Ayni, Regenerative Food Forest in the Amazon

Dear friends and supporters,

We hope this report from the field finds you well. Since we last wrote to you, we have continued our agroforestry outreach work with Amazonian families and communities.

Our team organized two field visits during the last three months to the Kukama communities in the Marañon to follow up the agroforestry plots of the Kukama women and their families. In addition to supervising the plots, we also provided technical assistance on beekeeping and honey production with Amazonian stingless bees. This topic always generates extra interest, and upon request, we supported several families with expertise and some prefabricated wood boxes for the beehives.

Earlier this year we were approached by the representative regional indigenous organization, ORPIO, with whom we´ve been sporadically collaborating throughout the years, to offer training to ten indigenous representatives from remote communities in the Peru-Brazil border region. In late June, we provided a week-long training on sustainable productive activities which strengthen food sovereignty. Always using as starting point the generally rich forest farming and management knowledge indigenous peoples hold, we offered the participants a deeper look into viable alternatives for food sovereignty and income generation for indigenous communities, with a specific focus on family agroforestry and native beekeeping.

Since the foundation of our organization, we´ve always had a special relationship with the communities that surround our Permaculture Center, whom we´ve been supporting in different ways throughout the years. Over the last couple of years, we´ve continued to support the most dedicated participants, a group of roughly 20 families, in their agroforestry endeavors. Earlier this year we´ve organized several one-day training courses, which continued into the period of this report. In addition, we´ve organized two learning visits for these families to our allies around Iquitos. In august we visited a farm specialized in citrus fruits, which many families integrate into their agroforestry system. In September, we invited the villagers to visit the impressive plant nursery and family farm of Pedro - a close friend and collaborator of Chaikuni - which produces an abundance of different fruit varieties within integral Amazonian agroforestry systems.

These visits were inspiring, not only for the villagers who already started to apply much of the learned lessons in their own plots, but also for us at Chaikuni. Some of the learnings helped strengthen our own work with our plant nursery, which has grown a lot over the last few months, with the intention to keep providing seedlings and plants to our allies and their family farms.

Finally, we´d like to transmit the gratitude from our team and our allies for your continued support, without which we cannot do what we do. We will also be honest with you: to be able to continue our outreach work and respond to the increasing requests from the communities, we need to step up our fundraising. We will put a lot of energy into the upcoming Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign on GlobalGiving, on November 28^th, and hope that you can help us spread the word. If you are in a position to donate or know someone who can, please do so. We are immensely grateful for any kind of support.

Warm regards from the Peruvian Amazon,

The Chaikuni Team