This is what happened to me in mid-April when we met a group of young Awajún from the Moyobamba jungle in Chota to spend a couple of days at high altitude, visiting some of our Rural Libraries.
This exchange was made possible thanks to the decades-long friendship between Grimaldo Rengifo and Alfredo Mires, PRATEC (Andean Project of Peasant Technologies) and the Rural Libraries. Last year, based on our work, PRATEC included the formation of libraries in jungle communities in its work programme.
And there we were, then, with those young people from the jungle, visiting fellow librarians from the Andes - barefoot friends who left their potato fields for a while to explain how their rural library works. Or women from the countryside of Chota, wrapped in their shawls to protect themselves from the rain and the cold of the high altitudes, to organise a reading circle with us.
What impressed me most was the frank interest of the Awajún visitors: their capacity to concentrate, to listen, to ask questions, to compare and share, their effort to understand, to read well, to let our experience penetrate them. I saw them suffer from the relentless climate at almost 4000 m.a.s.l., from the very different food, from trying to understand a language so different from their own, from wanting to communicate their customs and their efforts to protect the Amazon forest and to recover their ancestral traditions. And I saw us laugh, with a happy face, when we realised that we have the same visions, ideals and dreams.
Thank you for these days, for having been part of this ayllu, of this community.
Rita Mocker
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