Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala

The Venice, Florida, Interact Club, a group of 40 high school students, is working with Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala by supporting a scholarship for an indigenous student at our Mayan Center for Education and Development.

The club’s goal is two-fold—alleviate hunger by supporting a scholarship in sustainable agriculture.  In the remote indigenous villages in Guatemala, little opportunity exists to gain an education past 6^th grade, due to the extreme poverty of the region.  First, the Interact scholarship will put a Mayan student in an accelerated program, enabling him to complete three years of schooling in just two. A diploma opens doors to university studies, professional training, or management of a small business.  Second, the scholarship, by providing specialized training in sustainable food production, will benefit hundreds of indigenous children with nutritious food, thus helping to stem the severe malnutrition in the region.

Interact students sell Guatemalan crafts

Jane Mendola, Lead Interact Advisor and Rotarian of the Venice/Nokomis Rotary Club, says, “By training one student, our Interact Club is clearly helping to combat malnutrition of Guatemalan children.  The country suffers from the worst level of chronic child malnutrition in Latin America and the fourth highest level in the world.   Chronic malnutrition limits physical growth with the result that children’s bodies are stunted and highly vulnerable to disease and illness. It causes irreversible brain damage—leaving them unable to function well in school or in later life”.

Manuel wins a scholarship

Imparting one student’s expertise in growing food sustainably can positively impact at least 100 villagers.  Every student at the Mayan Center of Education is required to share his/her training in how to produce “super foods” (for instance, vegetables with the highest nutritional values). From “growing” soil (using green composting methods)—to using special planting techniques, to harvesting seeds for the next year’s crops—parents can change the health of their children for the better.

The motto “Train a student, transform a village,” is being marched out to the Venice and Nokomis communities where Interacters are selling hundreds of hand crafted Guatemalan key chains to raise funds.  Their one-of-a-kind international project just hit its midway funding mark last month, thanks to the enthusiastic participation of club members.  Their final goal—raise $2,000 for the annual scholarship.

Mendola says, “our Venice Interact Club is not just helping one student, it is helping entire villages—they are doing something vitally important that is improving the lives of many.  The Interact Club has really taken this project to heart and our facilitators at Rotary and Faculty Advisor at the Venice high school are very proud of them.”

If you belong to a group that would like to support a student, please Frances Dixon guatvillage@aol.com. 

Previously, we wrote that several graduates, including Juan Diego, would be interviewed and assessed for a coveted internship at the Mayan Center for Education and Development. 

When the Guatemalan Civil War ended in 1996, Juan Diego was seven years old.  He would grow up in a time of hope that the Peace Accords would bring better health, education, and economic times to his people—but, sadly, he would reach manhood to realize the failure of that hope.  Today, his people are hungrier than they were 50 years ago when the war began.  Now, chronic malnutrition threatens to destroy a generation.

As the main breadwinner of his family, young Juan Diego had certainly known hunger.  But those were in the days before staples such as corn and beans had not doubled, tripled and quadrupled in price.  A year ago, six tortillas could be purchased for 12 cents.  Today, one cannot get more than three or four for the same price.  Juan has neighbors who cannot afford to eat beans.  Rice is a luxury—meat, eggs, and cheese don’t show up on a Mayan family’s table in this distant corner of northwestern Guatemala.

The future of this current generation is clearly threatened.  Chronic malnutrition deprives bodies of vital proteins, stunting physical growth.  Without sufficient nutrients, brain capacity diminishes, sometimes up to 40%.  Willem van Milink Paz, a representative for the World Food Program in Guatemala, calls chronic malnutrition a “life sentence” that condemns generation after generation.

How to turn the tide of this tragedy when poverty is so extreme that parents can’t afford to buy even sufficient food staples?  With a small plot of land and a hand up from Adopt-a-Village, self-help gardens can produce food.  We believe that using sustainable agricultural practices in villages is the best way to combat chronic malnutrition—starting small—mother by mother, father by father, village by village —teaching, encouraging, empowering.  From the first step in building nutrient-rich soil in family plots through the interim steps that produce highly nutritious food, our Mayan friends can create an ongoing cycle of food—a cycle of life.

Who better to lead such a movement than a Maya who first-hand understands his people’s plight—their hunger, their deprivation, their need to work hard to survive?   Who better than one of our own graduates armed with specific knowledge in sustainable agriculture?  Who better than a young person known to be responsible, resourceful, a leader?   Juan Diego, of course!

