Support Shipibo-Konibo Change Makers

In the last month, Alianza Arkana has held several workshops in Paoyhan aimed at different demographic groups to enhance the skills and capacity of the community members and community organizers and empower them to make greater changes in Paoyhan:

The first workshop served a group of 35 women artesans with the dual purposes of learning new skills, and helping their artesan collective organize itself. They are hoping to formalize their group by registering publicly as an organization, which will give them access to different markets and fairs in Pucallpa, and they are eventually hoping to build a storefront location in the village focused solely on selling artesania. We will continue working with this group of women on brainstorming ideas for furthering their collective.

A hip-hop workshop we organized for youth in the community engaged over 75 people in collectively making music that highlighted pride in their indigenous language and culture, while also generating productive and impactful discussions about issues of racism, rights, and justice.

We are working closely with a group of dedicated community members who have formed a committee with the purpose of conserving their forest land, protecting it from exploitation, and generating a potentially sustainable source of income for the community through the creation of a community forest medicinal plants garden. Through a series of meetings with the committee-members and the local authorities, we have been assisting them through the process of realizing this project - the first of its kind in the community - so capacity-building for the committee members to execute a large project of this kind has been very important. The committee members are very excited about this project - please see more details here if you would like to support this project specifically: Donate Now to Farmacia Viva.

Lastly, we have been involved with several workshops and events to help get the people of Paoyhan registered with the public health insurance that they are entitled to, but many are lacking. This has also entailed educating families about what their rights are with regards to healthcare and how to navigate Peru's healthcare system, which is notoriously racist and extortionate.

After a successful workshop about regenerative solutions in the village of Paoyhan in 2017, the community decided to form a committee to steward 5 hectares of their community forest, in order to make it a medicinal plant forest. They decided to do so in order to improve local health, to revitalize plant medicine use, and to generate sustainable incomes for themselves that would go beyond logging and forest destruction. Protecting plant medicines and develop sustainable incomes from them offer villagers an ecological alternative to logging and industrial agriculture jobs. They are based on regeneration of species and the planting of species that are not there anymore. 

This past month, the committee organized themselves to demarcate the designated land. We are proud of this team of self organizing villagers, and are happy to support them with technical assistance and initial financial support. The idea is for this project is to make it self sustainable by creating a research center for ethnobotanical knowledge and biology in the long-term. This will not only make important research happen, but also generate jobs within the community which prevents rural to urban migration. We hope this living farmacy thrives!

All pictures were taken by Segundo Franco, president of the committee.