the courthouse.”
There was a chorus of surprise and congratulations from the other students. Even Lin Ming couldn’t help clapping quietly.
“Very well, Aisha’s husband will be joining us on our trip. His name is Jeremy and he dropped by yesterday afternoon to fill out the requisite paperwork and receive a university debt card and packing list, so he’s all set. You will all meet him once it is time to fly out, if not sooner.”
“You got married?” Bonnie asked, wide-eyed. “Gotta say, I never took you for the type.”
“What can I say?” Aisha shrugged helplessly. “He’s...it just works, that’s the best way I can describe it.”
“I’m curious to meet him,” added Krupa. “A girl like you isn’t tamed by just anyone. And he must really care about you if he insists on coming along.”
“Yeah. He’s not the touchy-feely type, but yeah, he does care. He’s a good guy, in his own way.” Aisha smiled fondly at the thought of her new husband.
There was no way for her to know it, but Lin Ming looked at her expression and felt a jab of some unfamiliar emotion. It took her a second to identify it envy. The notion horrified her, but she couldn’t deny the truth. She was jealous of Aisha, at least a little. She wondered if she’d ever have a man like that in her life, a man who made her smile the way Aisha’s husband made her smile. She wondered if she’d ever meet a guy who made her heart race and her head swim. But of course that was impossible, at least while she was going to school here. Her father would die before allowing her to marry a foreigner of any kind, and even if he picked a husband for her, it might not be for a long time to come.
Lin felt a strange melancholy settle over and shook her head, trying to banish it. She couldn’t think about such things right now. She was in class and it was her duty to pay attention and learn.
Harwood cleared her throat. “Now, for today’s lesson, I want to give an overview of our trip to the Amazon and how we will be travelling. As you’ve probably already figured out by now, it will be a long and arduous journey to the Aiwaha village, which is called Tlacloban.”
Harwood went over to a map of the world hanging next to the blackboard. Pointing to a spot, she said, “Tlacloban is located roughly here, in the western part of the Amazon several hundred miles from where the borders of Peru and Bolivia meet. To get there, we will first have to chart a flight to Bolivia’s Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz. From there, we will travel by off-road vehicle until we reach the Mamore Grande river, where boats will be waiting to take us further upriver. It will take at least a week traveling by boat before we reach the borders of Aiwaha territory, which is located between the Purus and Madeira rivers, shown here.”
She tapped another spot, indicating the land between the two rivers she’d just mentioned.
“Once we disembark, we will head into the jungle on foot. The Aiwaha will be expecting us and Naka-Mur has assured me that guides will be waiting to ensure we arrive at the village safely. After that, we will have several days to rest, eat and sleep.”
“How will the guides find us?” Isaiah asked. “We gonna send up a flare or somethin’?”
Harwood resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Hardly. The Aiwaha have called this part of the Amazon home for centuries. They know every tree, stream and rock for hundreds of miles. We will not have to find them. They will find us, and they will find us rather more quickly than you think.”
She faced the class squarely, making no attempt to sugar-coat what she said next. “Make no mistake: this will likely be the most difficult thing you’ve ever done in your lives so far. It will be a long, exhausting, and at times dangerous journey, but the experience will be worth it, and when you return here at the end of the semester, you’ll be glad you did it.”
“To that end,” Harwood continued, “I want to dig a little deeper into the history of the Aiwaha. You will learn much of their way of life after we arrive, but it is important for you to be aware of their history and heritage before we arrive. Be sure to take lots of notes, people. This is important.”
Dutifully, Lin took out a spiral notebook and set pencil to paper.
“Everything I know about the Aiwaha comes from what Naka-Mur told me,” Harwood said. “The Aiwaha do not have a written language, but their oral history and traditions are ancient. It is important, in their culture, for stories to be passed down with extreme accuracy. A storyteller who forgets even a single word or uses a word in place of another is seen as failing in their duty. Those selected to pass down these stories to the next generation are trained from the time they are very small, and hold a place of great honor among the tribe. This emphasis on total accuracy means the oral history of the Aiwaha comes down to us almost exactly as it was when it was first told--something almost unheard of in the field of anthropology.”
She paused to take a sip of coffee. “According to Naka-Mur and the tribe’s oldest living storyteller, a woman named Kura, the Aiwaha first arrived in the Amazon basin approximately two and a half thousand years ago. Where they lived before that is unknown even to the Aiwaha themselves, but their myths claim that a great cataclysm of fire pushed them out of their ancestral homelands in a great exodus known as the Long Walk. The Walk is supposed to have taken many years and many members of the tribe did not survive the arduous journey.”
