We motor through a driving rain up the Camisea River to Segakiato, a small Machiguenga community of 48 families that is little more than clusters of wood huts with thatched roofs connected by muddy paths. There is no electricity here, but there is a water well, drilled by Shell Oil Company workers years ago. The village has just one radio connecting it to the outside world.

Machiguenga girls play in a canoe in Segakiato. Machiguenga children learn to handle watercraft at an early age, but the Camisea Project has brought increased river traffic to the Urubamba. In August 2002, a Machiguenga girl in Kirigueti (a community north of Segakiato) drowned when two company boats reportedly passed the village.

We've come here to visit 22-year-old Wilfredo Marviredi Vargas, a Machiguenga worker we had met days before while on the company tour. Before we can locate him, though, we're brought to an old woman sitting on the porch of a simple hut. She's spinning raw cotton into thread, staring absently into the distance. This is Wilfredo's grandmother, we're told.

Teresa Provencia Maria speaks about the past in Machiguenga with a drifting, distant voice. "I was born in Madre de Dios Province, in the headwaters," she begins. "I don't know how old I am, nor what year I came here, but I know nobody lived around here then. We found lots of fish and animals here when we came." She lists the names of animals she used to see: bauhiles, cotomonos, matesapa, boca chica, tapir.

"Before, there were many animals, but now with the presence of the oil companies there are few," she says. "There have been many changes with the arrival of the company. I'm seeing traders come to the community to trade now. I hear noises in the mountains. What might they be? I don't know."

Like many here, she has heard rumors about why the company has come. "People have told me they are here to take this gas out, but I still don't know what this gas is. They say that there, under the ground, there is light that illuminates, but I've never seen it. Is it over there?" she asks, pointing to distant hills.

We ask about her grandson, Wilfredo. "My grandson already has another way of living," Provencia says. "He's educated, he has work, he generates income. Since he began working, with this money he has bought clothes, cookies, a radio, shoes, cassettes to listen to his music. But me, I'm illiterate. I don't know what money is, what it's worth. I'm happy. I think in the future, when I no longer exist, there will be very hard changes. The people are starting to change."

The Pipeline Project Brings a Changed Way of Life

We find Marviredi in his 6-foot-by-6-foot wooden bachelor hut. He's wearing the newest clothes in the village -- white khaki pants and a blue-striped Oxford shirt. We tell him we have just met his grandmother. "My grandma is the one who raised me," he tells us. "That's why I admire her and won't abandon her. If not for her, I would have gone somewhere else."

Oil companies hand out this comic book to the Machiguenga to help with community relations. The book answers basic questions about the project and shows how it will create thriving towns with hospitals, electricity, schools and discos.

Marviredi has just returned from a month living at the Pluspetrol plant upriver, where natural gas from the project will be compressed and piped to the coast. He makes $7 a day doing manual labor, eats unfamiliar foods flown in from Lima and watches satellite television until he falls asleep at night, he reports.

He articulates his uneasiness about the project, a feeling shared with many other villagers. "I'm happy with the job I have," he says, "I like to work. I don't want to be lazing around the community. When I'm at home, I'm losing time, I'm not making money. When I'm working I'm making money.

"But I don't know what gas is either," he adds. "What is gas? Is it a liquid light? How could it be? Will we be able to use it here?"

Behind Marviredi, a new stereo blares out salsa music over the thatched roofs of the community. The stereo, emblazoned with a Pluspetrol sticker, is connected with alligator clips to a car battery. Marviredi looks at his new boots for a moment, then off toward the river. "I've worked there for a month, and I come home and hear that they are damaging the stream up there where people drink, and I'm afraid there will be diseases. My grandmother tells the truth. Before there were lots of animals and fish to catch here. Now you go all day, from morning to night, and you don't catch anything. If you come home from the mountains empty, there's no food, and you have to go to the traders to buy food."

Marviredi shows us a market the traders have set up near the schoolhouse. Under a high thatched roof, one trader has spread out goods on a big blue tarp. This is the village's version of a mall. Teens mill about, chatting among themselves and eyeing the goods. There's soap and candy and cigarettes and candles and hairpins and T-shirts and stereos and shoes. The trader, a young woman with a child, brings all of it through the Pongo by canoe, traveling from community to community, selling her goods until they're gone.

A year or two ago, villagers tell us, this kind of market didn't exist. Here, at the end of our 10-day journey, the market seems an apt stand-in for all of the changes that followed behind this natural gas project. The project doesn't just pit preservationists against oil companies. It also divides the Machiguenga themselves. Some hope for a more prosperous future. Others fear the potentially high cost -- the destruction of the long-protected Upper Urubamba River and the end of the Machiguenga way of life.

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