We gotta visit Malingas right now!

During 2019 summer, Malingas Town’s Mayor Jesús María García Varillas saw how the season rains increased dangerously the load of San Francisco Creek. Malingas is located in the southeastern portion of Tambogrande District, Piura Region.

The solution that García thought was to record a video for sending to the Whatsapp account of Lima-based RPP Noticias network. Then, she requested help to the men who were there seeing how the flow  grew each minute up. Who were around her belief she was losing the sense of the reality, until one took her seriously. He recorded the video, sent it to the network… and the impossible became fact: one day later, the then anchorwoman Josefina Townsend contacted her for interviewing her live. If the video became a national trend on social media, the coverage she got to hold her as a top story for two weeks, provocating the reaction of the Peru’s President Martín Vizcarra himself, who arrived to Malingas and promised to build a bridge over San Francisco Creek for 2020.

But, the mayor thinks it is necessary to step beyond ahead. Learned about the work FACTORTIERRA.NET did in 2009-2011for putting the community on the map, she contacted Fernando Carrasco (her contender in the last municipal election) and requested him for information. Eventually, Fernando contacted me and arranged a meeting between the mayor and me, what happened on May 23^rd and basically consists in activating a García’s idea called “Creating the Malingas Brand”, one of her campaign promises.

The mayor’s idea matches so much with the Malingas Initiative, what granted FACTORTIERRA.NET the 2011 Environmental Citizenship National Award to the Best Media Campaign, given by the Peru's Ministry of Environment and Peru’s Catholic University. So, what comes up next is integrating efforts and seeing how to update what our initiative was and launching it in a most ambitious direction with the Malingas Town Municipality, that joins 20 villages.

In the beginning, the mayor and I have talked about anchoring on rural tourism plus a strong media campaign. But, we have stil to validate it with the rest of the community, so her office is going to call it for a meeting-workshop when we will learn the new communitarian map and see what we can do priority or what doesn’t.

García and I are very enthusiastic about the idea and we are going to pull itfor becoming it real. Obviously, we will keep you informed. Please, leave me any question on the comments box or my Twitter account.

The photo of this post was taken by Francesco Navarrete.