An indigenous community rises from the ashes in central Lima

Monday, January 23

In the center of very urban Lima we visited Cantagallo, a tiny part of the Amazon jungle that lives in the hearts of a few hundred indigenous Shipibo people from the far eastern side of Peru.  Their language – Shipibo – is one of about 50 indigenous dialects spoken by various Amazon tribes.

The community’s 300 homes were all destroyed by a fire in November, just a month after the Fall SST group had visited the community.  Pictures of the community after the fire can be seen here and here.

So that their children grow up identifying themselves as Shipibo — knowing the Shipibo language, vision of the universe, culture, and medicinal plants from the Amazon – they started their own school.  We visited the school and heard several speakers describe the importance of their cultural identity, art, music, and language.

The school’s art teacher taught our students how to make a small Shipibo design, and afterwards students shopped for Shipibo handicrafts.  We then toured the community they are rebuilding, currently a maze of homes built from pre-fabricated wooden walls and plastic sheets.  They say a Shipibo characteristic is survival, and their resilience was on full display.  In the coming months the government will temporarily relocate them to another site while 2-story cement structures for the community are built at the existing location.

For the evening we had been invited to sing the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” at an ecumenical service in the Good Shepherd Church, where we have our Spanish classes and course lectures.  The students, nervous once they saw a couple hundred attendees would hear them, nevertheless did fine and were roundly applauded.