Our three aid organizations for the protection of the tropical rainforest are united under the umbrella name AMAZONICA:

INDIO-HILFE e. V. (1982), Stiftung AMAZONICA (2007) and AMAZONICA Akademie gGmbH (2015)

OUR PROJECTS

We do what needs to be done.

When it was founded in 1982, “we” were Mascha Kauka, her husband Uli Pohl, family, and friends—all from Munich.

This is how it began:
“Have you ever been to a ‘blank spot on the map’?” asks Mascha Kauka and begins to tell her story: “During a vacation in Ecuador, my husband and I canoed into such an area: unexplored jungle in the Andes above the Pacific Ocean.”

This is where we had a fateful encounter with the indigenous Chachi, river nomads who had never seen tourists before.

Because the chief’s family trusted us, we soon learned of the great danger facing the Chachi and their rainforest: the state had leased the entire region to logging companies, which demanded the resettlement of the indigenous population so they could cut down the forest undisturbed.

There was only one way to save them, and the chief’s son knew it: “the white spot,” their traditional settlement area, had to be surveyed by the state in order to obtain a legally valid title deed. “You are the first white people we trust, so you must help us. Let our land be surveyed,” Chief Tapuyo pleaded.

As you can imagine, we threw ourselves into the adventure of organizing and paying for everything so that the Chachi would not be displaced and the rainforest would remain standing.