After my dear friend, Deet in Guatemala, weighed in on last post, I checked on what I was doing a year ago. March 18th was the day I returned from my annual visit, as Earthways Project Director, to AFOPADI's Organic Agriculture and Reforesting Programs in several Mayan communities in the mountainous Northwest of Guatemala. They were about 2/3rds of the way through the dry season. The rains generally begin around May and having been there during the rainy season, I can appreciate why people are so concerned about the coming rains in Haiti.
These photos show a new community (at about 7,000') where the villagers have asked AFOPADI to work with them. The doctor has already begun a clinic and we were there to discuss their request for corn silos. The top picture gives you a sense of the erosion (clearly the most dangerous during the rains when whole villages tumble down mountainsides). The bottom one shows the quality of soil, or lack thereof.
2 comments:
How fantastic that you're involved in this work, Julie. Did the village get the silos? What work will they do to control future erosion?
Thanks Altoon. I will know more about the silos once one of our corn silo donors makes a site visit in April. I will be attempting to answer to your question about erosion in my talk on 4/7 at Urban Habitat Chicago. Clearly neither a simple answer nor a simple situation. Just planting trees doesn't work because, like everywhere, trees have to be nurtured before they are established. And when thus is in a context of extreme poverty and genocide, well: it's complicated. But hopeful.
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