Saw Yan Myo Aye (Tutu) and Ling Houng in the Diamante native community in the province of Manu in the Madre de Dios region. Photos: Daniel Peña
By Jorge Agurto
Servindi, April 4, 2017. Two indigenous people from Burma, Asia, traveled around the world in an airplane and glided eight hours by boat through Amazonian rivers to visit the Diamante native community in the upper Madre de Dios.
They are Ling Houng from Chin village and Saw Yan Myo Aye from the Karen people. The latter due to the difficulty in pronouncing his name prefers to be called simply "Tutú". Both reached the ancestral territory of the Yine people, an area where uncontacted indigenous people of the Mashco Piro ethnic group, related to the Yine people, have frequently appeared.
A retinue with traditional Yine clothing welcomed the visitors
The visit of the Burmese, who belong to two different ethnic groups out of the more than 100 that exist in Burma, was carried out as part of an exchange activity under the project Indigenous Peoples, Forests and Climate Change, sponsored by the Norwegian Agency for Cooperation for development (Norad).
The visit of the indigenous Burmese allowed them to see the reality of the Amazonian peoples, a reality with differences and similarities to theirs in Burma, which has the official denomination of Myanmar.
Ling Houng is a program coordinator for POINT - Promotion Of Indigenous and Nature Together and San Yen Myo Aye is a specialist in networks and technology, which is why he will start working on mapping communities in Burma.
Both drank Masato, a traditional Amazonian beverage made from cassava. They also saw the crafts elaborated with native seeds that the Yine people make.
(Left, pink top) Jherli Ventura, from the National Organization of Indigenous Andean and Amazonian Women of Peru (Onamiap in spanish) board of directors, (Center) Tutú and Alejandro Parellada of IWGIA in dialogue with Cristina Sánchez, the translator who collaborated with the delegation, accompanied by women artisans of the community.
The Burmese were accompanied by Ruz Mary Sebastián, a member of the board of the Native Federation of the Madre de Dios River and tributaries (FENAMAD in spanish), and Jherly Ventura, from the ONAMIAP women's organization, among others.
Segundo Reynaldo, president of the Harakbut, Yine and Matsiguenka Council (COHARYIMA in Spanish), an intermediate organization of FENAMAD
Segundo Reynaldo, community leader and newly elected President of the Harakbut Yine Machiguenga Council (COHARYIMA), led and hosted them in a hospitable way and made the Burmese feel as if they were home.
All of them visited the kindergarten, primary and secondary schools of the community and talked to the teachers and students. Not only did they taste the traditional food, but also slept placidly in a cabin protected by mosquito nets where they fell asleep after bathing outdoors in a creek of the place.
Mary Sebastián Ruz, FENAMAD, who coordinated the logistics of the trip, shows an arrow of the Mashco Piro uncontacted indigenous people.
The next day they learned about the environment in which the UHF communication radio station operates, which allows the community to communicate with other communities and especially with FENAMAD, the regional organization that represents all the peoples and communities of Madre de Dios. COHARYIMA is a FENAMAD intermediate organization.
They also visited the internet room that thanks to solidary support operates for some hours, from 9 a.m. to noon, three days a week, which allows communication with the world. Obviously more computers are required to meet the need for students and the community to connect to the internet.
The lack and abandonment in which the communities live was seen when the parents and children of the primary school were forced to knit palm leaves to decorate a funeral ceremony. The death of a girl of barely a year and a half had caused local commotion.
Little Esmeralda died of chronic malnutrition while she traveled by boat to a better-equipped facility. Diamante has a health post but it was closed because the nurse in charge was working outside the community.
The lack of attention in education is tangible in the lack of teachers who speak the Yine language, which is spoken by 100% of the students in Diamante. Although there is a small group that speaks the Machiguenga language, they have had to adapt to the main language so they also speak the Yine language.
However, the principal in charge of secondary school speaks the Quechua language and Aymara, two main native languages in the Andean zones of Peru, but that does not meet the needs of the 50 or so Amazonian languages spoken in the native communities of country.
Despite the good will of the educational authority, the need to train bilingual teachers that respond to the languages of the Amazonian students is obvious and this continues to be a challenge for the Peruvian State.
A few years ago, the State ordered the closure of teaching schools due to "excess teaching staff" without considering that in the Amazon region many bilingual teachers are required to serve the Amazonian indigenous population and facilitate their mastery of Spanish as a national binding language, but without losing their own languages nor their native identities.
The educational abandonment suffered by most of the country's more than 1,500 native communities became apparent when the elementary teacher from Diamante showed the box of educational materials received for the current school year. As an indicator, we will say that in the box there was hardly a single box of color pencils, some pens, a few cardboards, less than full roll of paper, among other tools that were evident by their scarcity.
Undoubtedly, all that the box contained is exceeded by what any child from a private school in Lima brings at the beginning of the school year for them alone. However, that box was the only material available to the teacher for all elementary students in the community for 2017.
In spite of the lack of materials, the teacher was grateful that the materials this year have arrived in time, as well as some workbooks in the Yine language. She remembered that in previous times it was common for materials not to arrive until September, when the school year was about to end.
Returning to the Burmese, we will say that they showed their agility and fitness by playing volleyball and thus contributing to the triumph of the visiting team ("Rest of the world") against the locals, Diamante, who suffered a decisive downfall when Armando, an active and dynamic young man from the community, was injured.
The Burmese continued their visit in Puerto Maldonado. They participated on Sunday 26 in a workshop by Servindi and Onamiap, members of the consortium that implements the project in Peru. POINT does this in Burma and the International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) is the international entity that allows the feat of the rapprochement between indigenous peoples so remote and distant from each other.
On Monday, 27, they participated in a Forum on the effects and impacts of megaprojects in the Peruvian Amazon that took place at the FENAMAD headquarters. On Tuesday, the Burmese visited the native community Tres Islas, which leads a strategic litigation process in defense of their right to territorial control and in this way; the Burmese brothers continue their learning about how the Amazonian peoples struggle to defend the tropical forests in Peru.
Both Ling and San Yen were interested in the information of these two events and above all, they identified with the participation of the brothers of the indigenous peoples in Peru. This gives us a clear idea that the problems faced by indigenous peoples around the world can be very similar in spite of the distance that separates them and that it is possible to mutually learn to improve the capacity to defend the forests.
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