Winter Bulletin 2009/2010 Vol. 25 No.4

Articles: Introduction Plenty in Guatemala	TN Musicians host benefit for Plenty Haiti relief (watch the concert on YouTube)
The Adibe Soy project celebrates 30 years! The UPA-SOYA project Guatemala City’s Urban Poor Scavenge to Survive
Gulf Recovery Heros Homeless in New Orleans Plenty Belize Microgrant Success Story Pine Ridge Gardens

Dear Friend of Plenty, Plenty has a special place in its heart for the Mayan people of Guatemala. It was in Guatemala and among the indigenous Maya that Plenty volunteers first began to witness and comprehend the inter-related dynamics of hard-core, chronic poverty. We saw how a  combination of factors can conspire to keep communities and populations from achieving any semblance of basic, sustainable good health and welfare.

Because of the wasting effects of intestinal amoebas, easing the grip of malnutrition requires reliable and convenient access to potable water and effective sanitation, just as much as improving the diet. Malnutrition makes its victims more likely to get sick. Illness saps productivity and intelligence.

Other stresses result from a lack of access to education, or transportation to markets to sell goods. Increasingly, farmers are facing a shrinking supply of arable land.  Season this unsavory mix with a history of social and political discrimination and conditions of poverty become persistent and acutely debilitating. All these factors (and this is by no means an exhaustive list) contribute to a vicious cycle that can only be broken when all are remedied.

August 27, 2009, The Economist: “It is hardly one of Latin America’s poorest countries, but according to UNICEF almost half of Guatemala’s children are chronically malnourished, the sixth-worst performance in the world. In parts of rural Guatemala, where the population is overwhelmingly of Mayan descent, the incidence of child malnutrition reaches 80%. A diet of little more than tortillas does permanent damage.

This chronic problem has become acute. Higher world prices for food have coincided with a recession-induced fall in money sent back from Guatemalans working in the United States (remittances equal 12% of Guatemala’s GDP). Drought in eastern Guatemala has made things worse still. Many families can scarcely afford beans, an important source of protein, and must sell eggs from their hens rather than feed them to their children…”

When we landed in Guatemala after the earthquake of February 1976, we were clueless about Guatemalan history. At first we were simply overwhelmed by the disaster: 23,000 dead, whole towns reduced to piles of adobe rubble, more than a million now homeless. Gradually, we began to realize that it was Guatemala’s indigenous population of Mayan Indians that had borne the brunt of the disaster. Most of us in Plenty had grown up as children of the middle class in the U.S. 

However, at that point in our lives we had adopted the lifestyle of what we were calling “voluntary peasants” and were living mostly without running water and electricity in school buses and army tents in the southern Tennessee woods on about a dollar a day per person. Nonetheless, we saw ourselves as extremely well-off compared to the Mayan families who befriended us. At the same time, we were in awe of an indigenous culture that predated western civilization, a culture that in many ways we felt more in harmony with than the one we had grown up in. This was the beginning of a profound personal and organizational awakening for us. We began to understand our mission.

 I know we’ve talked about all this before, but it’s all bubbling up again now because of the recent return visit to Guatemala of some of the very first Plenty volunteers who went down, along with the now grown up daughter of one of those volunteers. As it happens, we are still connected to and are working with some of the very first Mayan families we started working with in the 1970s. Many of the projects that had their beginnings in the 1970s like community potable water systems and the soy processing plant outside Solola have been maintained and continue to operate.

Today they are benefiting the children and grandchildren of the families who helped install them. This is all incredibly heartening but, at the same time, many of the conditions these projects were meant to help alleviate continue to oppress people. We are reminded that we need to keep at it and hook up with new partners and support and new generations. There are no easy or quick fixes that we can anticipate, but we have learned over these past 36 years that good faith ultimately prevails and miracles are a renewable resource. In any case, there’s nothing else we’d rather be doing. We thank you for doing it with us.

                 Many blessings to you and yours in the coming year. We'll keep in touch.

2010 Summer Bulletin

• Introduction
• Along the Gulf Coast
• Haiti Clinic Report
• Guatemala: Karen's Soy Project
• KTC 2010 Summer Program
• Imani House Clinic
• Belize Mayan Restaurant

• Plenty Belize
• The Farm Community