Growth in APROSADSE

I left Guatemala City today to travel 1 hour into the highlands to the state of Chimaltenango where I wended up a long winding road to San Martín Jilotepéque. I was visiting APROSADSE, an organization that IDEX has been supporting for over 3 years now, and who has focused its programs on health, education and agroecology. When I arrived, I was invited to talk with 3 of APROSADSE's Board members to discuss the work of APROSADSE and the Board’s participation.

It's Nicomedes second year of being President of APROSADSE Board, but he has been participating in their programs for 25 years! A married man with 3 daughters, Nicomedes recognizes the positive impact APROSADSE has had on him. As a child he only finished fourth grade before he had to find work to help support his family. When he was a grown adult, he saw that APROSADSE was offering a long-distance education program for people over 15 years old to finish primary and secondary education. He took the opportunity and completed his secondary education. He's happy that he completed that education program and now he works as one of the health promoters in his community.

Perfecta and Marta were the two other Board members present, one a midwife and the other a health promoter, like Nicomedes. Marta, a single mother, was also inspired to participate in the long-distance education program, but only completed the 7th grade "due to circumstances of life," However, her training in health, provided by APROSADSE, was enough to help her find a job as an assistant nurse in a health clinic in Antigua, a popular tourist spot relatively close to Chimaltenango. Now she has returned to San Martín Jilotepéque to work with the Ministry of Health. What does she do there? Well, there is only one doctor who travels once a month to her community. They are called mobile doctors. For the rest of the month Marta is the doctor in her community.

Perfecta hasn't been able to go to school. Instead, she has been focusing on her work as a midwife to her community in the village of Varituc. As a Board member, she comes to all the training workshops that APROSADSE offers including health and agroecology. The health trainings have really helped the quality of her work as midwife. She received a midwife kit that APROSADSE distributed through their health program, which she is grateful for because now she has the proper tools to do her job.

Two years ago, when IDEX visited APROSADSE, the health program was just restarting (after a long period of hiatus) and served only 22 communities. Now they help 130 communities. Almost all the communities within San Martín Jilotepéque! Last year they trained 80 health promoters and 66 midwifes. In addition, they offered training in nutrition to 18 groups of 270 participants from the communities. They've been also strengthening their relationship with San Martin's health center to serve many more people in the town. One of the things that impressed me was that they remodeled their warehouse in the basement into a day care center so that the mothers can bring their children to APROSADSE's office when they want to attend training.

Not only a midwife, Perfecta is able to help her community with livestock rearing and some agriculture projects. Even though she does not work in agroecology herself, she can still help community members due to her knowledge that she acquired by attending to the agroecology workshops at APROSADSE. Last year, APROSADSE was able to train 22 agroecology promoters from 13 communities. Agroecology focuses on livestock rearing and transitioning from conventional farming to organic farming. APROSADSE also has a veterinary store at their office, which serves 416 people from 32 communities in curing animals, providing treatment and selling medicine at affordable prices.

In addition to the long-distance education program that Nicomedes and Marta participated in, APROSADSE has a scholarship program. They gave scholarships to 137 students last year to study primary and secondary education. Another activity APROSADSE carries out is a "summer" program (summer here is from October to December) to 181 secondary school students, giving classes on a range from subjects such as environment, micro-enterprise and sexual transmitted diseases. Like FUNDAESPRO, APROSADSE also involves the parents, and have met with 80 parents 10 times last year to talk about different subjects such as nutrition, environment, interpersonal relations, pregnancy, etc.

Through their agroecology program APROSADSE implements a microcredit initiatives, where they promote group savings and facilitate monthly technical assistance to each group. When APROSADSE distributes microcredit to a group, it does it in one of two ways:
1) Provide microcredit to a group for a group income-generating project; or
2) Provide microcredit to a group, but for individual income-generating projects.

APROSADSE also supports individual microcredit outside of a group, these are approved by the Board. They target community members who can't form a group in their community yet want to receive a microcredit to carry out an agroecology related income-generating project, usually after attending APROSADSE's workshops. One of the great things about APROSADSE is that their workshops are open to everyone, and that's how many people come to learn about APROSADSE's other programs.

These are not all the activities that APROSADSE is carrying out, but already this can show how they've grown since the last time that IDEX visited them. I'm looking forward to meeting the people that benefited from these programs when I start my community visits tomorrow.
Photo credit: Marlon Garcia

Health, Housing, and Painting the Town Red

I woke up early today to visit a community near the city of Patulul in the state of Escuintla, about 2 hours southwest of Guatemala City. ISMU was taking me to a community called Canton Luciana where around 145 families were living near a latex rubber plantation.

