Sponsor Shipibo Youth Permaculture Training

The last three months have been relatively quiet for education in the Peruvian Amazon as the schoolchildren and university students have been enjoying their long summer vacations. Most of our scholarship students take the opportunity to return to their home communities or go away from Pucallpa to work in this period.

However, during this time, we, in collaboration with the US-based NGO, Girls for the World, ran our fifth five-day personal development program for Shipibo girls between 13-19 years old. This was organized with girls and mothers from the community of Poayan, with whom we have good links, which is about five hours downriver from Pucallpa in a fast boat (twelve hours by slow boat!).

The girls actually travelled to a residential center near Pucallpa to receive the workshop, as have seen the benefits of them being away from the community and the often unwelcome interest of young men in what they are doing when we once ran this within the same community that the girls were from.

Like all the other programs, this was a great success. Additionally, the two mothers who accompanied the girls, who are important female leaders within their community, got great personal benefit from the workshop and are very keen for us to do another workshop and follow-up with the girls from this community.

Our other main activity during this time has been to offer holiday activities for the school children in the urban community of Bena Jema, where we have two volunteers working one year with the primary school. This has been a mixture of traditional educational activities such as help with reading and writing as well as artistic workshop activity focussing on creating representations of traditional stories, which the children investigated by talking to elders in their community. The photos show flags created by the children with emblematic characters from the stories of their culture.

Next March, we plan to start the pilot phase of a new project which will provide a free health service to women and children in the same community of Bena Jema. This will be jointly led by a German midwife and homeopath, who has already worked with us offering courses for traditional Shipibo midwives, and a Shipibo woman with great knowledge of medicinal plants. This represents the essence of good intercultural education - combining the best of what Western and indigenous cultures can offer, in this case in the area of health.

Our volunteer, Lucy, who had been living in the Shipibo community of Santa Clara, and coordinating our educational  there, sadly left Peru in September to return to the USA. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Lucy for all the work she has done to create such a fertile foundation from which to work with this community.

This fertile ground is now bearing many fruits, both literally, as the fruit trees in the permaculture project attached to the primary school begin to produce, and figuratively, as this project becomes a model for other educational initiatives with Shipibo people.

Thankfully, we have two new very capable young German volunteers, Anna and Antonia, beginning work in the same community, who started with us around the time that Lucy left. They will be with us for a year between leaving school and starting university.

We have also seen a change in the school teaching staff. There is now a new primary school teacher there called Rusber offering classes to around 30 children in one classroom of six grades. He is from the same community of Santa Clara and deeply committed to educating the children in a way that strengthens their cultural identity.

In collaboration with Rusber, and alongside Soraya, our French/Australian communications coordinator, Anna and Antonia have been working the last two months to run environmental educational workshops. These have used drawing to teach the children about pollination and have also involved planting flowers in the community to attract bees. Additionally, the same team of people have created a musical instrument playground very near the school using entirely recycled material.

Because of these recent initiatives, and the connection of education to permaculture that we have been developing in this community for over a year and a half, this project is beginning to attract greater attention within the wider Shipibo community.

This has led to the planning of a visit to this project on 26th November, when Profesor Eli Sánchez, one of the leading Shipibo educators and also a key adviser to Alianza Arkana, will be bringing a group of 20 teachers and local indigenous leaders to witness this project at first hand. This is part of the work Profesor Eli Sánchez is doing as leader of the intercultural education initiative that ORAU - the regional indigenous political organization - is now taking.

The plan is that, after the visit, the teachers will implement similar projects in the schools in their communities they are working in, supported by ORAU. We are delighted as it was always our intention that the educational projects we create can be models for other projects. We are even more delighted that this intitiative is now being led by a regional indigenous organization and not an NGO.