by Cristina Estrada in Puerto Inírida

“Everything can be recycled” says chemistry teacher Olga Lucia to her pupils at a school in the city of Puerto Inírida, in eastern Colombia. She is teaching them how to recycle paper.

Olga, also a Red Cross volunteer, has been teaching the same skills to a group of indigenous women and men. They are making and selling Christmas cards, notebooks and diaries as a way of surviving in an area with high rates of unemployment.

“Various materials can be used - pineapple, grass, corn, etc - depending on what you have and the colour you would like to get,” Olga explains. “What I’m not so good at is decorating them with seeds, wood and things from the forest. But they are very creative,” she adds, referring to the indigenous people she is teaching.

Employment opportunities

The paper recycling project falls into a wider initiative aimed at improving the environment and offering employment to indigenous communities. Other activities include local handicrafts using palm leaves and making ‘marañón’ jam from cashew nuts.

“We are hoping that one day, handicrafts will be our main source of income,” explains Miriam, one of the indigenous women benefiting from the programme.

“We are not begging, we are working,” says Marta Elena Toledo, a Red Cross volunteer for many years and director of the project.

Currently there are nine persons working in the project: five indigenous women, all single mothers, three indigenous men, one of them displaced by violence, and Marta Elena. “With this project we are also advocating for environmental issues, through radio programmes, workshops and awareness campaigns in schools. Recycling makes even more sense here in the Amazonian forest,” she emphasizes.

Social and economic problems

An estimated 20 million people live in the seven million km² of the Amazon basin. One million of them belong to 379 different ethnic groups. It is an area with big social and economic problems, high rates of unemployment, a lack of infrastructure and of basic services such as water and electricity. Between 70 and 85 per cent of the Amazon’s inhabitants live below the poverty line.

It is this poverty that the recycling project is trying to address. So far, 47 and half tonnes of paper, glass, cardboard, plastic and aluminium have been recycled as part of the programme. All this material has been recollected, sorted, weighed, packed and sent to Bogotá, the Colombian capital, by plane.

“It takes 15 days for three people to put together one and a half tonnes,” explains Miriam.

The only means of communication with the rest of the country is by air, which makes everything more expensive and precious. “To send one kilogramme of material costs 1,800 Colombian pesos (70 US cents). If the plane is not full, we get it cheaper,” Marta Elena points out. “We have to negotiate for everything.”

Process of trust

Marta Elena is also the director of an association of indigenous women, ADMI, where 19 women regularly meet to share their problems, support each other and look for solutions. “Prostitution, loss of identity and values, domestic violence and unemployment are only some of the problems these women face. Every initiative you start has to be done through a process of trust.”

The rubbish is picked up from stores and a big rubbish dump, two hours’ walk from Puerto Inírida. Every morning, at five o’clock, a group of women walk with their children through the forest to the dump.

“Together with ADMI we are trying to make these women leave their children at the association to be looked after. The problem is that the woman in charge of it also needs to get out and work to feed her family and we don’t have enough money to pay her,” Marta Elena explains sadly.

Last February there were two families already living in the rubbish dump. Now there are seven, with 13 children aged between two months and eight years.

The local branch of the Colombian Red Cross in the Guainía department has provided them with clothes, basic humanitarian aid and, most important, with skills, but there is still a lot to be done. “The balance is very delicate. They system can break down at any time. We need more political support and materials to carry on working,” Marta Elena says.