As much as I am not fond of being a tourist, this past week with Honey was pretty fun. Our days were packed full of travel and adventure.
We went straight from the airport to Coban on her first day. The next morning we headed straight to Semuc Champey to see some waterfalls and jungle. Honey was the photographer as I jumped off 10 meter cliffs, swung into rivers, swam through caves, and tubed down the river. Beyond those adventures, our hotel also didn't have hot water and we had to ride in the back of a pick up truck back to town!
On the third day we ventured over to Rio Dulce, a tourist town full of rich ex-pats living on their yachts and floating from port to port. The area was really pretty and we got to take a boat tour the next day to Livingston which is the port town where the 'garifunas' live. Honey felt bad for a dog who came to visit us and insisted on giving her a granola bar. The dog very much appreciated it but proceeded to follow us and started to get a little pushy. Then we headed back to Antigua for a night before heading out to Lago Atitlan where we took a tour of three villages and got to see the damage caused by the algae bloom that has turned the beautiful clear lake brown and chunky. In Santiago Atitlan (one of the villages) we were talked into taking a '5 site tour' and despite my reluctance to do it, it was well worth it. We got to see the Peace Park where 13 people were killed on December 2, 1990 by the army that was occupying the town. We also got to see an area of town where 1500 people were killed at the base of 2 volcanos when landslides caused by Hurricaine Stan (2005) covered the town.
The next morning we were off to the Chichi market, this largest and most popular market in Guatemala. After a week of waiting, Honey was finally able to do some shopping for the artisan goods that she had been admiring all week. I was her translator/price negotiator...we were usually able to cut down prices by 30-50%. Heading back to Antigua for her last couple of days in town, we went to the AWARE sterilization clinic on Friday then finished up with a few more souvenir purchases at the Antigua Mercado Artesenia and visited all of the churches/tourist sites in Antigua on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, Honey had to head back to the snow and 20 degree temperatures in Michigan today and I will be headed that way in less than three weeks!
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 14th 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!
Today is Dia Mundial del Animal. It is a day to think about animal welfare and offer education. Have you hugged a dog today? There are many dogs in Guatemala that have never and will never be hugged.
I had planned on making an event for Animal AWARE today until we found out that AWARE has recently grown a group of supporters that had already planned an event for October 7th. The are holding a trova concert in the capital with a raffle, a flea market, and lots of information about AWARE donations and adoptions. I'm sad I can't be at the event but I wish them the best of luck and hope that many AWARE dogs will either be adopted or sponsored as a result of the festival!
The new support group also has big plans for the future including restarting educational programs for children to encourage animal sterilization and human treatment, sponsorship follow-up photos so sponsoring families can see updates on their dog every month, AWARE tours, and continued sterilization clinics all over Guatemala. I am really excited to see some organization coming to the AWARE system and hope that this group will consider making themselves sustainable by planning a long-term future for AWARE administration.
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of computer work. When I first got back I spent a week typing up my notes from the 10 day journey, following up with the community on some internet research, writing my the blog, and trying to start my report.
Volunteers' House Project In the second week, I found myself unproductive with computer work and started to get antsy to do something. So, I spent the beginning of the week hunting for materials for and making a present (pictures to come after the gift has been delivered). Then, Danielle, a new housemate, and I started making plans to build a compost box and vegetable garden in the CasaSito yard.
Compost: Here in Antigua fruit and vegetables are soooo cheap that it's hard to not eat fresh produce for every meal and snack. However, as a by-product of this healthy eating, we also produce a lot of food waste when we peel our bananas, core our apples, scrape seeds out of our papayas, or find an unrecognizable rotted eggplant in the back of the fridge. Being accustomed to having a compost pile, it pained me every time I had to throw perfectly decomposable food waste in the garbage (I don't even know where the garbage here goes when it leaves our front door). Danielle had the same trouble throwing away food. Together, we decided that we were in desperate need of a compost pile and we started researching how to get the worms and how to build the box.
