You can now hear Rosemary Burnett's interview that was broadcast on Radio Scotland a few weeks ago as part of the 'A Journey' series. Rosemary talks about her experiences as an accompanier in Guatemala supporting human rights defenders.

GSN member Rosemary Burnett, talks her about her work as an international accompanier in Guatemala on Radio Scotland. She describes how she got involved, the plight of the witnesses to the genocide in Guatemala in the 1980s and everyday life volunteering in ACOGUATE, the Guatemala Accompaniment Programme. Rosemary has written about her experiences in a book Disent angling the Knots, you can get a copy from here.

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.

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MoSTANcilla currently consists of 13 groups of 5-7 women who were all made homeless by Stan. Every Monday and Friday afternoon they come to drop off and get paid for the work they have done and pick up their beds for the next week. As the groups are generally friendship groups or family it is also quite a social occasion. Of course the youngest children come too. Some of the late teens attend school in the afternoon, so they come in the morning instead so as not to miss out on their education.

Many women have a limited variety of styles so we have arranged classes where women are paid to share their expertise with others in the group. In the last class 32 women participated. We have been establishing rules for quality control and for fair payment of the women. We are currently paying a rate per item, with the idea being to share the profit fairly amongst the women on a quarterly basis. The first profit share is in March.

The main concern for us right now is to ensure a sustainable market. We have had some success in placing the products in hotels in the city and Antigua, and individuals and organizations such as Miracles in Action have supported out work by giving us a trial order. I am also trying to establish the tax rules for importing into the UK- any experience that you might have to share in this respect would be very welcome! We are also in the process of designing a website to exhibit the ladies’ designs online. The future plan is to establish an official cooperative association and to ensure our accounts are kept carefully, so that after two years we can apply for Fair Trade accreditation. 

We are also looking for an interested volunteer who maybe interested in working with the cooperative for a minimum of 6 months (although a year would be preferable) starting in July 2006. This would suit a Hispanic studies student with an interest in fashion and design who aspires to work in sales and marketing in the future. 

It will be many years before this population recovers from the destruction that was caused by STAN. However in the meantime we hope that MoSTANcilla can play a small part in the replacement of material goods, and by providing employment and a support network for this particular group of women in the psychological recovery process.

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For information you can visit Heather’s blog

Or for further information about reconstruction work in Atitlan since Stan

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.

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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. 

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For information you can visit Heather’s blog

Or for further information about reconstruction work in Atitlan since Stan

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.

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It’s Sunday 2nd October 2005 and I arrive in Santiago de Atitlán, Sololá Guatemala intending to spend three months working as a volunteer.

It starts to rain at about 2pm and doesn’t stop for five days. In this time over 600 people in my new community are killed, and between 3,000 and 4,500 people are made homeless as a result of a devastating landslide in Canton Panabaj. I arrived with Hurricane Stan. 

Stan cuts us off for the best part of a week. The phone lines are down, the power is off, the roads are closed, the market is shut and nobody anywhere else knows what is happening to the town. Everyone from every walk of society does what they can to help, whether that’s carrying water, washing dishes, sourcing food, chopping vegetables, or taking bleach to the shelters. I see a polio stricken beggar woman crawl to the town hall and donate 15 quetzales (approx. £1.50). Everyone gives what they have to help the people of their town. 

After 3 days the power returns and we try and get word out about what has happened. I write to the BBC on their website, but by the time they arrive – eight days on- and interview me we are old news. The Kashmir earthquake has happened and in comparison, the Stan tragedy doesn’t count as news.  I ask friends and family for help knowing that if we don’t even make the news, we can’t expect to receive much aid.

Food starts to get through as the press arrive. The next ten days are spent distributing food, but it is clear that the people are not going to receive much long term. We need to help the people affected by Stan, or the ‘damnificados’ as they are emotively being called, back to work. As we give out one of the last donations of food, we interview the people as to what equipment they need to work. My wonderful friends, family and colleagues come through at the same time and we use the initial donations to buy tools for the men so they can go back to their jobs in the fields. 

I give them three tools and offer the fourth on micro credit so that they have what they need to go to work. We maintain the contact in case we manage to get more aid. At the same time an Irish volunteer arrives, also with funds from home and we set to work together to collect information as to who needs what, and as far as possible to monitor who has received what from whom, although this proves difficult. This information means we are able to tell passing tourists what is needed and helps us access funding from German association Probigua and from a generous private British donor.

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For information you can visit Heather’s blog

Or for further information about reconstruction work in Atitlan since Stan

Please re-distribute and publish this declaration in your own publications, communities, and send it to your media and politicians.

