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WiRED Returns to the Peruvian Amazon for the Sixth Time since 2011
BY ALLISON KOZICHAROW; EDITED BY BERNICE BORN
T
his week a WiRED International team is traveling to South America to bring medical and health information to underserved and remote communities in the Peruvian Amazon.
This mission is to deliver the education and tools that will enable populations in the Amazon to improve the health of their communities.
WiRED will provide our entire 350+ module Learning Center library to people along the river and off the grid. The collection will feature the newly launched Express series, which includes topics that were requested by physicians in Peru and translated into Spanish by Translators Without Borders.
During this trip WiRED will establish a community health center in Orosa, an isolated village, deliver portable materials for an extensive outreach program, and outfit a river boat as a health training facility.
The WiRED team will start in Iquitos, which lies in the rain forest of eastern Peru and is accessible only by water. Last year we put in a center there and set up a training facility; during this visit we will check on these efforts. We will load our updated libraries onto computers and talk with the staff about any health and medical material they may need.
 Click image to enlarge
From Iquitos, WiRED’s team will travel by boat to Orosa—a tiny but important hub village on the Amazon—where our partner, Project Amazonas, (see sidebar) and others have built a clinic. There, WiRED will install a community health education center equipped with a projector and computers containing the entire WiRED e-library and the special sub-library of Spanish-only modules. Because Orosa has no electrical power, hardware for the center will run on solar panels.
In addition to the center, we will provide our first portable facility in many years—a solar-powered Pak ’n Go bundle. This package contains three moveable solar panels the size of a legal pad, a deep-cycle battery the size of a paperback, a small projector and a laptop loaded with WiRED Learning Center modules. Everything fits into a small backpack so that center staff members can carry this portable outreach program, via canoe, to other villages. The purpose is to take these training programs to outlying communities to teach people in the remotest regions about health.
The WiRED team’s third task will be to create a health training facility on a 70-foot river boat, the Nenita. WiRED will install laptops loaded with our medical and health program modules for individual study stations and supply a projector to allow for group presentations. This mobile unit is WiRED’s first floating health education facility. We expect it will train many people on basic health issues.
By establishing a new community health center in Orosa, continually expanding and translating our modules, and providing health education classes onboard the Nenita, WiRED continues its mission of bringing vital and free medical and health education to underserved and isolated communities in Peru and around the world.
Project Amazonas
As in the last two trips, WiRED will partner with Project Amazonas.
Project Amazonas is a non-political, non-sectarian nongovernmental organization working since 1994 to serve the people of the Amazon and to conserve the rain forest. It initiates, promotes and coordinates medical, humanitarian and research activities in the Department of Loreto in the Peruvian Amazon.
The WiRED team is grateful to Project Amazonas for arranging our visit.
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