Ashaninkas, Chikungunya and Community Particpation; A note.

The Ashaninka Nation in Río Ene, Peru has in its mythology the notion of a land of eternal abundance, and the concept of a circular universe bounded by rivers;  this Nation is located in the Central Jungle, in the  Pichanki, Satipo, and San Martin de Pangoa districts, province of Chanchamayo, Junin. I know deep this region for my rural internship with Dr. Manuel Quimper, by the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia - UPCH . The family groups have a territory of settlement ranging from Huanuco and San Martin perhaps until Ucayali, also distributed by the Huallaga and Ucayali rivers, afluent to the Amazonas. This  groups and families, that arenot more then communities, tell us that the concept of villages, population centers and native communities is more a concept of missionaries and urban concept. The Ashaninka lived fishing and hunting and collecting, and their agriculture is simple (corte y quema ), and they rotated to new land every 10 or 20 years. They moved out to find new lands , and after a period when they were visiting and settling through through relationship with family and compadres, always in periods of 10 0 20 years, they  return to original land. This was systematized with Centro de Investigacion y Promocion Amazonica  (CIPA) , and I later returned for a research in the area in leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis is a disease related only to poor inmigrants from the andean zone (colonos) that work in activities related to cutting virgin jungle forest areas, with the abundant literature of Revista Anthropologica, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru . My interest arose earlier, from the course of Tropical Medicine, in the Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, on our trip to Iquitos when Dr Ciro Maguiña  was resident,  and Dr Eduardo Gotuzzo was a young physician at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Alexander von Humboldt, and its was Director Dr. Hugo Lumbreras Cruz (RIP). Actually, Dr Maguiña and Dr Gotuzzo are directors of the Institute, which I must say have recently receive a recognition of UNESCO for their work to humanity. Writing this note is memories, related to being a member of the Association of Students (AECH), with Jaime Calmet currently a researcher for CIPA in Cusco, and I clearly remember that we had organized courses of Health and Society, coordinated by Dr Pedro  Brito Quintana (PAHO) and Eugenio Villar Montesinos (WHO) , teacher and resident at the time . But we must go to what is the matter of the note .... the focus is the Chikungunya, Ebola  and Neglected Tropical Diseases. The Central Jungle  Area was a focus very early in the XX century because of interests in caucho and cacao, and earlier though for catholic missions in the XIX century. First missionaries concentrated tribal families and groups in the Jesuit concept of communities and mills, but the family groups were affected by epidemics, as the population concentrated , including TB for example,  very serious and reemerging. The exploitation of rubber attracted attention and migration of peasants from rural andean zones that walked into the zone, and it came to standing that they were advancing on ancestral native lands, hunting areas and areas that historically permited crop rotation. Then appeared malaria and yellow fever, for livestock and deforestation, and their product, mosquitoes and finally the political concept of native communities that was  said to be aimed on the defense of natives, defined small territories, impoverishing  particularly the Ashaninka and Machiguengas. These water routes that were orientes towards Huallaga and Ucayali reviers and their affluents, these economic relations of  families and groups in the Central Jungl Area, this migration of landless peasants from the Andes, is what created conditions, pauperization of land resources, alter ecosystems, created villages without basic conditions, and thus created the basis for tropical diseases , not only malnutrituion and infectious diseases, but diseases transmitted by mosquitoes. And this situation is repeated in the Putumayo river border with Colombia, ... we must  remember theories of the first men in Peru and the Jungle theory, we have facts as that the black on red pottery in the Colombian jungle is in the origin of the Chavin style, and that aji  or chili come from Central America to Colombia, and was present in the caves of Lauricocha, Huanuco, Peru, most ancient place of man in Peru, and we are talking 14,000 years ago. This ancient routes are the background of a culture, and of an economy, threathened by oil, mining and coca agriculture. This note is what I remember of a conversation with Dr Augusto Meloni officer of MOH in 1995,  and what convinced him to request a contract for a year with PAHO on Organization of the Health System in Native networks in  Amazon basin, which I assumed,  and was later approved as a official document by the Ministry of Health, Dra Pilar Mazzetti. This work, basically consisted to identify households by ethnic groups along affluent rivers, identify trading activity and river transport by motor boats or pequepeques for example, and identify leaders and native authorities, to establish a system of communication and relationship, I also wanted to identify native groups to collect traditional myths, legends, stories and songs and organize them written in native languages for schools​​... of course this was the first part of the proposal and sought to convene the traditional authority structures of the native race ... things of anthropology and community participation