A Snippet of Central America
by Serra Benson

This fall semester I participated in a study abroad program to Central America with the Center for Global Education. Along with thirteen other students from all over the country, I traveled through Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua studying sustainable development and social change. I met many people who have suffered greatly from war, poverty, and discrimination. Getting to know and love these people who have built strong communities that work to change the systems that oppress them, was an experience that touched me deeply. It has given me an overwhelming feeling of responsibility to pass on their stories of triumph and defeat. Though I cannot share everything with you in this article, many of the communities I visited have a similar pattern so I will focus on just one, that of Nuevo San Jose.
In Guatemala we spent a week at the rural language school just outside a tiny community called Nuevo San Jose. The twenty-two families who live there used to work on a large coffee finca, or plantation. Nine years ago, the finca owner stopped paying his workers and they struggled for months to collect their back wages. When they finally got paid, they all left the finca and with their pooled wages bought the piece of land where they live now. This community traditionally grew coffee but with the current crisis in the coffee market, prices have fallen so low that many coffee fincas have gone out of business, creating a wave of layoffs and unemployment for campesino families.

The price of coffee in its crude form has plummeted to an all-time low, half of what it sold for last year. This sudden drop is due to the excess of coffee in the world market, in large part because of an IMF and World Bank loan to Vietnam to start producing coffee there. For the families of Nuevo San Jose, this economic situation makes it difficult to put food on the table. The father of the family I stayed with would leave each morning at five o’clock looking for work. Some days he would find a day job harvesting potatoes or corn on other people’s land and earn thirty-five quetzales for the day. After paying six quetzales for transportation too and from the fields, he was left with twenty-nine quetzales, approximately four dollars, to support his wife, parents, and four kids.
Their one year-old baby, Maria Roxana is severely malnourished and couldn’t even sit up yet. Her mother got an infection just after giving birth and couldn’t breast feed the baby while she was in hospital so they have to bottle-feel her with expensive powdered milk. What they can afford to buy weekly in milk for the baby is supposed to last only two or three days, so what they give her has to be overly watered down.
Despite their current economic reality, the people of Nuevo San Jose were incredibly inspiring. Even though they appear to have nothing, they are some of the most generous people I have met. Recently they allowed another tiny community, Nueva Vida, with a similar story to their own, to move onto the land right next to them. The original community realizes that these new people are even worse off than they are and have been very giving of what little they have.
 
While I was in Nuevo San Jose, I spent a lot of time in the two-classroom elementary school helping the kids read, teaching them songs and now to fold paper cranes. I think a lot about the future of those children. Will they have a chance to study passed the sixth grade? Will they stay in their community of leave to find work in the bigger towns and cities?  What I really wish for Nuevo San Jose is some way to sustain them economically. Unfortunately, their government, like most, tends to support large corporate interests over small and medium producers. It is difficult for poor people to get access to land, credit and fair markets. I think that social change globally will have to come from the people ourselves, as we change our societal and consumer values.
One way that we can directly support sustainable development and social change in developing countries is by choosing fair trade alternatives over mainstream brands. Take coffee as an example: buying fair trade coffee means that you are supporting coffee cooperatives that are collectively owned and run by the workers instead of by a large landowner. These workers receive a much better wage for their labor one that they can actually live on – such as $1.25 per pound instead of 50 cents. Fair Trade often means that it is grown organically. This is not only better for the workers and the consumer but is also more sustainable environmentally. Organic shade grown coffee often means that forest is not destroyed in the process, as the natural canopy provides shade for the coffee plants and predator insects to control pests.

I visited textile, agricultural, and many other cooperatives in Central America. Cooperative provides a local support network economic, physical, and emotional well being. Poor people pool their resources to provide emergency health funds, create educational workshops to combat domestic violence, and meet together regularly to talk about how they want to develop. What I loved most about these cooperatives is that they are building strong communities that challenge hegemonic models of development as well as traditional class and gender relationships. With all odds against them, through natural disasters, neo-liberal economic policies, a history of US supported war and military intervention, they and living our ideals of democracy equality, and justice.
I feel lucky to have learned so much from the people of Central America. They have given me the great gift of friendship and the inspiration to maintain international solidarity with them. Though I miss being with there in the campo, sharing stories and making fresh tortillas, I am excited to share what I learned from about the importance of community, sustainable development, and social change.