Walking on the road to Chaquijyá, Guatemala

This year, in order to further our understanding of global hunger, the Program Directors at all three MPI sites participated in the 30-hour fast organized by World Vision International. Though allowed to consume fruit juice, we were highly encouraged to not consume solid foods or coffee (eek!) from 1:00pm this past Thursday until 7:00pm the following Friday. In addition to the fast, PD’s also participated in service activities organized through their respective sites, and discussions concerning our personal sentiments regarding the fast. In Guatemala, we began our fast with an hour of service at a local feeding program and then conducted dialogues in house and with the Ecuador PDs via Skype. The fast was both physically and emotionally taxing, but we all persevered and I believed that we learned a great deal from the experience.

To be honest, when I first learned about the fast, I was not crazy about it for numerous reasons. Primarily, any given day, I probably spend more time eating than not, and I was not sold on the idea of forgoing food for an entire 30 hours. Additionally, I felt several moral qualms on the matter. Who were we to expect that a mere day-long fast would allow us to empathize with the suffering and turmoil of hunger victims? Watching movies on laptops, drinking clean water, and cozily sitting in our warm beds, we would be surrounded by numerous luxuries and we would have a kitchen stocked with food in case of emergency. We would begin the fast with the assurance of copious amounts of food in 30 hours and we would never suffer the anxiety of wondering the source of our next meal.

The fast also did not touch me initially at a personal level, as our physical experience of hunger could never resemble the experiences of the hungry in Chaquijyá. Many residents of Chaquijyá suffer from chronic hunger. While many of them may only eat one meal a day, they do eat. Our experience would more closely resemble the acute hunger of victims of natural disasters or war, whose food sources become cut off very suddenly. Like I said, there were numerous reasons. Overall, it seemed to me that our experience would not remotely resemble those lived by the impoverished, and I was hesitant to believe that the fast would affect my perspectives in working with the community members of Chaquijyá.

Having successfully completed the fast, I cannot say if the experience will affect how I make my lesson plans or teach my classes in Chaquijyá, but I can say that the fast did prove to be more enlightening than I had expected. Namely, even if the fast did not radically change my thoughts on world hunger, the experience did stimulate me to think. Though the fast was not “authentic” per say, hunger dominated my thoughts for 30 hours and compelled me to ask to ask more profound questions about myself and the larger issue. Indeed, I realized that is impossible for me to fathom the experience of chronic hunger. This realization excited in me both a rush of gratitude for the numerous blessings I am fortunate to enjoy, and also a larger appreciation for the resilience of people suffering from hunger. All over the world, people who survive on minimal food still work and struggle to support families. Often the most impoverished people possess the most physically taxing jobs, and millions of hungry people toil each day all the while still nourishing love for their families, religious beliefs, and/or inner determination.

I am so grateful for the smack-in-face, out-of-the-comfort-zone experience that was the fast. Sometimes I need a shock to my system to make me open my eyes and see the world around me more clearly. Global hunger is truly a world issue that cannot be fixed in a flash by one organization or government. Whether through monetary donations, volunteering, or spreading awareness, all of us must find our own ways to contribute to the struggle to insure food security for our fellow humans.

Ginny just finished a thirteen-month commitment as Program Director with Manna Project International-Guatemala and is returning to Guatemala to seek out other opportunities. For more on Ginny’s experiences in Guatemala, check out her blog.

Living abroad for me is a constant balance between trying to learn the language and fit into the Latin culture, while simultaneously keeping some American customs and cultural practices.  I enjoy trying to blend in to the fabric of Quito.  Obviously, I physically stand out as a foreigner, but I always feel secretly satisfied when someone mistakes me for a Colombian or Chilean – at least for the first 2 minutes of conversation.

But at the same, being the token standout gringo is also pretty fun.  The month of Movember offers one of those opportunities. According to Movember’s official site, “Movember (the month formerly known as November) is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health.” One of the new teachers here at Colegio Americano brought my attention to Movember, and successfully motivated a group of us here at Colegio Americano to participate in the cause.

