From Tropical Tours to Medical Missions: A Profile of Project Amazonas

In late July, as I was making my way towards the Amazonian metropolis of Iquitos in northeast Peru – the largest city in the world that can’t be reached by a road – I emailed a number of not-for-profit organisations in the region asking if they were interested in collaborating with my photography project. One of the few responses I received was from the President and Scientific Director of an NGO named Project Amazonas. He advised me that they had an upcoming tropical fish expedition with a few spaces left, and asked if I was interested in joining. Despite knowing very little about fish, the idea of floating along the Amazon and its tributaries for a week sounded like a dream come true, and the more I read about the organisation hosting the tour, the more intrigued I became.

Project Amazonas, along with its partner organisation, MT Amazon Expeditions, is a multifaceted institution which never seems to have a dull moment. They run a variety of ecotourism experiences, host a range of students and researchers at their two nature reserves, and perhaps most importantly, conduct medical service trips to remote Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon.

Their tours are world class. The one that I joined was targeted at tropical fish enthusiasts, who are able to come down to the Amazon and encounter the many spectacular species of freshwater fish that they would normally only ever see in a tank. Thanks to partnerships with local fish exporters, the participants are even able to bring a small number of fish back for their own aquariums – a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a passionate fish hobbyist. A few spots on the tour were also reserved for three local aquaculture students from Iquitos, whose wealth of knowledge and vibrant company only added to the experience.

Days were spent exploring various freshwater ecosystems, from tiny pools and puddles located deep within the rainforest, to the sandy banks of huge rivers like the Amazon itself. There were no lazy afternoons spent hanging a fishing rod off the side of the boat though – you had to be prepared to swim in the rivers and trudge through muddy swamps if you wanted to catch your ideal fish. Trips like these serve a scientific purpose as well. Water quality data was recorded at every location, and all of the fish were photographed, identified and catalogued before being returned to the water.

The only downside of the trip came when I was knocked out for two days with some kind of tropical fever. While my temperature subsided within 24 hours and I was back to normal within 48, there were moments on the first day that were spent wondering if I’d managed to contract malaria or dengue as I lay drowning in a pool of my own sweat. Thankfully, however, the boat we were on was the same boat that Project Amazonas uses for their medical trips, meaning that the storage room was stocked full of medication for just about any illness you could possibly encounter.

Following the conclusion of the fish expedition, I was invited to spend a few days at Santa Cruz Forest Reserve, one of Project Amazonas’ research stations in the Peruvian jungle. Featuring a huge patch of primary rainforest, kilometres of walking trails and a diverse range of wildlife, I found myself barely wanting to sleep or eat in order to maximise my time spent exploring the unique location. However, on the last day before he was due to fly back to the US, as the sun was setting over the reserve, I took the time to sit down with the person who had made all of this possible, and discuss his life, his passions, and his work.

Devon Graham is the President and Scientific Director of Project Amazonas, and has been part of the organisation for a number of decades. He is a vibrant character, with a deep understanding and appreciation of the surrounding ecosystem. His knowledge of mammals, birds and reptiles is impressive, but it’s the topics of botany and freshwater fish where he truly shines. Quick-witted, with a dry sense of humour and a wealth of interesting stories from across the globe, he makes great company for students, tourists and researchers alike, and argues passionately for more equitable access to healthcare between the developing and developed world. However, over the previous weeks, it was his generosity that had stood out to me the most. Devon appeared to be on a never-ending quest to give a new opportunity to someone who wouldn’t have otherwise had it.

The son of missionaries, Devon was a globetrotter from childhood, living in the US, Switzerland, Rwanda, Kenya and Canada before the age of twelve. These experiences gave him wanderlust, he says, and he returned to Africa with the Peace Corps following the completion of his undergraduate degree in zoology. But from there, the neotropics were calling. “I’d always wanted to go to the Amazon,” he recalls. “I grew up in Africa reading stories about the Amazon, thinking that it was so remote that I would never get there.”

