03.21.10
2010 Gardens Update
The gardens continue to grow, as we all do in our own way.
I am organizing a trip to El Remate in June 2010. The purpose is to work with the women in the gardens, and to share our lives with them. This is not the rich coming to give to the poor. This is a partnership in which we each learn from the other as we live and share our lives….
The lives of the women of El Remate do not change dramatically from year to year. They may experience a marriage, a death, the birth of a child, but they still live in the same village, and rarely have a sense of where or how they will pay for the next month’s rent, or perhaps even the next meal… Life is different. There is a calm in the routine and slowness to the pace of life. And a basic trust that there will be enough – enough to eat, enough to live.
Don’t get me wrong, they would all love to have the money we work and strive for in the developed world. For me it is a question of what I want versus what I need. Then again, I have the opportunity to make a living and to choose how I want to live. I suppose that having the choice is what makes it possible to have an understanding of the perspective.
At any rate, for the past year since I was last in El Remate and started the 2nd group, Brisas del Itza, the women have continued to meet twice a month, and plant their gardens. The government of Peten, the State in Guatemala (like California in the US) is building a women’s community center near the village. The mayor has dedicated a plot of land where they can have a community garden to grow vegetables for sale. That will create an income stream that they can use to invest in other projects.
One day I was talking with Rose, the other volunteer that started the gardens project 5 years ago. We were discussing how to move both Group 1 and Group 2 forward. An idea emerged to build gardens in each of the villages around the lake. If we can figure out a way to pay the women for the work they do in training the next group of women to build gardens we can create a self-perpetuating cycle that has the potential to take the gardens worldwide…. What an amazing vision!
