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 Our friends at Common Hope have issued their February newsletter. In addition to the excerpts below, you can click here to read the current and past newsletters.
Students begin 2010 school year: The 2010 school year has begun in Guatemala, and more than 2,700 affiliated students were ready to go with all of the necessary supplies on their first day, thanks to your support. In one day alone, nearly 1,400 students and their families visited the Antigua site to pick up their school supplies…
Future electrician needs a Sponsor: Sponsoring an older student can be a nice way to support a student with a shorter time commitment. Sixteen-year- old César Martínez has three years left of high school, where he is studying to become an electrician. César lives near Antigua with his mother, father, and two older sisters…
Target visits Antigua site: Staff from Target Sourcing Services in Guatemala City visited the Antigua preschool last Thursday to put on a day of fun with the children. The group brought two piñatas, snacks, and backpacks for all the kids…
Vision Team members in their own words: Several Vision Team members who recently traveled to Guatemala have posted reflections about their experience on Common Hope’s blog…
Hats, mittens, and scarves needed: Our February need of the month is hats, mittens, and scarves. Living in the highlands of Guatemala in homes made of cornstalk and scrap metal, families can get very cold at night…
To read more about Common Hope, please visit their website.
The following excerpt is from a March 9, 2010 article published by Inside Costa Rica. To read the article in its entirety, please click here. (Emphasis Added)
TEGUCIGALPA – Increase of violence is nowadays women’s main worry in Honduras, where more than 400 were killed in 2009 and most of those responsible remain unpunished.
That figure places this country as second, regarding the number of homicides in that social sector, following Guatemala, with 700 cases, according to data published on Monday on the occasion of the International Women’s Day.
We think that the situation of violence is serious, and we have started this year really bad in that reference, Visitacion Padilla Women for Peace Movement National Coordinator Gladys Lanza told press…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles about Health & Safety in Guatemala.
The following excerpt is from a March 9, 2010 article published by Commodity Online. Click here to read the article in its entirety.
GUATEMALA CITY (Commodity Online) : Central American republic of Guatemala said its sugar exports to neighbor Mexico surged to close to 200,000 metric tons this fiscal.
According to Guatemalan Sugar Growers Association, this compares to last year where Guatemala didn’t export one single ton of sugar to Mexico from the 2008-09 harvest.
The surge in Guatemalan sugar shipments to Mexico comes as Mexico’s 2009-10 harvest has fallen behind the year-ago pace by more than 15%, widening the local supply shortage created by Mexico’s harvest last year that also ended sharply below expectations…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to the Guatamalan economy.
 Our friends at As Green As It Gets published some great articles in its February newsletter. See the excerpts below, and click here to read the entire thing!
Our Lendees Are Now Lenders: The coffee farmers have historically been the biggest recipient of our small business loans. Some of the more established farmers have reached a point where they are financially stable enough to be lenders. The farmers’ collective loaned cash to the community to create 18 new home stays in San Miguel Escobar. This started with seed money from As Green As It Gets, but is now managed and financed entirely by the community…
Effort Beyond Charity: Two of our girls were exhausted—the desperate screaming of chickens being plucked had awoken them at 5 a.m. Another had biting ants swarm up her pant leg. The blisters I got from the machetes and hoes were bleeding freely. All in all, we found out very quickly that life at Columbia had not necessarily prepared us for the hard existence of the coffee farmers of Guatemala. However, according to Timoteo Minas, one of our host farmers from our eight-day trip this winter break, coffee farmers are far better off now than they were five years ago, when they began working with As Green As It Gets…
Addressing the Link Between Poverty and Deforestation: Deep in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle is the Ixcan community – displaced by the army during the civil war, neglected by the government and forgotten by society. Taming the forest is the only way that they have been able to survive. They have already lost 1,200 hectares of rainforest to slash and burn agriculture. Without your help they will lose the remaining part of their rainforest in 10 years…
Click here to read the rest of the February newsletter.
The following excerpt is from a March 6, 2010 article published by The China Post. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Jaime Vinals Massanet, the first Central American mountaineer to have reached the world’s seven summits, is in Taiwan to scale the island’s highest peak, Yushan (Jade Mountain), a national park source said yesterday.
Vinals, 49, a Guatemalan national, is scheduled to scale 3,952-meter Yushan on March 7-8, said Chen Lung-sheng, head of the Yushan National Park Administration (YNPA).