He began his dissertation work in Tropical Ecology at the University of Miami, and then spent a couple of years conducting field work in the rainforests of Costa Rica. While there, a mutual friend connected Devon with the founder of the organisation that he would one day become President and Scientific Director of. “He came down to see me and he said, ‘Costa Rica’s the size of a postage stamp, I’ll give you the entire Amazon!'” Devon visited Peru for a week that year, three months the next, and from there he “just kept coming back and back and back, and getting worked in more and more with the organisation”. These days, when not in the midst of a global pandemic, he spends around six months out of every year in Peru.

Project Amazonas has its origins in an ecotourism company from the 1970s. “The person who founded it had been bringing business people down and making them do jungle survival camps,” Devon recalls. “[These were] guys who thought they were pretty tough – they did marathons and that sort of stuff and they thought they could handle anything, and he’d bring them down and make them cry.” The tours were being conducted on the Orosa River in northeast Peru, and Devon explains that at that time, “there were no schools, there were no clinics, there was nothing – no services whatsoever”. Several former clients who had bonded over their time in the jungle decided that something needed to be done, and so they formed Project Amazonas with the aim of giving back to the nearby communities. “Over time we just grew,” says Devon, “and now we do eight to twelve medical trips a year.”

This growth occurred naturally. They began with trips to the communities they knew on the Orosa, and then, Devon explains, “you’d have other people showing up to the clinic and saying, ‘I’m from this river over here, we need this too, why aren’t you helping us?'” Each time this happened, a new destination was added to the itinerary for the following year. “The first year you show up on a river, everybody’s kinda suspicious. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What religion are you trying to convert us to? Why are you here?'” Concerns range from the understandable to the (hopefully) mythical. “There’s all sort of rumours about pelacadas – organ harvesters,” Devon tells me, “Gringos showing up with white coolers full of medical gear and whatnot, which is exactly what we were doing.” But trust gradually builds once the genuine intentions of Project Amazonas are understood. “The second year you show up again – same community – and they go, ‘Oh, you’re back. We didn’t think we’d ever see you again.’ And the third year you show up and they’re kinda looking at their watch like, ‘Weren’t you supposed to be here last week?'”

Today, Project Amazonas services more than 70 different communities on their annual trips, providing medical supplies, specialised treatment, and general health check-ups to people who live in some of the most isolated places on the planet. Reflecting on how much the organisation has grown, Devon also discusses his personal growth, and the evolution of his views on conservation. “When I first started coming down, my interest was purely biology, the natural history, the trees, the animals, the environment, things like that,” he says. “But over time you get to know people in the communities, you become friends with the families, you see their kids grow up, and there’s kind of an inevitable transition towards thinking about conservation as being about more than just the environment but also including the people who live here – because they’re the ones who know the most about that environment.” The depth of knowledge contained within these communities is one of Devon’s primary conservation focuses. “They value the forest for many, many different things – for medicines, for handicrafts, for spiritual uses, for practical uses… but if they leave, then you get loggers and ranchers coming in who value it for timber and, you know, steak. Basically that’s it.” Increasingly, Devon emphasises the importance of finding ways to maintain this connection between the planet and the people who know it best. “If they have to move to the cities to get better education for their kids, or to get access to medical care, that knowledge, that intimate knowledge, gets lost,” he explains. “So one of our objectives is to make it possible for those people who know the most about the environment to stay in the rural environment.”

And Devon certainly puts his money where his mouth is. Sitting down with me at Santa Cruz Forest Reserve, he explains the structure that they have in place here. “We have a system worked out with the local community where we have families that come in for four months at a time as caretakers. They get a salary per month and the community decides on the rotation,” he explains. Typically the caretakers are young families who are able to save for their children’s education, but they often also have older couples who act as valuable resources for the researchers at the station. “We’ve had caretakers here who are experts, I mean truly experts, on medicinal plants,” Devon says. “They can go out there and identify a hundred and fifty different plants, and tell you what the use of each one is, which is just an insane amount of knowledge.” However, it’s also a fragile knowledge, passed down through the generations by word of mouth, further emphasising the importance of Devon’s human-centred approach to conservation.