The international movement has gained some momentum over the last few years, and now it has arrived in Quito. For now, at our school, it is a primarily gringo event, for the simple reason that most Ecuadorians don’t have much facial hair.  Also, the majority of the local male teachers here are quite formal and I’m not sure if they would be interested in looking a bit ridiculous for an entire month.

So, although it may seem extraneous to raise money for an outside cause while living in a city with such immediate local needs, I am enjoying Movember.  At the very least, it povides a theraputic opportunity to laugh at one’s self while raising money for a good cause.  We are, by the way, currently lacking in that department, so please feel free to help out at http://movember.bbnow.org.

Philip Dixon is an English literature teacher in Ecuador, who has just relocated from Guayaquil to Quito, and a devoted mountain biker. For more information on his experiences, check out his blog.

Late 2009, I was a classic case of the leave-everything-behind syndrome. Having just finished my philosophical dissertation and stashed it in my professor’s letterbox, I was ready to put its contents – it was a study in ethics – into practice. I gave up my small Berlin apartment along with the odd job I did to pay for it, bought a bunch of flight tickets – and took off on a journey I called Charity Travel.

What I wanted to do was to promote the concept of helping grassroots initiatives in the developing world while traveling. I wanted to show that you could be engaged in other ways than simply giving out donations. Technical, medical, or journalist skills are of great value, as are organizing talent or the ability to expose and connect initiatives in a meaningful way.

In November 2009, a woman I had met in Korea had fallen for the idea. We decided spontaneously to travel around the world together visiting charitable initiatives and building momentum for this thing we called “charity travel.” We were inseparable during the adventure that took us to 40 countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. In April 2011 we married traditionally in South Korea.

Our journey is documented on charitytravel.blogspot.com. We’re not a big organization with public relations, fundraising, and legal departments. We’re typical travelers trying to make a difference.

During that journey I learned two critical lessons for our work. First, the smallest initiatives could use our help the most. Instead of “digging trenches” or performing other tasks such as primary child care or medical check-ups locals should be doing (or trained to be doing), such start-ups are in need of a few simple things: rust, exposure, expertise, and moral support.

Second, intrepid travelers could give these initiatives just that, either first-hand or by connecting them so others they’ve met along the way or online. But how to get people involved? How to connect struggling grassroots initiatives with the world of charity travelers? And more importantly, even if our struggling grass roots initiative manages to make its voice heard, we don’t know if we can trust it.

Meet KindMankind.net. I launched www.kindmankind.net in April 2011 as a website targeting independent travelers with a desire to do good works. But who scouts these invisible promising yet fragile people and their initiatives? This is the task of Kind Mankind’s “independent changemakers.”

These “independent changemakers” travel to communities who need and deserve change and help responsibly. A nurse from Kansas, while on vacation in Nepal, finds a struggling community clinic (not just the ones already mighty enough to launch their own website) and she sets up an “air-bridge” support of clean needles while en passant pointing out the importance of hand washing. A German construction worker spontaneously teaches a two-week course of an advanced technique to local builders in Tanzania – builders that are ‘common people’ and have never heard of NGOs.

They are change makers because they often bring transformational change to a community, contributing their skills to local startup initiatives such as microlending groups, community centers, schools, ecotourism initiatives, sensitizing campaigns, or human rights activists. They are independent because they can take care of themselves and they can help out initiatives that are not well-managed -yet. That means they can have a true impact.

Unlikely? Is creating such opportunities mere opportunism or can it be a vital resource in our quest to make the world fairer and more liveable? Let’s find out!

Kiva Fellow David Connelly, my predecessor here at Kiva Partner Caja Rural Señor de Luren in Ica, has written before about the 2007 8.0 magnitude earthquake. The statistics are chilling: 519 people dead, 1366 injured, and some 76,000 homes collapsed. “After two and a half years,” he wrote in 2010, “Ica is still very much recovering.” Last week’s comparatively modest 6.9 magnitude earthquake made it clear as day that the wounds are fresh.

Moments after the quaking abated, Peuvians tore out of buildings into the streets. The roads flooded with vehicles screaming out of Ica, trying to reach homes and families on the city’s peripheries. Co-workers clutched at each other outside, waiting for tremors, which arrived dutifully shortly thereafter. While the earthquake itself had not unsettled me, the sight of a city in sheer terror was consummately unnerving.

