Frank Seidel, the Director of our French Recruitment Office, recently returned from Peru and put together a fantastic video featuring our Conservation Program in Peru. Even if you don’t speak French the amazing images of the Amazonian jungle and of our many different projects speak for themselves. Anyone else think Frank should submit this to the Cannes Film Festival?

Inca Project Supervisor Daniel O’Shea updates us on the latest news from the Inca Projects

Inca Trail - As always the volunteers on the Inca project have kept up their hard work on keeping the Inca Trail in Sicre (not far from Huyro) clear of vegetation. The volunteers have been working with machetes and pruning sheers to carry out this work. The work aims to protect artifacts which may be present on and around the Inca Trail.
 
Cochapata Mountain - Volunteers took another few day trips up the mountain and into ‘sector 3’ of our explored areas to search for more Inca ruins. Although there was not as much found as on some previous trips, any structure that was previously unknown was recorded by means of GPS. This information is then relayed to the INC (National Cultural Institute) via our resident archaeologist Jhon Valencia. The cleaning and clearing of ruins continued in Sectors 1 & 2.

Volunteers working on Cochapata Mountain

Incatambo & Amaybamba - Our close relationship with the INC had enabled us to visit and help maintain previously restored ruins in Incatambo. Volunteers also got the opportunity to visit and help clear ruins in Amaybamba. It was only after a local farmer approached the local INC watchman about ruins on his land that we were made aware of these structures. There will be more exploration and field work programmed in the future in this area.
 
Visit to Te Huyro and Huaymanmarca - Volunteers were taken for an afternoon tour of the local tea factory. Although it is not running on full capacity and hasn’t been for many years the volunteers got the chance to see how the tea manufacturing process works from picking the tea leaves to seeing the tea bag being boxed. Volunteers also got the opportunity to visit Huaymanmarca, an Inca sacrificial site not too far from Huyro.
 
Community House - The main development in the community house this month was organizing an ´Archaeology Area´. This included putting up maps and a white board where our archaeology lessons can be held. We also arranged our books into an archaeology section.

Breakfast at the Community House

Archaeology Lessons - The lessons with our resident archaeologist Jhon Valencia have included ´an introduction to archaeology´, ´ceramics´, ´Quipus´ and general ´question and answer time´ regarding Inca and pre-Inca cultures.
 
Sports - With school starting up again in March we have been able to arrange local soccer matches between the teachers in the local schools and the volunteers on the Inca project. There is also the opportunity to play volleyball with the locals too. It really is a great way to get to know the local people and to practice Spanish. Volunteers also have access to the local outdoor swimming pool at Huyro sports center.
 
Inca Social - All the Inca volunteers were treated to a half week in Cusco where they got to visit a few Inca sites including Raqchi, Sacsayhuayman and Q´enko. Projects Abroad arranged free entry to all the sites through the INC.
 
Volunteer Social - This was held in Urubamba and all the Inca volunteers attended along with other volunteers from Teaching, Care and Sport programs. The evening included a buffet meal for everyone and afterward all enjoyed a few games of ‘sapo’, a popular Peruvian game.

Daniel with local kids

Click here for more information about the Inca Projects in Peru

By Richard Munday, Alumni and Desk Officer for the Conservation Program in Peru

For nearly three years we have been trying to get our foot in the door – so to speak – with the community of Palma Real. Palma Real is a relatively new community, only about 100 years old really, which was set up with the work of Catholic priests that came to do missionary work in Peru and the Amazon.

The Indigenous people of the lower Madre de Dios region naturally lived in small groups with a few families in one place then a few more in another and so on with the main hub in one place, far away from large rivers and lakes. But when the priests came, the first thing they did was round-up all the locals and move them into two areas. One is called Palma Real (with around 300 people living there) which is located about one and a half hours further down river from the Taricaya reserve and one called Infierno, which is located about one hour from Puerto Maldonado itself and is accessible by road.

