With a thirst for empowering people, I am beginning my journey step by step. First by building a sustainable community of collaborators including: visionaries, leaders, professionals, teachers, students, colleagues, and friends in Guatemala City. Second, by expanding my awareness of the world in order to generate creative ideas and create movement for action. Third, by cultivating my own personal transformation because if I want to inspire action then I have to become that action!

My green tree (symbolic of Green Connect) is in the seedling stage. It will take many years for my tree to grow but I am confident that I have the tools, inspiration, courage, creativity, passion, and patience to continue developing through this process. I know that what is important for me to do is to nurture the seeds I am planting and keep rooting myself in what is important for my life. For me it goes back to service. How will I serve?

When I feel myself getting lost in the process of planning my service to humanity- because lets face it, it is easy to get lost- I go back to what inspires and energizes me the most- yoga and meditation. It is through my daily practice of yoga and meditation that I reconnect with the universe and discover that we are all interconnected beings sharing this space we call Earth. For it is in that moment when I recognize the significance of G22 Green Connect to foster holistic change in Guatemala and see the endless possibilities for the future.

Photo Courtesy of Bonnie Norton

Mindi Batson is currenting living in Guatemala City, Guatemala and working for G22 as Co-founder and Green Connect Program Developer, as well as an independent English teacher, psychologist, and yoga teacher.

As municipal gardens were trimmed and the streets cleaned ready for a vast influx of tourists, the central plaza gave itself over to a schoolchildren’s procession raising environmental awareness.

In a country where Pachamama – the spirit of mother earth – is a key indigenous figure, environmentalism will always have a profound cultural significance – but with mining as one of the nation’s primary industries, there’s a delicate balance to be wrought.

This week, as I’ve spoken to fellow professionals in NGOs, businesses and government agencies, time and again we’ve returned to the issue of the environment.

Lloyd Boutcher of Sunvil, a tour operator which holds five-star accreditation for responsible tourism from Britain’s Association of Independent Travel Operators, explained to me that the company sees support for South America’s eco-education schemes as an investment in the future of tourism as well as a social good.

‘Education is key. If you get a local school up and running, and create environmental awareness in children as young as seven or eight, it will stay with them into adulthood. We’ve put money into the Tiskita Foundation, working in southern Costa Rica. Three years ago, local fishermen were hunting turtles, now they’ve been trained as guides taking travelers to see the animals. It has come full circle: making a living from something you were hunting and killing.

Closer to home, here in Ayacucho, questions of environmental protection and sanitation go hand in hand. Where so many remote communities operate without basic utilities, intervention is required to provide a sustainable, unpolluted environment – most importantly of all, with a supply of clean drinking water.

For the staff of Servicios Educativos Rurales (SER), a campaigning Peruvian NGO, the issue of clean water goes to the heart of politics in Ayacucho. Twenty years ago, the province saw a brutal civil conflict between government forces and the guerrillas of the Shining Path.

‘In the campo, home to much drug production, the communities are very poor. Only four in every hundred people have access to clean drinking water,’ Cesar Alvarez of SER told me.

‘These are the rural communities where Shining Path still has a strong presence. The causes of the violence haven’t gone away, and those who were affected by the conflict haven’t had their needs addressed by the state,’ claimed Cesar.

As a campaigning organization, SER sees its duty as monitoring the state, rather than replacing it. Cesar explains: ‘Many NGOs give out food and clothes, which leads the state to pull out and hand responsibility over to them. We refuse to supplant the state, but challenge it to deliver on its obligations.’

However, the SER team find the issue of clean water so pressing that they do provide water utilities, funded by foreign organizations, on behalf of local government.

‘The state has utterly let these communities down on basic utilities. We’re more flexible in responding to local needs, and we maintain relations after projects are completed – we don’t just disappear once the utilities have been installed.’

I’ll be coming back to the question of sustainable development, and talking further with Lloyd and other ‘responsible gringos’, next time.

Matt Finch is an educational consultant from the U.K. and is currently working at the San Domingo Savio primary school in Peru. For more 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.

I traveled into the Sacred Valley to visit Will “KB” Janecek, a Minnesotan that has been running a hostel and giving mountain bike tours in Peru for seven years.  So, as exploring new ruins and culture with a mountain bike was my stated goal for the trip, KB seemed like the man to see.  I arrived in the evening and found him hunched over his laptop in the lobby of his hostel, “I’m on a skype call, I’ll be right with you.”  On the walls, photos of various pro riders that have visited the area are prominently displayed as well as the 2006 NYT travel section piece on Ollantaytambo that mentions KB and his hostel. “Damn it, five years too late!” I thought.  Sitting down in his comfortable sofa, after the obligatory introductions, we planned a ride for the following day.

