Volunteers Work with Women’s Group

I have a ton of things to blog about … which means that I have NO TIME TO BLOG!! It is one of those Catch 22’s … the more things that are happening, the less time I have to write about it!

Two volunteers, Rose Lord and Martha Luz Atkinson, from Global Coalition for Peace, (Washington, D.C.) arrived on Monday, Sept. 26th to continue the work with the women’s group that they began in January of this year.

Their work began by teaching the women how to build Square Foot Gardens,

and the program has since expanded to include many aspects of “group development” to help the women organize. Rose and Martha Luz have committed to coming to El Remate for 2 weeks, 3 or 4 times per year (this is their third trip … see http://home.earthlink.net/~coalition4peace/globalapplicationsforselfreliance.htm for Rose’s diary and lots of photos).

Rose and Martha Luz were really impressed on this trip to see how hard the women are working to earn some money to begin developing their land (Project Ix-canaan has over one full manzana of land that is solely for development by and for the women’s group). Twice a week, the women are meeting at Doña Blanca’s house to make tamales.

It takes them until about 3pm to finish cooking them …

Here we see Doña Juana (President of the Women´s Group) and Doña Beti (Officer) covering the tamales in preparation for about 3 hours of steaming over the fire in the wood stove. Cyra (Vice President) is in the background, preparing maza for the tortillas they will eat for lunch …

which she is shown cooking in this next photo …

Doña Beti, Doña Juana, Doña Blanca, Janeth, Cyra and Alba, waiting for the 300 tamales to cook so they can pair up and go door to door selling them for Q2.00 each (about $0.25), thus earning about Q125.00 ($16.00) for the group each sales day.