Heather Parr was in Guatemala as Hurricane Stan struck in October 2005. Here she shares her account of how the local community she has got to know in Sololá has undertaken the task of rebuilding their lives and their future.
Over the next three weeks we help 150 men get back to work. At this stage the town hall also starts to give out tools, so we switch our focus to the women knowing that the remaining men are receiving support from other places. The women either weave or make beaded jewelry or ‘mostacilla’ as it is known in Spanish. A local hotel owner is coordinating a project with funding from ECO and Oxfam for the weavers so we concentrate on the bead makers.
The same day that we take this decision in mid November, I hear that my ex pupils at Monkseaton Comnunity High School in Whitley Bay have organized a series of fundraising activities and have made £650. We use this money to buy needles, threads, scissors and of course, beads for the affected women.
We invite ten women who we know to be truly affected to invite five other friends or members of their family who are affected to form a group. Word gets around and we end up with 88 ladies, many of whom are new widows, teenage orphans and all of whom have lost their houses and suffered trauma. Their stories are incredibly moving. It is our intention to simply give them the ‘mostacilla’ so they can start back at work again. But John Bound from www.gypsyrose.com a wholesale trader in the States seeks me out and tells us that he wants to buy directly from the women. He makes a generous donation and more importantly makes me think: what if I could help the women access direct sales?
I do a bit of investigating and the corresponding maths. The women are often paid as little as 2 quetzales (about 20p) for an hours work once they have paid for their materials. The traders on the other hand, will often make double this when it is sold on. I also discover that many NGOs operating in Guatemala sell Guatemalan produced ‘mostacilla’ to raise money for their development work projects. However for some reason, they do not seem to make the connection that by buying from traders at the lowest possible prices they are exploiting one group of people to benefit another.
Can I raise people’s awareness and convince them to buy at a fairer price from the women direct? In this and by finding other markets to sell directly we could potentially quadruple the women’s earnings. This is the beginning of our association MoSTANcilla.
For information you can visit Heather’s blog
Or for further information about reconstruction work in Atitlan since Stan
