The beating Heart of Central America

Sunday April 30th, Mostly cloudy, H 31 L 23 Celsius Peten, Guatemala 2023

I don't feel like I can legitimately say that I live in the jungle... Im right next to it... it used to be jungle...there is a beautiful chunk of virgin land down here right next to me that is still untouched... I can hear the howler monkeys that are trapped down here in it with no way to get back up to the Biosphere because everything else is cleared around it.

I live on the right side of the photograph above which as you can see is very close to being entirely deforested. I am just a few miles away from the pristine borderline of the protected Peten rainforest clearly defined to the left. Many folks here have witnessed this change and personally know how it was before, as its only taken place over the course of the last 30 years.

Fun Fact

The Peten- Veracruz is the second largest moist forest in Latin Americas after the Amazon. Covering an area of 149,100 square kilometers (57,600 sq mi), extending from central Veracruz state across portions of the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Tabasco, Chiapas, and Campeche, as well as northern Guatemala and most of Belize.

Time Magazine 1953 the road to Peten used to take days or weeks to travel depending on the rains

Bravisimo!!! The First Green Deal for the Lake & its Communities

Im tickled pink that Just as I predicted The Peten itself will be increasingly recognised in the coming years as one of the most important remaining intact points of biodiversity on the globe!

Last week... the President of the Republic signed a new Green Deal for Peten, in conjunction with the UN, German, Swedish, Swiss and Spanish embassies in Guatemala.

The Green Deal is focusing on the ecological and sustainabale transition of Peten. They spoke about critical things like- finally putting in water treatment systems. As it stands our black water pipes full of detergents and bacteria run out our front doors into the roadside gullies, and all of it washes down into the lake when it rains.

The pigs who take full body submersion siestas, and the domestic ducks who poke about in the household runoffs, will both surely miss their favourite hangout in the muck puddles. However besides being a cesspool of bacterias and a major health hazard especially to all of the little kids playing outside, the down hill run off is of course ending up in the lake and messing up the water biology terribly. So hopefully the news will be as good as it sounds, and they do follow through in the coming years!

Connecting Ecology, People, and Art

They found that another one of the reasons the ancient Mayan civilisation died off was that besides using up all of the natural resources, the intricately designed drinking water purification holding tanks system became irreversibly contaminated.

Tikal National Park ruins

Untitled

Give all of your heart to life

And the quiet qualities of love

With all of its gentle subtleties,

its unpretentious mildnesses,

its utterly powerful gift and request of absolute and complete surrendering

Without definition,

Without boundary or expectation.

E.H.

Growing Local Food Sovereignty

As I mentioned in my last blog post, once the Adica Association families has bought community land to live and work on, the heart of the property will center and be largely dedicated to growing organic produce providing food directly to the Association members as well as surrounding communities, and local businesses.

However in the meantime and as an adjacent in- town initiative, it is vital that we take these smaller proactive steps to begin to orient and bring life to the Association goals, create a movement, and culture of local food sovereignty. Through front door exchanges with neighbors, village barter, trade, and seed share to empower families to counteract the widespread ongoing hunger and malnutrition in every home and experienced widely in the region.

Planting starts in May!!! The Garden Layout, soil prep, and seedlings are coming along.

Working in the garden hours have been limited to mornings and evenings at the moment as its been steadily in the upper 90s!!! Holy moly.

It's slower doing it by myself, but right now it is important and on purpose that I am do so. I need others, especially women, see 'a woman planting a decent sized home garden by herself'. The reason Im aiming at the women, is they are almost exclusively at home and with the children. Many men walk on foot up to two hours away (or take the horse) into the back flats and hills to get to minimally paying field labor jobs for the whole day at the end of which then still have another two hours walk back home.

I am gauging the level of interest and will continually adjust to include more people as we go. Working out back in the garden gives me the opportunity to engage, promote, and share ideas with curious neighbours of all ages. Almost everyone stops to chat and ask me what Im doing.

In over the fence casual chitchat we get into the importance of the global and local environment, ecology, organic chemical free gardening techniques and reasoning, how we can end hunger, that maybe we won't see all of the results ourselves but how each one of us can plant an inheritance for our children, and grandchildren etc.

Once it starts to get dripping hot I hit the other office...

Switching hats

Don Juan and I during last weeks meeting

Don Juan President, Don Luis Vice President of Adica Peten and I have been meeting weekly, laying and mapping out all parts of our initiatives, preparing the Associations multi year full proposals to begin sending out Letters of Inquiry for Association programs and land grants funding.

Many of the folks I am working with in the Association are illiterate. I am also one of the few people in the village with a computer! Working together collaboratively on this is a new experience for everyone. Its about as slow living as you can get without going entirely off the map, and the pace and the challenges of doing pretty much anything in Guatemala are multiplied x3 up here. The electric goes out sometimes up to 15 times a day!!! It was off last night and today it was completely off until noon.

Come mid/late afternoon its

The Ceramics Workshop and Kids Space time

Harvesting wild clay last month was a great success. We have started processing, wedging and using three of the different clays that we harvested. For me its a sculptors dream come true being able to dig my own clay out the ground from right under my feet. They are incredibly pure, rich, beautiful clays! We have a few larger nature based sculptures and recognizable pieces in the works that the kids are helping me with as well as independent things they make on their own in the spirit of creativity for creativities sake.

Again, like I mentioned in my previous post, because of the infinite supply of local clays here that nobody, literally nobody, is doing anything with it, my goal is to re introduce the practice and traditional of ceramics to eventually maybe have a few new sculptors, who knows, but primarily to have any number of families trained in ceramics to be able to make a living from their own lines of unique exportable quality stoneware and pottery.

These are shards of ancient Mayan ceramics that I find on any given day, everywhere, just lying on the ground in the dirt. It's been quite a thing to hold these in my hands and run my fingers over them imagining the hands that made them hundreds of years ago.

A very very special Thank You to everyone who has joined me on our fundraiser! It's been truly heartwarming to hear and connect with so many people on this.

On behalf of everyone here, from my little neighbour Wilson, the boy in the photo who comes by almost everyday- who's life you are changing- from all of the Association families, a huge Thank you, we are so so so incredibly appreciative to have your support.

We have just a little ways to go to meet our first fundraising goal!

Also just to let you know, this email is not being sent from a bulk email list, just my regular contacts, so if you'd rather not get these emails just let me know and will make sure not to bomb you inbox;)

With warmest regards to you, sending much love from San Pedro on the edge of Lake Peten Itza, on the edge of the Mayan Biosphere near Tikal.

Absolute Warmest Regards,

Yours truly,

Emily