Garden: But what would we do with all the compost. We could sell it as a CasaSito fundraiser...who's going to buy rotten food? Well, what can you do with compost other than fertilize a garden anyway...we decided to also build ourselves a garden so we could grow staple fruits and veggies like limes, beans, tomatoes, and strawberries. I had been really excited about the plastic bottle wall I had seen implemented in Santa Cruz and wanted to use that as the model. After starting to think about materials and how we would have to buy wood anyway to make the mold to pour the cement (defeating the purpose of only using recycled materials since we could just use the wood to build a box instead of using the bottles and cement), we decided to change the method a little bit. In the end, we decided to alternate between wine bottles and cans. The wine bottles would be filled with trash and the cans would hold flowers intended to keep the bugs away.
Recycling: We were so excited to get started that we went out to all the bars in Antigua in search of their empty wine bottles that would have otherwise been thrown away. I am going to pick up all the bottles today. We also went to the local vivero (the English Gardens of Antigua) to start pricing plants and soil. We also visited a local construction site rumored to have a mountain of used wood that we could use to construct our compost box (sure enough...literally a mountain). Danielle is going to hunt down some worms while I'm home for a month.
Proposal: In the midst of the excitement we submitted an official proposal to Alice and Amanda, the CasaSito team and they loved it. In the end, the only garden materials we will need to pay for are the wire to attach the bottles, the wire mesh for the compost box, the plastic lining for the garden, some nails and staples, prepared dirt (although we will get most from the construction site), and the plants themselves. The whole project should cost less than $40.
Unfortunately, the project may be put on hold while I'm home for a month but hopefully we can get the compost box started so the worms can start working.
Moon Festival Yesterday happened to be the Chinese Moon Festival which is celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the year. Therefore, there is a full moon. The story is that a woman stole her husbands elixir and flew to the moon where she continues to live in a palace with a rabbit and can be seen dancing on the moon during the Moon Festival.
The celebration is much like 4th of July with family gatherings, grilling, and fireworks. We started cooking at 5PM and the celebration went on for hours. Melissa, my Taiwanese housemate invited her friends and I invited Julio. We grilled veggies and meat and stuffed peppers and followed up the meal with way too much sugar. It is tradition to eat Moon Cake while watching the full moon. It also happened to be Agnes' birthday so we had cheesecake and chocolate cake too! I am really excited to be going home tomorrow for a month! I will be able move forward with HiA so I can go back to Samox in November with a proposal to move forward with a project.
It’s been noted that my blogs are too long. So I will post only a short summary of my past two weeks in Samox San Lucas but I would be thrilled to talk about it more (please).
So, I left the beautiful, volcano views of Antigua for the rainy, rural, unelectrified, waterless community of Samox San Lucas in Alta Verapaz, approximately an hour outside of Coban.
I
I V
Community
Samox San Lucas is a community of 86 families with about 500 people split across three zones. They came to their current land as refugees in search of farmland in the mid ‘80s. While the government was responsible for finding and supporting land for the refugees, the land is still owned by a woman in Coban who lets them live and farm there until they can figure out a way to officially buy it.
While some community members have stores or grow food animals, most of the community members are farmers harvesting corn, beans, coffee, and cardamom.
They are only crops to harvest between September and April. One amazing community member sold two cows in order to construct the towns first 'pescaderia' (tilapia fish farm).
The community appears to be super organized with their six community committees but that brings along its fair share of politics and chaos which I got to experience while I was visiting.
New committee: Comite Consejos de la Comuindad
Used a modification of the Logical Framework Analysis to list and prioritize community problems, potential solutions, and the necessary resources. Top three to investigate first.
§Business/agriculture
§Water infrastructure
§Improved Stoves
My biggest challenge in Samox was getting the community to appreciate sustainability and not develop dependency. They just started receiving outside aid over the past few years from several organizations including CasaSito, FONAPAZ, Centro de Salud and Asociacion Bautista K’ekchi’, the Peace Corps, Mi Familia Progressa, Euro-Solar, Rotary International, and Health in Action. They are starting to take advantage of these organizations and seem to be losing the energy to make change for themselves. The work I did with the committee aimed to reverse the growing paternalism by asking them to make their own goals and determine how to achieve them. By the end of the week, I think the message started to reach a few community members who had been frequently asking what HiA was going to bring to the community.
