Support Indigenous Students in the Face of COVID19

Dear friends and supporters,

Warm greetings from the Peruvian Amazon. We hope this latest update from the field finds you well.

Since we last wrote to you, we continued our "Promoters of Good Living"-program. We seized the Easter break at the end of March to organize a 6-day session with the students at our Center. 11 students joined the event from a very mixed background. They belong to the the Kukama, Achuar, Awajún, and Wampís indigenous peoples, and study various careers including international business, tourism, food industry engineering, tropical forest ecology, nursing, law, and political science, to name just a few.

The topic for this module was interculturality, identity, and productive projects in indigenous amazonian communities. Hosting these exchanges at our Permaculture Center allows us to make the dialogue practical and interactive. Our different agroforestry demonstration sites become our classroom. We exchanged knowledge about the medicinal plants we encountered along the way, and how each indigenous people traditionally applied them. We also talked about traditional farming methods while learning about the agroforestry systems we are developing at the Chaikuni Center, visiting our beehives, and picking some fruits along the way. As one student put it: "It feels like being in my village... because I can eat anything." In addition to the knowledge they bring from their communities, the students learned about new techniques and skills from the field of agroecology and permaculture. This combination allows us to believe that other forms of development are possible, applying creativity and innovation while maintaining a strong connection with our cultural heritage.

For parts of the workshop, we also invited a group of Kukama women from Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, an organization of Kukama indigenous women from the Marañon river. They recently achieved a historic court ruling for the protection of the Marañón River, and they shared their experiences of organization, future vision, and leadership, responding to the questions of the students. This session provided an inspirational space for sharing, facilitated by a methodology specially designed for this workshop by an expert in playful dynamics and art therapy.

Partially thanks to the strong bonds formed at the Chaikuni Center, some of our promoters have begun the journey of creating projects together. For example, with a little guidance from our end, Amy (Achuar), Dámaris (Achuar), and José (Awajún) are proposing a project related to promoting the breeding of stingless bees, focusing on education and awareness to avoid invasiveness (in Achuar territory), but with the aim of creating development alternatives in an area affected by the presence of oil companies for over 50 years.

There is more good news. 2 indigenous students, both participating in our Promoters for Good Living program, graduated from university: Amy (Food Industry Engineering) and Pitit (Tropical Forest Ecology). Pitit has done two compulsory practices for her studies at our Center, and over the recent months we have been accompanying and advising her thesis work, which focuses on the traditional farming methods of the Awajún people, as example of traditional agroforestry systems. This marks a great starting point for further research into traditional knowledge, and how traditional systems may represent a key to solving contemporary problems. Pitit is now on the final stretch for her upcoming defense and obtaining of the long-awaited professional title. We are aware of all the effort and dedication it took for Amy and Pitit to get to this point and are very proud of them. We are confident that now, as professionals, they will continue to build a better future.

Furthermore, in commemoration of International Women's Day (March 8th), we supported the launch of the music video for the song Mujeres Luchadoras (“strong or fighting women”), created by Doris (from the Ticuna people) and Pitit (Awajún). You can listen to the song here.

As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly becomes a thing of the past, we would like to give you a heads up that we will make some adjustments to our campaign for the students here on GlobalGiving. While we now officially entered the post-pandemic period, the support needs of the indigenous students remain as real and intact as ever, and we are determined to continue to back these future leaders of the Amazon. None of this is possible without your generous support.

Thank You!

The Indigenous Students and the Chaikuni Team

Dear friends and supporters,

Happy new year! We hope you´ve had a great start into 2024. May this new year be filled with joy and purpose. Since we last wrote to you, “un shunto de cosas” (a lot of things), as we say here in Loreto, have happened.

The scheduled University vacations were reduced with the intention of catching up on the delay caused by the pandemic. The demand for the students' time and resources was quite harsh, but instead of starting the new academic semester in September, a national strike of public universities began, which continues to this day, without any defined date to return to classes. Trying to make the best of this situation, we got extra busy, moving ahead with the activities of our “Promoters of Good Living”-program.

Due to the uncertainty generated by the university context, and in general by the fact of being far from their communities and family, the young students expressed their need for spaces for reflection and support. Taking this into account, we held meetings and interviews to get closer to the personal stories and motivations of each participant in the program. The insights from the talks also allowed us to adapt the structure and content of the course to best satisfy their needs and expectations. While two students stopped participating due to personal reasons, 7 new participants joined the program.

In November, in coordination with our permaculture program and our partner Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana (the federation of Kukama Kukamiria Indigenous Women of the Marañón River), we organized a 2-day visit and training at a local plant nursery. The students learned about techniques such as the preparation and application of Biol and the grafting of citrus fruits. Not only did each student do their own grafting exercise, but they also contributed to the group telling their own experience from their communities and learned from the comments and traditional uses of others.

A few weeks later, we organized a second workshop within the “Promoters for Good Living”-program, this time at our Permaculture Center, where we spent 4 days living together and experimenting with the daily routine of “Good Living”, that is: harvesting fruits and vegetables from our integral farms, preparing food while telling the stories of origin of the dishes or ingredients, and from the tradition of each village. In addition, we developed spaces for encounters and reflection from a place that would be much more welcoming and not an additional student burden. An approach which starts from care and listening, and which uses tools such as games, conversation, and the arts, seeking experiential learning and promoting the formation of safe spaces, accompaniment, and exchange. From this starting point we got to talk about topics as diverse as the global and indigenous economy, the view from critical interculturality and personal visions on “development” and “community”.

While many of the participating students were from the Awajún people, the Achuar, Kichua and Ticuna peoples were also well represented, adding to the already familiar diversity of the resident volunteers and part of the Chaikuni team, who come from other parts of the country and the world.

We further used the time of the University lockdown to accompany some of the students in the planning of their thesis work and pre-professional practices, so they are ready when the University re-opens. Many of the students have an impressive drive and resilience.

Pitit Ahuanari, for example, never stops. Not only did she use the time to return to her community Yutupis on the far away Santiago River to begin collecting information for her research on agroforestry farms (with the aim to rescue ancestral indigenous Awajún knowledge), but she also used the time to compose several songs - some in Spanish and others in Awajún. The lyrics vary from themes such as the search for personal growth to an empowerment anthem for women, totally danceable. She will soon be making a practically self-managed video clip.

José Pacunda, also Awajún, has already started his practices at our Permaculture Center, being passionate about learning new forms of community organization and “development” and seeking to strengthen territorial sovereignty. Manasés Akintui has managed to reconnect with his passion for martial arts and is seeking - together with 2 friends - to create an association that can work with women and the community through education and strengthening the traditional culture of his Awajún people.

And finally, the guys from YAAS (see previous reports) continue to grow their handicraft business, being ambassadors of Awajún art in the multiple fairs to which they are invited to attend - thanks to their well-earned prestige -, and who now propose the idea of rescuing and strengthening the use of more traditional materials such as huayruro (Ormosia coccinea) and huitillo (Renealmia alpinia) seeds, but from the propagation and planting of their own plants.

It is a pleasure for us to be able to honor the student´s trust by allowing us to accompany them in their personal growth processes. We seek to strengthen spaces where the knowledge they bring from their community is integrated with that learned in the professional training and in city life, enriching their personal development through experience, and at the same time strengthening their humanistic tools for the role they already play in their environments and for those they decide to assume in the future.

Having closed the year 2023, we draw a very positive balance: closer ties with the students, empowerment of dreams and, above all, having established a good foundation from which with joy and perseverance we will continue to build together.

With hope and much gratitude for your continuous support,

The Indigenous Students and the Chaikuni Team