ESARIRI – Sustainable rural tourism that values indigenous communities

In this episode we’re getting to know Esariri – a new kind of tourism platform that allows people from all over the world to access virtual tourism experiences provided by indigenous and rural communities in Latin America. They also allow you to support these communities through buying their handicrafts, unique pieces that keep the most intimate part of their culture: the learning that is passed from generation to generation.

Esariri comes from “sariri experiences”. The “sariri” is a traveller in Aymara, and is an ancient role in charge of carrying ancestral knowledge from one place to another.

Host: Natalia is Colombian, a telecommunications engineer. She was not always an entrepreneur. For 13 years she worked in the corporate sector in a large multinational. Until she started to question what she really wanted to do. She started volunteering on weekends, until she finally decided to give it all up and travel the world volunteering. Natalia tells us about how the venture was brewing inside her, before it came to light.

Natalia: After a difficult process of letting go of many of my securities, I resigned and my plan was to go and do some volunteering around the world and connect with communities, so I traveled slowly. I started in China, where I volunteered with a foundation for children with motor disabilities. And well, I think that’s where my whole process of preparing for entrepreneurship started.

Initially I budgeted that this trip would last about 8 months and it lasted almost 3 years. In the first year I was volunteering in India, also in Australia, in the Philippines. When I returned to Colombia, I was supposed to go back to the corporate world. But after having lived what I lived during that year, I felt that I could not just stay there, I felt that there was something more and I did not want to go back to the corporate world yet but I wanted to create something that would generate impact.

Host: During her stay in Peru, Natalia stayed in Ayacucho, a small town in the mountains. Victoria and her husband were waiting for her there. Humble and generous, they set up a little English school for local children to learn the language. In exchange, they offered modest lodging to the volunteers who acted as teachers. There, Natalia discovered that they also had a handicraft workshop, where they taught other women how to weave and embroider so that they could use it as an economic activity. As the days went by, Natalia became aware of the problem faced by these communities.

Natalia: They learned this knowledge from their ancestors, from their people, from their parents, from their grandparents. But their children are no longer going to continue doing it because there is something about handicrafts: they are very seasonal. So when a lot of people go to Ayacucho during Holy Week, it sells, but the rest of the year it is very difficult to make a living from handicrafts. So the children have to go to the city and work in something else.

I have experienced this situation in many villages, where there are different ancestral knowledge that come from generation to generation, but they are reaching one generation and bang! They are lost because of the rural exodus.

The reason why they are lost is because of the rural exodus, because they have to go to the cities and they lose their language, their culture, their knowledge, everything. So that’s when I started to think about modelling the project I wanted to undertake.

I wanted to somehow generate a technological solution that could give some dynamism to the economy of these places, but that went hand in hand with the knowledge they had.

So I initially created a platform in which the communities could generate experiences from their territories, face-to-face experiences. For example, using what I experienced with these artisans of sharing, of seeing how they made their weavings or when I was invited to the house of a popular cook. And I would go in and she would show me how she made soup on firewood. And then we would have a very intimate chat. Especially in small towns and places which are located off the tourist route. We gave visibility to these people and gave them the possibility to get directly to people who I was sure were interested in living this kind of experience.

We consolidated the information and everything to start offering these experiences. In some cases, they already had them set up, but precisely because they were in places outside the tourist circuits, the travel agencies preferred to avoid them. When a tourist arrives in Argentina and Buenos Aires and asks what there is to do, they send them to Bariloche, they send them to Iguazú, but they have never sent them to the north of Argentina.

Although some were already offering these activities and had them set up and they were very nice, nobody knew they existed. So I said well, we have to start, at least someone knows that they exist and that there is visibility.

Host: Now we’ll listen to the voice of one of the first Esariri hosts. A host is a service provider, a person who lives in a community far from the traditional tourist circuits and has a lot of wisdom and stories to share.

Aura, Esariri Host: A very special greeting to everyone. My name is Aura Tisoy, from the Inga Community of southern Colombia. When Esariri arrives, we start a process and they support us with advice. As for the organisation of the virtual activities, we have critical advice also from experts so that the activity is presented in the most profitable way.

Host: Esariri is not only made up of hosts or experience providers, there is also a very important role for the ‘sariris’, explorers and mentors in charge of identifying potential hosts and helping them to structure the experiences and upload them to the platform.

Natalia: I wanted the experience I had had during my travels to be available to others. And we wanted me not to be the only Sariri, but initially the dream was a community of Sariris, of travellers like me, who would identify and get to know these people, these stories that are worth telling.