Telesegundaria
I went to SSL partially as a CasaSito representative to support the secondary school. A community committee of concerned fathers have struggled to get a secondary school up and running for their kids and others from surrounding communities. They have been fortunate to received support from CasaSito and a local man who has experience in school development projects.
CasaSito has helped to secure funds for the TV and DVD player that define a secondary school, teacher funding, some classroom supplies, and are currently in the progress of securing land and funds for a new secondary school and teacher salaries. They are struggling especially with enrollment. In order to receive funding from the government, they need to maintain a minimum of 25 students in each class.
Water updates
Back in February, HiA implemented some Biosand filters in the schools to encourage tooth-brushing and hand-washing with purified water. Since then, the elementary school has stopped using their filter because it started smelling like gas (that have students bring the influent and oftentimes water containers may be reused gasoline containers). The middle school still uses their filter daily but only for hand-washing since they don’t brush their teeth at school. It would be great to know if the filter is drinking quality so they could drink water after recess. I unsuccessfully tried to test the filters (I didn’t have the right Petri dishes for the test kits).
Since HiA was in town, Rotary International donated water filters for every classroom in the primary school. They consist of stacked buckets with 2 ‘candelas’ (activated carbon filters). The filters need to be cleaned at least once a month and the ‘candelas’ replaced annually. This is the reason they are unsustainable and not practical for this community…the community has been told that the candelas cost Q365 each (x2/filterx8filters=Q5840/year)…a ridiculous expense for a community of farmers that make about Q15/day.
Independence Day
On September 15, 1821 Guatemala gained its independence from Spain. Guatemalans go all out to celebrate their freedom. Two weeks before the event, street vendors took advantage of the patriotic season by selling Guatemalan flags for all purposes. The week leading up to I-day, SSL-ians started spending their entire school days doing patriotic art projects.
Finally, the I-day events started the night before with the Niña y Señorita de Independencia pageant. The men spent the whole day building and decorating a stage on the school grounds which would have a large stereo and lights powered by a generator for the special occasion.
The competition, the girls basically need to wear traditional clothing and do the slow, lonely Marimba dance up to the stage where they explain their message to the audience. I served on the judge’s panel for the Señoritas and my favorite (2nd place winner) had a great message for the community, saying that women have the same rights and abilities as men.
The competition was interluded with performances from students in each grade including poetry, a Mayan futbol match (the kind where they light a soccer ball on fire and kick it at each other), dances, a reenactment of Guatemalan parties (with pushy millitary-men and police, drunkards, and all), and song...Samox is definitely not known for its Grammy winning singers...
The event was followed by some festive merengue dancing...
...and, much to my dismay, the slaughter of a one year old bull...
After the music stopped around 2AM, the children stayed up through the night playing fútbol in the schoolyardwhile the men started cooking the meat and chicharrones to share with the community the during the I-day festivities.
I-day itself was a big day for SSL because it would be the culmination of a month-long fútbol tournament where two SSL teams would compete for the trophy and pride. While miscommunication caused me to miss the game itself, the important part of that day was that people from communities all around SSL came to watch. With this, the telesegundaria had the opportunity advertise the middle school in hopes of increasing enrollment.
Following the fútbol game there was more music and the community chowed down on the 1000 pound bull.
I offered to help wash the dishes in the pila with the women…only to realize that the job entailed scraping lard (which reminded me of the butter mixture they sell for popcorn) off of bowls.
A local family
During my 10 days in Samox, I gradually made myself at home with a local family and they were a good resource for a lot of community information. Olivia is a 32 year old mother of 5 very unique children ranging in age from 2 to 16 and wife of a sawmill worker who has attempted some international travel but was kicked out of Spain and never made it to the States.
And the dog...Ca'an (he was just a puppy when HiA came in February)
With this family, I learned to bathe in the river, wash clothes in the river...
...desgranar corn...