As we wound back and forth on rough switchbacks up the Camino Willoq, bottoming out the dated Toyota wagon, KB was chattering non-stop; “Peru is raw… I mean sure it’s developing, changing faster than ever before, but at the same time, new ruins are being discovered every day, so you can still have the same experience, or better, as your grandfather had here 80 years ago because ruins have been exposed that previous generations have never seen. For example, these ruins here, they are being excavated and cleaned slowly by the local population, and the government tried to charge for entry to them, for two years they charged a fee to enter here, but now they are free — that is good news for us as mountain bikers.”

As I watched the last rays of sun illuminate crumbling grain storage structures while riding on top of the Inca agricultural terraces of Pumamarca, I pondered this contradiction.  Here, the constant discovery of ruins contrasts with the simultaneous abandonment of certain sites and Inca roads.  Inca roads and ruins reveal themselves, but are then often forgotten, drifting into cultural memory.  We stopped along our decent into the lush Urubamba valley and KB pointed to an overgrown trail and told me he needs to change his story. “At first I had to say that this was a newly discovered Inca trail that only we were riding, now look at it, it’s abandoned, we haven’t ridden it recently and neither has anyone else.” My imagination ran wild in the endless riding.

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

This is a pretty tall order. And it’s up to us to determine how these ideals can jump off the paper and be fleshed out in the real world. That is the challenge of development work, and it requires vision, resourcefulness, and above all, some innovative thinking. But it turns out, development workers are brilliant, and inspired ideas are taking form all over the globe.

Imagine a program that cleans up a neighborhood, forms community alliances, and builds vital educational infrastructure in a community in need, all in one go. I was witness to one such program’s development from the ground up a few weeks ago in Guatemala. The program is part of a collaboration between Hug it Forward, a San Diego-based non-profit, and Manna Project International, a direct-service organization with three international sites in Latin America. Manna Project International’s newest site in Chaquiyjá, Guatemala, has only been in operation since August 2011 but it’s already pursuing a bottle school project with Hug it Forward. The schools are constructed with recycled plastic bottles stuffed with nonbiodegradable waste, rather than the cinder blocks typical of Central American construction. The bottles are stacked in between chicken wire, and covered in cement; the schools are economical, eco-friendly, and of course, structurally sound.

These bottle schools not only provide poor communities with vital facilities for education, an achievement in itself. The projects also foster environmental awareness, clean the neighborhoods of discarded trash, develop new skills—from construction to team leadership—in community members, keep spending on the project limited to within the community, build alliances among the populace, and most importantly, give kids ownership of the school, because they build it with their own hands.

But the bottle schools project goes even further: it forges a new path in the rapidly expanding field of environmentally-sound development. Hug it Forward and Manna Project International are leading by example in new and uncharted waters. But they’re also fulfilling the old adage: one man’s trash is another man’s educational infrastructure.

Kate Bennett is currently researching nonprofit effectiveness in Guatemala. For more about her experiences, check out her blog.

To learn more about Manna Project International’s work or to volunteer with their group, visit the MPI Guatemala blog or check out this post from Manna Project’s founder on La Vida Idealist, “Talking (Or Not) About Your Time Abroad.” For more information on Hug it Forward, visit  their website. 

Photo by Flickr user Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak

What strikes me most about Central America are the dumps. Yes, the dumps, those places with the trash. Where I grew up in the United States, trash was out-of-sight, out-of-mind once the garbage truck came by. But here, dumps are rarely hidden and hardly contained, and for miles around you can see remnants of litter scattered throughout the campo by the wind. This sight really makes me consider the impact of my travel here and wonder if the way I travel could be any greener for the benefit of Guatemala and for our earth on a whole.

Luckily, there are a lot of handy tips for green travel. It goes without saying that before you leave home, turn out your lights, unplug your appliances and chargers, and don’t leave your coffee maker on. Don’t buy those travel size products, as cute as they are- smaller products mean more packaging, and more packaging means more waste. For example, I like to travel with as little weight (for as little cost) as possible, so instead of buying teeny-tiny shampoos I try to fill up reusable containers from home.

Another really important thing to keep in mind is the efficiency of your transportation. One good (and cheap) option is to travel by train or bus rather than flying- however, if a flight is essential you can by carbon offsets for your flight at sites like CarbonFund or TerraPass. Obviously this is slightly pricier- my flights from New York to Guatemala spit about 2,052 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, and offsets cost about US$10-18. If you’re really gung-ho, you can look for flights from JetBlue or Continental, two of the greenest major airlines, according to GOOD Magazine, and opt for direct flights, because the majority of fuel is burned during take-offs and landings. Continental even gives you the option to buy your offset when you purchase your ticket!

