Posts Tagged ‘EduPaz’
IDEX Program Officer, Katherine Zavala, recently traveled to Mexico to spend time in the field with our grantees there.
I met up with Javier and Jose, staff of EduPaz, in Comitan, Chiapas to visit community groups who are participating in EduPaz’s Economic Solidarity (Microcredit) Program. I got into EduPaz’s car, a traditional Mexican red bug, (VW Beetle) and rode 90 minutes through stunning green mountains to a community called Amparo Agua Tinta.
Amparo Agua Tinta is home to 700 families, approximately 3500 people. The area offers few job opportunities and EduPaz estimates 25% of the men have migrated to other cities in Mexico, such as Cancun, and also across the border to the United States. Those who stay grow maize and beans and raise cattle. EduPaz is the only non-profit organization working in this community.
Amparo Agua Tinta has a painful history. It was a community that was part of the autonomous municipality of Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom), which was dismantled by the paramilitaries in 1998. Many people were injured, threatened and some were tortured.
Families are still traumatized by this experience and find it hard to trust people, including their fellow neighbors. To build trust, a key part of EduPaz’s work has been to mediate between community members to bring reconciliation back in Amparo Agua Tinta.
One way that EduPaz does this is to encourage people who want to apply for a microcredit loan from EduPaz to do so as part of a community group, rather than as an individual. Currently, EduPaz works with 3 community groups. One of them is a 8 women-member cooperative of a grocery store within the community called “One Hope Ahead” that initiated this year.
Leonol Vazquez Mirano is part of the “One Hope Ahead” group. She is 53 years old and has 3 daughters. Together they discussed the idea of starting their own family grocery store. Leonol already had been part of a community group and had worked with Edupaz. The group had sold second-hand clothes. This experience taught Leonol about responsibility, coordination and consensus building, and inspired her to take on a new group project of a grocery store. In its first 6 months, the store is going strong and the cooperative is generating 500 to 600 pesos ($38 to $46) a day. The cooperative members are also taking the opportunity to start saving their own money by each contributing 30 pesos ($2.30) each month.
The other 2 groups are formed by members who are doing individual income-generating projects but meet once a month to share experiences on how their projects are advancing. Most of them are raising livestock (pigs, sheep or chickens).
Raul Sanchez Lopez invested his microcredit in a roadside store. His store is well situated and attracts both drivers passing through the town and neighbors. He’s done so well he decided to invest a small part of his microcredit in raising egg-laying hens as an experiment. He soon hopes to sell fresh eggs at his roadside store.
It was wonderful to meet these community members and learn more about their different projects.
IDEX Program Officer, Katherine Zavala (pictured 2nd on the right), is currently in Mexico on field visits to our grantees there.
Today I went to Comitán de Dominguez, where our partner EduPaz is based. Comitán is 90 minutes south of San Cristóbal de las Casas on the way to the Guatemalan border. EduPaz had planned to take me on a community visit to Tziscao –but first, a much-needed stop at their office for pastries and coffee.
To enter their office, I had to pass through their fair trade store called EcoPaz (Economy for Peace), which was opened to sell products made by the community groups and collectives that received microcredit from EduPaz.
This season, it was interesting to see a beekeeping collective is producing lots of honey and there was plenty of honey on sale.
During breakfast, the 3 full-time EduPaz staff introduced themselves and got me up to speed on the community we were going to visit. And so headed off to Tziscao, a community of around 6,000 people, located an hour from Comitán.
In Tziscao, EduPaz has built a health center which now has a doctor to serve the surrounding communities. Soon there will be 5 alternative medicine interns from the School of Alternative Medicine in Tuxtla Gutierrez on site to provide holistic health services, which is great since this area is really underserved in regards to medical care.
About 15 to 20 community members go to the Tziscao health center each week. There’s only 1 other hospital in the area, but it is limited in it services and just has 1 doctor and 1 nurse. Plus the only supplies they have are of anti-parasite medicine and contraceptives. The EduPaz health center is a much-needed resource and also serves as a meeting space for farmers or cooperative members in Tziscao.
An indigenous couple is currently living on site to take care of the health center: Baldemar and his wife Eloisa. They moved into the center 3 months ago and Baldemar is also currently being trained on how to run the agroecology program at the center.
EduPaz is also in the process of constructing an Agroecology Training Site. They already have started growing organic vegetables – including squash, radishes, peanuts, chayote, chipilin (herbs for broths) and green tomatoes. While I was there, Baldemar showed me where they’re planning to build a chicken coup, and a space for farm animals including rabbits and sheep, as well as fruit trees (avocado, lemon, apple, pear and banana plants) AND a greenhouse to grow tomatoes. It was quite impressive.
They’ve already built a pigsty and a space for a biodigestor. The biodigestor will use the pig manure to create natural gas to produce energy for the center. They will install the biodigestor in August, at the same time IRRI-Mexico, an IDEX catalyst grantee in Mexico City, will train Baldemar and other community members from Tziscao on how to install and maintain this technology. The goal is to encourage them to also use this in their own homes.
I also visited 2 community groups in Tziscao: an organic coffee cooperative and a family grocery store collective. Both have received microcredit loans from EduPaz. They shared how helpful it was to access microcredit through EduPaz and how much better it was than going through a bank which requires a lot of complicated paperwork and restrictive lending terms. Plus the banks only loan large sums of money, which is not necessary for these groups’ projects.
