Plants and remedies

In Cajamarca, May is the month of flowers. That is why the coordinators and healers of the Community Program meet every year at this time, bringing fresh plants from their homes for the preparation of medicine for children with projectable capacities.

Don Antonio tells us that once he was coming from San Isidro, on a bus, with his backpack full of plants. They stopped in the city of San Marcos to have lunch and Don Antonio left his backpack with the driver, asking him to take good care of it because something very valuable was inside.

Someone must have been listening to this comment because Don Antonio couldn't find his backpack when he returned from lunch. Surely the thief hoped to find money, jewellery or a good cell phone - things that for many are objects of much value. But for us, these plants are worth much more than material goods: they are the health and strength of our communities, they are the goodness of the earth - which ensures a healthy and happy life for all.

Martha returns

Until the end of 2014, Martha Yglesias - from the community of Hoyada Verde, in the province of Contumazá - coordinated the Community Program in her area.

Then Martha got married, had her child and set aside working with children with projectable capacities for a while.

At the start of this year, Martha communicated with us expressing the desire to participate once again in the Program.

In May, Martha re-integrated by attending our Training Meeting.

Welcome, Martha. How good it is to count on your presence!

Nathalia informs

We continue advancing with the thesis project that we are carrying out together with the Network of Rural Libraries of Cajamarca: Andean routes and geographies.

This collective initiative seeks to systematize by recognizing what our organization has done and continues to do. The idea is to review the interrelation of the foundations, actors, places and actions carried out by the Network as an Andean entity that encourages and exposes the permanent relationship between nature and society, and as a proposal to be replicated throughout Latin America.

We will undertake some meetings, encounters, workshops and visits so that, between conversations, we may reconstruct history, observe the present and set the future.

Some pivots for the talks are:

- The fundamentals and conceptions that guide our actions

- The origins, the institutions involved, the processes and the contexts in which our project emerged, was consolidated and continues to live

- The personal experiences, the human, geographic and social influences and lived moments

- In what places, regions, landscapes and geographies is the Network found and spread

- The actions and projects jointly constructed to enliven the voices and the presence of the Andean rural communities of Cajamarca

- The challenges of the organization in today's society

- The strategies of collectivization of the proposal in the Latin American context

- The fabric of the geographies of the Network of Rural Libraries of Cajamarca as an entity that avoids breaking the ties between nature, society and Andean geographies.

Nathalia Quintero, from Medellín

Angela encourages

Huarrago is a community in the heights of Sócota, Cutervo province. There Angela lives with her husband and her three children. Aldana, the oldest, had a problem at birth and since then has suffered from cerebral palsy.

But thanks to the enormous effort of Angela and her husband, Aldana is improving every day. When we met her she was only three years old and could not move her legs. Now Aldana walks alone with the help of two walking sticks and goes to school. In the house - with the adaptations to the environment that the family has carried out - Aldana takes care of herself to a great extent and also helps with simple tasks.

But Angela's will goes much further. Several years ago she assumed the coordination of the Community Program in her area and is visiting and assisting six other children with disabilities in Huarrago and the surrounding communities. She also organizes a group of the parents of these children where they share and exchange knowledge and seek solutions together to any difficulty.

One of these difficulties is the lack of understanding of the situation of students with disabilities on the part of their peers. For that reason, Angela - since last year - goes continuously to the school of Aldana. There, during morning assembly, she talks about the reality of her daughter and other similar children in order to sensitize the educational community, aiming at better school integration.

Thank you, Angela, for this extraordinary effort.

Lynda once again

Lynda Sullivan has reintegrated as a volunteer after spending several months in her native Ireland.

Now, fully engaged in the tasks assigned to her within the Network - and especially in the Enciclopedia Campesina - her presence encourages and consolidates the thousand and one paths that open before us to walk and rewalk.

Our appreciation to Lynda for this generous joining, for that fruitful deployment.

May there be more encouragements like this.

As the writer Victor Hugo said: "No one is lacking in strength; what many are lacking is will."

We are capable

Our book "We are capable: Disabilities and basic treatments" has just left the press.