Once you land, try to find hostels or hotels that are eco-friendly, like the Green Hotel Association or HOLA hostels (HOLA also gives discounts to its members!). Make an effort to eat locally — that is to say, eat food that hasn’t been imported, no matter how much you miss your peanut butter. The local fare tastes better and fresher, and will also give a helpful boost to the economy. On that note, try to limit your souvenir purchases to goods made by local artisans, rather than hats and shot glasses manufactured in China. Finally, don’t litter, and  carry your trash out on hikes! We travel to beautiful places to see beauty, so let’s keep them that way.

Kate Bennett is currently researching nonprofit effectiveness in Guatemala. For more about her experiences, check out her blog.

The city of Culiacán in western Mexico is rife with gang violence due to the ever burgeoning drug trade. So Reyes thought one way to tackle the problem was by asking people in the community to voluntarily give up their guns. Idealistic, yes. But a waste of time, no.

Television ads invited citizens to hand in guns in exchange for coupons they could trade for appliances and electronics. Strikingly, 1537 guns were collected. What Reyes did next was melt the weapons, and sent them to a factory to be turned into shovels. The shovels – with this story imprinted on its handles – were then passed along to schools and art institutions so that people could use them to plant trees. Says Reyes of the project, “This ritual has a pedagogical purpose of showing how an agent of death can become an agent of life.”

Photos of Reyes' shovels from Flickr user dalbera (Creative Commons)

An inspiring, poetic sentiment. I love how these guns – ugly, harsh, destructive, heavy – were transformed to create something beautiful, ethereal, nurturing and protective.

But in such a violent city, did the handing over of guns compromise the safety of its citizens when it came to self-defense? Just who are the people who turned them in, and was that number enough to make an impact? Could the guns somehow have been utilized differently to generate money for youth educational programs or create alternative opportunities for those looking to get out of the drug trade?

Regardless, I’m amazed by the community’s solidarity in response to such a widespread and deep-rooted problem.  And how this project — started in a small city – has since planted its seeds beyond Mexico. Those shovels broke ground in places such as Vancouver, San Francisco, Paris, and Denver.

What do you think? Is this a good idea that could work elsewhere in Latin America?

Celeste Hamilton is back in the United States after living in Buenos Aires for 2 1/2 years. At the time of writing, she is pining for Argentine humor, dramatic tango performances and gritty graffiti.

For my first few months, my colleagues regularly warned me about the bone-chilling cold that was right around the corner. Frequently, as I hurried into school, teeth chattering, and rushed to warm my hands over the fire, the Patagónes would give me a “this ain’t nothing” smile and tell me to buy extra scarves. But once the temperature really started dropping, the wind pounding, and the frosts becoming daily, even the locals would shiver around the chimney, speculating on how long that particular cold snap would last. Our poor Physical Education teacher, whose gym is practically outdoors (there are only three walls) would come running into the teacher’s lounge between classes shaking with cold and saying “Hoy día sí que sí” (Today, yes, it’s really quite cold).

This winter was a particularly severe one: the region had the worst snowstorms in thirty years. When the big nevazón hit last July, we were without light, water, internet, and phone service for three days. Plus, all roads out of Puerto Aisén were snowed in, which meant the ambulance couldn’t get to Coyhaique, lots of people couldn’t get to work, and many more (myself included) missed their flights.

I did finally get to Santiago, my winter vacation destination, a week later. Once upon a time, I thought that Santiago was cold in winter, but on this vacation – as my American friends layered up and shivered – it felt almost tropical in comparison.

Once I leave Patagonia, I’ll probably remember the cold here as a series of images: my vice-principal walking down the street puffing his cigarette through clenched lips, both hands shoved protectively into his pockets; a friend’s mom handing me a stack of five wool blankets to supplement my comforter; students running to flock around the fire as soon as they enter my classroom; me pulling on a second pair of socks – and then tucking my sweatpants into them; the lock of our iron-gate frozen icy white in the mornings; my frantic rush to make fire after work, ripping up page after page of newspaper as kindling. And, of course, an image I’d never want to forget – the graceful snow-covered slopes that surround the town on three sides.

Nereida Heller is currently volunteering in Puerto Aisén, Chile with the English Open Doors Program. For more about her experiences, check out her blog.

Mosquitoes have been rampant here in northern Mexico for the past five months, and although the amount of them are decreasing as the colder weather approaches, I still see them floating around every room in our coffee shop and in our house. I’ve gotten good at catching them in midair, then smacking them to their death on my thigh. But my ninja-hand moves are not enough to rid them all, especially because females can have up to 3,000 offspring in their 100-day lifetime.