ISMU was invited to come to the community to carry out a needs assessment survey to see where they can best support these families. The two crucial areas that needed to be addressed the most was the improvement of housing and health issues.

A previous government program had started training 5 women in this community to become health monitors. However, the government program only trained them in children's health, and not any of the diseases that afflicted adult community members such as diarrhea and respiratory health issues that could be prevented. As a result, ISMU coordinated a series of preventative health workshops to train health monitors. Trainings included a practical workshop to make herbal shampoos, creams and cough syrups.

ISMU also organized the visit of an expert to come to the community to teach and facilitate themes requested by the community such as conflict resolution.

For the longest time there was a conflict between two families that had been a caused by a community member's chicken trespassing to the neighbor's garden to eat some flowers. No one knew the origin of this conflict until the conflict resolution workshop. By facilitating the discussion the community members learned how to express themselves better and resolve these conflicts sooner rather than later.

Another requested topic to be addressed was sexually transmitted diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS. In most communities in Guatemala, HIV/AIDS is still a taboo subject. When someone dies of HIV/AIDS, people will usually not reveal the true cause of death. Instead, they'll say the person died of severe bronchitis, or any other illness that exacerbated the HIV/AIDS patient. The health monitors did request specifically to have this theme be taught separately for a group of women, men and youth.

These talks in general were considered a success, as more than 100 people attended each session. The session with the worst turnout still attracted 75 people. More people would have come, but it was raining. After these sessions, the health monitors follow-up with private conversations with the community members to see if they had more questions or comments about the topic.

ISMU also addressed was the housing improvements. ISMU hired an architecture to design blueprints for a 42 meter squared house that was both affordable and utilized as much space as possible. ISMU then coordinated with FONAVI (National Fund for Housing in Guatemala) to fund this project. FONAVI finally agreed to provide funding but had some strict requirements including collecting paperwork of each family who wanted to be part of this project. At first, the community members didn't believe that this project would happen and didn't bother to get their paperwork together. But once they saw many families applying, people started to find their paperwork. As a result ISMU improved a total of 91 houses.

One curious requirement that FONAVI asked for was that the roof of each of the new houses would be painted red, so that when the governor would fly on his jet plane, he could see all the houses he helped construct through FONAVI, and thus, feel proud of himself. Really, I'm not kidding!

Tomorrow I leave Guatemala City and head to the highlands to visit APROSADSE.
Photo credit: Marlon Garcia

Meeting CIAM

Gladys and Lupita of CIAM

On the outskirts of San Cristóbal lies the office of El Centro de Investigación y Acción de la Mujer Latinoamericana (Latin American Women's Center for Research and Action, or CIAM), one of IDEX's catalyst grantees. Even the taxi had a difficult time to find this place but once I arrived, I found myself in a beautiful house where CIAM's staff is busy working with different rural development programs for improving women's quality of life.

Gladys, CIAM's Director of Programs and Lupita, the Financial Administrator, sat down with me to talk about their organization. Unfortunately, the field staff could not accompany us as they were busy working in different meetings that day.

Gladys shared with me the programs at CIAM, which all integrate a genders lens and a holistic approach. The 4 main programs are: Health, Agroecology, Women's Issues and Human Rights. A fifth program is in progress which will concentrate on researching these four thematic issues to facilitate even better their discussions with community members.

CIAM works in 3 areas in two states in Chiapas (Amatan and Hiutiupan), bordering the state of Tabasco, a very neglected area. It takes a day to drive there. However, once a month, the field staff (in charge of health, agroecology and women's issues) drives there together to stay for almost a week, during which they give workshops to these communities on the issues mentioned in the parenthesis. After their week, they return to CIAM's office to evaluate how it went and then use that evaluation to improve their training for the next month.

"Why did you choose to work with these states in Chiapas, especially since they are so far away?" I asked Gladys.

"These areas used to be filled with coffee plantations and the coffee there used to be exported. In 2000, the price of coffee went down globally and at the same time, a strong plague attacked the plantations, leaving the people in these communities in a difficult crisis. As a result, they need so much support now, especially since they are in an inaccessible area.

Also, the cultural trends that existed on these plantations have continued today within the families. For example, there still is the tradition of women being stolen at 13 or 14 years old to get married to the man who stole her. Another example is how daughters are being sold today for a sack of sugar and other foods."

"What?! That still exists?" I was shocked!