Project Amazonas still maintains its original business model today. Their tour company, MT Amazon Expeditions, provides the backing for their humanitarian and conservation work – although the name has required some evolution. “The founder of the organisation, his wife was named Margaret, hence it was Margarita Tours,” Devon explains. But they eventually transitioned away from the name because “people thought it was a drinking trip”. While participants certainly won’t go thirsty, their tropical fish expeditions, birding tours and herpetological trips are definitely only for those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty. “We bring people down in the role of ecotourists, but the proceeds from that go towards funding the educational projects, the medical projects, and the maintenance of the field stations which are used by various researchers,” says Devon. “It’s a thoroughly nepotistic and beneficial relationship, so we make no apologies for it!”

While considerable progress has been made, the communities that Project Amazonas work with still face a wide range of challenges, from access to clean water, to malaria prevention and mosquito control, as well as general gaps in education. “We’ve done experiments with communities where we just take the little mosquito wrigglers, put them in a soda can or whatever with a little bit of mesh, and they hatch out and there’s mosquitoes in there – and people are amazed because they never associated those little wrigglers in the water with blood-sucking mosquitoes.” Additionally, while most locals have no objection to using Western medicine in conjunction with traditional remedies, Devon explains that they occasionally encounter resistance, sometimes in high pressure situations.

“A few years back we just happened to stop at a community and there was a nine-year-old kid who had sepsis in his leg,” Devon tells me. “He’d fallen out of a tree and broken it, and the parents were not present, but the grandparents were there, and they didn’t want to send him to a clinic because they thought that the leg would be amputated and then he’d be a cripple for life.” While the Project Amazonas team could empathise with the grandparents, and knew that their heart was in the right place, they were also acutely aware of the seriousness of the situation – the boy had a critically high fever and was almost certainly not going to survive another 24 hours. “We managed to persuade them to let us take him to a clinic,” Devon said. “They put him on a massive antibiotic drip, and they saved both the leg and the kid.”

Aside from the obviously happy ending, Devon’s anecdote also highlights two key aspects of the work that Project Amazonas does. Firstly, it demonstrates their long-term approach to education and medicine – their actions didn’t just save one child’s life, but potentially the lives of many others. The next time someone in the community has a similar illness, people will know that they can rely on their local clinics for support. But secondly, it also underscores the value of the employees that make up the Project Amazonas team. “We always have a Peruvian doctor, a Peruvian dentist, and a Peruvian student or two along on the medical trips,” Devon emphasises, “so they really help smooth the way and break the ice with communities.” And it’s not just the medical staff, but the crew as well. “A lot of the contact with these communities is through our crew, who are all Peruvian,” Devon explains, “and they have really, really great rapport with the local people. They know all the local slang, the local legends, the local lore – I mean they are really the true icebreakers.”

Devon singles out his crew as the heart of Project Amazonas’ operations. One member, Segundo, is a jack-of-all-trades who is responsible for any maintenance during the tours and medical trips. “When we’re doing medical clinic in these communities, he’s doing motor clinic,” Devon explains. “Everyone’s bringing him their peque-peque motors for their canoes, and he’s servicing them and telling them how to maintain them properly.” This aspect of their work is just as important as the medical side, Devon stresses: “It’s something that the people really identify with, it’s meeting a real need that they have, and it just builds up that level of confidence and trust.”

The authenticity of their approach is evident across all of the work that Project Amazonas conducts. “We’re not here to convert them to X, Y or Z religion,” Devon emphasises, “we’re not here to harvest organs, we’re not here because we’re the DEA and we want to see how their coca field is doing.” While Devon grew up around missionaries, it’s clear that as an adult he’s been able to maintain the positive aspects of his parents’ altruism, but without the religious dogma. “We’re not here to preach values or philosophies, and a lot of our medical volunteers come from multiple backgrounds,” he explains, “Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Hindu, whatever – we don’t care, it’s not our business, it’s not what we’re here for. It’s just, ‘How can we help?'”