Wayra, Sariri: Hello, my name is Wayra, and I am a Sariri. Sariris are volunteers who are in charge of getting in touch with the communities to empower them and accompany them in the construction of their tourism ventures. Esariri for me is like a gift, a source of knowledge, of things that otherwise I would not be able to learn. Every time I come into contact with a community and I become aware of their projects, projects that are conscious of the development of their communities, their women’s groups, their youth, their elders, their children and their relationship with and care for Mother Nature. Each meeting is exciting, exciting, sometimes it even makes me want to cry because they are projects that are beyond beautiful.

I thought I came from a civilised world, but after meeting all these people, I really question what it really means to be civilised. There is nothing more civilised than them and their projects.

Host: While in 2019 the project was already underway taking its first steps, in 2020, the pandemic arrived and tourism was one of the most affected sectors. We are interested to know how they reinvented themselves and continued to create a positive impact in the communities.

Natalia: The project has been transforming. Let’s say, in an accelerated way because of the pandemic. So, if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, we would still be doing face-to-face tourism experiences and that’s as far as we would have gone. During the pandemic, my partner and I said: “we have to look for another solution because this problem isn’t going away any time soon”. And that’s when we launched our first online tourism experiences.

Basically we adapted those experiences, that some people had or that we were building, to the online world, giving the possibility that many more people could live this kind of experience. And without wanting to, we discovered that this ideal for making this knowledge visible, for giving these cultures visibility. And whatsmore were were able to achieve our goals more widely  because we could anyone in any time or place reach any place not only aimed at travellers who could only come and visit a certain place at a certain time – now we could reach the world.

We now have 18 experiences in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia.

We also realised in 2020 that this had a very strong educational potential, because, for example, through these experiences I myself discovered that in Colombia there are 65 indigenous languages, not just Spanish. I didn’t have the slightest idea for a year and I then saw it. The most beautiful thing is that this is still preserved. And behind a language, there is a whole culture. 

We started to do it with educational outings with schools. We have been doing it with families, with independent people, with independent consumers of culture and here we realised that the children are interested.

Once we had an experience with guaino – which is totally folkloric music in Peru. People say ‘young people only listen to reggaeton’. But here we saw that young people were delighted with folk music. So we have to remove that barrier so that children and young people have the opportunity to get to know other cultures.

During the pandemic, the communities called us and told us that the handicrafts were not selling. So we said: “we have to change this” and that’s when the idea migrated a little bit and became a platform that generates alternative solutions for these communities, allowing them to generate complementary income from their territories and with their own knowledge. And this is where virtuality helps us a lot. We recently activated the handicraft shop where they can publish their products.

Host: You could say that Esariri is a bridge between conscious consumers who value culture and rural communities, who need to sell their products to sustain themselves economically. Can you imagine a luthier from northern Argentina teaching you how to make Andean instruments or a Chilean artisan showing you in a video how to make a pre-Columbian whistle?

Natalia: The pandemic brought the possibility of bringing these experiences to people who cannot travel to live them in person, like Gladyz Zevallos Noratto, 86, who travelled all over Colombia without leaving her home. It is also for those who even want to reconnect with their culture, living in another place.

Diana, consumer of virtual experiences: Hello, my name is Diana Stefy Gutierrez, I am Colombian and I live in Pennsylvania, I am the mother of two little girls, I have enjoyed the Esariri experiences as it has brought me closer to my country this year that I have not been able to travel. But additionally, besides seeing the great landscapes, seeing our typical people, I have learned a lot about my history, I have learned how our products come out, I have gotten closer to the communities, my daughters have also enjoyed it, and with my husband we have shared my country.

Host: What we have heard so far sounds really incredible. Now, we asked Natalia what is needed for Esariri to grow and reach more people.

Natalia: To give visibility to the project so that people can buy their products.

We don’t like the big tourism conglomerates that get the big slice, but in our case, the communities always get the lion’s share of the income.

So, in order for Esariri to sustain itself, we need more sales volume. We, in the virtual experiences, give them 75%, and we keep only 25%, and with the handicrafts it is less, 15% for us and 85% for them. The point is to make this solution visible enough so that we can help them as much as we want to help them and make ourselves sustainable.

Host: We love this project and hope to be spreaders of this inspiring story. Finally, we asked Natalia about how she imagines the future and what her dreams are.

Natalia:

Above all, I imagine a future where all young people and children are proud of their own culture and are no longer ashamed of who they are.

Who don’t want to be who they are not. They do not want to look like what the Western world decides is best or what the Western world deemed as the future or so-called progress. Rather, they have recognised in themselves the value of their culture and their knowledge. And by recognising this, they have strengthened their identity and are no longer ashamed of it.