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Vinals, the first Central American ever to climb the world’s highest peak, Mt. Everest, was invited by Taiwan to drum up publicity for Yushan, which has been nominated as one of 28 candidates in a worldwide contest to choose the Seven Wonders of Nature on the planet…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to Guatemalan culture.
The following excerpt is from a March 5, 2010 article published by the UN News Centre. Click here to read the article in its entirety.
5 March 2010 – The United Nations, together with the Guatemalan Government and aid partners, today launched a $34 million appeal to counter food shortages affecting 2.7 million people living in the Central American country’s so-called ‘dry corridor,’ which even before last year’s drought had one of the highest rates of chronic malnutrition in the world.The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today’s appeal will complement national relief efforts and provide support for food, health, nutrition, agriculture and early recovery, as well as water, sanitation and hygiene projects for six months for some 680,000 people living in departments in the eastern section of the country, including the dry corridor – Jutiapa, Santa Rosa, Zacapa, Chiquimula, El Progreso and Baja Verapaz – and the neighbouring Izabal and Quiché.
Global acute malnutrition among children under the age of five in the dry corridor and the two neighbouring provinces is at 11 per cent, and at 13 per cent among women of child-bearing age. Both figures are above the emergency threshold of 10 per cent.
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to the Food Crisis.
The following excerpt is from a March 4, 2010 article published by SF Gate. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Marco Pappa scored to help Guatemala beat El Salvador 2-1 Wednesday night in an exhibition. Jhony Brown also scored for Guatemala, which hasn’t lost to its neighbor in nine years.
Pappa, who plays for the Chicago Fire in MLS, scored from 31 yards out in the 45th minute after El Salvador struggled to clear the ball off its back line…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles about Guatemalan culture.
This article has been excerpted from the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) on March 3, 2010. To read the full piece, please click here.
GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 3, 2010 (IPS) – Guatemala knows that when it comes time to demonstrate compliance with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of global anti-poverty and development target to be met by 2015, it will make a poor showing.
Along with the rest of the world’s governments, authorities in this impoverished Central American nation committed themselves at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, from 1990 levels.
In 1989, 20 percent of the Guatemalan population was living in extreme poverty. At the start of this century, the MDG poverty goal appeared to be within reach, because by 2000 absolute poverty had been reduced to 16 percent of the population, which currently stands at 13 million people.
But by 2004, the extreme poverty rate had risen again, to an even higher level than in 1989: 21.5 percent, according to the Secretariat of Planning and Programming’s latest report on progress towards the MDGs, drawn up in 2006.
And things have only gotten worse since then, with the knock-on effects of the global economic crisis that originated in the United States in 2008.
A 2009 report by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) reported the drop in remittances sent home by migrant workers abroad and the rise in unemployment and of Guatemalans deported from the United States, among the impacts of the crisis in this country.
To read the rest of this article, please follow this link.
To read other education articles on Clinic Link, click here.
The following excerpt is from a March 3, 2010 article published by Relief Web. To read the article in its entirety, click here.
Siriaco Mejia is an optimist. His friend Gloria Gonzalez says he is always smiling, even when he is in trouble. He just has a positive outlook.
But even Mejia was unable to put a favorable spin on his situation at harvest time in late 2009: after he’d planted his corn and beans in his field high above the languid Chixoy River, now flowing at a very low level, his crops had failed, owing to lack of rain. Most years he can grow 22 quintales (about 2,200 pounds) of corn. This year, Mejia says he got about a tenth of that.
“We could see the corn cobs, but when we opened them up, many were totally empty,” Mejia says, standing in his field. “We got almost nothing this year.”
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This food shortage is occurring in a country of luxurious green that exports millions in sugar cane, pineapples, bananas, and coffee. Despite this abundance, poor Guatemalans, who are mostly indigenous Maya people, regularly face chronic food shortages. There is plenty of food in stores, but poor people can’t afford it.
Since the Spanish colonization of Central America, indigenous Maya people have been systematically moved off the most productive farmlands to arid areas and steep hillsides. In Mejia’s case, his community and several others were originally in the Chixoy River valley but were involuntarily relocated in the 1980s to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Most of the flattest, best land is used to grow export crops like coffee and sugar cane and, more recently, biofuel crops…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles about the Food Crisis.
