Chariboan Joi's Blog as a Space to Share Their Accomplishments

Rising Voices Grantee Project Update

cantando en neblina

Storytelling night during the Chariboan Joi Festival, December 2, 2014.

In the past few weeks, the Chariboan Joi team has been dedicated to finish up the process and selection of the material from the Chariboan Joi Shipibo Cultural Festival held on December 2, 2014 and from the Digital Journalism Workshop held on February 2015. The aim is to share their digital media, especially through the recently created Chariboan Joi blog, where audios from both events are available.

The blog has audios of two Masha songs in the Shipibo language, a joke and two traditional stories, with a brief explanation in Spanish. They will soon be available in English. There is also an explanation in Shipibo, exclusively for a Shipibo-speaking audience.

This was something to be proud of and to rejoice for the Shipibo members of the team. At the same time, it's a kind of self-criticism, as the use of their oral traditions in the city has been decreasing due to their lifestyle and modern distractions. There was even some doubts regarding the type of a sacred chant of one of the audios, was it an Icaro or a Masha?

Masha are traditional sacred chants with the aim of physically, emotionally, and spiritually healing a patient. Their lyrics are direct and beautiful, as the chant Body cleansing, that says:

Voy cantando, voy limpiando a esta mujer.
Voy entregando energías nuevas y positivas.
Desde aquí visiono su felicidad y entrego nuevas energías.
Voy limpiando para que andes compartiendo tu felicidad.
Sea feliz, eh eh eh… eh eh eh….eh eh eh eh eh.

I'm singing, I'm cleansing this woman.
I'm giving away new and positive energies.
From here I see her happiness and give away new energies.
I'm cleansing so that you can go and share your happiness.
Be happy, eh eh eh… eh eh eh….eh eh eh eh eh.

The joke about the mayor and the parrot triggered an interesting reflection and interpretation. The story tells how a parrot, after being taken away from its place of origin and experiencing many setbacks, makes fun of Western authorities and institutions, such as the mayor and the church. Demer Gonzales, a young Shipibo law student writes:

En el chiste, el loro representa al pueblo shipibo, su sufrimiento, así como su resistencia cultural a manera de catarsis, pues finalmente el loro termina burlándose de todos.

In the joke, the parrot represents the Shipibo people, its suffering, as well as its cultural resistance as some kind of catharsis, as the parrot ends up making fun of everybody else.

As a result of the Journalism Workshop we find the best audio interviews carried out by Shipibo teens in the city of Yarinacocha. Most of them are in Shipibo language and have a summary in Spanish. The topics selected by the teens reflect their concerns and the current problems such as:

  • Bilingual intercultural education
  • Shipibo culture and cultural identity
  • State of the education
  • Importance of Ani Xeati, female puberty rituals
  • Floodings in the communities
  • Agriculture in the communities
Reporteros adolescentes de Chariboan Joi

Chariboan Joi teen reporters

The material has been produced by Shipibo teenagers from the communities of Nueva Betania, Nueva Palestina y Bethel, who took part of in the Cultural Festival, from where the ten best participants were selected. They later took part of the Journalism Workshop.

Within the goals for empowering the communication abilities of the Organization of Indigenous Youth from the Ucayali Region (OJIRU), a Facebook page for OJIRU was created. It has frequent updates. On the other hand, the OJIRU blog is more complex, so it will take some tutoring in future months.

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