Giving Value Back to the Amazon

You may have wondered what the heck I am doing in Peru this summer and for what purpose, besides the fact that I love to travel, speak Spanish, find new adventures, give power back to the marginalized and learn about new cultures. I am currently in a social work graduate program that requires me to complete 600 hours of a practice internship in my area of interest. My wide variety of interests fall somewhere between international development and community organizing with a little bit of agriculture and food security thrown in and participation as always being central to the work. So as I was looking for internship opportunities on idealist.org I put into the search function “agriculture” and “community development” and out came an organization looking for a “participatory community development planning” intern. Other opportunities with the organization included working with agricultural cooperatives and farmers. So I signed up! (Well, actually I sent in my resume)

Fundación Runa is the name of a multifaceted organization and you may recognize the name from a tea you have seen in your whole foods or organic gr

ocery store. This tea was the initial beginnings of an organization whose goal is to harness the Amazonian cultural and biological resources and ancestral knowledge and create socially sustainable opportunities. Within this core value their work is focused on cultural, ecological, economic, and social (i.e. governance) sustainability. They are bringing value back to the rainforest. In Ecuador they started with Guayusa tea, a beverage that is drunk daily by the people and have found ways to sustainable grow it and market it in the United States.

 Runa Tea Brand! Focused energy!

The Guayusa tree I planted in our yard. Ojala que crezca!

In Peru they are harnessing the medicinal plant knowledge of the rainforest to create a clinic called Rios Nete for the investigation and practice of traditional plants medicine. They are creating public and partnerships to turn this dream into a reality working with Shaman healers, doctors of western medicine, and development professionals. This area is highly deforested and the value of traditional healing is being lost. With the creation of Rios Nete in combination with community work value will be returned to traditional healing and the forests will be regrown. 

So where do I fit into all of this? I am living in the rural community that the Rios Nete Clinic will be located and developing sustainable relationships with the community to identify ways that Rios Nete can partner with the community to build on the values of Runa (Culture, ecology, economy, and society). We are starting from square one, and I am a part of the first round of interns on this project.

We are also partnering with the Fair Trade coffee and chocolate Cooperative, Oro Verde, to assist in surveys with their cooperative members to create baseline data for their organization and ours and assess the feasibility of introducing Guayusa (Runa Tea) with these farmers.

Join me on this journey as I explore the world of international NGOs, participatory community development, food security and agriculture, and Peru!

A little taste of what I get to see everyday!

When traditional is sustainable...

My taxi driver on the way to the bus station out of Trujillo, Peru, attempted to make small talk with me by discussing how more advanced the United States is than Peru. After 2 days of visiting the Peruvian ruins of Chan Chan and Huaca de la luna y del sol I had a hard time agreeing with him, for societies have existed in Peru for hundreds of years longer than the United States could even imagine.

Chan Chan is the largest man made ruin in Peru and is the largest adobe city in the world. It was built around AD 1300 and covers 20sq km. It once housed approximately 60,000 inhabitants. It is the remnant of the Chimú empire, which existed well before the Incans.

Huacas de la luna y del sol sit further off the ocean and are 700 years older than Chan Chan. These two temples existed during the Moche period and the Huaca del Sol is the largest single pre-Colombian structure in Peru. The friezes on the walls of this massive temple are something to be admired, for they have endured over 1500 years. Between the 500m expanse of the two temples sits the city of the society that worshipped at these temples.

After visiting these two ruins it was hard to agree with a taxi driver claiming that the United States is one of the most advanced, for hundreds of years before us, complex societies were created merely with adobe and they ruled for hundreds of years. Even as I enter into the lives of traditional agriculture practices here in Peru it is impressive to note that the methods that these societies used before the conquest of the Spaniards, are still being used today, and it is methods like these that are being used in sustainable agriculture practices today.

Terraces in the Colca Canyon, Arequipa, Peru

It is from these societies from that we must learn.