Mountain Voices Website

The Panos Oral Testimony Programme has launched a new website which presents a collection of interviews gathered by and from communities in selected mountain and highland regions. To date more than 250 interviews have been recorded in local languages, and transcribed, translated and summarised. The testimonies come from communities in the western Himalaya of India, the Cerro de Pasco region in the Peruvian Andes, Mount Elgon in Kenya, the highlands of Ethiopia and Lesotho, Nepal, and from southwest and northeast China. Each collection is only a snapshot, and does not claim to be representative of entire mountain groups. But the range of individual voices does provide a vivid picture of highland societies, their changing physical and social environments, and their concerns for the future. The main content of the site consist of text summaries of each interview. Each summary presents a profile of the interviewee, an overview of the interview, and a detailed page by page description of the topics covered. The site also provides information about the locations where the testimonies were collected, and the partner organisations involved in the project; and the themes and concerns (with quotes) which emerge in each collection. The testimony summaries are accessible by region and by theme. It is easy, for example, to look through all the summaries in the Peru collection; or all the summaries in all collections relating to the theme of 'migration'; or all the summaries that relate both to Peru and the theme of migration. Sample themes include: changes in the environment; relations with lowland people; gender; the impact of resource extraction; traditional customs.