...and tortillear (make tortillas)...Sharing nearly every meal with Olivia and her family, I left SSL craving homemade tortillas and beans.
ABK-Asociacion Bautista K’ekchi’/Ministerio de Salud collaboration
I met and worked with Rosaura (who happens to be the sister of Olivia), the field technician that offers monthly health classes to over 90 mothers in the community. The organization aims to promote socio-economic development in the country. Rosaura’s health lessons aim to teach the most basic hygiene and nutrition and the women seem to enjoy them. Some issues with the COCODE have made Rosaura threaten not to return. This partnership also brings a nurse to the Centro de Comvergencia in the community once a month to offer clinic services to mothers and children under 5 years of age. During the rest of the month, the associations keep the room well stocked with preventative medicines and antibiotics for the children. They have trained a community member on how to assess basic illnesses and distribute the free medications and conduct a monthly weigh-in of children under 2.
The association has also set up an emergency plan for the community including a fund where community members donate Q2/month and can borrow money in case of emergency.
·Formed in 1991 to implement social development programs to benefit kids, families, and communities in general especially kids under 5, rural women, older adults, and the disabled. Colom’s wife and her team have developed new programs and re-vamped the old to bring a large scale sustainable and self-sustaining change to these populations to combat poverty and underdevelopment.
·SOSEP has two sectors: Hogares Comunitarios which provides home, education, and food for street children and Creciendo Bien which promotes improvements in health, education, and nutrition and opportunities for women through community self-management to be able to support the family.
·To use the programs offered by SOSEP, the community would need to take a written proposal for funds, materials, or education. We have considered requesting help from SOSEP for improved stoves but I really think the community needs to know why they need them first in order to write a powerful proposal.
The program is funded by the European Union and the Guatemalan Ministry of Energy and Mines. The goal is to bring sun and wind energy to rural communities while supporting education and health. The participating communities (of which Samox is one) will receive:
·Electricity and communication
oSolar panels
oSatellite antenna for Internet connection
oSatellite telephone
·Education:
o5 laptop computers
oPrinter
oProjecter
oLights
·Health
oRefrigerator for vaccines
oWater filter
oLights
FONAPAZ (El Fondo Nacional para la Paz, http://www.fonapaz.gob.gt/)
Created in 1991, it’s goal is to develop and implement projects to eradicate poverty and extreme poverty. It aims to construct homes in rural areas, government buildings, community meeting centers, sport fields, develop educational and recreational programs, donate roofing material and accessories for rural construction, provide nutritional aid, build and supply schools, aid Peace projects, and other projects requested by President Colom or his wife. They serve as a direct link between COCODEs in the rural communities and the President of Guatemala because communities used to have to go to their local Municipality for support and would often be rejected because of the extreme racism and corruption on the regional government level.
In Samox specifically they have started donating something annually. The women’s committee secretary fills out the application and gets it stamped by the COCODE. This year they applied for pilas and haven’t heard anything back yet. They can only apply for one project at a time. In 2008, each family was given a gas stove and a tank of gas. (Alice told me that they often receive material donations from foreign countries rather than funds so FONAPAZ sometimes just hands out what they receive even if it’s not best suited for a particular community. However, when they do have funds to spend, they seem to do a good job.) Earlier this year, they donated hand mills.
Mi Familia Progresa (http://www.mifamiliaprogresa.gob.gt/)
A government program to bring financial aid to impoverished famlies so they may receive a primary school education, preventitive health care, and proper nutrition. The vision is ‘a nation where every Guatemalan man and women may have the opportunity for a better life.’ They are currently supporting 41/86 families in SSL with Q300/month for the children. The program requires that the children attend school and the money can only be used for schooling and medicine and food for the children.
Other achievements
Rode standing up in the back of a pickup truck. Climbed a tree in the river to pick guava-like fruit. Reprimanded older men for abusing a dog.
Ate meals with only tortillas for silverware. Wore traje típico...
Camped alone in a village with no electricity or running water, ate PB&J dinners by candlelight (Lit matches!)... ...lived side-by-side with the creatures who made their home near my tent (Herded a cockroach out of my tent).