This document is the result of the work and training of the entire Community Program team to accompany children with projectable abilities.

Rita Mocker -Director of the Program- carried out the work and was supported in the revision of texts by Coordinators Nanci Huamán Campos, Humberto Huamán Lara, Sergio Diaz Estela and Lola Paredes Saldaña.

By not knowing some of the symptoms or characteristics of the conditions, we may proceed in a way that is not appropriate: this book helps to identify "disabilities" and at the same time provides aids that allow us to attend and accompany them.

In this way we continue accompanying, joining together and getting better!

Poverty

Just a few days ago, the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI for its initials in Spanish) issued the report “The evolution of monetary poverty 2007-2016”, indicating that poverty had fallen by more than one percentage point.

The study indicates that the monthly expenditure of a fifth of the country's population (6.5 million people) is not enough to buy a basic basket of consumption, currently valued at 328 Soles per person.

For a change, the report also indicates that Cajamarca and Huancavelica - for the fifth consecutive year - are the poorest regions of the country with poverty levels ranging from 43.8% to 50%.

In Cajamarca, the figures indicate, extreme poverty (more than 19%) is five times higher than the national average (3.8%).

Walking in Chota

After the intense rainy season we have had, some roads have been left to walk with much precaution.

We visited the western area of the province of Chota, coordinating the possibilities of opening new libraries and accompanying teachers who had invited us to initiate the rescue of oral traditions in their communities.

It goes slowly but surely.

And the accompaniment of this exhilarating landscape encourages us to continue the journey.

Jeny is back

Jeny Paredes participated in Phase I of the Enciclopedia Campesina Project, back in the '90s. Her assistance in the processing of campesino testimonies and oral tradition was a very important contribution to the project.

Today, 20 years after that first experience, Jeny rejoins for Phase II and she does it with enthusiasm and efficiency, like starting from scratch, learning and unlearning.

We celebrate her reincorporation on this path that does not cease and which teaches so much.

Ignorance

In response to a rich man who thought to say that "The poor do not read because they are ignorant", here is a text from our brother Alfredo Mires published two years ago in the book "Esa luz de más adentro" (That light from deep inside):

The Communal Root of Health

He is not ignorant he who does not know the multiplication chart or the lyrics of the national anthem. It is not ignorance not travelling to other countries or not knowing how to eat with a knife and fork. Less ignorance still is not knowing the name of the singer of the moment or the last political event of the country.

We in the countryside call ignorance the lack of generosity, the lack of gratitude and gratuity. Ignorant are the abusive and the hurtful, the mean and the opportunistic, the creeper, the coward, the traitor and the trickster. Ignorant is he who is disrespectful, who does not know how to live in community, who does not share and does not dream.

Whoever denies and offends the life of the other is more than ignorant: he is wretched. Bitter must be the life of one who does not know how to appreciate the value of the rest. That is why God appears in the form of a beggar, the poorest of the poor, to test the inner worth of his people.

Whoever prides himself on the clothes he wears, on what he earns by exploiting or being exploited, on the titles or foolish reasons that confer banal powers on the brute, are only walking tombs, sad headstones, truncated flowers, forced tears. Ignorant.

To see potatoes, corn, peas, or ocas as mere products, as simple "natural resources," is a shame. Because it is not an object that which lives and that which is the generous fruit of the earth and of the creative efforts of our grandparents.

That is what our elders teach us, that is what the stories of all the communities in the Andes tell us: that food is sacred, that they are a blessing, that every plant, every stone, every beat has its power and fortune.

These tales of ours, fruitful school of the deepest knowledge, tell us that the health of the people depends on this grace, on the mutual affection among all living beings, on the endearing affection, on the highest respect, on the primordial kinship among all of us who have been creating together.

When the cornfields and potato plants sing in the wind, when the ocas rest in the sun to sweeten us later, when the whole earth is a permanent promise, we know that it is worth living, and that this feeling alone is wisdom. This is the health that does not reside in hospitals nor pharmacies. This is the foundation that escapes ignorance.