Ica, in many ways, is a modern city. It is the capital of its department in Peru. We have several large supermarkets, wide asphalt avenues with obeyed stoplights, and our very own over-priced coffee house, where I sit now and where I sat at the time of the quake. The buildings here are solid, new, and given the events of the last decade, built to be earthquake-proof.

Though standards of construction and seismic mitigation efforts were doubled during reconstruction in Ica, time and financial constraints did not afford this kind of purposefulness beyond the borders of the city. This is where you’ll find the truly vulnerable population and Kiva’s target market. They may live in fragile and overcrowded adobe homes. They may live with instable or nonexistent access to water, electricity, and gas lines. Their transportation infrastructure is meager. Faulty ATMs spell for limited access to liquid assets. Peru’s poor, those already on unsure financial footing, are those impacted greatest by natural disasters.

Let me give you a scenario for the average micro-enterprise in the wake of a natural disaster. Say you lend $25 to Kiva borrower María, to invest in her small store, where she sells sodas, candy, and pastries. She is making repayments on time, selling goodies to her neighbors, and flourishing in the way that we hope that every Kiva borrower will. But what happens to her store in the wake of a disaster?

Within moments of the event, costs accrue. It’s possible that her physical business- the building, her cash register, her products- are damaged or destroyed in the event. María now must pay to repair or rebuild, and might be without income in the interim. Meanwhile, her neighbors, experiencing similar interruptions in income, have stopped buying her sodas and candy. Even if her store is still standing and her cash register still works, she may be without electricity, and therefore unable to open the register or to operate past dark. Not to mention, if María was stocking dairy products, they just went bad.

And even if she’s lucky enough to find that her store is fine and her neighbors still have their disposable income to buy sodas and candy, she’s still not out of harm’s way. All of the sudden, the small business or company from which María bought her soda and candy are unable to produce these goods, because the water services have been shut off and their production facilities have been damaged. And even if they could keep making candies for María to sell in her store, they’re now unable to reach her store due to damaged transportation infrastructure.

The economy cannot function at normal levels in the wake of a severe natural disaster. Consider the direct economic losses, such as destroyed or severely damaged buildings, transportation infrastructure, energy and water infrastructure, environmental infrastructure (such as dams), and other private property. These result in innumerable disruptions of the business sector; production facilities, economic markets, and distribution systems are stalled or stopped altogether. And when micro-enterprises come into the picture, these private sector interruptions become a personal tragedy as well. Damages to personal items, injury, or death all bear heavily on a small business owner’s livelihood and their day-to-day lives.

So what, then, can microfinance do to alleviate the effects of a natural disaster? What role should microfinance institutions assume? In normal conditions, microfinance seeks to expand access to financial services- whether savings, credit, or insurance- to those traditionally excluded from the credit market- by poverty, geographic isolation, loan size, or other barriers from traditional banking institutions. Microcredit specifically (what we do here on Kiva) addresses two needs of borrowers. It smooths existing income and protects against fluctuations in livelihoods, a “micro-disaster insurance,” if you will. Microcredit also works to boost income by removing capital constraints and allowing for micro-enterprises to realize their potential. The point being, it serves certain needs of the poor.

However, the needs of the poor shift dramatically in the wake of a natural disaster. Affected parties are not interested in expanding their micro-enterprises. Frankly, in the case of a catastrophic disaster and a disrupted economy, this could be considered imprudent. What affected parties require is some form of speedy mitigation, direct assistance, and a return to normalcy. Their own immediate changes in behavior may include a “reduction in consumption, sale of assets, migration, withdrawal of savings and borrowing and using remittances to mitigate the effects of a disaster” (Parker and Nagarajan 2000). Their coping mechanisms, in short: access all available liquid assets, and apply prodigiously.

As such, disaster relief does not call for market-driven microfinance but for well-allocated aid or subsidized credit, as controversial as that idea may seem. This may not be an appropriate task for financially self-sustainable microfinance institutions in the open market. But Kiva Field Partners are in a much better position to provide this support.

