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‘Evil things do exist, beliefs of the Shuar Amazonian community’ by Lorena Ankuash Kaekat, a journalism student at the Salesian Polytechnic University of Cuenca, in Ecuador, won the 2023 RFI Reporting Award in Spanish. Her report is about an indigenous community in the Amazon where modern medicine and the practices of healers and shamans coexist.
“I am very excited by this great news,” said Ecuadorian student Lorena Ankuash, the winner of the 2023 RFI Reporting Award in Paris América.
“I have never gone to other countries and I have always wanted to. This award (from RFI) will allow me,” added the journalism student who will come to Paris this summer to do a month-long internship at Radio France International. , all expenses paid.
Lorena Ankuash is a member of the Amazonian Shuar community, which has made it easier for her to obtain sources for this report on the tensions between medical specialists and shamans. One of her interviewees is precisely a shaman who recognizes the advantages of Western medicine. “According to this Shuar shaman, what heals the patient is faith. Then it depends on the beliefs of each one; if the person believes in the specialist doctor or in the shaman,” adds Ankuash.
Mauricio Latorre, head of RFI’s Spanish service, stressed that the report seemed to the jurors “daring and original because it explores that sometimes delicate relationship between healers and modern doctors. In this sense, what a clinical psychologist says is particularly interesting to try to convince the members of that community not to limit themselves only to what the healers say, but also to open up to modern medicine”.
