Sponsor Shipibo Youth Permaculture Training

We are continuing to make good progress in creating a new model for intercultural education at this pilot school project known as “Soi Sani” of 120 students in the indigenous Shipibo community of Puerto Firmeza in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon.

Thanks to the generosity of our donors, we have been able to advance on four significant fronts in the last few months:

1. We completed the construction of six organic compost latrines during the school holidays at the start of this year. On return to their school in March, the students were taught how to use these toilets. Apart from providing a much better experience than the dirty, unhygienic toilets that previously existed, these toilets will also produce manure that can used in the permaculture project in the school grounds.
2. We have begun the construction of a traditional kitchen and workshop area on the edge of the school grounds. This kitchen will be used by the nutritionist working with us to give classes on nutrition and cooking for 15 people at a time to 80 children at the school and 30 of their mothers.
3. We are planting vegetable crops such as carrots, onions, cabbage, spinach, lettuce and tomato to provide some of the basic ingredients for the cooking/nutrition classes. In addition, we will be running a three-day workshop to teach 15 members of the community how to plant and grow these crops for themselves.
4. At the beginning of the new school year in March, we gave each one of the eight teachers at the school a small budget to enable them to purchase basic teaching materials such as pens and papers.

This new model of education is important as it combines the practical teaching of traditional agricultural practices based on permaculture principles with the Peruvian State education curriculum. By doing this, we are developing an innovative model of “productive education”. Additionally, the children will receive classes about the arts and crafts of their own culture and its cosmovision.

Many thanks to our donors who are enabling us to continue this important work, which helps preserve and strengthen a unique indigenous culture as well as help create food security and diminish malnutrition by developing the capacity of the students and their parents to grow their own nutritious food. And especial thanks to the donors who give monthly as this is invaluable in helping us plan ahead.

Many thanks to all our supporters who have generously donated via Global Giving. In total we have now raised $9,725 through this campaign.

This money has enabled us to do the following:

• Begin work on building a fish farm, which is a key part of our strategy to provide nutritive food to the children at the school, many of whom are suffering from malnourishment.
• Complete the building of an area to raise chickens. Each family has contributed one chicken. The children at the school will help rear these and, in time, apart from providing eggs and food for the school, two chickens will be returned to each family.
• Support two students on the Agriculture Degree Course at the National Indigenous University of the Amazon to attend a ten-week course on permaculture at the school during their three month vacations.
• Support the printing of material which is helping to introduce a new curriculum into the school closely linked to the Shipibo culture.
• Plant an area of fruit trees - some of which are for human consumption and some of which will feed the fish in the fish farm.
• Construct six new dry compost organic bathrooms for the school, which will provide manure for the cultivation of fruit, vegetables and medicinal plants.

Further donations will be used to:

• Build a traditional kitchen, combined workshop area and dining room on the school premises where a nutritionist employed by Alianza Arkana will teach the children and parents about nutrition, based on food that will be grown at the school and within the community.
• Begin to cultivate the additional three hectares the community have donated to the school with cotton that can be used to teach the children traditional weaving skills and further staple food crops such as yucca, platano and dale-dale.