The following excerpt is from a January 28, 2010 article published by Planet Green. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
You’d never know it just from looking, but the new bright orange schoolhouse in Granados, Guatemala has walls built with used plastic bottles—and so much other plastic waste that the team who built it had to go to neighboring villages to collect waste because they used up all the trash in their own.
Peace Corps volunteer Laura Kutner was inspired to start the project because of the plastic trash that she noticed everywhere in Guatemala, and because schools had classrooms with no walls. So she borrowed the idea of using bottles as a construction material from Pura Vida, and with materials and labor from local businesses as well as help from Hug it Forward, they set to work…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to the environment, or here to read more articles related to education.
The following excerpt is from a March 1, 2010 article published by Reuters. Click here to read the article in its entirety.
More coffee drinking coupled with climate change have reduced supplies of beans, producers said at an international conference over the weekend.
“There is already evidence of important changes,” said Nestor Osorio, the head of the International Coffee Organization, which represents 77 countries that export or import beans. “In the last 25 years the temperature has risen half a degree in coffee producing countries…
Click here to read the rest of the article, here to read more articles related to the Guatemalan economy, or here to read articles related to the Guatemalan environment.
Our friends at Safe Passage have released their latest newsletter. Click here to read it in its entirety.
 Chances are that if you’re reading this e-newsletter, you use and enjoy the accessiblity of a computer. It’s a tool that keeps you connected to the world at large and enables you to organize, analyze, strategize, and hone any number of skills.
The same is true for the children and families of Safe Passage. Computer skills are essential to the children, teens, and adults, for their potential to open doors to new career paths, academic pursuits, communities, and personal interests.
There’s a computer lab at the Educational Reinforcement Center, a computer in every classroom, and several computers in the adult literacy classroom. Students have access to the computer lab at least once per week, and the older children use computers more frequently, to do research online, to learn English…
Click here to read the rest of the newsletter, or here to read more about Safe Passage.
Our friends at Synergo Arts has released its February 2010 newsletter. Click here to read the newsletter in its entirety.
Bench Project Update
The ergonomic bench is now available directly from Mario Chavajay Navichoc. He makes them independently, under his own brand at his family’s carpentry shop in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala…
Berta, Mario’s mother, leads Grupo Ecológico Teixchel, a women’s textile cooperative: “Every day I use the bench that my son made. It’s beautiful, and I don’t just mean to look at but that it’s truly useful…
Click here to read the rest of the newsletter, or here to read more about Synergo Arts.
The following excerpt is from an article published by the Rainforest Alliance. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
For Manfredo Lippman, whose family has owned Finca Ona since 1966, coffee farming is as much about people and the environment as it is about growing the aromatic bean. His estate farm in northwest Guatemala provides employment, education and basic healthcare to hundreds of families, whereas the streams that run through it supply drinking water to the city of Coatepeque, and its more than 1,000 acres (405 hectares) of protected forest are home to an array of wildlife. Lippman’s commitment to community and ecology were essential for getting Finca Ona Rainforest Alliance Certified, which distinguishes farms that comply with a strict social and environmental standard.
The Rainforest Alliance, an international organization that works to protect ecosystems and the people and wildlife that depend on them by transforming land-use practices and consumer behavior, has certified thousands of coffee farms in a dozen countries together with its partners in the Sustainable Agriculture Network. During the four decades since the Lippman family purchased Finca Ona, which was founded in 1850, Manfredo and his daughter, Margaret de Vila, have introduced a series of innovations to make the farm a better place to work and live. They built and support a school with six teachers and a health post with a full-time nurse. They also maintain four soccer fields and provide uniforms and transportation for the local team, which has won 40 trophies.
The most obvious innovation, however, is the modified ski lift…
Click here to read the rest of this article, or here or here to read more articles related to the Guatemalan economy or environment.
The following excerpt is from a February 26, 2010 article by The Abundance Farming Project (AFP), and hosted by Google News. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
GUATEMALA CITY — Coffee producers say they are getting hammered by global warming, with higher temperatures forcing growers to move to prized higher ground, putting the cash crop at risk.
“There is already evidence of important changes” said Nestor Osorio, head of the International Coffee Organization (ICO), which represents 77 countries that export or import the beans.
