Field Visit (Part 1)

Finally, I discuss my amazing work!

At Nature Services Peru, my role is officially as Project Coordinator, but I spill over into all things related to policy, technical, governmental, and institutions. My experience in D.C. prior to moving here has proved fundamental to being able to move easily into this role. Primarily, I have a solid base knowledge of the international entities that are important to this work.

My central project is the development of a PDD - Project Design Document. I am limited on how much I can share publicly, but the project we are developing is located in the Manu Province of the Department of Madre de Dios. We are working with two native community groups with land title (Diamante and Shipetiari) and are also working with logging concessions and an agricultural title. I was sent, along with my fantastic team, to learn about the project on the ground. This was a great opportunity but also completely necessary as reading the reports and documents are not nearly sufficient to understand the circumstances.  

In order to fully understand my project and goals, it was essential that I get to the field. And so, I went - by bus then van then boat then taxi then boat then foot.  A quick clip below shows me and my friend Larry keeping ourselves busy during the 7 hour trip (and we didnt make it and had to spend the night in Boca Manu).

Welcome to the next 7 hours of your life

Melissa, Larry, y Yo

Theres jaguars in there

Diamante includes people of the Yine and the Matsiguenka cultures, and consists of 81 families and 340 individuals. Located on the along the southern side of the Madre de Dios River, the community was founded in the 1970s with about 20 families. The following decades brought a steady increase in population, due to growing families and immigration. Gradually, central organization strengthened to include a leader, a secondary leader, a secretary, regularly held meetings, and records of the proceedings. 

The main road that runs through town

Nice home in Diamante

Since 1986, the community has held land title of property Nº 017-86 inscribed in the Public Registry. The community is located right off the Madre de Dios river, which shapes much of their culture, from transportation to fishing to recreation. In 2011, the community consisted of 340 people: 268 Yine (78.8 percent), 52 Machiguenka (15.3 percent), 18 mestizas (5.3 percent), and 1 Wachipaeri and 1 Harambuk. In total, there are 94 adult men, 79 males under the age of 18, 79 adult women, and 88 females under the age of 18. 

The community does have internal divisions – most striking of which is between original community members and those who arrived after the official founding of the community. This highlights a division between ´comuneros´, native community members, and outsiders, or ´mestizos´, which can cause tension between community members, with some of the indigenous members feeling discrimination from newcomers (mestizos). 

umm....amazing

Community members have a rich knowledge of local species, including plants, wood types, and insect and animal species. Importantly, there is an awareness that natural resource availability and quality is diminishing. High quality hardwoods are becoming harder to locate near the community. For example, the catahua tree, used for the hulls of boats can no longer be found within a 4 hour walk whereas in the past these resources were much easier to obtain.

Swimming kids

In regards to natural resource use, all of the community members have rights to make use of the entire territory. While there is organization in place, it does not appear strong enough to effectively monitor the use of natural resources at this time. A lack of internal organization, trust, and communication has been a limitation for effective management of natural resources in the past. For example, the community has a General Plan of Forest Management (PGMF, in Spanish), but in earlier interviews performed by our team, no one had sufficient knowledge of what this plan contained.

There are two types economic systems that exist in tandem in the community – one is non-monetary system of reciprocity while the other is a system based on the exchange of currency. Household development and projects tend to progress on a non-monetary basis while wood extraction is more rooted in the monetary market. There are two levels of non-monetary exchanges – those within families and those between families and the community. Those within families include transportation, borrowing a boat or some fuel, sharing meals. Communal work involves cleaning roads, carrying or hauling construction material inputs for social programs, and construction or maintenance of communal buildings (community hall, school yard, health post, etc.)

Monetary market is also important to the community. These interactions take the form of earning money for construction of roads or trails, agricultural labor, construction with funding from external institutions, for jobs supported by the community, and from sales of the communities four stores. As mentioned, the primary external market driver at this time is wood extraction (called madera).

Patricio being awesome

We had a series of workshops in the community that lasted for three days, and concluded with a full assembly. These were focused on identifying the main issues and threats facing the community, deciding on the most important, and then creating a plan of action to address the problem.  My colleague Patricio runs the show and he is nothing short of amazing at this job. It was a pleasure to watch him work and I learned a great deal from his approaches to engagement, building trust, and allowing the community to develop their own answers.

Enjoying Masato with my Friends

Following the workshops, we typically had a group lunch that included a big bowl of masato (beer from yucca root) and had the opportunity to get to know people on a more personal level. I really enjoy this type of interaction, and went out of my way to have conversations with various individuals and to ask lots of questions about culture and worldviews. In return, I received a warm welcome from many individuals and even gifts - in the form of a papaya and a bottle of anis liquor.

Our conditions were just a bit rough in Diamante and I think I've risen to a new level of travel toughness. There were no bathrooms or showers. Hair washing was from a pipe that had a low pressure water flow that everyone used to wash clothes and themselves. My ankles are nearly destroyed by mosquito and chigger bites (an amazingly itchy and awful type of bite). Our beds used "mosquito nets" that were just white sheets sown into squares. This kept the bugs out but offered no air flow.  And every day it was HOT. Oh, and we had tons of cockroaches in our room at night at tarantulas on the ceiling. But both of those things are actually no big deal as you quickly get used to brushing off roaches and I never saw a tarantula below 5 meters up (look at me using the metric system!!).

All in all - amazing. I can hardly explain what it was really like. But it was cool.