Description of Challenge
The urban capitalistic culture is attractive to all to use modern medicine as a replacement of ancestral healing knowledge. As a result, farmers need to pay a lot of money to get these drugs from the cities and thus loose their autonomy in healing in addition to weakening their physical capacity to heal. This fact is part of a general strategy of the State to weaken the farmer communities and make them dependent on the capitalistic urban system.“We made a decision. Our decision is life. And it is life itself that corrects and leads us.” Eduar Lanchero, visionary and accompanier of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó
Solution
Part of the 11-year-old University of Resistance’s curriculum is to share ancestral health knowledge. It has become survival knowledge as well as a tool to regain community power and autonomy. Creating, together with the Global Campus network, medicinal herb gardens in different hamlets of the Peace Community, studying ancestral and indigenous medicinal knowledge, seeds exchange across several regions of Colombia and abroad as well as creating a model of medicinal herb garden for children to learn from it on a daily basis are the main continuous works and achievements of this initiative.
