When her husband condemned her to singleness for not being able to have children, Balbina Sundi Akumbari, from Kandozi village, found in the Taricayas turtles her best ally to assert herself and help other women like her who resist. to the scourge of masculinity so ingrained in the remote community where he lives, in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon.
The men return from their fishing duties and have breakfast, some women clean from a canoe clothes and dishes in the water of the Pastaza river, Others cook fish and banana on firewood between wooden sticks and palm leaf roofs, a teenage girl breastfeeds her baby, and children under five, barefoot, cut canes with machetes.
It’s a few minutes past seven in the morning, but the day started hours ago for the 100 Kandozi families living in the community of Musa Karusha, where one arrives after sailing two and a half hours by boat from the village of San Llorenç, capital of the jungle province of the Datam de l’Marañón.
BE A WOMAN AND SINGLE
In this corner of the Peruvian jungle, where convenience arrangements hold family clans and women — submissive, invisible, and illiterate — waiting for a signal from her husband to speak, Balbina Sundi Akumbari arrived to break schemes.
It did it with his project dedicated to the conservation of taricayas, an initiative that launched of voluntary form in 2004 with purely environingingmental aims and that now, turned already in a bionegocio, gives him economic support, to her and to twenty of single, divorced, widowed, orphaned or abandoned women in their community.
“We need (the project) for widows, orphans … If they end up (the taricayas), what will these women work on? Women don’t know how to fish,” Balbina, 50, told Efe.
And she knows what she’s talking about: her husband abandoned her for not being able to have children, something considered a “curse” for the Kandozi people, where the woman’s reproductive role is central to maintaining the clan’s descendants, according to explained the social psychologist César Renfigo.
“That’s why they leave them and, when it happens, it’s a very conditioning thing for women because it’s very rare for them to come together again. They have to leave the community, they are already marked in it and it’s a shame,” he said. detailed in Efe the specialist.
REPOBLAR TARICAYAS
To all this drama Balbina responded with the Charapi Women’s Association, which with the support of the environmental fund Profonanpe recently got the approval of the management plan for the extraction and repopulation of the taricayas.
Thus, the women have green light to collect the eggs of podonecmis unifilis, the scientific name of this species, from the banks of Rimachi Lake, located a few minutes by river from the community of Musa Karusha.
They then move them to the 20 artificial beaches they built in their camp, sow them and care for the nests incubated for about 70 days, which is the estimated time it takes for the turtles to be born.
Once out of their shell, 50% is sold to traders in the city of Iquitos, who export the animals to the Asian continent, mainly, and the other half is returned to the pond to promote restocking and conservation of this aquatic chelonian.
Maintaining the balance between the exploitation and preservation of these reptiles is key for this species of turtle, one of the largest in the Amazon Basin and which is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Nature Conservation.
Uncontrolled human consumption is the greatest threat to this animal, highly valued for both its meat and its eggs.
“If we sell everything, the taricayas are over,” said Balbina, who added that, in addition to the marketing of turtles, his association also benefits from the sale of “non-viable” eggs. that is, of those that are not suitable for planting but are instead consumed as food in the area.
In this way, concluded by Efe Alen Manuel Morayari, specialist in taricayas of Profonanpe, the more than twenty women who work for Balbina “are having income from eggs and the sale of baby turtles” to “sustain the fuel, l ‘food and groceries’ without depending on a man by his side.