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.