07 March 1998

Bonn, Germany: "Where lies the illness, lies the cure" is the guiding principle of Takiwasi (the Singing House). The centre has existed in Tarapoto in Peru’s Upper Amazon since 1992. It aims to research an alternative therapy for drug addiction, based on traditional Amazon medicine. Michel Mabit worked there for four years, for the latter two as a UNV sponsored by the French Government.

For the last fifteen years or so, that region of Peru has produced coca leaves in quantity for the world cocaine market. But large amounts of the basic paste have found their way to the local market also, through payments in kind to young people who harvest, prepare and transport the crop. Easy to get hold of, cheap and full of the chemicals used in making the paste - which hasten addiction - the drug has become a scourge locally, too.

For centuries, Amazon healers have made use of the medicinal properties of the myriad plants in their jungle. Takiwasi has devised a treatment combining that ancestral know-how with aspects of modern psychotherapy. Following detoxi-fication with the help of strongly purgative plants, the patient is enabled over nine months through use of other psychoactive plants, periods of isolation in the forest and dieting to come to know himself and understand his dependence. Finally, psychological reinforcement in the shape of therapy via work and music, relaxation and com-munal life complete the treatment. Five years and 240 patients on, it seems effective.

So effective that Takiwasi was flooded with visiting experts and requests for information. Prior knowledge of Peru and twelve years in journalism led to Michel Mabit being drafted in to be in charge of communications, to progress the idea of establishing such centres elsewhere in Latin America. It wasn’t easy: Amazonia’s heat and slower pace, appointments rarely kept, roads turned to mud, different ways of doing things, the endless hours on duty given the team’s small size, the electricity failures, the humidity which wrecked equipment, insects eating the paper and nesting in the computers …. You had to be pretty adaptable. Despite which Michel managed to organise Takiwasi’s publications, videos and cassettes, to increase their mailing of magazines, flyers and posters, to set up a modern office, arrange visits for enquirers from all over the world and receive journalists and TV crews. Takiwasi were the first in the town to go onto Email. The project won a Markie Award in 1996 from the US National Foundation for Communication on Alcoholism and Addiction and was accepted as a Hannover 2000 Exposition exhibitor.

Beyond the immediate job satisfaction there was the fulfilment of seeing people put the infernal spiral of drugs behind them, although there were those who couldn’t free themselves despite continued promises never to touch them again. The experience gives Takiwasi a basis for preventative work in schools - which Michel Mabit feels should be extended, but will stretch the small team even more. For his part, he has now moved on to a second UNV assignment, to direct a drugs prevention programme in the Dominican Republic.