Wayku Community - Lamas - San Martin (2nd Day)

In this second day in Tarapoto, we have visited a native community in the city of Lamas called Wayku. CEDRO and the Finnish Children and Young Foundation (FCYF) host a project there to form leaders in the community also a project to support local cultural initiative such as the production of musical instruments.
These instruments were commonly made by the people in the community but with time, these started to be forgotten and the way to produce them was also destined to oblivion. The raw material for those instruments (that can include flutes, drums and others) is located in special places were there are some sort of cerimony to extract them.
This project created a sustainable practice by teaching youngsters on how to make the instruments by the more older people. The instruments are then used in the biggest community party which is the Fiesta de Santa Rosa.

We also visited the city of Lamas where we could try this organic grown coffee from a local cooperative. In the last couple of years, Tarapoto and region has moved from the coca to legal crops such as coffee, cacao, rice and corn. Farmers have understood that prices for the legal crops were better than the risk of planting the coca, which is a change that happened in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, José (local monitor from CEDRO) showed the empty lands in the mountains and explained that these are a heritage from those times once coca plantation was done in a way that year after year, the old fields of coca would be left alone and more forest would be turned down to become crop. This has happened because the coca plant exhaust the land and it takes rather a while to recover from it.