After the disastrous 2007 earthquake hit in Peru, Kiva Partner Caja Señor de Luren provided a six-month grace period to a large portion of their affected portfolio. Virtually all restructured clients repaid their loans on time and clients were able to make a full recovery. Furthermore, Caja Luren’s partnership with Kiva enables them to reach out to riskier clients, those impacted most heavily by the earthquake, in a time of extreme need.

But even when subsidized and cheaper microfinance products are unfeasible or inapplicable, microfinance institutions have other means of alleviating the effects of a disaster. Microfinance institutions can proactively offer micro-insurance and support disaster preparedness leading up to the event, and retroactively provide the invaluable service of financial liquidity of savings to their clients in case of a disaster.

Microfinance, even in normal conditions, is not without its limitations. In a time of upheaval and economic collapse, this may be doubly so. But microfinance can support clients before and after the fact. Through improved access to microfinance services, clients can build and fortify their productive assets, be they economic, human, or social. Access to financial services can restore borrowers’ livelihoods and enhance the preparedness of clients for the next possible disaster. Here in Ica, there’s no telling how far off that might be.

This blog post was invaluably informed by “Can Microfinance Meet The Poor’s Financial Needs in Times Of Natural Disaster?” by Joan Parker and Geetha Nagaraja. To read the article in its entirety, click here.

Kate Bennett is currently living in Ica, Peru and working as a Kiva Fellow with Kiva Field Partner Caja Rural Señor de Luren. More more videos of borrowers or to hear more about her experiences, check out her blog!

It’s a story of deforestation and reforestation; of destruction and rejuvenation; of changing perceptions of land use; and of ecology.

Last week when I visited Mindo (a small town less than 2 hours west of Quito, Ecuador) with a group of teachers, the taxista taking us up to the waterfall hike and zip-line canopy area couldn’t contain himself. He was non-stop chatter the entire 30 minute ride up to the trailhead. His pride in his community was palpable.

As we climbed up the windy rough road in his pickup, the town of Mindo slowly got smaller and eventually almost blended into the surrounding forest. Apparently, it didn’t used to be that way. According to our new guide, just 15 years ago the area surrounding the town was completely deforested. The town was using the land to make a living, and a meager one at that. Then, change happened. A foreigner visited the town, and was captivated by the beauty and potential for tourism. With the support of the local community, he set up the first tourism agency, and started bring customers from Quito to Mindo to explore the forest canopy on zip lines and hike through waterfalls. At this time, the trip from Quito to Mindo was a 6 hour trek, instead of the 2 hour trip it is now.

Eventually, the locals banned together with Quiteños to create a foundation. Later, they succeeded in gaining governmental approval to create a protected forest in the area. This forest came under threat when the state oil company was planning to run a pipeline basically through the town. But the locals protested, and the pipeline was diverted to protect the forest and the growing tourism boom in Mindo.

“Now, it’s true….we’re not true ecologists… we’re green ecologists here, green like money,” said our taxi guy. He explained to us the transition from and extraction based local economy, to tourism. The government helped too, by renovating the road from Quito to Mindo, making it more accessible to tourism. Today, Mindo has gained a reputation as a hot spot for bird and butterfly watching, so virtually every weekend the town is filled with Quitenos and backpackers. The American Bird Conservancy even has a partner organization there, http://www.mindocloudforest.org.

So for me, Mindo provides an inspiring example of how Thomas Friedman’s “Green Revolution” is in action here in Ecuador. And if developing countries in Latin America can do this, just imagine if some bigger “leading” economic powerhouses could do the same…

phto credit: Mary Cornwell-Wright

photo credit: Mary Cornwell-Wright

photo credit: Mary Cornwell-Wright

Philip Dixon is an English literature teacher in Ecuador, who has just relocated from Guayaquil to Quito, and a devoted mountain biker. For more information on his experiences, check out his blog.

Her direct response fascinated me. All day, I found myself returning to the question: can music be an agent of social change? Can music truly change the world?

