English Version

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Yauda Estudios Amazónicos was born in 2010 in Florencio Yaci’s maloka, a Murui elder from Puerto Refugio, Putumayo (Predio Putumayo Reservation). It was also founde some months later at the National University of Colombia, in the form of an Undergraduate Students’ Task Group. Our first initiative dealt with a local proposal to commemorate the centennial of the genocide of indigenous people perpetrated by the British-Peruvian Rubber Company in peruvian and colombian Amazonia.

Along the years, Yauda’s work has focused around two objectives: to foster studies related to Amazonia in academic circles, and to formulate community work projects in compliance with interests of indigenous populations we have worked with in Putumayo and Amazonas provinces. In order to achieve our first objective we founded the Young Researchers’ Group in Amazonian Studies, which has evolved into a learning and feedback scenario aimed at newcomers in Amazonian Studies.

In 2013 the Group decided to step forward and become a Non-Profit Organisation. During these years Yauda Foundation has strived to strenghten the Undergraduate Students’ Task Group, as well as to expand our intervention area to the Orinoquia region in Colombia. The Foundation has now two strategic divisions: the Research Division and the Community Intervention Division.

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“My experience with Yauda has changed my life for good. So much, that I went back last year after for years to visit the community Refugio at the border between the Colombian department Putumayo and that of the Amazon again. In my mind, the voluntary work with Yauda has not been one of gaining ‘professional experience’, it has, above all, been one of making friendships. Friendships not only across cultures, but also across different backgrounds of experience, across different ways of accessing truth, of thinking life, of relating with people. It did not only quipped me for a range of questions, doubts and encounters there were to come, it still warms me from the inside.

Having closely worked together with students from the Universidad Nacional and a variety of people living in different communities across the Putumayo, I have learned that ‘cultural exchange’ is not just an empty phrase. It starts with learning to find the perfect angle to jump from some meters heath into the river, how to gut fishes that have been just fished, and how to distinguish the voices of the birds when one lies in the darkness.

This is more essential than it sounds. But then there is also the depth that lies in the art of constructing relationships, of articulating ideas together, of listening carefully to each other and to permit that what is said, lived, heard, changes you. When I am talking to one of the friends I made with Yauda, or to Vica, the political leader of the community, I enter a safe space, where my thoughts and feelings are carefully considered and put into perspectives, and where I can do so as well.

I studied Political Sciences and Philosophy, and I am now doing a Human Rights Master in London, and I can say that my experience with Yauda has informed my perspectives developed in university to an intangible extent. Important knowledges are produced in university, but they are clearly not only produced there. We have to find more and more ways of engaging them with each other, of strengthening that exchange of perspectives if we want to do justice to this complex reality that we call life. Yauda does this work, excellently, and I am grateful, to this very life, to have been, and to be part of it.” By Jule Hartnack, German political scientist

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