Our story
How This Began
The idea was said out loud in 2018, and six years passed before there was a Foundation to put it in.
- 2018
- The idea, said out loud in the Andes
- Six years
- Between the idea and the first steps
- 2024
- The Foundation, and land at Taray
- 2025
- The first cuttings in the ground
2018, the Andes
A Walk
Hamid Jabbar had been working with Huachuma before any of this, and always in the same way: seated, indoors, turned inward. In 2018, in the Amazon, a friend asked whether he had ever taken it as a walk in the mountains, and gave him one name.
The name was Miguel Mendiburu, a Huachumero in the Sacred Valley. The first walk with him was at Kinsa Qocha, three lakes, high in the Andes. They had come straight from the jungle with no warm clothing, the climb is hard, and by the end of the day it was sleeting.
He was shaking with cold and stopped fighting it. He was not a religious person at the time, and that was when he first really connected with the idea of a prayer.
“So I surrender. If this is it, then this is it. And I surrendered into it, and all of the pain went away. And then I was just with him in his prayer.”
Hamid Jabbar
2018, Pachatusan
The Idea
The second walk of that trip went up Pachatusan, a long climb that opens at the top onto a view he has never been able to put into words. He started crying. What he was thinking about was his father, and the rest of the people he loves.
The feeling he came down with was that he had to bring those people there. The idea of a Huachuma Foundation was said out loud on the same trip.
Then everybody went home, and the idea sat like a seed, being watered by many prayers and intentions, as he puts it.
In the meantime, he planted.
A rule kept from 2018
One for One
In the same year he set himself a rule: one Huachuma into the ground for every time he worked with the plant alongside another person. He kept it for years before there was any organization to keep it for, and grew thousands of them from seed across a property in Arizona where his parents were living.
Raising Huachuma from seed is slow and exacting, and the seedlings need years of attention before they can look after themselves. When the house was sold he moved about fifty of the grown plants by hand to his own place in the desert. Within two months every one of them had been eaten. Water is scarce out there and a Huachuma is full of it.
2018 to 2024
Six Years
For six years there was no organization, no land and no plan. He went on working with the plant and went on planting it.
Travel to Peru became difficult around 2020 and stayed difficult for three or four years after that.
And the people he had first wanted to bring were not going to come. Letting go of that took a long time, and what came out of it was that other people could come instead.
2024 and 2025
The Garden
The first steps were taken in the summer of 2024. A crowdfunding campaign was opened to pay for the ground work, and land was acquired at Taray in the Sacred Valley.
The hillside was cut into terraces and walled to protect what would go into it. In the summer of 2025 a group went out and put the first cuttings in the ground, and among them was Dani Reardon, who had spent two years raising money for that hillside without having stood on it.
The Huachuma Foundation is an Arizona non-profit and was recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity in December 2025. The podcast started in August of that year.
Two years of talking about it, raising money for it and making posts for it, watching the walls go up and the land be terraced from the other side of the world, wondering whether it would really happen.
Dani Reardon
2026, northern Peru
At Chavín
In 2026 Hamid Jabbar and Dani Reardon traveled north to Chavín de Huántar, where this cactus appears in the stone carving of a temple that has stood for at least three thousand years.
Across the river from the temple is a garden one person has been planting for about twenty years. It holds thousands of mature Huachuma in precise rows and it can be seen through the trees from inside the temple. Miguel Mendiburu had spotted those cactus heads on an earlier visit and gone over to look, and he came back to the Sacred Valley with the idea for a garden of his own.
That garden is where the one at Taray came from.
The Work Now eight years on
Several hundred Huachuma are in the ground at Taray, on terraces built to hold five thousand. Miguel Mendiburu tends what is planted there and offers the prayers over the cacti.
Huachuma Wisdom first met in January 2026, as a way for all of us to come together. Enrollment for its 2027 season is open. A community education center comes after the garden, and where it will be is not settled yet.