“In the last 25 years the temperature has risen half a degree in coffee producing countries, five times more than in the 25 years before,” he said.
Sipped by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, coffee is one of the globe’s most important commodities, and a major mainstay of exports for countries from Brazil to Indonesia.
But producers meeting in Guatemala this week are in a state of panic over the impact of warming on their livelihoods…
Click here to read the rest of the article, here to read more articles related to the Guatemalan economy, or here to read more articles realted to the Guatemalan environment.
The following excerpt is from a February 25, 2010 article pubished by The Guatemala Times. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Guatemala – The green Gold of Guatemala is Cardamom. 23,000 tones of cardamom are cultivated in Guatemala annually.
This makes Guatemala the world’s largest exporter. Guatemala’s cardamom production sets the prices in the global market. When the production of Cardamom decreases in Guatemala, the prices on the international markets go up. Guatemala exports its entire crop to the Middle East where cardamom is used as an ingredient in drinks and food. When the quality and quantity of the spice from Guatemala drop, global prices climb.
United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria and Kuwait consume Guatemala’s “green gold”…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to the Guatemalan economy.
here is an account of countries around the world with educational shortcomings. Guatemala is on the list of countries where over 30% of young adults have fewer than four years of education. I encourage everyone to skim the article as it’s really quite eye opening.
I think some of the solutions discussed in the article would be a good start, but I question how well they would solve the root causes of a struggling education system. Private sector education is difficult to roll out to the broad community, which presents an accessibility issue. Performance related pay might actually dissuade potential candidates from entering the profession.
Once again, the article can be found here
The following excerpt is from a February 25, 2010 article published by The Wall Street Journal Online. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
GUATEMALA CITY (Dow Jones)–Harvesting of Guatemala’s current 2009-10 coffee crop continues at slow pace and weather problems are making a recovery more difficult, Guatemala’s National Coffee Association, or Anacafe, said Thursday.
“We are still sticking to our last forecast, but the harvest in the eastern coffee producing regions has not been good,” Anacafe President Ricardo Villanueva told Dow Jones Newswires.
Villanueva said that although Anacafe still hopes Guatemalan coffee production in the 2009-10 cycle will end “a bit above production” in the last harvest year, output continues to be “well below the yields” seen in a harvest with normal weather…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to Guatemalan economics.
The following excerpt is from a February 24, 2010 article published by Today Online. Click here to read the article in its entirety.
Some 1,700 years ago, the great Mayan civilisation chose this country in Central America to set up their most impressive structures – it was on these sacred grounds that their priests would ascend the steps to speak to the gods. Today, Guatemala continues to draw the awe of travellers to the country with its rich history and quietly majestic landscapes. Its most-visited townships lie at the base of towering volcanoes, or alongside great lakes that invoke in travellers a sense of serenity as they would a sense of foreboding.
Visitors to Guatemala have two things to check off on the country’s to-do list – scaling the active volcano Pacaya in Antigua, and visiting the country’s most famous Mayan site in the northern city of Tikal.
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to Guatemalan culture.
The following excerpt is from a February 24, 2010 article published by The Latin American Herald Tribune. Click here to read the article in its entirety.
GUATEMALA CITY – Thousands of teachers from all of Guatemala’s 22 provinces occupied the capital’s Constitution Square on Wednesday to press the government for a 16 percent pay raise.
While union official Rumulado Maldonado told Efe that some 70,000 teachers were taking part, the number in Constitution Square was closer to 5,000.
The head of the ANM union that convened the protest, Joviel Acevedo, said the teachers will remain camped out in the square in tents and cardboard boxes…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to Guatemalan education.
The following excerpt is from a February 24, 2010 article published by 7 News Belize. Click here to read the article in its entirety.
The Belize National Teachers Union held a Council of Management meeting today – but at news time – we were unable to find out from the union what is the decision going forward. But in Guatemala, those teachers aren’t playing. Thousands of them have shut down all major roadways demanding a 16% pay increase. And in Melchor those major roadways meant shutting down the bridge between Belize and Guatemala.
General Manager of the Border Management Agency Gonzalo Rosado told us that no vehicles were allowed to pass into Belize form the Guatemalan side today…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to Guatemalan education.
The following article is an excerpt from the Vancouver Sun on February 22, 2010. To read the article in full, please click here.