Pondering the question at length, I began to reflect on my year in Guatemala. I left Guatemala at the height of the campaign hoopla preceding the presidential election. In a country where scores of residents lack mailboxes or consistent access to television and internet, most political candidates use popular music as a means to advertise. Every day, pick-up trucks equipped with loud speakers will roll through the streets (sometimes at painfully early hours), blaring popular songs remixed to feature a candidate’s name and platform. Unlike the ads, signs, and debates customary in America, the music reaches the illiterate, the impoverished, and the people who might not pay attention otherwise.

I also saw music prevalent in Mayan communities. The large wooden xylophone called the marimba has survived the Spanish conquest, centuries of social and economic oppression, and the horrors of the 36-year civil war to remain a pillar of Mayan ceremonies and traditions. For every reggaeton or pop song that resonates from a tienda, there is also a marimba recording that resounds from the store next door. For every baile moderno danced by the children at school celebrations, there is a baile tradicional being performed to an upbeat, marimba tune. Despite the influx of American culture and relentless inequality, the marimba seems a unique way to celebrate and preserve Maya identity.

Christians in Guatemala also seem to express their faith through music. Whether in a chicken bus, tienda, or church gathering, Christian music constitutes a significant portion of the music that I encountered in my daily life in Sololá. Praise music seems to play an emotional role for Christians, and many devout members of the Evangelical churches even denounce all non-religious music.
From political campaigns to Maya traditions to religious practices to the most banal Tigo promotion outside the grocery store, music already seems to play a central role in Guatemalan communities. So maybe my friend is right. Maybe music touches us in ways that words or images alone cannot. I do not know of any non-profit organizations working with specifically with music, but I look forward to investigating.

Ginny is in the last stage of her thirteen-month commitment as a Program Director with Manna Project International-Guatemala. For more on Ginny’s experiences in Guatemala, check out her blog.

At long last, the 87th switchback of Cerro 87 comes into sight. My fellow guides and our clients drop our backpacks and set up for breakfast in an ideal spot for the brilliant spectacle still to come.

As I sat munching Quetzaltrekker’s infamous oatmeal/granola concoction I saw my old friend creep up to greet the day. Right on time. The moments before a sunrise are the most beautiful. We stood in awe, too afraid to move for fear we would ruin the perfection, until finally, the sun burst up and over the mountain peak.

To any outsider the Quetzaltrekkers setup, with no boss and all-volunteers, may seem like a precarious balance. How does it work really? Every guide knows this truth within their hearts: the only thing that stands between the kids of Escuela de la Calle and abject poverty is Quetzaltrekker’s success, and this keeps the fire within us stoked and our level of determination high.

Furthermore, these kids are kids we know individually by name, face, age, dreams, fears, and those first signs of teary tantrum on-sets. Every week we get our butts kicked on the soccer field by 13-year-old boys who would make jaws drop in the United States and college scouts salivate. Most kids start learning by kicking a coke bottle on cement streets because they can’t afford a real ball.

Eventually I stopped asking, “Does this place really exist, and can this really work?” because though I can’t explain it, I know firsthand that it does work. For the volunteers it is a way to travel but simultaneously learn about the culture and help make an impact on the local community.

All of the Hogar Abierto children have sad stories to tell. The odds were against them to survive- let alone thrive. I don’t know where they find the strength, but I find my strength in them.

Raised in a culture that spends thousands of dollars for entertainment and escapism I found my sanctuary for free. Quetzaltrekkers led me into the clouds and out of the darkness both literally and metaphorically. For the first time in my life I was happy, content and making a difference. Quetzaltrekkers helped save me just as much as the children it has helped over the past fifteen years, and will hopefully continue to save in the future.

To learn more about Quetzaltrekkers and its programs (or to sign up for a hike), check out their website or this recent NY Times article on the group. For other La Vida Idealist posts on volunteering abroad in Latin America, check out “Part I: Being Quarter-life Idealists in Guatemala” by Whitney Devin, ”Now I’m Ready to Start: Five Tips for Volunteering Abroad” by Megan Kaseburg, “Finding Your Niche as a Short Term Volunteer” by Jennifer Yael Green, or  ”How to Fundraise Your Own Salary: 5 “Easy” Steps“ by Kate Bennett.

