The nomatsiguenga people live in the central jungle of Peru. We came to live with them.
The field is not the place where we “do missions.” It is the place where we live — with our family, our neighbors, the same sounds and the same questions they have.
The Antioquia Mission Base (BMA) is a community of missionary families located near the nomatsiguenga people, in the central jungle of Peru. It is not an operations base or a stopover: it is our home.
We arrived in 2025 with our children. What we found was a people with their own language, their own history and language-development work already under way — in which Miriam now takes part closely.
≈ 11,000
people of the nomatsiguenga community (2017 Census)
2025
year the Rosas Maya family arrived at the BMA
Pangoa
Valley
province of Satipo, region of Junín — and nowhere else
A community built so that fieldwork is not loneliness.
The Antioquia Mission Base has existed for decades. It is a community of families from different organizations who live together, near the nomatsiguenga communities, with a shared purpose: that this people have the Bible in their language and the resources to keep developing it.
Living at the BMA is not living in isolation: it is living in community, with neighbors from different countries, a school for the children, and the jungle in front of us.
A language that is still beating.
The nomatsiguenga are an Amazonian people of the Arawak language family. They live only in the Pangoa Valley, in the province of Satipo, region of Junín — in the basin of the Pangoa river and its tributaries. They are found nowhere else in Peru. They share territory with neighbors such as the Asháninka and the Matsigenka, but they are a distinct people, with their own language and history.
Nomatsiguenga is a living language, with young speakers and songs of its own, though today it is considered vulnerable. That is why language-development work matters: what Miriam does at the BMA helps the community itself sustain its language — literacy materials, workshops, local leaders who learn to read and teach in their own tongue.
For Pepe, born in Pucallpa in the Peruvian Amazon, this setting is not foreign. He knows what it is to grow up between two worlds, and that changes how he listens and accompanies.
Learning to read in your own language is recovering a part of yourself.
Miriam’s work with the nomatsiguenga begins with the most concrete thing: teaching people to read and write in nomatsiguenga. Not in Spanish. In the language they already speak, already think, already dream in.
That calls for materials that did not exist — primers, readers, glossaries — and workshops where the community itself learns to teach others. Because the goal is not to create dependence on missionaries: it is to build local capacity.
Production of pre-reading and early-reading materials in nomatsiguenga
Literacy workshops with adults from the community
Training of local teachers in bilingual methodology
Collaboration with SIL’s LD team for South America
Knowing is not enough. But it is the first step.
What happens at the BMA also happens in Colombia, in Brazil, in Mexico. Every person who prays, who gives or who shares what we do is part of that network. There is a place for you here.
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