GUATEMALA CITY – Guatemalan indigenous Maya people held religious and cultural ceremonies Monday to mark the start of the year 5126 under the ancient Mayan calendar.
 Culture Minister Emilio Ajquejay said that under the Mayan calendar, 5126 marks Kej, year of the stag or deer.
The four-legged creature symbolizes four cosmic points of strength and power, said who said that this is likely to be a year in which “world powers will be strengthened,” he said.
Director of Indigenous Affairs Maria Quezada said the stag reflects the four energies of life: physical, mental, spiritual and emotional, as well as mankind’s dominion over other beings on earth.
In the Mayan faith, the new year is ushered in after the end of Wayeb — a five-day period of reflection, meditation, planning and goal-setting — and to mark the event ethnic Maya leaders held vigil services across Guatemala overnight Sunday into Monday.
Roberto Cajas, director of a confederation of indigenous groups said the new year celebration offers Guatemalans the chance to express their “profound gratitude to Nature” for having provided humans all the essentials needed for life.
To read the rest of the article, please click here. To read more about the Mayan calendar, check out our review of the MY2K blog, which focuses on Mayan symbols in Guatemala.
This month’s Blackboard has as its theme one of Guatemala’s most well-known exports. So we encourage you to sit back, relax and read this issue of the Blackboard over a cup of what has been described by Alexander Pope as “the beverage that can make even politicians wise.” - The Staff at Avivara
Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it’s hard to go back to sleep…
Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil. It is estimated that the global coffee industry earns in excess of $60 billion dollars annually, yet less than 10% of those earnings end up in the countries where the coffee is produced, and slightly less than 0.5% of the total earnings translate into wages for those who actually labor to produce the coffee. For every $3.25 latte sold in the U.S., approximately 1 penny of that goes to the workers who do the actual work of growing and harvesting the coffee beans.
Approximately the size of the state of Tennessee, Guatemala is well known for its many volcanoes, picturesque lakes, and coffee. After Colombia, Guatemala ranks second in the world in the amount of high-grade coffee it produces, and has the highest percentage of its crop classified as “high quality” by world-wide buyers. Over half of its coffee is exported to the U.S., representing around 15% of the Guatemalan Gross National Product and generating about 1/3 of Guatemala’s foreign exchange.
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Fair Trade Coffee in Guatemala
The Fair Trade movement was launched in the Netherlands in 1988. Although coffee was the first, and most common fair trade certified product, other fair-trade commodities now include bananas, chocolate, honey, tea, sugar, orange juice and indigenous handicrafts. Currently, Fair Trade coffee constitutes approximately 2% of the world’s coffee supply and can be purchased at over 7,000 retail outlets in the United States. To be classified as Fair Trade, the coffee (and the growers) must meet several criteria. Growers must be organized into democratically run cooperatives and the cooperatives must agree to independent inspections. They must also use sustainable methods of agriculture….
To read the rest of this article, click here. To view other Avivara newsletters, or to be placed on their monthly distribution list, click here.
The following excerpt is from a February 22, 2010 article published in the Los Angeles Times. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
SG Biofuels on Monday revealed a proprietary variety of the jatropha curcas plant that the Encinitas-based company said will yield more oil at a more profitable rate.
The newly launched JMax 100 has traits that make it optimal for harvesting in Guatemala, said the company, which also said it will produce 100% more oil than existing jatropha varieties.
JMax 100 will also be more than 300% more profitable than current commercial varieties, SG said, able to produce more than 350 gallons per acre at $1.39 per gallon.
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to the Guatemalan Environment.
The following excerpt is from a February 18, 2010 article published by AudubonMagazine.org. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Last week, I returned from a Guatemalan birding extravaganza, the likes of which I’ve never before experienced, with four solid days—5 a.m. starts, sporadic meals, hours of fantastic bird watching—in a country smaller than the state of Tennessee. I personally saw 102 different species, 83 I’d never encountered, and at least a dozen I’d never even heard of.
But to be honest, that was nothing. My spotting paled in comparison to that of my companions, some of the most-skilled birders I’ve ever been out with; several broke the century mark for species spotted in one day.
We spent the entire trip—put on by the Guatemala Tourism Board, INGUAT, and several first-rate tour operators —in the southwestern part of this country of 13 million that, in addition to Spanish, boasts 23 officially recognized Mayan languages…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles related to the Guatemalan environment.
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