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Flight To Taisha

For a while now Taylor has wanted to fly out into the jungle on a flight with one of our pilots. He was out to the Waorani village of Damointaro almost two years ago, but he told me he wanted to fly again when there was a chance. Yesterday about 3:30 PM the weather finally cleared. It had been cloudy and rainy to that point, and planes weren't flying out of Shell. As soon as the weather cleared, Tomas asked Bruce if he'd go to Taisha to pick up a transfer patient, and maybe make one other stop. The way it turned out, Bruce only went to Taisha and straight back, and had room for Taylor and me. It was 30 minutes to Taisha, where we picked up a teenage boy with second degree burns on his leg. After sitting on the ground for 15 minutes, we were on our way back to Shell. It was very hazy all over the jungle. They say it's a lot of smoke in the air from fires. I guess it's from clearing fields and maybe even the rainforest, and I've heard that the smoke comes from Peru and Colombia. Even though we couldn't see very far, we could see the jungle and rivers below, the trees looking like broccoli, and the rivers like giant snakes. I saw one interesting river, where the the it had changed course to form an oxbow lake. In the photo the river flows from right to left, and there is a small lake on the right side of the photo that was left after the river changed course. Taylor actually was a little bored on the way back. He was glad he could go, but I think it will be a while before he wants to do that again. What would be terribly exciting for his friends in California has become just a bit 'normal' to him.