Support native artisans & rainforest in the Amazon

In this report, I would like to share some highlights of the Training for Artisan Facilitators we did in the village of Brillo Nuevo on the Ampiyacu River in early March and help our supporters better understand the full context of our work in this region.  Planning for this workshop began three months before when we consulted with our artisan partners to set the place and dates for the event and begin planning the logistics.  I gave our program coordinator Yully the names and photos of three birds the artisans would make in this workshop so they could bring the appropriate colors of chambira palm fiber with them.

On the last day of February, two dozen artisans converged at the Amazon Ecology house in Iquitos from their villages on the Tahuayo, Marañon and Ucayali Rivers. They hung out until it was time to take motokars (3 wheel motorcycle taxis) to the port where the Amazonas Ferry leaves for its trips down the Amazon River. We boarded early evening, and five hours later we walked down a gangplank to a mud bank by the entrance to a military base at Pihuayal at the mouth of the Ampiyacu River. We then piled into a crowded motorboat that took all of the passengers that disembarked there on a half-hour trip to the town of Pebas. We crashed for the night in two local hospedajes (simple hotels). The next morning, we had a bit of breakfast and did some shopping in the Pebas market where I saw Celia, an artisan from a Huitoto village sitting behind a big bowl of umari fruits for sale. The large group then headed up river in a covered boat while Yully and I took a motorcar over the narrow cement path and 20 bridges that cross the ravines between Pebas and the twin villages of Puca Urquillo Bora and Puca Urquillo Huitoto.

I was very happy to see one artisan for the first time in many years since she had been living mostly near the Brazilian border. I was sad, however, to see her looking very thin after dealing with a serious case of diabetes – an increasingly common malady since the local diet is mostly starch with an increasing amount of refined sugar. Right outside her house, three men were trying disassemble a rusty bulldozer with a wrench and crowbar to sell its parts for scrap metal after it had only served as a climbing toy for children and host for vines for over 20 years.  

Yully and I then went to the health post which serves as the front-line medical facility for the 14 native communities in the Ampiyacu and Apayacu watersheds. We officially handed over a binocular microscope I had brought from the US to fulfill a commitment we made to leaders of both communities and FECONA – the federation that represents all native communities in the region. They had pooled the funds due to them under our Social Rebate fund (coming from 20% of the net profits of our craft sales) to buy this microscope so their technician could diagnose and begin to treat people suspected of having malaria and other parasitic conditions faster than if they had to send them to the government hospital in Pebas.

We joined the boat going up the Ampiyacu and then Yaguasyacu River and arrived in Brillo Nuevo in mid-afternoon. The trip only took about five hours because heavy rains had raised the river level. This was a sharp contrast to my last trips during the dry season when the very low water posed a constant hazard of hitting a hidden stump and we often had to get out of the boat to haul it over logs and shallow rapids. It was great to finally see the extension that had been built onto our house in the village a year ago. The 400 square-foot room now gave us the space to host meetings, small workshops and in this case provide an area for all of our visiting artisans to sleep in their tents or mosquito-netted beddings. We took our meals of chicken or paca (a large rodent) with large helpings of rice, manioc, noodles and/or beans at two houses where the women took turns cooking for our group.  

That afternoon, I wandered down to the other end of the village passing many skinny dogs and aging houses to greet several people I had not seen for 18 months since my last visit there – a delay first caused by an injury a year ago and low water that prevented a trip six months ago. I had a sobering flashback having dinner looking out the same window I had been sitting at several years ago when we witnessed an old man founder into the river and drown while trying to retrieve his canoe that had floated away from shore. We had had to suspend a workshop in progress then because the community hall where we were holding it was needed for a wake for this man when his body was finally recovered.

Our Training for Artisan Facilitators began the next morning amidst the sounds of villagers cutting the grass with machetes and gasoline powered weed whackers. In the past year, we learned that many of our artisan partners were much more productive making bird ornaments when they worked with a spouse or other reliable artisan companion so we incorporated this method into this workshop. The 30 participants were divided into three groups that would each make a new species of bird suggested by Wild Birds Unlimited store owners from the southeast US. These were the Carolina wren, painted bunting, and rose-breasted grosbeak. The artisans would then work with one or two partners to make three or four copies of their species in three days.

