Support Indigenous Medicinal Gardens in the Amazon

Cultivating Health, Cultivating Hope: Final Steps of the Rao Banabo Project

We’re approaching the financial goal of our campaign—and thanks to your support, we’re not just funding a garden. We’re nurturing a movement.

In Yarinacocha, home to a vibrant urban Shipibo community of the Peruvian Amazon, a spontaneous wave of health self-management is taking root. Traditional healers are offering direct care to patients while encouraging families to use medicinal plants for everyday ailments. This is where our project, Rao Banabo—which means “cultivate your pharmacy” in the Shipibo language—finds its purpose: empowering families to grow their own medicinal gardens.

What We’ve Achieved So Far

Despite recent challenges, including severe flooding in several Shipibo communities, we’ve remained focused on expanding our institutional nursery and supporting the medicinal gardens we’ve already helped establish. These gardens are becoming hubs of plant propagation and cultural exchange—quietly transforming neighborhoods.

In urban settings where medicinal plants are scarce, these gardens offer more than greenery. They offer resilience. Neighbors come to collect cuttings, seeds, and seedlings. They also bring stories, knowledge, and a spirit of reciprocity—reviving traditions that often fade under the pressures of urban life.

What We Need to Finish Strong

As we enter the final phase, we’re asking for support—not for grand gestures, but for the simple tools that make this work possible:

• Shovels, hoes, pruning shears

• Hoses, watering cans, and irrigation pipes

• Organic fertilizers and soil amendments

• Seedling bags and nursery materials

• Educational materials for workshops and training

Each item helps us equip gardens that are not only medicinal but also cultural sanctuaries—spaces where health, heritage, and community thrive together.

Join Us in Cultivating the Future

Your contribution helps us complete a vital cycle: from seed to soil, from ancestral knowledge to everyday practice, from community resilience to collective healing.

In the urban outskirts of Yarinacocha, many Shipibo families live in conditions marked by economic hardship, social exclusion, and limited access to public healthcare. Migrating from their ancestral territories in search of opportunity, they often find themselves navigating a city that overlooks their needs and undervalues their traditions.

Women and children are especially vulnerable. Mothers carry the burden of care with few resources, and children grow up in environments where cultural identity and health autonomy are at risk of being lost. In this context, medicinal gardens are more than green spaces—they are acts of resistance and restoration. They offer families tools to care for themselves, reclaim their heritage, and reconnect with each other.

We’re close to the finish line. With your help, we’ll get there—not just with gardens fully implemented, but with a vision fully alive: one where Indigenous knowledge is honored, health is self-determined, and communities flourish despite adversity.

Thank you for walking this path with us.

In the recent period, we have successfully strengthened our relationships with two primary beneficiaries, as elaborated below:

MAROTI SHOBO

At the Shipibo Mothers' Handicraft Sales Center in the Yarinacocha Plaza in the peruvian Amazon, we generated income through the sale of a book of kene (traditional Shipibo designs), collaboratively created with the artisan mothers. With this revenue, we have constructed an improved stove for firewood, which significantly reduces smoke exposure and enhances the efficiency of firewood use.

Additionally, with the remaining funds, we are excited to begin establishing a medicinal garden on the center's premises. This funding will cover essential expenses such as the removal of concrete rubble from the future garden area, as well as the purchase of topsoil and compost. However, to fully realize this project, we still need your generous help. We continue to need seedlings, hoses, various gardening tools and a better irrigation piping system, among other things.

To provide some context, Maroti Shobo is home to approximately 50 artisans who dedicate long hours, often accompanied by their children, to creating crafts, selling their products, cooking, playing, and teaching their culture. Here, children and young people gain invaluable knowledge, such as cultivating and using medicinal plants, which are scarce in an urban environment.

Supporting them is not merely a matter of cultural preservation; it is crucial for self-management of health. The public health system does not adequately serve them, both in terms of capacity and cultural sensitivity.

Your contribution is vital in empowering these artisans to sustain their heritage and improve their well-being.

BILINGUAL INSTITUTE

We embarked on an exciting journey to establish a medicinal garden with the students of Instituto Bilingüe. These students have enthusiastically contributed their diverse knowledge and labor, bringing together their rich cultural heritage from various Amazonian ethnic groups. During the process, they eagerly shared the different names and uses of the plants in each of their mother tongues, fostering a vibrant exchange of traditional wisdom.

Once these students become bilingual teachers, they will return this enriched knowledge to schools throughout the Peruvian Amazon. Their education, now augmented with the medicinal knowledge of various Amazonian cultures, will significantly benefit their future students. This vision fills them with great enthusiasm, driven by both their love for their cultures and the acute awareness of the scarcity of Western medicine and doctors in their home communities.

With a healthy dose of ambition, they aspire to expand this project within their institute to include the installation of medicinal and fruit forests. To achieve this, they require some essential tools such as wheelbarrows, shovels, and rakes. Moreover, they humbly request support for the purchase of food for the collective work tasks, which we believe is fair considering the invaluable contribution of their labor and knowledge for the common good. This initiative will ensure a high biodiversity of medicinal plants at their place of study, benefiting both current and future students.

Supporting this project is not merely an investment in their education but a commitment to preserving and enhancing their cultural heritage. By contributing, you are helping to empower these students to become the future custodians of Amazonian medicinal wisdom and self-sufficient health management.

Join us in this noble cause. Your generous support will make a tangible difference in the lives of these students and the communities they will serve. Together, we can cultivate a future where traditional knowledge and modern education coexist harmoniously.