My name is Espíritu Yanchaliquin Chimborazo, I was born in the community of Mindina that belongs to the parish of Simiátug, Cantón Guaranda, in the Bolívar province. I belong to the organisation Fundación Runakunapak Yachana Wasi (House of the Knowledge of Man).
In the year 1983 I first met Doctor Carlos Rojas when he walked into my community to examine all of the children in the local school, and also to teach about good health. He’s done this type of work for the last 30 years, helping us to improve our lives, because in the 1970s and 1980s my community suffered racism and exploitation, and for indigenous people it was forbidden to enter education or business. This means there was a corrupt group between the church, the town hall, the landowner and the bar owners; we were condemned to live a life of hard labour, mollified by liquor, with our heads bowed, and paying an outdated colonial tax. Doctor Carlos Rojas with his Italian friend, Enrique Cappelletti, and his compatriots started to make us realise that we indigenous people also had a right to everything: education, health, food, clothing, housing and land. So these friends first created the organisation called Fundación Runakunapak Yachana Wasi with the objective of showing us our rights that had been lost, and then they created schools in the communities for indigenous people, with the ideology of well-living, and a healthy existence as a human right.
In 1996 my community elected me as health promoter and instructed me to attend the training, by then Foundation Alli Causai was already created as a team of professionals, and at the head was Doctor Rojas. From that moment I started my first training in primary health care, along with six friends from neighbouring communities. Of course, I was supporting my own community and making people see that health and education go hand in hand. Without education there is no health, and without health there is no life. This social work I have done for the last 17 years, thanks to the unconditional support of Alli Causai.
Today I am a technologist in Primary Health Care legally recognised by the Ministry of Education. It has been difficult to get recognised morally, socially and economically but despite this and thanks to the training and knowledge life has given me I am still fighting for a weak society without a voice so that we can reach equality, liberty and justice.
Thank you very much,
Espíritu Yanchaliquin Chimborazo