Help Build Ayahuma Nete: A Shipibo Medicine Center Led by Maestra Delicia Arévalo
We’re raising funds to support the construction of Ayahuma Nete, a traditional Shipibo Medicine Center founded by Maestra Delicia Arévalo, a respected Shipibo Onanya. Maestra Delicia has dedicated her life to the healing traditions of her people, and this center will be a place where those teachings continue—rooted in Shipibo culture, led by Shipibo hands.
Named after the Ayahuma tree—a powerful and protective Master Plant—Ayahuma Nete will offer a safe, culturally grounded space for ceremony, learning, and deep healing. Your support will help bring this vision to life, and contribute to the long-term preservation and continuation of traditional knowledge.
We are raising funds to support the construction of Ayahuma Nete, a new Shipibo Medicine Center founded and led by Maestra Delicia Arévalo, a respected elder and healer from the Shipibo-Konibo peoples of the Peruvian Amazon.
About Maestra Delicia and Ayahuma Nete
Maestra Delicia sitting amongst Piñon Colorado, one of her most valued and respected plant teachers (2023)
At nearly 70 years old, Maestra Delicia brings a lifetime of experience, depth and care to her healing practice. She began training in plant medicine as a child, under the guidance of her father, Maestro Santos Valencio Miller, one of many renowned healers in her family. By the age of six, she had begun her first samá, a traditional Master Plant dieta that involves deep learning and relationship with the plants through isolation, fasting, and discipline.
After losing both her parents at a young age, she continued her studies under her maternal uncle, Maestro Mateo Arévalo, and has remained dedicated to this path ever since. For decades, she has served both her own Shipibo community and those from around the world seeking healing, rarely turning anyone away, regardless of their ability to pay. She is a mother, grandmother, and cultural caretaker, known for her humility, strength, and deep commitment to the values and practices of her tradition.
Maestra Delicia has never had her own maloka (ceremonial space) or Medicine Center to work from, often working for other centers or renting spaces to work out of. Now, she is building something lasting: Ayahuma Nete, a traditional healing center named after the Ayahuma tree, a powerful Master Plant known within Shipibo culture for its protective and grounding qualities. This center will serve as a place for ayahuasca ceremony, Master Plant dietas, plant vapor baths, traditional purgatives, poultices and other treatments from the Shipibo system of medicine. Her center will not only serve foreign visitors, but also Shipibo people themselves, who often lack access to safe and well-resourced healing spaces in their own territory.
A Community-Rooted Vision
Unlike many centers in the Amazon that are developed and operated by outsiders, Ayahuma Nete is Shipibo-led and owned, community-oriented, and grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction. Maestra Delicia is building this center in partnership with Jakon Kibi, a North American-based Shipibo medicine organization that supports the ethical and culturally grounded transmission of traditional Amazonian healing. Both Ayahuma Nete and Jakon Kibi are committed to decolonial values, centering Indigenous leadership and prioritizing access for BIPOC and underserved communities.
Maestra Delicia is also a member of ASOMASHK, a union of Shipibo traditional doctors formed in 2018 to protect their culture, organize politically, and respond to the challenges created by the growing international demand for ayahuasca and plant medicine. Through this work, she has become part of a broader movement to reclaim agency, resist cultural appropriation, and build systems of care that reflect the realities and needs of her people.
What Your Support Will Fund
The funds raised through this campaign will go directly toward the construction costs of Ayahuma Nete, including:
Completion of the ceremonial maloka
A home for Maestra Delicia and her children/grandchildren
A small cabin for her staff/assistants
8 cabins for visitors to her center
A kitchen and dining area
Water supply and plumbing infrastructure
A vapor bath house, chicken coop, and medicine preparation area
This is a long-term investment in cultural preservation, Indigenous sovereignty and increasing access for underserved communities to Shipibo medicine work of the highest level.
How to Help
You can donate directly through the GoFundMe campaign, and we welcome you to share this with others who believe in this work.
Your support, whether financial, material, or relational, will help us build something meaningful and lasting. Together, we are creating a healing center where Shipibo people are not sidelined but centered, where BIPOC guests are respected and valued and where the traditions passed down for generations are upheld with the care they deserve.
Irake. Thank you for standing with Maestra Delicia and us as we work together to bring Ayahuma Nete to life.