This week I have been in Lima and have inadvertently come across some very innovative approaches to youth development – some without that as their intention I’m sure. Seeing these initiatives was very inspiring for me and got me thinking about alternative tools for working with young people and helping them to create paths out of poverty.

While in Parque Kennedy in Miraflores, an upper-middle-class and very touristy area of Peru’s capital, I went over to see the amphitheatre where there are often old couples romantically dancing the night away. When I arrived a man was singing ‘My Way’ and the audience was swaying away. Then as he finished a group of youths came onto the stage setting up their decks and microphones – needless to say the atmosphere changed just a bit! It was amazing though, this group who represented the Movimiento Hip Hip del Perú had come to perform and spread their message to the people of Miraflores – that it is not your fault where you are born and that poverty is not a disease. Their lyrics were clever and meaningful and the breakdancers were incredibly good. I loved it but unfortunately most of the middle-class Mirafloreños there left pretty soon after it started.

It got me thinking – these young people could have easily become pirañas (street kids) struggling to rise out of poverty in Lima but they have turned their lives around through the power of music and art.

Olga Luna's stunning work using masks made from the faces of street children in Lima

I had another encounter with this type of approach through visiting a project called Casa Generación in Lima. In one of their homes for former street children they taught them to surf and they have become true sportsmen (and women) and some of them have actually become national surfing champions. They have also done art and theatre projects with street children – like this striking set of masks with the help of artist Olga Luna that is on display at the Museo de la Nación in Lima (above).

Chatting to the director of Casa Generación about this was enlightening too, she was a big fan of the skills and values that art and sport could bring to street children – organisation, teamwork, dedication and boosting their self-confidence. See this video to learn more about Casa Generación and their budding surfers: Generation Surf.

Fran Talavera is currently the International Projects Manager with Latin American Foundation for the Future. For more on her experiences, check out her blog.

Arthur Rimbaud was a French Symbolist poet who wrote furiously at a young age. He lived a life of indulgences, and was driven to the edge of insanity before he gave up writing all together at the age of 21. His work can be characterized as dark and “absolutely modern.” His writing led to the Surrealist movement in France and later served as the driving inspirational force in the Beat movement in the United States, heavily influencing 20th century writers and musicians such as Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas.

I met my modern Rimbaud in a hostel in Ollantaytambo. Like Rimbaud in his youth, this backpacker was full of literary energy. As soon as he found out that I was a teacher, his face lit up. “Oh, wow, great man, so what do you read? What do you like? Poetry? Dante? Poe?- oh, you’re American, Frost? Dickinson?” He carried with him at least eight heavy classics of literature including Volume One and Volume Two of Edgar Allen Poe’s Short Stories, Dante’s Inferno – in Italian, some Shakespeare, and others. But more impressive than his portable library was his ability to recite verse and quote obscure authors from memory.

His passion was contagious. I was humbled by his knowledge and memorized verse, but also inspired. We continued to swap names and authors throughout the night. Later, at the bar, his list went on: “Sure, sure, yeah, yeah great, how about Keats? Wow, the urn! Right, great, and Beckett, Sarte? Si, son lo maximo.” When we got to the Latin writers, I couldn’t keep up. “Neruda, Garcia Marquez, right, incredible!” He was on fire. At about midnight, I was sufficiently saturated with poetry and drink, so I decided to leave the bar and take some night photos of the Inca-era cobblestone streets.

The next morning, I found my friend with his band of revelers playing music and singing in the square. Like modern Muses, these carefree travelers were motivating me. They reminded me how I felt when I first discovered literature in high school, and why I am in the teaching profession, and why I should be happy that I recently landed a job as a literature teacher in Quito. As a teacher, I am constantly looking for ways to engage my students and keep them interested. And although I know that it is a tall order to imbue them with the same passion as my modern Rimbaud did in me, I am looking for ways to do it. So, attention fellow teachers reading and writing for La Vida Idealist: please feel free to share some of your success stories in the classroom and I will continue to document my humble attempts. Thanks!

Philip Dixon is an English literature teacher in Ecuador and a devoted mountain biker. For more information on his experiences, check out his blog.

