As a final post, we thought we would share a short message from each of us, as we all took away something a little different. Thanks for watching, and until next year 🙂

ALESSANDRA

My experience in Peru has been above all eye-opening. I am proud of our team for fulfilling our goal in an enjoyable way. We were able to live a unique opportunity, something I’ll hopefully cherish for the rest of my life.
Our project took a whole new dimension with the employment opportunity for the Santo Tomas community developed in the final weeks, which gave me even more satisfaction than expected.
This unforgettable six-week experience, away from the numerous worries and preoccupations of the city life, allowed me to finally appreciate the simpler things. Our little jungle Home away from home has been a small haven of books, work-outs and reflection, which, although tough to endure at times, is and will always remain an exceptional place. I am happy to have learned, and lived, a completely different lifestyle based on teamwork, solidarity and patience.

KRISLIA

From the moment we entered the Peruvian Amazon, I knew that our Project would exceed my expectations. The community of Santo Tomas warmly welcomed us into their lives and made us feel at home. In those six weeks, I witnessed growth not only in myself and our project team but also in the project itself. At the base, we accomplished our initial goal of creating reforestation initiatives and increasing awareness and access to traditional medicine. Beyond that, however, we developed a scholarship program and were given the chance to share the knowledge of traditional medicine on an international database. This means that in addition to contributing towards rainforest preservation and cultural preservation, we were also able to develop educational opportunities and a better representation for traditional medicine worldwide. I am truly honored to have been given the opportunity to participate in such an enriching project. That being said, I do recognize that this is just the beginning and I am certain that our partnership with Project Amazonas and the bonds we have made with the surrounding communities will continue to drive the sustainable progression of this project in the years to come.

LENA

Truly an unforgettable experience, this summer’s project was enriching, humbling, and inspiring. I was able to learn so much – developing my personal skills, having the time to reflect deeply, gaining an understanding of the different perspectives for the environment and of the Amazon (as a means for life and/or as a resource), and, finally, setting myself future goals. Having returned to my the normalness of my daily life, I have come to look at my life with a different eye; I appreciate the little things that I had not noticed before, or that I had once taken for granted. Re-adapting to the fast pace of an urban lifestyle, I try to apply the slow, tranquility of the Amazon and take time to realise the good things that come to me and savour them.
Knowing that I spent six weeks this summer applying myself through a truly wonderful project is definitely a feeling I take pride in. I believe that our team did an excellent job to keep motivated, even during tougher times, and to keep pushing ourselves to achieve more. We kept adding to our plans, furthering the benefits we hoped to bring to the community. We built a strong relationship with the people we worked with, and that important connection will always be remembered. It is this very connection that allowed us to better understand the needs of the community in order to target our efforts to reaching a sustainable, lasting impact. Many NGOs use these developmental buzz words lightly, but in the case of our project, I truly do think that we have embodied what it means to be a successful, strong, caring, and dedicated development group.

ANNA

Summing up our entire experience in a paragraph does a great disservice to all the people, beautiful night skies, delicious dinners, and hard days of work that necessarily get left out of this reflection. There’s a rightful stigma that surrounds “development projects.” With so many horror stories of ill-planned construction projects and the all-too-familiar examples of “voluntourism”, I entered our stay at Project Amazonas with a bit of trepidation over how successful our medicinal herb garden and tree nursery could ever really be. Indeed, we were presented with a number of obstacles, from having our plant identifiers unearthed by some playful children to losing nearly all of our tree seedlings right after their acquisition. However, after a few weeks back home, I can only look back on our project with a sincere sense of accomplishment. Development projects are hard, and while the long-term impact of our work along the Rio Orosa is still uncertain, judging from the smiles on the faces of those in Santo Tomas and the smile that continually crept up on my own face throughout our time in the Amazon, I can only look back with gratitude in my heart and optimism about what will come of our work with Project Amazonas and the people of Santo Tomas. So what will I miss? Of course I made a list! On it contains everything from the fine coffee and meditative silence of each morning to the clearest starlit nights I have ever seen. Mostly, I’ll miss all of the inspiring people we had the grace of being surrounded by throughout our six weeks. From our humble and talented chef Raul to soon-to-be Dr. Zoe, there are simply too many people that I’m so thankful to have met on this fleeting and beautiful thing called life. Thankfully, I’ll be seeing six of those people in a few weeks; our Nourish team I’ve come to regard as family. To another year of Nourish!

