Pastoral de la Mujer recently started a new scholorship program in Tajumulco. We give scholorships to certain young students, male and female, to continue studying until they finish their version of high school. At the same time we work with older women who have either never studied, or never finished their básico studies. I would básico is the equivalent of our middle school. The women of each community meet every 15 days for a class, but also work with an educational radio program in Guatemala called, IGER.
The Guatemlan school year runs from January until November, so we were in Tajumulco signing new contracts with all the scholarship recipients. Tajumulco is an incredibly underdeveloped municipal, there is not a single paved road in the entire municipal, and many of the communities are unreachable by either car or motorcycle. On Tuesday I went with one of the padres of Tajumulco to a tiny community. We had walk for one and a half hours to the community where the padre would give a special mass in honor of Isquipulas, the namesake of the community. The walk was incredibly beautiful, down the side of a mountain, to cross a ravine, to walk up the other side of ravine. Tajumulco is as green as can be, and one of the few places in Guatemala with an abundant water supply.
While right now Tajumulco looks like a paradise, I also know it is being affected by climate change, and the people of Tajumulco are being affected, and will continue to be affected in the future. Already the people see changes in the weather patters, in the rainy and dry seasons, in the dying vegetation due to pollution, and the affect this has on their crops. The people of Tajumulco are subsistence farmers, who try to supplement their incomes by picking coffee. Tradionally they have grown enough to survive for a year, but with changing weather patterns their crops are not growing appropriately. Then there is the water supply. Tradionally people have been able to drink from the rivers, without any problems. With our contaminated air, and the contamination of the soil, the water is not longer safe to drink, but people don´t have the infrastructure, or resources to change how they get their water. So they are left with unsafe water that they can boil and hope will not make them sick. With failing crops they are forced to pick more coffee, in incredibly dangerous situations. Tajumulco is a mountainous region, on the side of the largest volcano in Central America. So the coffee is grown on the sides of mountains, contributing to environmental degregation. The people tie themselves up to a tree and use ropes to climb down the sides of the moutains to pick hundreds of pounds of coffee they have strapped to their waists. So many people die every year trying to survive because they are no longer able to grow enough to survive. While the poverty of Tajumulco is not soley due to environmental degregation, the situation is much more complicated, it is a huge contributuing factor.
Here, I am seeing first hand the devestating effects of climate change or global warming. I don´t care what you want to call it, but we are responsible for our world, and the effects it has on everybody. In developed nations we don´t see the everyday effects, and it is easy to ignore. Sometimes we don´t recycle our plastic bottle because the trash can is right there, and we don´t want to carry the bottle around until we find a place to recycle it. We don´t buy recycled products. We waste gallons and gallons of water everyday. We buy prepackaged products because they are easier. When we have a party we use paper and plastic products because we don´t want to deal with the clean up. We want our lives to be simpler, but by making our lives simpler we are complicating the lives of others.
We can close our eyes and tell ourselves it is not as bad as everyone is saying. We can tell ourselves there is still more time. In reality we are out of time. The changes have come, and people are dying. People are dying because of our irresponsiblity. I am not trying to offend anyone, I am guilty of not being environmentally responsible also. But I also recognize the dire need to change our habits, and I am seeing the effects climate change is having on the most vulunerable population of the world. I also know there are other communities around the world that are more affected than Tajumulco. And no longer can I close my eyes to what we are doing to our world, and no longer can I be silent.
And so, for my friends in Tajumulco, for everyone in the world, I am begging everyone who reads this blog to make an effort to change too. Maybe you do try to be environmentally responsbile, but I am also sure there is more you can do. And you can also encourage others to change
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