Sponsor Shipibo Youth Permaculture Training

The last three months have been busy for us in the Shipibo community of Santa Clara.

At the beginning of April, the children returned to school after their long summer holidays. Also our volunteer, Lucy, returned to live in the community after a short break back home in the USA.

We began once again to offer weekly lunches helping the organization of mothers in the community supplement the food they receive from the Peruvian Govenrnment with more nutritious food and also financially supporting the community by buying food such as fish and chicken from members of the community. We currently cook one meal a week for all the children and young people in the comunity. A new volunteer has recently joined us who has more specialized knowledge in nutrition and she will also be helping in this project by offering weekly classes in nutrition linked to the food the women are cooking.

Additionally, we have been making good progress on developing the permaculture site attached to the primary and kindergarten school in the community. Our Shipibo permaculture technician has been involving the children from the school in the preparation and planting of the site and at the same teaching them about sustainable agriculture. The site is now producing basic food such as yucca, bananas and sweet peppers for use in the weekly meals. Over time more healthy food will be harvested that can be used in the weekly meals.

One other important event occurred in the last three months. Our of our nine University scholarhip students, who we wrote about in the previous report, had his graduation ceremony. For indigenous students to overcome the financial and other barriers to complete a university education is a huge achievement and we would like to congratulate this student and his family for finishing his five year course of studies to be a primary intercultural education teacher, without one single failed class!