After two years of pandemic-related travel restrictions, Misean Cara staff are once again able to conduct in-person monitoring & evaluation visits of the projects that we fund.
One of our Learning & Development Officers is currently visiting projects in #Peru, including ADSOPUR (Association for Sustainable Development in Urban and Rural Settlements), an agricultural livelihoods project of the #PresentationSisters that works with women in the impoverished, urban settlements outside Lima.
During her visit, our L&D Officer has been meeting with ADSOPUR staff, volunteers and project participants to learn about their successes with hydroponic vegetable cultivation. Women in the communities are taught to grow lettuce and other leafy crops using technology that requires only water and nutrients to cultivate the plants, a process that also yields a new harvest of crops every one to two weeks. In addition to a steady, reliable diet of nutrients, their bio gardens provide income to help support their families.
The Presentation Sisters’ presence in Latin America crosses three countries, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. Sisters arrived in Chile from New Zealand in 1982 to begin the first mission in a rural region called Lo Valdivia. A year later, Sisters from the South West Province in Ireland arrived in Ecuador and in 1993 Sisters living in Latin America established a mission in Lima, Peru. The Latin American Spiral was officially formed in 1996.
Lima, Peru
Over the past twenty-five years the Presentation Sisters have lived inserted with a group of displaced families, forced to move from their land, families and animals in the mountains, during the time of the terrorist shining path movement in Peru. This group of 25,000 people invaded the Lima rubbish dump in March 1992. The Presentations Sisters joined their struggle in August 1993. They have been living and evolving together with these families ever since.
Their specific ministry as healers opens their hearts to touch the fragility, vulnerability and pain within ourselves and embrace and hold the vibration of love for those who are struggling. It is an experience of mutual healing for all including the earth community.
Both Presentations Sisters who live inserted in the area, Eileen Kearney and Marg Kehoe are trained Energy therapists and instructors. They have put a lot of energy into training people from marginalized areas of Peru and Latin America as healers. They also have co-created with these people holistic healing centres in different areas of Lima and in Chile.
In San Juan de Miraflores, Lima, Peru, they have two Holistic Healing Centres, Centro Nana Nagle which provides a large variety of healing modalities for families and Corazon de Nana which is dedicated to the health and wellbeing of children and adolescents. This has helped to open spaces where people from very different social and economic backgrounds have come together as one. The walls of separation have come tumbling down and the new consciousness is being embodied.
These healers have now constituted a legal association in Latin America – PROSH (promoting holistic health) and in 2018 three Peruvian women and six Chilean women were certified as Instructors of Healing Touch in Latin America.
