Sponsor Shipibo Youth Permaculture Training

We have recently hosted a visit of Swedish kindergarten and primary teachers in Pucallpa. Five Swedish kindergarten teachers spent four days working with the kindergarten school in Bena Jema. Three primary school teachers visited the primary school in Bena Jema for three days and had a one day visit to the school in Santa Clara, where they saw the permaculture project we have established in the community.

The Swedish teachers visit was part of a program of intercultural exchange. Next year, there will be an opportunity for three Shipibo teachers to visit Sweden to continue exchanging ideas about educational practice.

Our intercultural book on plant medicines for Shipibo primary school children continues to develop well. We now have all 30 plantings of plant spirits commissioned from Shipibo artist Lastenia Canayo. Additionally, we have most of the botanical drawings from another artist in Pucallpa that will also be part of the book.

The paintings and drawings will soon be shipped to New York where a professional photographer will photograph them. We will be working with the Shipibo-Konibo centre for contemporary art, also based in New York City, on the book design. We plan to publish the book in the early New Year.

First of all, many thanks for your ongoing support, which is helping us do important work in education and health in a number of Shipbo communities.

In mid-July we ran our sixth five-day personal development workshop for teenage girls. This workshop was held in the Shipibo community of Paoyan, about five hours by fast boat downriver from Pucallpa.

This was the second workshop ran for girls in this community and we are building relationships not just with the girls there but also the two female leaders who have been attending each workshop. The female leaders have told us they have got so much benefit from the workshops themselves, that they want us to help organize a workshop for young mothers in this community.

As always, by offering the girls a safe space to voice their experience, the workshop was very successful. Key themes discussed were self-esteem, sex education, human rights, autonomy, violence and cultural identity. These were all covered using creative and participative methods that help break down barriers and foster sharing and involvement. You can read more about the workshop here.

At the same time as working with teenage girls, we continue to work with primary school children. This happens in two main schools - one in the urban community of Bena Jema and another in the semi-rural community of Santa Clara, where we have our combined education and permaculture project, which has featured in previous reports.

To learn more about our work in the urban school in Bena Jema, see this blog post written by Antonia, one of our year long German volunteers who has sadly just left us.

We also finished the second pilot project of what we call the 'small two-women-wandering clinic'. Nine and Carolina, the two women who lead this, worked for a month in the mixed Shipibo and mestizo urban community of Jhon Hawking providing a free medical service based on traditional Shipibo plant medicine and Western homeopathy. As in the first pilot project, this work proved to be very important in offering high quality attention to people who do not usually receive it and providing an effective health intervention. You can read more about this here.