Juan was awarded the coveted internship and took his place alongside the small but growing contingency of Mayan teachers at the Center.  He will teach the incoming students the basic elements of sustainable gardening; and he will train families in outlying communities, empowering them in the art of growing nutritious food.

Adopt-a-Village embraces 2012 with a two-fold goal:  First, expand the number of villages currently receiving training; and second, introduce a community training program at the Mayan Center where parents can learn advanced techniques in gardening and nutrition.  The Mayan Center’s Nutrition Center and demonstration garden will serve as the base where courses in organic pest and disease control will be taught.   Parents will learn how to choose the principal vegetables for nutritional value and how to preserve nutrients when cooking the food, as well as seed harvesting techniques and food storage methods.  With these skills, they can return home, using this knowledge to build a foundation of health for themselves and their children

Through a simple but effective plan of harnessing the educational resources of the Adopt-a-Village Mayan Center, chronic child malnutrition can be combated.  Families have already demonstrated that they are eager to learn these new skills that can restore their health, vigor and dignity.  Self-help gardens, not food handouts, can help them to attain this goal.    Join us in this unique partnership—your help in purchasing seeds and tools and supporting the training of young Mayans like Juan Diego can make a powerful and positive impact in their future.

Twenty mothers from  Santa Elena, a Q’anjoba’l Mayan village just south of the Mexican border, received their first batch of vegetable seedlings for the New Year from Adopt-a-Village.  This self-help program empowers villagers to learn the techniques of sustainable gardening so that they can be assured of ongoing food for their children.

Non-hybrid seeds that can be harvested and grown successfully for future plantings are provided from the Mayan Center of Education, the Adopt-a-Village unique school that trains indigenous students in academics and sustainable agriculture.  A major goal of the school is to combat the chronic child malnutrition in the region.

In our last post, we wrote that Juan Diego’s grandfather asked Adopt-a-Village to consider his grandson for a scholarship at the Mayan Center for Education and Development…

Juan Diego (center) celebrates graduation with friends

The Mayan Center, located on a mountaintop, isolated from the distractions and pollution of population centers, is a very desirable facility at which to study for several reasons. Foremost, the school offers a two-year accelerated curriculum that puts a student on a fast track to a high school diploma, thus saving time and money to enter higher education or begin working.  That prized certificate, possessed only by a small percentage of Mayan youth, opens the doors to university advancement, professional training, or managing a small business.  Additionally, the Center’s students receive 30% more class time than what is offered at “in town” schools (classes run all day, not half days as in other schools).  Individual use of computers and Internet service are provided.  In other schools, groups of six or more students must share one computer during lessons; and, they must pay for computer time at Internet cafes in order to complete homework assignments.  The Mayan Center boasts a large library, a rarity in any level of school in rural Guatemala.  Ready access to books and computer equipment provides an enhanced opportunity to learn more and thus gain better grades that assist them in gaining entry to university or employment.

A feature important to parents is the school’s 18-day intensive study timetable that gives a student the ability to spend the remainder of the month at home working to help to help sustain the family.  To win a scholarship, Juan would have to demonstrate certain attributes—speak a Mayan language, demonstrate leadership skills, produce records of good grades, and be financially unable to pay tuition and boarding costs.  He easily demonstrated these requisites.

Juan was awarded a scholarship and lived on the rustic mountain campus with his fellow students for two years.  He studied hard and fulfilled of all his academic obligations. In addition to class time, the school requires that students take part in managing and maintaining the campus with the purpose of building leadership skills.  Work involves keeping the school and campus clean and orderly, tending the student’s vegetable garden, feeding the chickens and cleaning their coop, daily grinding the corn for tortillas and helping to prepare mails, and performing other tasks that support a well-run educational facility.

In addition to a heavy load of academic classes, Juan received intensive training in sustainable organic agriculture.  A component of the training is that students use their skills to help impoverished families in nearby villages.  During their practicum, they work alongside family members, teaching them how to prepare soil, produce green compost, transplant seedlings, use water-saving techniques, and harvest seeds for the next planting.  Juan excelled in the sustainable gardening course. He confided to the school director that his long-term goal was one day to pass along this specialized education to young people by teaching at a high school.

A few weeks ago, Juan Diego graduated as valedictorian of his class.  His long years of struggling during his childhood had given him the needed determination to succeed in winning his high school diploma.  He had clearly shown himself to be a hard worker, responsible, and resourceful.

