From the highlands of Guatemala: Final Thoughts and Thank You's

With Ovidio at Lake Atitlan in the Guatemala highlands

"Ish kam", says Ovidio (our driver), as we pass some road kill leaving Canilla, our last interview site. Ovidio is not ethnically Maya, but he proudly shares tidbits and phrases that he has picked up from living in Quiche-Maya territory for most of his life.

"Ish kam" or "It is dead" is certainly a phrase that he has heard more than once. In Guatemala, perhaps as in other developing countries, life and death seem more immediate than at home where beginnings and endings generally take place behind closed doors. In Guatemala the proximity of life and death is inseparably tied to faith. Where the common U.S. citizen might perceive danger (i.e. when six year old boys nonchalantly hurl machetes into trees or when a relaxed passenger hangs half his body off a clunky pickup as it swerves around the curves on an uneven road), Guatemalans leave the possibility of deadly accidents up to what Dios quiere-what god wants.

Ultimately people face life and death situations here with such regularity that it just wouldn't be sustainable to get yourself worked up every time you saw a kid throwing a machete around. 

This thin line of fate was very clear to us with the last groups of interviews we did in Canilla. Kindly facilitated by a local Peace Corps volunteer, all our last groups were part of an FAO food aid program, which started 4 years ago to provide assistance and training to the most needy communities in the region. These communities are part of an arid region where only one crop of corn and beans can be planted a year-all of which is used for household consumption.

In order to make it through the hungry season women joked that they would become widows for 3-6 months as their husbands left for the coast to cut sugarcane or to clear underbrush in coffee plantations. "What if something happens?" I asked. "What if they don't come home or send money?"  "Si Dios quiere", they responded, "they will come home."

banana tree with fruit

But by the looks of things many of the women were taking steps to protect themselves from the consequences of such a fate. They had learned to tend corn and beans, they tested new techniques in their small vegetable gardens and homes (priority projects of the FAO), they managed their households and their (often) many children. Despite their full schedules, however, they still found time to come out and talk to a couple curious foreigners about agriculture and information. 

As our time here comes to a close we are infinitely grateful to all those people, including the women of Canilla, who have found time for us in the past few weeks and we hope to make good on their investment, even if it is just in a very small way.

We also wanted to say a big thank you to our funders, the UC Davis Blum Center and the Hemispheric Institute of the Americas, and to the Horticulture Collaborative Research Support Program and Peace Corps for their unwavering support. 

This project would not have been possible without all of you. As with all endings there are new beginnings and as we say goodbye to Guatemala our project is just beginning to come to life. During the next academic year we hope to continue to share our thoughts and findings with all of you! 

Hasta pronto,  

Elana Peach-Fine, graduate student, Plant Pathology, UC Davis
and Kelsey Barale, graduate student, International Agricultural Development, UC Davis