"Yes, in the 21st century, those customs still exist today and not many people know about it."

If you can't even imagine how these customs work, I highly recommend you to watch the movie "Like Water For Chocolate." At least that's they way I can picture these traditions.

Gladys continued:
"There's also a need to preserve the Zoque culture. Its identity is being lost as the new generation don't want to speak the Zoque language anymore. Instead, they want to celebrate the Spanish holidays and we have seen many of them consuming high amounts of alcohol. This is a reason why we are emphasizing now workshops on "masculinity" where we bring men together to talk about their role in the community and how they perceive women to bring more awareness on gender equity."

In spite of being an organization that works on low economic resources, CIAM is very organized in terms of their planning and evaluation. Each January, CIAM's staff plans their activities for the entire calendar year! In order to schedule these activities, CIAM sends the communities they work with a questionnaire that will tell CIAM what are the issues requested so that CIAM can plan for workshops that address the community's needs. What I really like is that their plan depends mostly on what is requested by the communities.

But my favorite aspect of CIAM is what they have done with their human rights program. CIAM has created a 3-year school program that has a focus on leadership development and invites 30 women from different social organizations to participate to become better leaders for themselves and their communities. The school started in 2004 and currently, they are about to start the second generation of graduates this fall.

I had hoped to visit one of their workshops but that was not possible, given that I will not be here when they have their next workshop. In any case, I could tell from my conversation with CIAM´s staff, and the photos and materials they showed me the hard work that CIAM is doing to support women and neglected communities in Chiapas.

Kat

Catching up with K'inal

Near the market of Santo Domingo I took a colectivo (van) to head towards IDEX's partner, K'inal Antsetik's Leadership Center. Both the offices of K'inal and the Mayan weavers cooperative called Jolom Mayaetik are based there.

Getting to K'inal's offices turned out to be not so easy. The colectivo dropped me of in the middle of the street. "Just cross the piece of land ahead and watch out for the dogs! They like to bite people," was the last thing I heard the van driver say. I found myself ultimately on Calzada de la Escuela and of course, none of the numbers are in order. A woman that looked out of place was walking nearby, so I thought maybe she would know what I'm looking for. Indeed the European woman showed me the way to K'inal. I knew I was there once I saw the pink building.

The first person I met was Celerina, the President of Jolom Mayetik's Board. She is in her last year of presidency and is already training young indigenous women to become part of the Board the next year when she leaves.

"What do you want to do after leaving your president's role?" I asked her.
"I want to study medicine to become a nurse. I want to be able to support women in the communities in issues of health. That has always been my dream."
"How is it, being president for the cooperative?"
"It has been hard but I have learned so much on the way. At first I told the cooperative that I didn't want to be the president, but no one really paid attention to me, because the next thing I know I was the president! But now I'm glad because I have the opportunity to learn to speak to people and to travel and get to know other countries. I now can travel to other countries by myself."

I then met with Micaela, K'inal's Director and Rosalinda, the Health Program Coordinator. Micaela talked about her ongoing work in supporting Jolom Mayaetik cooperative and how excited she is to start a new program for indigenous young women at K'inal.

K'inal is hosting for the first time 3 young women from the community of Marques de Comillas to stay at K'inal's Leadership Center to continue their education in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Also, at the end of August, they will be receiving a 17 year-old young woman who will be studying law at a nearby university. Her community will be collectively paying her tuition fees with the commitment of her returning to the community to defend their rights as indigenous people.

Rosalinda gave me the details of the health program at K'inal that started in 2006. By March 2007, Rosalinda had visited 3 times each group of women belonging to Jolom Mayaektik cooperative to create a needs assessment of what health-related issues to cover in the program. At the same time, she's been accompanying indigenous women to doctor and gynecological appointments to be the translator from Spanish to Tzotzil so that these women can have access to healthcare in the city.

As if that wasn't enough, Rosalinda just finished her first semester of studying alternative medicine where she plans to get her bachelor's degree.

"Why did you want to study alternative medicine?" I asked her.
"At first I thought I wanted to study accounting because of my experience at Jolom Mayaetik. [Rosalinda is the former President of Jolom's Board.] Then I thought I wanted to study computer science but how am I going to help women directly with a computer? I chose alternative medicine because it will allow me to have the skills to support directly women in the communities. That was the most important decision maker for me."

After our conversation, Rosalinda showed me her garden, where she is growing various medicinal plants. She's still learning but she is hoping that whatever she learns she can pass on to indigenous women in Chiapas.

Kat