What would be his next step?  He knew that the school administration was offering an internship to a graduate.  The internship would provide an opportunity to study and teach under senior teachers at the Mayan Center, offer advanced organic agricultural training, and gain paid work experience in nearby villages by teaching sustainable food production.   In its assessment of Juan, the administration noted not only did Juan’s skills meet a challenging set of needs, but also his background could made him ideal and very important candidate for the work he would undertake.  He could be empathetic to the extreme level of poverty the Maya suffer.  He spoke the Q’anjob’al language—the dominant Mayan language of the region.  And he had proved himself to be a dependable leader.

Several graduates would be interviewed and assessed for this desirable position.

To be continued….

Guatemala is one of 20 priority countries that the American government plans to help cut poverty and overwhelmingly high chronic child malnutrition rates.  On the other hand, the Peace Corps announced last week that it has canceled plans to send a contingency of new volunteers to Guatemala next month.  What a loss!  Peace Corps hands-on technical training helps rural families attain low-cost sustainable development from the ground up that can fight poverty and malnutrition.

Kristina Edmunson, a Peace Corps spokeswoman in Washington, said the move stemmed from “comprehensive safety and security concerns.”  Guatemala is one of the Central American countries that is used as a staging point by drug cartels to ship cocaine to the United States from South America.  The escalating drug and organized-crime violence in Guatemala has had much press lately. The country has one of the highest per capita murder rates in Latin America at 42 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.   (On a comparative level, the murder rate in Mexico is reported to be at 15 per 100,000).

Peace Corps technicians and others like Adopt-a-Village volunteers have the background to teach a variety of skills to empower rural people in improving their lives.  With the rate of chronic child malnutrition in Guatemala now at the 4^th highest level in the world, Adopt-a-Village has focused on teaching sustainable agriculture— soil improvement through no-cost green composting, (instead of using expensive chemical fertilizers that leach and eventually exhaust the soil), multi-cropping, correct water usage, and seed harvesting for the next planting—all viable techniques that an impoverished people can use at virtually no financial cost to help themselves out of the grip of ever-worsening hunger.

Although Peace Corps support has been cut to Guatemala, USAID is assisting this “focus country” with another style of foreign aid.  In a recent meeting at which current food security policies were discussed with a USAID official in Guatemala City, Adopt-a-Village representatives were told that USAID does not “support subsistence farming programs,” (perhaps not understanding the difference between “subsistence” and the “sustainable” methods AAV uses).  Rather, the USAID view is that some of the most promising opportunities to lessen poverty and chronic child hunger lie in non-traditional agriculture, horticulture, and coffee exports.  USAID programs have engaged thousands of small-scale coffee growers in the highlands to develop production and participate in the global market. (Some would argue that land would be better used to grow food for hunger-stricken local people).  Additionally, USAID has forged an alliance with the multinational giant, Walmart, which recently bought out Guatemala’s largest family-owned chain of grocery markets. Whereas this government/corporate agricultural partnership provides jobs for some, most of the food grown is exported to other countries in Central American and to the United States. (Google “Feed the Future” program for details on this alliance).

Crime and corporate agricultural goals aside, Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala is committed to staying and continuing to make a difference in the lives of malnourished children.  Come January, we will enter our 21^st year of service in northwestern Guatemala.  If you are the adventurous sort, we welcome you to come and volunteer with us—we are especially looking for people with organic gardening skills, carpenters, and Spanish language teachers.  (Fluency in Spanish is a Ministry of Education requirement in schools.  However, our students have been raised speaking one of the Mayan languages and need help in mastering Spanish).

Your support, as always, strengthens our resolve.  As we have stated, our foremost goal is to stem the current devastation of stunted growth and minds of Mayan children permanently impaired by chronic malnutrition.  To achieve this, our progressive school, the Mayan Center for Education, is creating a network of Mayan villages where nutritious food is being grown—but this goal needs your help in order to succeed.

In this time of giving thanks, I want to extend my most heartfelt thanks to you for your past and present commitment to the Maya of Guatemala.   Together we are helping to empower them to make important and meaningful changes in their lives.

There are few schools in the world that can be found on top of a remote mountain, (less one that boasts a resident jaguar as does the Adopt-a-Village Mayan Center).  I know of one distant school in the Chilean mountains, just across the border from Argentina.  It’s on the way to a ski resort, so I’m not really sure that it qualifies. Other educational boarding facilities tout their remoteness, such as another one in the Nevada desert, but really, it’s only half an hour drive to pick up a burger and a six-pack, even though the school administration frowns on the idea.