The last few years have proved particularly challenging for Devon and Project Amazonas. They lost members of their Peruvian team to Covid-19, and experienced feelings of helplessness knowing how desperately the communities they work with were in need of supplies. “They couldn’t even get ibuprofen or paracetamol, because all the river traffic was shut down, and a simple fever-reducing pill skyrocketed in price,” Devon recalls. “You used to be able to get a box of a hundred [paracetamol] for four soles (~US$1), and then they were selling single pills for five soles, which is a lot of money out in the rural areas.”

However, that didn’t stop Project Amazonas from making an impact. “We were able to get some fairly major donations down to support some of the communities,” Devon explains. “I did a bunch of online promotions and people really responded.” But there was one donation that really stood out for him. “We had a group of Canadian nurses who were going to come down in early 2020,” he says. “They had already raised a bunch of money for their trip, and they just donated it all to covid relief. As one of the magnetic stickers on the boat says – Superheroes Wear Scrubs. They were awesome.” Once more, Devon’s words are backed up by his actions – healthcare workers and first responders have access to a discounted rate on any tours with MT Amazon Expeditions through to the end of 2023.

To round out our conversation, Devon reflects on some of the biggest changes he’s witnessed during his time working with Project Amazonas. “One of the things we see happening in this area is that the birth rate is dropping, big time,” he says. “When I first came down and we started doing medical trips, ten or twelve kids per woman was not an unusual number. The maximum we ever came across was eighteen, which basically meant that from puberty to menopause this woman was either pregnant or nursing the entire time.” Shifting perspectives on education mean that people are more determined to get their kids to school, and the associated costs, combined with improved standards of living and access to birth control, mean that families typically prefer to have significantly fewer children. And with women spending a smaller portion of their lives raising children, Devon highlights another key trend. “The other thing that’s happened that has been really important is that women have moved into more important roles in society across the board,” he explains. “There are a lot more opportunities for women in this country than there are in a lot of South American countries. They’ve worked hard at stamping out that machismo attitude, and you know, it’s still there – hey, we still have it in the US – but it’s come a long way.” For Devon, this is a promising trend for Peru and its Amazon region. “With those opportunities, women are taking charge,” he says. “You see more women political candidates at all levels, and I think that really promises good things for the future for Peru – when you have the other 50% of the population actively involved in decision-making.”

From the turbid brown waters of the Amazon River, to the dense green maze of the surrounding rainforest, my time spent with Project Amazonas will forever be one of my favourite South American experiences. Rarely do you come across an organisation that so perfectly blends the intrinsic joys of any nature-lover with the extrinsic imperatives of those who want to create a better planet. Devon’s work confidently illustrates the ability to live a life that is simultaneously altruistic and authentic – one that improves the lives of others without sacrificing one’s own individual passions.

Indeed, through Project Amazonas, Devon has dedicated his life to a synthesis of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations – one in which his overall goals have evolved to encompass both the things that he loves doing, as well as the inherent responsibility we all have to make the world a better place. This is an objective that we should all strive towards in our daily lives, regardless of how we decide to live them. First identify the things that bring us joy, and then use those passions as a springboard to work out how we can best contribute to the world around us.

And for any budding naturalists who aren’t sure where to begin – a tour with Project Amazonas is a fantastic place to start!

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You can read or listen to the full conversation with Devon Graham via the links below

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This is the first organisation to feature as part of our Protect The World series. Each month, we’re planning on profiling an amazing not-for-profit like Project Amazonas. If you’d like to help us contribute financially to these organisations as well, consider signing up to our Patreon for as little as $5 a month.

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Don’t forget to check out the video we made about Project Amazonas as well!