Community Visit

Friday we went with Ana Maria to another indigenous community in Cartagena. The indigenous group contacted Wilfrido, in order to start a colloborattion with FEM - they are also struggling with lack of indigenous rights as the urban indegenous group we are working with. Ana Maria describes it as a perfect example of how communities contact the NGO to get help, and not the other way around where the NGO goes to the communities and push them into a collaboration.

The community we visited faces heavy rainfalls, which makes the river (see pictures), in their back yards overflow. The heavy rainfalls come approximately every 4th or 5th year and destroyes a lot of housing.

Ana Maria sees a potential project for this particular area, since she earlier had a cooperation with a very talented architect about creating houses on stylts - much like houses used to be built in the area. A house on stylts is much more resilient to the heavy rainfalls and floods.

It was very interesting to see how FEM worked to get the attention of the community. A lot of people gathered around us, showing interest in a potential project. Chairs were found in different houses and a spontanious meeting was held - mostly with the attendance of women from the community. In the meeting expectations were discussed and a relationship was established.

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