The Mayan Center for Education is situated in a pristine rainforest four hours north from a bone-jarring drive over four-wheel roads of Huehuetenango’s northernmost supply town of Santa Cruz Barillas.  Even their inhabitants don’t really know where it is and as most are non-aficionados of the wilderness, really don’t wish to know.  Nevertheless, Mayan youth who were born in isolated mountain villages call it home for two years as they live, study, and work on campus to earn their accelerated two-year diploma.  Once in hand, they can choose one of several paths—begin university studies, train in a professional facility, or even start a small business.

In addition to academic classes (where students receive 30% more class time than “city” schools), intensive training is provided in sustainable organic gardening.  Guatemala suffers from the worst level of chronic child malnutrition in Latin America and the fourth highest level in the world, according to United Nations statistics.  Every student graduates with the ability to provide his family and village the help they desperately need to produce sustainable food to stem the staggeringly high rates of child malnutrition from which they suffer.

Mateo Ordoñez, pictured here with his father, Pascual Ordoñez, and the school director, Osman Casteñada, has already introduced to his community the unique methods of soil preparation, green composting and multi-crop planting.  His father, an enthusiastic of the Center’s sustainable organic growing techniques, has volunteered to head up village committees to encourage others in these methods of food production.

Our first graduation!  What better way to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of Adopt-a-Village?

Only the country’s violent October tropical storms threatened the schedule.  Three days before the ceremony, president Alvaro Colom issued a plea for people not to travel the flooded highways—many of them destroyed by landslides, and mountainsides still collapsing with the heavy rains.  “Travel only in an emergency,” was the edict.  AAV’s director, Frances Dixon, determined that attending the first graduation of the Mayan Center for Education definitely required travel, and after 3 ½ arduous days of re-routing and skirting blocked highways, she reached the isolated mountain school, drenched and muddy.

Strains of the marimba music lifted spirits (although not the rain) and signaled that the festivities were about to begin. The school’s colors, green for the mountains and gold for the jaguar that lives nearby, festooned the hall; students proudly presented themselves in their forest-hued shirts and gold satin cummerbunds; and all proudly posed for keepsake photos garbed in a traditional cap and gown.

The ceremony climaxed with smiles and tears as parents rose and stepped forward to embrace their children.  What were they thinking?  Long-held dreams were coming true for them in those joyful moments.  Education had been denied parents in their youth when they found themselves trapped in refuge for years in Mexico during the Guatemala civil war, but in these moments they could rejoice, watching their first children graduate.

Two years of dusk-to-dawn days spent by staff and students living and studying in a remote rainforest mountain campus had paid life-size dividends.   New doors were opening—some students were continuing on to university, others were taking jobs or preparing to begin small businesses, and a top student had won a teaching internship at the Center.

Best of all, students would be sharing their knowledge in their home villages.  Indeed, they had already introduced sustainable organic gardening skills to their families and neighbors, and seven nearby communities had benefited from the students’ instruction during school service projects.  “Train a student, transform a village”—this school motto had born fruit with the first graduation!  Their education had empowered them to create a powerful surge of change in their communities—a change ensuring nutritious food for a people suffering from one of the world’s highest rates of chronic child malnutrition.

Please share these joyful times with us.  You can assure the continuation of a better future for the Maya by giving a scholarship to a deserving student for the 2012 school year.

Give Now

Two extraordinary events occur when you give an Adopt-a-Village scholarship.  First, you change the course of one child’s life.  And then, you change the course of a community.

Our Mayan Center for Training and Education benefits worthy and impoverished students to improve their lives.  Additionally, through students’ community service, it benefits entire villages.  A scholarship is the key that opens doors to employment, professions, or university enrollment for a student.  But more—it is the key that empowers parents to transform their children’s debilitating hunger to good health.  By teaching our unique sustainable gardening methods, families are being helped to stem the chronic malnutrition rampant in their communities.

Guatemala has the 4th worst level of chronic child malnutrition in the world.  Lack of food impedes children from gaining a normal height and from growing strong and disease-resistant bodies; worst of all, it destines them to suffer irreversible brain damage.

Our training center is one of only three in Guatemala that offers accredited courses in sustainable organic vegetable-growing.  With a demonstration mini-farm fully operational and a nutritional health center under construction, we are now sending cadres of teachers and students to train families in surrounding villages.