All in all, it was incredibly rewarding to learn more about EduPaz’s work and meet some of the people that are benefiting from their programs and working so hard to continue that they are successful.
IDEX Program Office, Katherine Zavala, is currently in Mexico on field visits with our grantees there.
I’m in Chiapas, Mexico visiting our grantees here. It’s nice to be in warm weather, after the summer fog of San Francisco. Even better, I get to spend time in the beautiful colonial town of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. I’m going to be in Chiapas for 2 weeks visiting IDEX partners DESMI and EduPaz.
IDEX has been supporting DESMI for over 10 years and we’ve worked with a number of communities. On this trip I’ll visit 2 communities in the Southern and Northern zone of Chiapas. DESMI works to strengthen indigenous communities in Chiapas who are organizing using Solidarity Economics and the values of justice, gender equality, dialogue and respect to the environment. Their goal is to support social change that promotes autonomy and self-sufficiency within the communities.
DESMI was founded in 1969, and this year is their 40th anniversary. DESMI is celebrating with communities in the 3 different regions they work in: Northern, Central (Los Altos) and Southern zone, as well as in San Cristóbal de las Casas, where their office is.
As well as DESMI, I will visit IDEX’s newest partner EduPaz. EduPaz is based in Comitán, and works with communities in the Southern zone of Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala.
EduPaz was founded in 1998, initially to serve Guatemalan refugees who were escaping Guatemala’s internal conflict across the border into Mexico. As Guatemalan refugees started to go back to their home country, EduPaz began to work with the local population in the Comitán region. But their experience with Guatemalan refugees was also needed in their own communities in Chiapas after the Acteal massacre in December 1997.
Today EduPaz’s focus is to promote peace and social transformation through the programs of Solidarity Economics, Holistic Health, Agroecology and Popular-based Organization.
I’m looking forward to catching up with DESMI and growing my knowledge and relationship with EduPaz.
Today I had my last site visit of my trip and for that I had to travel one-hour south to Comitan. Comitan is where the organization Educación por la Paz (Education for Peace) more often called EduPaz was founded ten years ago, focusing primarily on supporting Guatemalan refugees in Chiapas. Now EduPaz has evolved to an organization that focuses mainly on 2 areas: health and economic development though microcredit.
EduPaz’s health program is focused on mental health as they felt that the issue of addressing people’s traumas after having lived through a conflict was missing in many indigenous communities. Maria Elena, the director of EduPaz’s health program, studied Gestalt therapy when she was in Argentina years ago and now has shared her knowledge with other community members to provide a space for families who need more psychological support.
Jose, an indigenous man who comes from a community that speaks Tojolabal, manages the economic development program. He is the son of indigenous farmers who used to work on a large finca back in the day. He told me how when he used to be a young boy of 8 years old that he would talk Tojolabal with all the other children on the finca and that his father would discourage him from doing so and told him he should only speak Castilla (Spanish). So he did and he lost most of his Tojolabal until he was in his 20s and when he began interacting with Tojolabal-speakers outside of the finca and gained it all back. Now, as director of the microcredit project in EduPaz, he speaks Tojoloba all the time.
EduPaz has a more personalized way in managing its microcredit program than many other non-profit organizations. Before a group of community members can receive microcredit, EduPaz will have a dialog with them 3 times to make sure everyone understands the conditions and why these conditions exist. All members of the group have to become responsible for the group members to pay back their loans. A board of directors is selected and then Jose, with the support of Javier, EduPaz’s executive director, will check one by one all the microcredit proposals and budgets to ensure that the proposed income-generating project will be guaranteed a positive result.
EduPaz will also assist the groups by providing financial administration training to each group. But they do not organize workshops and then ask people to come. Instead, they go to each of the groups they work with, one by one, and give each group the necessary training to build everyone’s capacity to administer their loans.
Before, EduPaz used to offer many workshops such as training in agroecology and seminars on NAFTA and the World Bank but they discovered that not many would attend and people were just not interested. They decided to stop offering the workshops and focus on giving more personal attention to each group.
EduPaz’s office includes a collective store on the first floor where group members involved in the microcredit program can sell their products. The store is focused on offering products that are both organically made and qualify as fair trade. The main product they sell is organic coffee as EduPaz has given a microcredit to organic coffee collectives.
EduPaz has only three staff members and all of them are constantly traveling, mostly to the communities in the Zona Selva and Fronteriza, that border with Guatemala. In spite of the small staff they seem to be covering lots of neglected areas and the advantage of having a Tojolabal native on staff makes a lot of difference.
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After finishing this visit, I feel sad and happy that my work in Chiapas has been completed. I am sad to leave Chiapas as this has been a magical place to be and for me it has been quite an eye-opening experience where I have witnessed the hard work that is being done on the ground with the financial support IDEX has provided. This is a place where you can meet many activists, many community members and people living with another type of government. I am happy to be able take all that I saw and learned back with me to San Francisco to do a better job in raising more funds and working harder to make my small contribution to supporting the various groups that IDEX supports there.
I hope you have all enjoyed reading about my trip and has encouraged you to visit Chiapas and/or learn more about the work that is being done there.
Until the next trip…. Peace out!
Kat
