I'm Ba-ack

Excited to come home to Guatemala after a quick month filled with work, Health in Action meetings, and wonderful weekends, I got to work right away. Since I got back two weeks ago, I’ve started to build the garden/compost area for the volunteer’s house with housemate Danielle, prepared for and attended a flower sale/CasaSito fundraiser, spent a week in Samox San Lucas, went on a vacation planning spree for Honey’s visit, and started fostering a dog.

Garden

While I was away Danielle was busy drinking…I mean…collecting almost 200 wine bottles from local eateries and constructing a compost box to house our pet worms. When I got back, we set to work on weaving together the wine bottles to form the ‘recycled’ wall of our garden. With both of us busy, we stopped there and plan to get to work today to get the rest of the garden together because we have lots of plants lined up and waiting for their place in the soil…

CasaSito fundraiser/flower sale

The plants came from the flower sale that CasaSito was beneficiary of on Saturday the 14^th of November. The American ex-pat who co-owns the local restaraunt, La Peña del Sol Latino, wanted to sell plants and flowers from her garden to benefit one of Antigua’s many NGOs. The sale, named Festival de Semilla de Education (The Seed of Education Festival), was a fun event with over 2000 plants for sale (hearing about the awesome festival, other businesses and ex-pats from around Antigua were eager to donate their own plants for the sale) and live music and food from the restaurant.

Samox San Lucas

After a month of HiA meetings and project selection in the States, it was time to do some follow up research and make a proposal to the community about the type of work we planned on doing. HiA was interested in picking up on the community’s interest in an agriculture educational/reform program linked into a business module which would be accompanied by sanitation education and follow up research for future programs in Samox. I entered the community with a list of questions to investigate throughout the week and with a plan to follow-up with the committee that we had started during my last visit.

I dove right into getting my questions answered by just hanging out with families, observing habits, and asking endless questions as we went about daily life in the community. While I felt like I was making great progress in the research portion of my trip, I was barely making any progress with the committee we created last time. In fact, only one committee member came to the first meeting and only two to the second. We tried a third time to hold a meeting to invite all of the committee members in the community (20-30 people) and no one come. I felt terribly unsuccessful by the end and a little frustrated with the community’s response to HiA’s attempts to work on educational programs in the community. I received an email today from a community contact who said they did end up having the meeting and are interested in the idea for community gardens…it’s a start but will need some significant follow up.

Coffee drying. Families grow it in their yards to drink and to sell.

Cleaning cardamom.

Washing ixtamal (corn for tortillas).

Rubber trees.

Cardamom.

At the same time, I spent the first two days with a representative, Alex, from Sustainable Horizons which is a for-profit organization that finds week-long projects around the world and proposes them as spring break and summer trips to American high school students. The students offer to implement a small development project with a price range of $1000-2000 (a good sum of money for a developing community…the community was particularly interested in this opportunity). Also, on the third day, CasaSito representatives came to move forward with the plans for the construction of a middle school. Following up that meeting, I met with the widowed, divorced, and single women in the community to look into the possibility of offering snack to the middle school students to encourage their attendance.

After seeing the community response to Alex and CasaSito’s projects, I was a little discouraged about the future of HiA in the community. As an organization that has tried to make a commitment to offering only educational resources (and no money), we are struggling to motivate the community to view education as an asset and to move forward on their own development projects (especially since they continue to have big projects just donated to them).

What I think the community needs is an overseer that coordinates all of the outside hands that do work or could potentially do work in their town. I feel like I have begun to serve that role but struggle to balance that and my intentions for HiA. I think where I can make progress in the community is to manage the groups that do work there and emphasize how important it is for them to do some sort of work before having the project implemented. For example, while Sustainable Horizons would have been satisfied with a report from me explaining potential projects in Samox, we have asked the community to write their own set of proposals and budgets. At the same time, this overseer could bridge the projects happening in the community so each organization will know what other organizations are already doing. For example, HiA often works on educational health modules in the community and not until I spent some time learning about the other programs there did I learn about the health worker who educates women monthly. After spending some time in Samox, I am beginning to realize that I have not really found a niche for HiA’s work there that both HiA and the community could agree on.

Vacation planning

The access to Guatemalan vacation planning online is basically non-existent. For all of the forums about past Guatemalan travels, very few of the travel agencies and hotels have websites on which you can plan and book trips. Honey and I finally got things planned out for her trip that starts THIS Friday! We will be traveling to Semuc Champey, Rio Dulce, Lago Atitlan, and the Chichi market with a possibility of checking out Pacaya Volcano if we feel up to it.

Foster mom

Patches is a mangy (literally) mutt from the streets of Guatemala who has been living at AWARE for a few months. He has a family ready and excited to adopt him in the US but he needs to get there and we need to be sure that he is well-mannered and used to living in a house. So far, he has been great with people and other animals and has only had one accident in the house…but he learned quickly.

I don’t understand how people can have dogs in the city…we went to the park to go potty and the groundskeeper told me that he wasn’t allowed to go on the grass…when asked where he was supposed to go to the bathroom, the man just pointed to the cement ground he was standing on. I had seen many dogs just go on the sidewalk before but that concept doesn’t make any sense to me. Most of the homes in the city have only cement floors…how are the dogs supposed to know the difference between going outside on the cement or going inside on the cement floor!?

Anyway, Patches has to go back to AWARE when Honey and I head off for our travels this weekend but I think he’s ready and excited to hop on the plane that will take him to his new family in the States.

What's next

The rest of this week will be filled with report writing for the fellowship I received from CICS. Honey arrives on Friday and we head out immediately for a week of travels. Once she leaves, I will have a week of down time again to finish reports and prepare for my final trip to Samox San Lucas during my fellowship period. Then CasaSito has a Christmas party, Brad comes, we make some progress in Samox, we have the CasaSito art festival, then it's already time to come home! Somewhere in there, I will have time to breathe...it'll be a relief to get back to the daily routine in Winter 2010!