Emergency Health Fund for the Shipibo people

It’s summer here in the southern hemisphere and, for the Amazon, this means it’s rainy season. The rainy season usually entails extensive flooding, which makes sanitation efforts difficult in both urban and remote areas, and water-borne illnesses an even greater threat. Further, emergency transportation to hospitals during the rainy season is often impossible. This year in Pucallpa and surrounding areas, however, the weather has been abnormally dry.

Despite the dry weather, Pucallpa is still reeling from the impact of rain in other areas of the country. At times, roadways have been closed due to mudslides and flashfloods, which have restricted transport to and from the city. Road closures are causing food and fuel shortages, which affect households and businesses alike. The shortages are noticeable in locations such as Santa Clara, our partner community, where people often rely on vendors that come from the town center to sell items like chicken, fruit, and rice.

We at Alianza Arkana have learned that food insecurity solutions are most effective when community-based. Not only are such solutions pragmatic, but they also encourage anti-colonial approaches to issues brought on largely by colonial development methods in the Amazon.

During our Intercultural Health course, which was completed at the end of 2019, our nutrition component highlighted the fact that the traditional Shipibo diet, which consists of staples such as locally sourced fish and bananas, promotes better health than the fast food and packaged food options which are now common in urban centers and indigenous communities.

Together with our community partners, we recognize that the current state of food insecurity is especially unjust considering that these areas were once teeming with biodiversity. Alianza Arkana’s agroforestry and permaculture projects aim to not only restore ecological diversity, but will also provide edible crops for community consumption and income generation via sustainable, traditional practices in the long-term.

In our last quarterly update, we announced that we were offering a month-long training course for Shipibo health professional students. The Intercultural Strategies for Community Health course was designed to complement students’ coursework, introduce students to public health concepts and research methodologies, and discuss in detail specific diseases that are a concern in local communities. Our students had a wonderful time delivering a parasite prevention workshop in Santa Clara, and it was a pleasure to learn alongside them.

Our upcoming Intercultural Health activities will be directly informed by the community household surveys we conducted last year. After interviewing families in Santa Clara, we learned that almost half of all community members are not currently enrolled in SIS (Sistema Integral de Salud), a public health insurance that qualifies recipients for a myriad of free healthcare services. Working with the Ministry of Health for the Department of Ucayali (DIRESA – Dirección Regional de Salud), we hope to support Santa Clara community members in procuring public insurance with an inscription campaign, similar to the one we completed in the community of Paoyhan in 2018.

As always, we will keep you updated on all of our future activities. We greatly appreciate your continued support of our programs!

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Alianza Arkana is an indigenous-led non-profit organization working with Shipibo-Konibo communities in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. Our Intercultural Health Program works to address health issues in urban and rural communities through a series of educational workshops, health campaigns that bridge access to government resources, and community-based action. For more information, follow Alianza Arkana on Facebook and Instagram, visit our website, and contact us at salud@alianzaarkana.org.