Please become part of this life-giving force that will stop the chronic malnutrition and its deadly consequences for Mayan children.  Give the gift of education and help turn the tide for an impoverished and hungry people.  Your scholarship will provide the opportunity for one student to help train hundreds of his neighbors.  It will empower Mayan families to become self-sustaining in food production.  It will insure that parents can raise healthy children—children with strong bodies and strong minds—a new generation that can build a better future for their people.

Clayton Dunnaway, a Boy Scout with the Highlands Ranch Troop 665 in Colorado, has inspired four international organizations to join him in his quest to help poor Mayan women in Guatemala—and at the same time, earn the coveted Eagle Scout ranking for his project.

The Boy Scout Troop; Finding Freedom Through Friendship in Lexington, Kentucky; Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala and the Rotary Club of Palmetto, (both located in Florida); joined the team project that would bring aid to Mayan mothers—two international borders away and some 5,000 miles from Clayton’s home town.  It is unlikely that he could have realized the heartwarming impact his project would have upon them.

Guatemala has one of the highest rates of maternal and child mortality in the world.  Mayan mothers suffer from malnutrition, as well as with severe anemia, parasitic diseases and other untreated infections, making them vulnerable to life-threatening complications during pregnancy.  Prenatal care is rare. Babies are birthed by a village midwife, who, often as not, has little training and no equipment.

Clayton’s inspiration centered on helping these mothers.  He and his fellow Scouts sought donations of newborn clothing, hand-knitted baby caps, cotton diapers, and baby blankets, and raised funds for partial transportation costs.  He partnered his Scout troop with Finding Freedom through Friendship, an organization that helps single mothers with food, staples, and safe housing. which added midwifery equipment and prenatal vitamins to the donations, who shipped the jam-packed duffle bags to Palmetto, Florida.  The third partner, the Rotary Club of Palmetto, arranged for shipment from Florida to Adopt-a-Village headquarters in northwestern Guatemala.

That organization, led by president Frances Dixon, made the final leg of the journey—a five-hour bone-jarring trip in a four-wheel drive vehicle over a rugged mountain track to the village of San Juan Tutlac.  There, grateful mothers received their gifts, while the village’s two midwives practiced with the stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs.  San Juan Tutlac is the first village of several that are receiving supplies.  It is estimated that 170 newborns will benefit from this project.

The gift of prenatal vitamins, more perhaps than any other, was met by quiet awe from mothers.  Such vitamins are highly prized—but  completely beyond their reach.  A one-month supply would mean a month’s work in the fields, and other necessities are seen as more pressing.

The village gathering included mothers and their curious children, the midwives, the village health aide, and community leaders.   Diego Pedro, the health aide, spoke, imploring the mothers to try to better feed themselves, not only for their sakes, but for the sake of their unborn children.  He told them that without adequate nourishment in the earliest years of life, their children would be destined to suffer from stunted growth, brain damage, disabilities, diseases and infection.  And that malnutrition would lead to diminished educational achievement.

Attacking chronic child malnutrition is at the forefront of Adopt-a-Village goals. Recently, the organization launched its boldest program ever—a sustainable organic mini-farming program to stem the debilitating hunger of the region’s children.  Guatemala has the highest rate of chronic child malnutrition in the Americas, and the fourth highest in the world, according to United Nations statistics.  In this remote region of Guatemala, hunger is the standard for indigenous children. Some, notably those of widows and single mothers, eat only every other day.

In time, and with the help of volunteers and donors, AAV hopes to reach dozens of villages and schools and initiate sustainable food production.  Creating improved nutritional health will be the cornerstone for wellbeing of the future generations of the Maya.

The sole support of these fatherless children is their widowed mother. She has no schooling, speaks no Spanish, and the little work she can find is picking coffee during the harvest season. Harvesting is done now and there is no work for another five months. We ask you to consider sending a small donation to help us purchase food for Easter for this family and others like them.

Dominga Pedro of Santa Elena happily holds her basket of vegetable seedlings, ready to plant in her prepared garden bed.  She is one of 15 mothers who is participating in the Adopt-a-Village bio-intensive garden project in her community.  César Garcia, agronomist and specialist in bio-intensive agriculture, spent the day completing the second level of training with the mothers.  This takes us another step closer to confronting the severe food crisis in Guatemala.