Richard raised his hand. “A volcanic eruption, perhaps?”
“Very good,” Harwood smiled. “Yes, that is one possible explanation. Another might be a wildfire. Regardless, the Aiwaha themselves are not sure where exactly they came from, only that their homeland was lost or so heavily damaged that it could no longer sustain them. What we do know is they arrived in the Amazon rainforest after a perilous exodus that claimed many lives. When they looked around at this new paradise, they knew the gods had blessed them and they had found a new place to call home. So grateful were they for this gift that a score of the tribe’s most beautiful young women offered themselves up as sacrifices so the Aiwaha could show the gods their gratitude. This offer pleased the gods so much they came to Karo-Mur, the high chief at the time, in a dream. They showed him a great and mighty tree and bade him use it as the sacrificial altar. More, they instructed him to carry out the sacrifice over the course of three days, and to carry the bodies of the girls to the tribe’s crop fields and lay them face-down in ceremonial graves. The graves were not to be filled in with dirt until after the conclusion of the ceremony at the end of the third day, and afterward, the dead girls would go on to enrich the soil and help the crops grow strong. In this way, their sacrifice would nourish not only the gods, but their own people too. This began the tradition of the yearly Festival of Fertility, which has continued unbroken to the present day.”
“Lots of cycle-of-life-and-death symbolism there,” Krupa commented.
“Just so,” Harwood concurred.
“How bad is it it?” Aisha couldn’t help but ask. “Being sacrificed that way, I mean. Do the girls suffer a lot?”
“If you’re so curious, you could always volunteer yourself and find out!” Harwood joked. “In all seriousness though, they do not suffer unduly from what Naka-Mur told me. In fact, by all accounts it’s an extremely pleasurable experience. The girls’ hands are not bound and they are free to pleasure themselves as they die. The lack of oxygen coupled with sexual stimuli produces extremely powerful orgasms. The sort that most women rarely experience in their lifetimes.”
“Doesn’t sound like such a bad way to go,” Bonnie smirked.
Krupa looked thoughtful as she digested Harwood’s answer. “Hey, can I ask another question?”
“Of course.”
“Can we post photos and videos of our time with the Aiwaha online after we get back?”
Harwood pursed her lips. “Well...I suppose, so long as you run it past me before you post anything, and as long as it doesn’t expose anything the Aiwaha wish to keep to themselves. You can’t, for example, say anything that might give away the location of Tlacloban, or post footage of the sacrificial girls being hung during the ceremony itself. That would violate the sanctity of the Aiwaha’s most ancient and important traditions. But things like scenes from everyday village life would probably be acceptable.”
Krupa pumped a fist. “Yes!”
Brian was next to ask a question. “What can you tell us about how their society is organized?”
“Good question, Brian! The first thing you need to know about the Aiwaha is their society places great importance on sex. I know I mentioned this before, but I want to go into more detail so none of you have a faulty impression. The Aiwaha view the sexual act with extreme reverence due to the fact that it creates new life. It creates a soul. The act of creation, of bring something into being from nothing, is the closest a mortal human can come to wielding the power of the gods themselves. To the Aiwaha, having sex elevates you to a higher state of being for the duration of the act, and therefore it honors and pleases the gods to engage in sexual activity as much as possible. A tribe only grows strong if it bears many children, so the more its members procreate, the better.
"This is not to say that women are reduced to broodmares, though. The Aiwaha never engage in sex without consent, and violation is punished by instant death. The Aiwaha hold women in great esteem and reverence, for while it is the man who plants his seed within her, it is the woman who carries it, nurtures it, and brings it forth into the world. Thus, women are viewed as being closer to the gods and more favored in their eyes than men.”
“Do women hunt?” Aisha inquired. “I’d like to learn how to do that while we’re there.”
“Some of them do,” Harwood said. “But for the most part, it is the men who gather food and defend the tribe’s territory. As such, while you have the option of learning how to hunt like the Aiwaha do, it will be a mandatory skill that Richard, Brian and Isaiah will be required to learn. Everyone in the tribe is expected to contribute in some way, and while we are staying with them that includes us too.”
The three boys looked comically surprised. Harwood chuckled at the looks on their faces. “Oh, don’t worry, you three. We girls will have plenty to do as well. Aiwaha women concentrate on bearing, rearing and caring for children, along with other domestic tasks. I don’t expect any of the girls here to get pregnant--unless you want to, of course--so we’ll probably be spending most of our time doing other things like cooking, weaving baskets and getting water. This is not because women are viewed as inferior or weak. Rather, Aiwaha culture holds that women are too precious to partake in risky activities like hunting or combat.
