Support for the Zio Bain Indigenous Community in the Colombian Amazon

Deep in the Colombian Amazon, on the banks of the San Miguel River, lives the Zio Bain de Citará indigenous community. They number just over a hundred people who inhabit their territory whilst maintaining an intimate and respectful relationship with Mother Earth, growing their own food in the chagra, fishing, passing on their language and keeping their ancestral spiritual practices alive. For them, life cannot be understood in isolation from nature or from the knowledge passed down by their elders.

Today, this way of life is facing a delicate moment. Economic hardship, a lack of opportunities and pressures on their environment are driving many young people to leave. And with every young person who leaves, there is a risk of losing an irreplaceable part of their culture, their memory and their ancestral wisdom.

We at the Cosmovisiones Gaia Cultural Association and Ayahuasca Retreats RdA, who walk alongside the community in a spirit of respect and collaboration, feel a deep calling to stand by them at this time. Not by imposing our will, but by supporting an initiative that stems from the community itself and, in particular, from its women—the weavers of knowledge and guardians of cultural hospitality: the creation of the House of Knowledge Library.

The House of Knowledge Library will be a living classroom dedicated to preserving and sharing the memory of the Siona people in their own words. A place of great educational value where children, young people, elders, visitors and travellers can come together around words, knowledge and ancestral teachings. Its structure will be symbolically supported by eight pillars that underpin Siona culture, forming a house where the language, spirituality, relationship with the land, the chagra, food and their way of understanding and caring for life can be discovered and shared.

The community has already embarked on this journey with great strength and dignity, but it needs support to make the House of Knowledge a reality. To build and fit it out, to promote the role of the women who have envisioned it, to involve young and old alike, and to provide it with the necessary resources so that what has been preserved for generations through the spoken word and experience may also find a home for the future.

Every contribution, however small, becomes a seed. A seed that helps to build this house, so that a young person can remain connected to their land, so that a grandmother can pass on what she learnt from those who came before, so that traditional knowledge can continue to tell stories, and so that a culture can continue to grow from its roots.

Supporting the House of Knowledge Library also means remembering that there are other ways of living in the world – slower, more mindful, more connected. It means helping to protect a legacy that belongs to the Siona people and which, shared with respect and in their own voice, reminds us of the richness of human diversity.

From Cosmovisiones Gaia and Ayahuasca Retreats, we invite you to see this project as something close to your heart, as an extension of the values we share: respect for life, cultural diversity and connection with the Earth.

If this resonates in your heart, we invite you to get involved. To donate, to share, to support.

Because caring for the Zio Bain community is, at its core, caring for the life that sustains us all.