The concept was straightforward, but putting it into practice took some time. While the small groups were supposed to coordinate their actions to make their bird with the same size and shape and partners were supposed to divide the specific tasks of making a bird between them (e.g. one makes all of the bodies while the other makes all of the heads, etc.), we noticed that some highly experienced artisans were charging ahead alone while their partners were left to figure things out on their own.  After giving the group some strong feedback, the small groups and partners started to cooperate much better. They worked hard for about seven hours each day stopping for lunch and short breaks when they needed to run to a clothesline to pull in their laundry when it rained.

The results of this three-day long experiment were very positive. Each small group met or exceeded their goal to make their birds with the proper size and design. This was the first time every bird made in one of our workshops met our high-quality standard for export.

Many artisans expressed how much they appreciated this process. Lindy, an artisan from Esperanza on the Tahuayo River said, “I really struggled the first day, but once my partner and I started talking and coordinating our work, we did much more together than we could have done on our own. I learned so many new techniques and am really proud of what we accomplished. I am anxious to introduce this cooperative approach to the other artisans in my community.”

We can't tell the artisans the artisans how they have to work, but it has been encouraging to see that sharing positive models developed by artisans in one community can be welcome and adapted by artisans from other villages.

The other theme we wove into this workshop was an introduction to public speaking and making videos.   One evening while dancing around (and being stung by) some black hornets attracted to our one hanging lightbulb, I shared some short videos I had made during a recent trip to Costa Rica.  During the first and second day, I did short video interviews with five artisans, edited them to two to five minute pieces and shared them with the group on the third evening so they could get a feeling for the best ways to answer basic questions facing a camera. On the fourth day, artisans worked in small groups where each person practiced being the interviewer and interviewee with a cellphone camera.  Feedback about this experience was very positive so we hope to do a full video training workshop to follow up the still photography one we did last year.

Many artisans who live in communities that have regular visits from foreign tourists have long expressed an interest to learn some English so they can better communicate with these visitors.  So, I led two evening sessions with interested artisans where we covered the alphabet, vowel sounds, numbers, some questions and responses typical for meeting someone and discussing craft purchases, and some words related to types of crafts and the plants and processes involved in making them.  This was a fun introduction which many artisans would like to do more.

The final element of this trip to the Ampiyacu extended our collaboration with the Days for Girls organization. We have now begun our third year delivering cloth menstrual kits and a related education program to girls and women in our partner communities. In 2023, a retired school teacher visited the community of Amazonas with us, gave a talk about menstruation accompanied with a video in Spanish and donated 40 of the Days for Girls kits.  We then connected with the women volunteers from the DFG chapter in Camp Hill, PA which has now sewn and given us another 180 kits to distribute to girls and women in our partner communities. The washable cloths allow them to avoid buying paper products in the city and polluting the local environment when they dispose of them. On this trip we did one presentation and kit donation in Brillo Nuevo and a second one in Nuevo Peru on our way downriver. While Yully, Marianela and I handled the DFG tasks, the artisans visiting the Ampiyacu enjoyed hanging out with hospitable folks from the village eating shimbillo fruit.

The rest of trip down the Ampiyacu was uneventful as people watched trees going by, worked on crafts, snacked and slept. After spending the afternoon in Pebas, we had a farewell dinner at a “polleria” (chicken restaurant), and spent two hours at a local dive playing “frog” which involves trying to toss a heavy coin into the open mouth of a metal frog or other holes in a wooden board for points. We took our own boat out to the Pijuayal at 11 pm to catch the Ferry returning to Iquitos, but we had to wait for four hours on the muddy bank before we finally saw the lights of the boat heading our way up river. Patience is not a virtue but a necessity when traveling in this part of the world. Back in Iquitos, I gradually bade farewell to our artisan friends who had traveled far to learn from and support their fellow artisans with the hope they would all share their experiences with the other artisans in their respective communities. 

I felt very good that this workshop gave us a rich opportunity to help our artisan partners learn with and from each other how they can make more high-quality crafts and communicate the process and value of making these crafts to tourists who visit their villages and anyone else through the internet. It also felt very good to integrate these artisan-focused activities with our commitment to strengthen the overall health and well-being of their communities in tangible ways.

Thank you very much for your support that makes this work possible.

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