Providing Education for Young Indigenous Peruvians

In October, 251 Amazonian young people and 24 teachers came together in the remote riverside community of Santa Clotilde to participate in Amantani’s Pathways Programme. The programme provides workshops on personal development and vocational and academic orientation to young people in their final two years of secondary school.

Our Pathways Programme is an important first step in supporting young people emotionally, academically, psychologically and financially, so that they are able to access and complete their studies.

Our Project Director, Thilo, shares, “this programme contributes to the development of more resilient young people, who are confident in themselves and prepared to confront the challenges that the future holds. Our commitment to the students’ emotional and holistic wellbeing is a crucial step in the construction of a more inclusive and meaningful education.”

Over a series of 30 workshops, the Amantani team, Thilo, Edu and Shirley, engaged young people through games, art, theatre and play. The common thread of these activities linked individual choices with collective change, such as in the environment workshop, which aimed to raise awareness about local actions to protect our shared home on Earth. As members of native Amazonian communities, the young people’s voices and perspectives were heard about personal and community actions that are being taken to slow down climate change and become guardians of the forest.

The workshops emphasised the impressive resilience of local communities in the Amazon, encouraging appreciation for the many stories and historic examples of resilience from the young people’s own homes and villages. For these 251 young people in a crucial stage of their lives, Amantani provides a unique and important space for them to reflect on their own identity and place in the world, aware of the challenges but positive about the changes they can make – personally, locally and globally.

To learn more about the young people we work with and the Amazonian River Napo communities where they come from, stay tuned for our new project video, which will be published very soon!

Earlier this year, Judith joined the Amazon Youth Project and began a new chapter in her education as a nursing student. She made the 3-day journey down the River Napo from her home to the rainforest city of Iquitos and her comfortable new base at our Amazon Youth Hub.

“Amantani’s support is enabling me to become who I want to be in life. I am so grateful. When I come to the Amazon Youth Hub, I feel like I have another family here and I’m not alone.” – Judith

She is excited to be studying nursing, a career that will give her the knowledge and skills to help people in her community when they fall ill: “we have to put all our effort in to do well in our studies, so that we can make people feel better and cure their illnesses.” In the future, she hopes to return to her remote Amazonian community, San Fernando, to care for older people like her grandmother.

Judith’s peer, Paolo, joined our Amazon Youth Project last year and is thriving as a second year nursing student. In the future, he too plans to care for the older members of his community; but first, he wants to finish his technical degree and continue his studies at university.

Paolo shares that Amantani has helped him to make decisions about his next steps: “Being part of this programme means getting to know ourselves better, focusing on our life projects and what we really want to do. It has been an opportunity to reflect and, for me as a teenage boy, to think about being more responsible, more resilient and focus on where I want to get to in life.”

Our Amazon Youth Project is not only changing the lives of young people like Judith and Paolo, but is also paving the way for healthier, happier and more resilient communities in the Amazon region.