Volunteers arrive in Palma Real

Typical house in Palma Real

Over the years many NGOs have entered the community with good intentions but little foresight. One of them actually built a cement water tower and fitted tubing to a local fresh water creek, gave them a generator and water pump but failed to provide a daily budget for them to run it all so now it stands mainly unused. The early ones insisted that the community hold on to their native activities and try not to change at all whilst they were giving them western clothes, western food and many other habits that westerners have developed. So the community has developed a mentality of reliance.

Now as you all know this is not the philosophy of the Taricaya reserve. We help those who help themselves. So our first attempt to work with them failed as we were not insistent enough with them. In 2005 we planned to build a dam for them so they could use a water wheel to pump their water. All we asked is that they cut the wood for the structure. We gave them our chainsaw, gasoline and all the measurements. The chainsaw was returned a month later with no sign or news of any wood. So about six months ago we began trying again, this time with something a lot smaller in regards to work but that should have a huge visual impact and give them more confidence in us as well us in them.

So far our plans and negotiations are going very well, we have been speaking with the teachers of the community who seem to have a lot more power in the town (The community actually has a president who rules over the town but seems to be more of a puppet of the teachers) and have decided upon an interesting new idea. Palma Real has a really bad rubbish problem, with no collection system or a place to dump it, so most it goes on to the floor and is left there which you can imagine is a horrible sight. Using one of our donkeys and a specially designed cart we are fairly certain we can help them set up a system of rubbish collection and transport to an area away from the town and we have also managed to get the community to promise to cut the posts for the donkey enclosure and plant them as well as organise a “Community Day” where with the help of Taricaya volunteers, staff and hopefully most of the community we will clean the whole town of rubbish, so in one day they can see the huge difference a clean community can make.

The future of Palma Real

In fact all Taricaya will have to do is put the wire onto the posts, bring the donkey and spend a few hours explaining and showing the community what the donkey can do, which will be done via a variety of demonstrations.

This work will be started and should be completed early next month as there isn’t a huge amount of labour. Then we hope that they will see that we can provide sensible, long term solutions that cost them next to nothing and begin to trust us a lot more and begin putting more and more cooperation into our ideas. We will also begin to slowly start suggesting bigger projects, which as you can hopefully tell means we are potentially embarking on a major new route for Taricaya and hope to bring you some great news on this project soon.

Learn more about Tariaya and our Conservation Program in Peru HERE

By Richard Munday,

One of our ongoing projects for the last six months has been the GPS mapping of the entire reserve.

This project has been planned in three stages. Stage 1 was the complete mapping and marking of all the trails around the reserve, which meant walking around all the trails and stopping every 50M waiting for a GPS signal and then moving on to take the next point. Now as you can imagine, with about 30 KM of trails to mark we knew it would take a long time! But thankfully we had the help of Rike Becker, a student who is now in Argentina, who took charge of the entire project and managed to complete this stage for us.

Stage 2 was the marking of all the main structures of the reserve, platforms, buildings, bridges and then putting all the data into one spreadsheet so that we could make the computerized version of the map. Again this wasn’t a huge task, although we probably had about 1000 points in total and probably a lot more than that. We managed to have the basic map made up with about two weeks of work, the next stage of things was to link all the points together so that the trails were actually lines and not just dots, making sure each trail was coloured differently, adding special colour points for bridges, platforms and buildings and then adding trail names, the river, the creek, a compass, and the main key.

What a cool map!

Stage 3 which is still being planned out, is the identification and marking of key areas of botanical interest. In February we should have had several botanists planning to visit us, but due to the flood and the resulting high swamp levels, we decided it would be best to delay their arrival until we could use the forest properly. When the levels have dropped again, the botanists will be able to help us identify primary and secondary forest, swamp areas, dense forest, clear forest, even down to different types of trees, this again is going to be a pretty big task and will no doubt take a good few months to complete it. But once the work is done we will have a complete map, which we can use for many different things like navigation, identification of good sites for certain projects such as mist-netting and auto-camera sites, and even new observation points.

You can learn more about our other projects on our Conservation Program in Peru here