Sponsor Shipibo Youth Permaculture Training

Our intercultural education work with young people continues to evolve. The last three months we have run two important workshops.

The first of these was a five-day personal development workshop with teenage girls from the communities of Santa Clara and Bena Jema. These are both communities where we have long-term involvement and so the work with girls is also part of our approach to working with the whole community.

This workshop marked five years of our cooperation with the US based nonprofit, 'Girls for the World', running these workshops. You can read more about the workshop on our blog here:

http://alianzaarkana.org/blog/?p=3997&lang=en

The blog ends saying:

"A really lovely thing happened three days after the end of the workshop: the girls came to the Alianza Arkana offices encouraging us to put on another workshop. They said that they had loved it and that they wanted to keep learning; something that made us very happy indeed. We realised just how essential it is that we continue with these transformative activities which have so great an impact on the lives of young women."

You can also see a really good video of the workshop here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnTGAZMrBJU

The other important event was a leadership and personal development workshop with the recently formed Association of Young People of Santa Clara. You can read about our work partnering with the youth of Santa Clara here.

Staff and volunteers of Alianza Arkana took a group of fifteen young people from Santa Clara about six hours downriver for four days to the Shipibo community of Nuevo Saposoa, which acts as a gateway into the recently created National Park of the Sierra del Divisor. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this event was that it was the first time many of the participants had experienced jungle - although they live one hour from the city in a semi-rural community, all the surrounding jungle that was originally part of their community has been deforested.

You can read a very fresh, authentic and lively account of this workshop written by a volunteer here. This blog article concludes:

"We had all been together for only four days – all with different experiences, all with different future dreams – but in four days we had had a great time together. I come home with hope, excitement and two important questions. What differences will there be in Santa Clara in 20 years if I were to visit then? What dreams will have become reality and what new dreams will have been born, still waiting to be realized?"