Welcome to our new volunteers

Corinna, Christina and Inti have taken the courageous step of joining us for a year here in Sauce in the peruvian Amazon.  They will be helping us offer classes to children 3 - 16 years old in art, handicrafts, English and help with academic subjects as well as assisting with our construction and gardening projects.
So far they have all shown an affinity for our wonderful laguna, trying their hand at paddling our traditional dugout canoe, doing a lot of swimming and even jumping off a 15 meter high platform into the lake.  That's quite high folks, around 50 feet.

Señor Green

Here is Señor Green, he has a heart of gold and is the first one to arrive in Sauce.

Construction continues

Thanks to some kind donations from the UK and Germany we have been able to continue putting together the basic construction elements needed for our new permanent Estrella del Sur location.

We have built a wooden fence in back, a cement sidewalk (pavement) in the front and are well under way with walls for the bathroom which is to have hadicapped access.

Jungle catamaran update

I'd like to thank Andres Sergeant, mi sobrino (nephew), who came and helped out with our educational project for two weeks before heading up to see the wonders of Machu Picchu and thence on to the US and back to the UK to start his higher education at York university.  He also helped me and German Andres prepare these hulls for putting in the water which involved the gruelling task of putting in literally thousands of screws to mechanically attach areas where the fibergass had unglued during over a year in the tropical sun.  Then the screw heads had to be embedded in autobody putty and fresh gelcoat painted over.  Nasty but necessary work.

Launching day finally.  This involved 8 guys including don Alquelino the boat builder and his little hand trailer.

Wow!  They float!

 

 

 

Visiting our Shipibo friends

How a year flies by!  Now we are just about to say goodbye to our two young German volunteers who have done an excellent job receiving children and senior citizens at our Estrella del Sur educational outreach program and helping out in the local public school here in Sauce. Last month they went on an overland adventure by bus to Pucallpa which involved many hours of rough road travel and crossing a river on a makeshift ferry.
In Pucallpa they met up with Lourdes who had been in Cusco and together they went up the Ucayali river four hours in a typical amazonian riverboat to our small school project in the village of Ceilan.




 

Here's Freya doing traditional embroidery with Shipibo girls in the classroom we built two years back.

And here's Andres sliding down the creek bank with some boys.  Later he told me the Shipibo visit was the highlight of his time in Peru.  It's certainly a whole world apart, something increasingly rare in this time of advancing cultural uniformity.

Lourdes with Exhilde and Elias who founded Ceilan 35 years ago.  The embroidered designs reflect Shipibo culture's ongoing close connection with the world of the spirits.  These are stylized images of visions and songs perceived during traditional nighttime ceremonies.  Noya Rao is the name of the healing center in Ceilan where we have our 'escuelita' and is the most powerful, mysterious and elusive of the plant spirit allies in the pharmacology of Shipibo shamans.