I woke up early today to visit a community near the city of Patulul in the state of Escuintla, about 2 hours southwest of Guatemala City. ISMU was taking me to a community called Canton Luciana where around 145 families were living near a latex rubber plantation.

ISMU was invited to come to the community to carry out a needs assessment survey to see where they can best support these families. The two crucial areas that needed to be addressed the most was the improvement of housing and health issues.

A previous government program had started training 5 women in this community to become health monitors. However, the government program only trained them in children's health, and not any of the diseases that afflicted adult community members such as diarrhea and respiratory health issues that could be prevented. As a result, ISMU coordinated a series of preventative health workshops to train health monitors. Trainings included a practical workshop to make herbal shampoos, creams and cough syrups.

ISMU also organized the visit of an expert to come to the community to teach and facilitate themes requested by the community such as conflict resolution.

For the longest time there was a conflict between two families that had been a caused by a community member's chicken trespassing to the neighbor's garden to eat some flowers. No one knew the origin of this conflict until the conflict resolution workshop. By facilitating the discussion the community members learned how to express themselves better and resolve these conflicts sooner rather than later.

Another requested topic to be addressed was sexually transmitted diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS. In most communities in Guatemala, HIV/AIDS is still a taboo subject. When someone dies of HIV/AIDS, people will usually not reveal the true cause of death. Instead, they'll say the person died of severe bronchitis, or any other illness that exacerbated the HIV/AIDS patient. The health monitors did request specifically to have this theme be taught separately for a group of women, men and youth.

These talks in general were considered a success, as more than 100 people attended each session. The session with the worst turnout still attracted 75 people. More people would have come, but it was raining. After these sessions, the health monitors follow-up with private conversations with the community members to see if they had more questions or comments about the topic.

ISMU also addressed was the housing improvements. ISMU hired an architecture to design blueprints for a 42 meter squared house that was both affordable and utilized as much space as possible. ISMU then coordinated with FONAVI (National Fund for Housing in Guatemala) to fund this project. FONAVI finally agreed to provide funding but had some strict requirements including collecting paperwork of each family who wanted to be part of this project. At first, the community members didn't believe that this project would happen and didn't bother to get their paperwork together. But once they saw many families applying, people started to find their paperwork. As a result ISMU improved a total of 91 houses.

One curious requirement that FONAVI asked for was that the roof of each of the new houses would be painted red, so that when the governor would fly on his jet plane, he could see all the houses he helped construct through FONAVI, and thus, feel proud of himself. Really, I'm not kidding!

Tomorrow I leave Guatemala City and head to the highlands to visit APROSADSE.
Photo credit: Marlon Garcia

Labels: Guatemala, Health, housing, ISMU

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