Without those trees, the picture starts to change all at once. Light rushes in, perhaps. But at the same time, animals start migrating in droves from their ruined natural habitat. The soil begins to erode. The water quality downstream is degraded, preventing its use in drinking, cooking, washing, and even fishing. What’s more, the water retention of the area is severely depleted, causing worse droughts in the dry-season and worse still floods in the wet season. In the mountains of Guatemala, these floods will cause avalanches and mudslides, devastating families and sometimes- entire villages. This is the real picture of deforestation in Guatemala.

Reforestation project in Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan, a Guatemalan village that suffers from an unreliable water supply. Photo by J.S. Barrie

This transformation can happen in the blink of an eye (or really, within a generation). The trouble is, a phenomenon as complex as deforestation cannot simply be outlawed or prohibited, because some families depend upon the sale of these trees as lumber or their use as firewood to survive. Enforcing prohibitive laws would be difficult, costly, and at the end of the day, ineffective against those who will risk arrest to maintain their livelihoods. But communities, driven by the degraded water quality downstream, and non-governmental groups, seeking to create an incentive against deforestation upstream, are cooperating to create market solutions that work for all parties.

Conservation projects must satisfy many social, economic, and institutional aspects that factor into the equation. One such project making waves is the Sierra de las Minas Water Fund, located in the Alta Verapaz department in southeast Guatemala. Upstream are private landowners in the highlands of the Motagua River, which runs through the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Preserve. Downstream, water is in high demand for household consumption, agriculture, cattle, tourism, recreation, commerce, and the large industrial water users of the region, such as bottling plants for Pepsi, Coca Cola, and Rum Zapaneca, a Guatemalan rum distillery.

In recent years, water quality and quantity has taken a significant blow due to its excessive use by the bottling companies as well as the hydroelectric and papermaking industries. Prior to the Water Fund, there were no regulatory financial mechanisms monitoring excessive water use in the region. The new Water Fund establishes a link between the water users downstream, and forest and watershed conservation upstream and guarantees sustainable local financing for conservation. Even better: the system is entirely voluntary.

The Water Fund is a joint project of Defensores de la Naturaleza, a Guatemalan environmental nonprofit, the World Wildlife Fund/World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Central America, and a series of other national and international partners. It incorporates what is known as a payment for ecosystem service (PES) mechanism. In a PES mechanism, “ecosystem services” can be sold by parties producing positive ecosystem services to parties benefiting from these services. Ecosystem services include all the benefits of healthy ecosystems not usually captured in economic valuation – like the role of wetlands in filtering water and preventing stormwater flooding, forests sequestering carbon, or bees pollinating crops.

Reforestation project in Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan, a Guatemalan village that suffers from an unreliable water supply. Photo by J.S. Barrie

In the case of the Sierra de las Minas water fund, major water users downstream who benefit from good water quality and steady quantity, most notably the bottling companies, pay a fee to upstream residents. The money is channeled into a water trust fund, which disburses funds to the private upstream landowners towards watershed restoration as well as agroforestry and sustainable forest management in the buffer area of the reserve. Essentially, downstream water users are voluntarily paying upstream residents to ensure a steady flow of water through the Motagua River. This exchange of payments for the ecosystem services provided by the Sierra de Las Minas Biosphere Preserve establish a sustainable system for watershed management.

Tropical deforestation plays a formidable role in climate change: twenty percent of the world’s carbon emissions come from deforestation and forest degradation. Not only do the efforts of Defensores de la Naturaleza and the WWF work to slow this process, but they also establish a mechanism to regulate it for the long-term. Projects like the Water Fund- realistic measures that balance the interests of all parties involved and perform a much-needed service for our entire planet – symbolize a bright future for environmentally sustainable development. With programs like this advancing throughout the world, we can begin to envision a greener future for all.

Kate Bennett spent several months in Guatemala last year studying nonprofit sustainability and is currently living in New Jersey. To hear more about her experiences in Guatemala or her future plans in Ecuador, check out her blog. For further information on the Sierra de las Minas Water Fund, please consult the World Wildlife Fund’s website or Watershed Market’s case study on the Water Fund.