Andean Outreach Program - Netherlands Chapter
Welkom - Bienvenidos - Welcome -¡Jallallt’atäpxtawa!
The Andean Outreach Program - Netherlands chapter is an non governmental organization located in Amsterdam who strives to improve the lifes of Andean people through international volunteers.
Objectives
In addition to fundamental mission of the Andean Outreach Program to to promote sustainable community development and solidarity for the poverty stricken peoples of the Andes Mountains in South America, the AOP Netherlands has a stronge focus in the area of indigenous language advocacy.
The
Aymara People, Language, and Culture
Aymara valorization is complex and multi-faceted endeavor which has at its core indigenous literacy efforts . Although some may argue that as Aymara has a relatively large number of speakers, these efforts are unnecessary, but this is simply not the case. Quite to the contrary, it is important to introduce valorization efforts before the language becomes totally moribund for them to be effective.
Moreover, there are two principle observations which add more importance to the project:
(1) Aymara, contrary to the account in the literature, is not one uniform language, but a fabric of variants, some spoken by communities with merely dozens of people;
(2) The Aymara variants spoken in the isolated highland regions of Peru are on the verge of extinction. This owes to an array of socioeconomic and cultural reasons as well as detrimental monolingual government policies.
The simple fact is that in many communities, young adults have a rudimentary understanding of the language, teenagers can understand some but cannot speak, and children have almost no ability. If something is not done soon, many unique variants of Aymara will disappear and the impressive and fascinating diversity of the language along with all the cultural and folk knowledge will quickly fade with it. This represents a loss not just for the people themselves, but for humanity as a whole.
