Yanomami jungle clinic A return to the roots of Rüdiger Nehberg's commitment: a hospital for the Yanomami to mark the association's 25th anniversary.
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25 years of TARGET e. V. - a hospital for the Yanomami
2025 is a special year for TARGET e. V.: 25 years of dedicated work in the service of indigenous peoples and in the fight to protect girls from genital mutilation. To mark the anniversary year, the association is returning to the original roots of Rüdiger Nehberg's commitment to human rights with an extraordinary project - to the Yanomami. They are the largest indigenous people in Brazil still living in their original state and also the best known. Their home is the largest protected area in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest: 9.7 million hectares of pristine jungle. They are the guardians of this huge primeval area and we support them in this. It's about the future of the Yanomami children - and the future of the world's children.
Rüdiger Nehberg - the founder of TARGET e.V. and long-time advocate of Yanomami rights - dedicated himself to protecting this people and their unique culture right from the start of his work in the 1980s. Today, more than 40 years later, TARGET e. V. is continuing its work with a pioneering large-scale project that provides the Yanomami with urgently needed, reliable medical care: The Yanomami Jungle Clinic.
The new hospital, which is being built in the Yanomami region, will be one of the largest and most modern medical facilities for indigenous peoples in the whole of Brazil. With 160 inpatient beds and a team of 50 professionals - doctors, pediatricians, nurses, laboratory technicians, indigenous health authority staff - it will be a center for health care and prevention for the Yanomami.
The logistical support for this ambitious project: Brazil's military is flying 550 tons of building materials for TARGET to the remote Amazon region free of charge to make construction possible in the first place, as there is simply no other means of transport.
Place for over 160 patients and 50 employees - TARGET's Yanomami jungle clinic.
Find out more about the construction of the jungle clinic here!
The Yanomami are the largest indigenous ethnic group in the Amazon region with an estimated 20-30,000 people. They live deep in the jungle in the Brazil/Venezuela border region. Their way of life is closely linked to the rainforest, which they have used for centuries for hunting, fishing and agriculture. Their culture is characterized by special body ornaments, traditional rituals and a deep spiritual connection to nature. The Yanomami live in round huts, often in large communities, and have preserved their way of life and traditions for centuries.
Their territory covers around 9.6 million hectares - an area twice the size of Belgium. It has been declared a protected area and thus left to the Yanomami for their sole use. Illegal intruders such as gold prospectors and the associated destruction of the rainforest as a result of ruthless gold mining have posed and continue to pose a growing threat. With the intruders come violence and diseases such as malaria or influenza, they hunt the game, sometimes devastate the fields and also settlements, thus destroying the livelihood of the Yanomami groups in the gold mining areas. Irreversible environmental damage such as the massive contamination with mercury used to extract gold is simply a disaster for people and nature.
This catastrophe leads to the next one. This is the limited access to medical care. For serious illnesses, often brought in by invaders, for which the indigenous people know no medicine, sick people often have to travel long distances to a health center or even to a hospital in a town outside their area. However, the city poses further major health risks for these people who are accustomed to nature and only know their traditional way of life.
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