Visit to the Alta Verapaz Region

Sophy Wolters is back home in Panajachel after a visit to the Alta Verapaz region:

After a drive of seven hours we arrived in Coban, the department capital of Alta Verapaz. The trip takes you through a few totally different climate zones. From Guatemala City the area is first very dry and arid. And then going north the landscape becomes more and more green, lush and wet. It rains almost all year in Alta Verapaz, with cloudy overcast afternoons and little drizzles in what in de rest of Guatemala is the dry season. So we pass by the Nature Preserve where the last Quetzals live, since their habitat is cloud forest.

Care Guatemala has their office for the region in Coban so we stopped there to meet the staff and talk about the program. Namaste is forming three groups of a 100 women with the Edubanco program from Care, two of them located in two different counties in Alta Verapaz.
Edubanco is a program that combines credit with a solid capacity building program for women and an education component for girls, the daughters of the women in the Trust Banks. The Millennium goals are particularly focused on bringing up the attendance in the primary school. In Guatemala half of the girls in rural areas drop out before 4th grade. One of the reasons for this drop out rate is that the families don’t have enough financial resources to send all their children to school and then choose for the boys to go on and keep the girls at home to help with chores. But Care’s educational specialist also mentioned another reason. Most parents don’t feel good about their daughter being one of the few left, the higher they get into the school system. Since girls go to school older they hit adolescence when they are still in primary school, so the parents are worried about the girls sitting in a classroom full of boys. Another reason for school drop out lies in the girls themselves: the education system in Guatemala is based on road learning and is quite boring. Teachers will show up late or not at all in rural areas. Most teachers don’t speak the local language of the area (Qeqchi in Coban) so the children don’t even know what’s going on half of the time. So they drop out because they feel they have something better to do.

Care tries to work all these angles with their specialized educational staff that works together with the loan officer. They give workshops for the schools to improve on educational quality. They talk to fathers and mothers about the importance of girls’ education. They work with the girls on capacity building so they are well prepared for their school experience. And they help the mothers with additional income activities to be able to afford to send their girls to school by giving them credit combined with vocational training.

The next day we went to visit the communities in rural San Pedro Carcha, one of the counties where Care works. The 4 wheel drive ate itself through mud and loose gravel to come to the remote little communities where the women that Care serves live.

The first group had been organized for a while. The women told me what they wanted to do with their loans. Most of them will invest the capital they will be receiving in animal husbandry activities: from fattening chicken, laying hens, pigs, and cattle. Edubanco’s loan cycle is a nine months cycle, but the women had requested a year cycle because the cows take about a year to get to full weight. What surprised me here in the region is that the women don’t sell their animals to butchers but prepare the meat themselves and go and sell in the market. That way their profit margin on their business is higher than if they would sell their animal to the local butcher. All of the women were also weavers and when asked wanted to learn more about that too. Some even asked to learn to weave on a foot loom, until they found out hat was a full time 4 months commitment to learn. They also wanted to learn to make soap, shampoo, candles end pastries to sell. When asked about the problems they were facing with their girls in school their main complaint was that the teachers would show up for an hour and leave again. The education facilitator Ermelindo, present at the meeting is going to pick that up with the school after Easter week.

The second group we met with is from a little village called Aldea Chajixim (Ixim is he god of corn they explained me). The auxiliary mayor was present, because it was his original idea to form this group, trying to get them to grow vegetables. When they asked Care for help, Care took the group on and will be working the education and loan part of the group’s development process. The mayor talked to us in qeqchi. When I asked the Care facilitator later if really nobody here spoke any Spanish he told me lots of women do, but it is a custom under qeqchi indigenous to talk to visitors in their own language. So the Care facilitator translated everything. The women told me that they were very happy to be in the group. For most of them this was a first time experience to be in a women’s group and they all looked very excited about learning, sharing and working together.

The third group met in the house of a young powerhouse woman, who we think will be the mayor of her town in ten years. She learnt to use the foot loom in a capacity building workshop. The loom was standing in the room with ten yards of beautiful cloth for wrap around skirts the women wear here already woven. Here the businesses were more diversified. One woman goes to a town 5 hours away to buy chili and resell on the markets around the region of Carcha. A few of them know how to manage the foot loom; some of them will invest in animal husbandry. Two women will invest in grains to sell on market days. One woman is a candle maker and will invest her capital in parafina and thread to make the candles. She was the oldest of the group, almost 60, and a solid business woman with great leadership qualities. They also will be receiving their loan right after Easter week.

After the long day of driving through this beautiful landscape of green lush steep mountains we came back to Coban and talked about our experiences with the head of the regional programs, Efraim. Care is an old NGO, in NGO terms in Guatemala. They have been working here in Guatemala for 48 years. You can feel the experience in different programs, starting as a nutrition program in all their staff. I was very impressed with their dedication to development. At 6.30 most of the staff was still present to finish their chores for the day. I am very content and proud to be working with them to help these wonderful women.