Support Indigenous Students in the Face of COVID19

Dear friends and supporters,

Warm greetings from the Peruvian Amazon. We hope this latest update from the field finds you well.

Since we last wrote to you, we continued our "Promoters of Good Living"-program. We seized the Easter break at the end of March to organize a 6-day session with the students at our Center. 11 students joined the event from a very mixed background. They belong to the the Kukama, Achuar, Awajún, and Wampís indigenous peoples, and study various careers including international business, tourism, food industry engineering, tropical forest ecology, nursing, law, and political science, to name just a few.

The topic for this module was interculturality, identity, and productive projects in indigenous amazonian communities. Hosting these exchanges at our Permaculture Center allows us to make the dialogue practical and interactive. Our different agroforestry demonstration sites become our classroom. We exchanged knowledge about the medicinal plants we encountered along the way, and how each indigenous people traditionally applied them. We also talked about traditional farming methods while learning about the agroforestry systems we are developing at the Chaikuni Center, visiting our beehives, and picking some fruits along the way. As one student put it: "It feels like being in my village... because I can eat anything." In addition to the knowledge they bring from their communities, the students learned about new techniques and skills from the field of agroecology and permaculture. This combination allows us to believe that other forms of development are possible, applying creativity and innovation while maintaining a strong connection with our cultural heritage.

For parts of the workshop, we also invited a group of Kukama women from Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, an organization of Kukama indigenous women from the Marañon river. They recently achieved a historic court ruling for the protection of the Marañón River, and they shared their experiences of organization, future vision, and leadership, responding to the questions of the students. This session provided an inspirational space for sharing, facilitated by a methodology specially designed for this workshop by an expert in playful dynamics and art therapy.

Partially thanks to the strong bonds formed at the Chaikuni Center, some of our promoters have begun the journey of creating projects together. For example, with a little guidance from our end, Amy (Achuar), Dámaris (Achuar), and José (Awajún) are proposing a project related to promoting the breeding of stingless bees, focusing on education and awareness to avoid invasiveness (in Achuar territory), but with the aim of creating development alternatives in an area affected by the presence of oil companies for over 50 years.

There is more good news. 2 indigenous students, both participating in our Promoters for Good Living program, graduated from university: Amy (Food Industry Engineering) and Pitit (Tropical Forest Ecology). Pitit has done two compulsory practices for her studies at our Center, and over the recent months we have been accompanying and advising her thesis work, which focuses on the traditional farming methods of the Awajún people, as example of traditional agroforestry systems. This marks a great starting point for further research into traditional knowledge, and how traditional systems may represent a key to solving contemporary problems. Pitit is now on the final stretch for her upcoming defense and obtaining of the long-awaited professional title. We are aware of all the effort and dedication it took for Amy and Pitit to get to this point and are very proud of them. We are confident that now, as professionals, they will continue to build a better future.

Furthermore, in commemoration of International Women's Day (March 8th), we supported the launch of the music video for the song Mujeres Luchadoras (“strong or fighting women”), created by Doris (from the Ticuna people) and Pitit (Awajún). You can listen to the song here.

As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly becomes a thing of the past, we would like to give you a heads up that we will make some adjustments to our campaign for the students here on GlobalGiving. While we now officially entered the post-pandemic period, the support needs of the indigenous students remain as real and intact as ever, and we are determined to continue to back these future leaders of the Amazon. None of this is possible without your generous support.

Thank You!

The Indigenous Students and the Chaikuni Team