MIKAELA

There is no short summary or a few words that can tell of my experience on the Project this summer, but here I will try! I am proud of the work our team accomplished for our first year of the Project. I think we have truly made important first steps in creating a sustainable project that will benefit the community today and in the future. It was amazing to see our relationship with the community of Santo Tomas evolve as our Project evolved – something that I think is essential to the success of a Project like this one. Although leaving was a sad goodbye, I am confident that the community members will hold up their end of the contract we made with them and continue to develop the tree nursery and take care of the garden until we return next year to expand on what we have already done! I can’t wait to see what is to come ☺

ALEC

As my team has pointed out, it is difficult to sum up our experience this summer, but after a few weeks back, here are some points that I have realized. On our end, I think that we all have and will benefit from this experience for the rest of our lives. Being able to see a way of life different than our own, seeing what we have with a new appreciation, working hard as a team to implement and improve the project as we went, and simply being out of our usual society with its bombarding technology and connectivity – these things are indispensible. While we talk of our western world being so progressive and modern, I cannot ignore how much better I felt while being away from it all. Apart from this, I believe that we still have work to do. We are well on our way to creating a sustainable project, but I think we can re-evaluate our efforts in order to really increase our impact in the following year. That being said, I am still very proud of what we accomplished and what we learned! It was amazing to get our hands dirty, learning from the community about their local plants, herbs, and trees, and sharing all of that knowledge with our book and hopefully Wired Int’l is fantastic! I am incredibly grateful to have had first hand experience in the field of development, a field which I can now make better-informed decisions about. Beyond that, I am so happy to have met and formed relationships with everyone along the way: from the graceful Doña Alicia, to Raul the siempre-alegre cook, to the Santo Tomas community, to our team of beautiful, kind-hearted people. On top of it all, I know I can say with complete certainly that we will continue to process and learn from our experience as we transition back into our daily lives. I can only hope that while we work to better McGill Nourish as well as our project, we will keep in mind the lessons of the jungle.

SALLY

I miss the jungle!!!! I was lucky enough to be able to continue travelling through Peru after our project work was complete. Through these travels, with each new friend I made, I ended up explaining a little bit about our project experience. With each of these conversations, I felt prouder of the work we completed and more grounded in the values we stand by.
My favourite part of our project work is how we are sustainably and effectively working to bridge the gap between traditional and western medicine by working with community members. I believe this is one of the most important aspects of our project because as western medicine clinics preside in jungle communities, the traditional medicinal knowledge is being lost. This knowledge was typically passed through generations; herbalists and shamans have a wealth of knowledge that their offspring would learn as they grew up. What types of plants are useful, what they’re used for, how they are prepared, etc. Western medicine and traditional medicine both have gaps, but with the two working together, overall health in these communities can improve. I enjoyed spending time with the local herbalist in Santo Tomas, Doña Alicia. Hearing her stories, watching her eyes light up and her typically-serious-face break into a smile was wonderful.
After coming back into our “real world” after 6 weeks of serenity in the jungle, we all felt more stressed out, anxious, and missing our slow-paced life in the rainforest. I miss the peace of the jungle and the company of my lovely project interns, the Project Amazonas staff (Raul, our cook, and Julio, our coordinator), and the smiling faces of the Santo Tomas community members. One of my favourite aspects of the project experience was this newfound internal calming that the jungle provided. After the 6 weeks, I felt mentally and physically restored.
I am looking forward to returning to Montreal to reunite with the project team and to continue working on our medicinal plant database, educational modules, and book. I am also excited to get back to school and share our stories with other nourish chapter members and inspire students to join the project team next summer.