Malaria, dengue and yellow fever are the major diseases mosquitoes like to pass along, so although I cannot turn blood sour, here are a few ways to decrease the risk of getting those diseases:

They are buzzing around my ear as I type this

1.  Rub Listerine or Vick’s Vapor Rub on your skin, as both work like a repellent. Or just use a repellent with a high percentage of DEET.
2.  The smoke from candles/fires repel the pests. It seems that although Citronella oil helps repel mosquitoes, it’s the smoke that is most effective.
3.  Plant some catnip near your living quarters. Or basil, marigolds or lavender.
4.  Wipe Bounce dryer sheets on your skin/clothes. Some people say this does not work, others swear by it. Those who say it works, say only Bounce brand does the trick. (Not sure if you can find Bounce in Latin America.)
5.  Rid any standing water around your house. Check your trash can, as a tiny amount of water will be plenty for that mama mosquito looking to make thousands of babies.
6.  Don’t kill every spider you see. They are on your side — unless they are poisonous. Or get/make a bat box.

Mosquitoes smell you, mostly because of the carbon dioxide you are breathing out. For some reason, certain people’s skin is more attractive than others. No conclusive evidence explains why.

What seems to be more important than me ninja chopping mosquitos ten times a day is to remember that it’s much worse in other areas. In fact, the diseases that I have to Google search are a part of normal life for many of the world’s inhabitants. Although most of mosquito-net-donating charities distribute these nets in Africa only, there are some that distribute them all over the world. Against Malaria, for example, distributes them in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. In addition, it sends 100 percent of the five dollars you pay to buy one net, to actually buy that net and send it where it’s needed.

If anyone knows of any other sites where mosquito nets are sent within Central and South America, please leave a comment!

Gena Thomas is a women’s coop laborer and faith-based coffee shop co-manager with her husband. For more on her experiences, check out her blog. For more on critters in Latin America, check out “Piké!” by Megan Wood and “Scorpions, Tarantulas and Rats, Oh My!” by Bridget Barry.

Latin America contains 26% of the world’s water resources and hosts 6% of the world’s population.

This means a lot; this means little. Unequal water distribution is not just spatial. It is temporal, through cycles of drought and flood. It is situational, for lack of a better word: government policy, investment, patterns of use.

Uruguay’s pretty lucky. In 2004, 60% of Uruguayans approved a constitutional amendment which made access to potable water and sanitation services a human right guaranteed and administered by the state. Despite highly potable tap water in most of Montevideo, the sort-of local bottled water industry thrives. Parque Salus bills itself as a nature reserve and tourist destination as well as bottling plant: “every day of the year I’ll enjoy/ eight glasses of Salus…” There is lots of water here. In fact, Uruguay sits atop part of one of the world’s largest freshwater aquifers, the Guaraní Aquifer. I tell people I’m studying public participation and Guaraní Aquifer policy, and they tend to say, “Oh, you’re really here to steal our water.” They’re only sort of joking.

Water for All (Las Herrerias, Spain)

On a continent in which economies rely heavily on the extraction and export of natural resources (oil copper, lithium), it’s little wonder concerns about water rights have sprung up. And with that, the demand for water as a right as well. (A subtle difference in the meaning of ‘right’, but vital). The UN-adopted Dublin Principles from 1992 declared, among other things, “Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good.” The mercantilization of water is an unpopular idea in environmental justice circles, and seen by activists as carte blanche for multinationals to rush in and co-opt water resources with the help of neo-liberal privitization policies (e.g. the 2000 Cochabamba Water Wars). In contrast, the recent UN non-binding resolution that declared access to water and sanitation services as a human right can be interpreted, in part, as moving away from the Dublin Principles and towards support of both the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the state-guaranteed water management structure implemented in Uruguay.

And yet, I think water as good versus water as human right is turning into a false dichotomy, the perpetration of which will only hinder the creation of effective water distribution and management policy. As long as water services require pipes and reservoirs and filtration; as long as upstream uses threaten downstream livelihoods; as long as we all can’t dig our own pump or use water indiscriminately without the threat of contaminating groundwater or lowering water pressure, nature’s gift of water is surrounded by a necessary web of services and regulations and yes, competing uses that isn’t free and can’t be wished away in the name of moral obligation or socio-cultural expectation.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to increase affordable access to water or sanitation services of course, even if many states don’t have the stability, budget, or wealth of natural resources to replicate the Uruguayan model. But it does mean scientists, economics and activists need to pool their perspectives and tackle the problem holistically. Latin America, where sharp debate is as abundant as the water itself, is an ideal place to start.

Flora Lindsay-Herrera is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Montevideo, Uruguay. For more about the world of water, here is a good set of resources.