The signers of this Declaration are clear – they DO NOT WANT North American mining companies exploiting the lands and resources of indigenous and campesino communities, harming their environment and development.

This is not a declaration demanding better ‘regulation’ of the global mining industry, demanding better ‘laws’ to hold the global mining industry accountable for harms and violations. While good and enforceable ‘regulations’ and ‘laws’ may be useful short-term demands, the underlying demands are to put an end to unjust, exploitative and environmentally harmful global industries.

While the signers do not expect the company, governments and World Bank to immediately accept the DEMANDS, as set out below, in the measure that more and more North Americans become aware about and involved in efforts to support these DEMANDS, the company, governments and World Bank will have to respond positively to these demands, even when they don’t want to.

For more information about this and other issues related to the negative impacts of the North American mining industry from Rights Action: info [at] rightsaction.org

Alternatively, you can find out more information about the fight against Glamis's exploitation of Guatemala's natural resources at this new website which is an independent repository of information on mining in Guatemala.

You can read the full declaration here and sign up to it by emailing caminando27 [at] yahoo.es.

Just caught this published on St Margaret's Community website in Teddington, West London: "Each year during Lent the people of St Margarets Roman Catholic Church parish commit to helping some of the poorest people on our planet. This year they are supporting the villagers of Panimaché in Guatemala and children and babies orphaned in Uganda. If you would like to help you can send a donation to St Margarets RC Church Lenten Project and drop it in at the Parish House opposite St Margarets BR Station."

"Alternatively you could support one of the many events that are taking place.

• Sunday 23^rd April Don Rush will run for the 26^th time in the London Marathon with his long time running partner Rush Yadave. They are grateful for sponsors in support of the Lenten Project. As two of the ‘evegreens’ they will get to start with the elite runners.
• Saturday, 29^th April Grand Jumble Sale — 11am St Margarets Church Hall.
• Saturday, 21^st May Family Fun Day — 12.00 onwards.

Thank you for your support and interest."

In these Delegation-Seminars, Rights Action takes a comprehensive historical and global approach to understanding the endemic poverty-exploitation, enviro-destruction, repression / foreign interventions, and racism of a place like Guatemala.

FOR WHOM: Concerned citizens and activists, donors, professors and educators, law students and teachers, who are concerned about exploitation-poverty-“development” / foreign interventions and repression / enviro-destruction / and about community-based resistance and work for equality, justice and enviro-well being.

STUDY PLAN: Through a series of city-based meetings with development, enviro- and HR activists and travel to rural areas (including mining company-affected regions) to meet with and learn from community organizations where the negative impacts of the exploitation, racism and repression have been most felt, the Delegation-Seminar will focus on:

• HISTORY: In readings sent to delegates before the trip, and discussions on the first day, this Seminar-Delegation will provide an understanding of 500 years of Guatemalan history – including the past and on-going negative role played by the powerful, wealthy countries of the global north, a perspective necessary to understanding Guatemala’s endemic poverty, racism, repression, impunity and lack of democracy today

* PARTICULAR ISSUES: Indigenous and popular resistance to the harms and violations associated by the global mining industry, including the Glamis Gold open pit mining company; efforts to seek justice and reparations for the U.S.- and western-backed genocide of the 1980s; efforts to seek justice and reparations for forced evictions and massacres related to the World Bank, Inter-american Development Bank funded “Chixoy Hydro-electric Dam project”;

• RESISTANCE & GRASSROOTS MOVEMENTS: Despite the on-going repression – on top of exploitation and widespread enviro-destruction -, there are courageous and vibrant grassroots organizations organizing and fighting for a just development model, for democracy and the rule of law, for the environment and women’s rights.

This Delegation-Seminar - led by Grahame Russell of Rights Action, in conjunction with key partner groups that Rights Action supports and works with in Guatemala - will enable participants to learn first-hand about community development, enviro- and HR struggles and organizing, and about how to be involved, in North America, with political, legal and quasi-legal activism and organizing in support of Guatemalan community-controlled development, enviro- and HR work.

RISKS: Rights Action will have an open discussion with participants about potential risks: on-going political issues; crime; health; etc. Participants will sign a waiver, accepting responsibility for what might happen during the Seminar.

COSTS: US$900. This includes 3 meals a day for 7 days; board for 8 nights/in-country transportation/translation/guiding/honorariums for local community-based groups that participants visit with. Participants are responsible for arranging and paying for their travel to and from Guatemala.

More information

For more information (including costs in UK£), contact Jane Pelly de Jocolt in the UK rightsactionuk [at] yahoo.co.uk