Food Sovereignty and Youth Engagement

The curiosity of children is contagious, but it seems to die with age.
In San Isidro, when one child appears with a plastic bag and a
purpose, surely about fifteen others will follow. It´s a sense of
community that only children are capable of.
Last Friday, we organized a small trash-pick-up activity along the
streets of the town to teach the children about littering and to clean
up about three years of potato chip bags and candy wrappers trapped in gullies, sewers, and pot holes.
After putting up an announcement in the one store in town, three
children showed up at 2:00 p.m. ready to get messy. Within ten
minutes, the rest of the town´s children came to see what all the fuss
was about. Soon after, twenty children were scouring the dirt roads
and grassy banks of San Isidro with plastic bags overflowing with
trash and hands caked with dirt. In just thirty minutes they
collected 14 trash bags worth of litter, litter that these same
children had contributed to, and they admitted it.
Looking at all that trash made me sick, because I knew it would only
enter the atmosphere as methane, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide.
Four days later, two children stood outside our property with shovels
in hand, ready to dig a grave for the trash. We´d invited them to
demonstrate a more environmentally-friendly alternative to burning
every scrap of trash and polluting the blue, mountain skies.
As we began to dig, curiosity served us well. By the time we were
ready to bury the trash, about 7 shovels and 14 children taking turns
with them were covered in dirt, singing Enrique Iglesias, and learning
something new.
But we were slow. Eight year olds aren´t exactly the best at using a
pick-axe, and ten year olds are a little weak when it comes to picking
up a shovel-full of dirt.
Yet that day, a group of children working together, learning together,
laughing together, drew the rare curiosity of an adult. Busy with her
eight-month-old baby boy, her corn fields, her five other children,
and her jelly-making business, the last thing Lupe needed to do was
come up to the house in her pretty green skirt and black heels and
take up the pick-axe. But she did.
She broke more rock than 14 children and three gringos put together,
the muscles in her arms straining, her black hair glistening with
sweat on her temple. We applauded her when the hole was deep enough, and she watched with a smile on her face as the children, two of whom were hers, jumped into the pit, dancing to compact the trash. She looked on as we covered it with soil, and as the children thought to plant a make-shift wooden cross and put white flowers on the grave of our community litter.
We always hope that the activities we do with the children will be
passed onto their parents at the dinner table, but to have adults and
children working together is the best way to get anything done, to
learn, and to enjoy ourselves as a community, as a family.
As we were washing our hands, a few of the children ran off to climb a
mango tree, and it began raining mangos. We sat around sucking the
sweet, yellow flesh off the pits, chatting about what we learned,
boasting together of our successful community effort, feeling closer
than ever.

Greetings from San Isidro! The past two weeks have been busy,
productive, trying, and fun. The three of us (Sarah, Rebecca, and
Tomás) have spent most of our time getting into the swing of a regular
schedule for teaching at the 5 schools we are working with in
Vallecillo. As adorable as these kids are, we've always discovered
that teaching for hours at a time is physically and mentally
exhausting. With every lesson, though, we recalibrate and talk about
what worked and what didn't so we can improve the experience every
time we teach.

In our classes thus far we have covered salutations, numbers, ages and
asking about age, and colors for English, as well as deforestation,
climate change, oral health, and hygiene. Some of the highlights from
our lessons so far include playing a numbers game called Señor Tigre
and seeing the artwork the students at the Colegio produced depicting
their reasons for why trees are so important. We were truly touched
when one little boy wrote, ¨Cut one tree, plant two,¨ and when a
little girl wrote, ¨Plant a tree today, harvest life tomorrow.¨ These
children are really very thoughtful. When we taught the high school
students about climate change, we asked them to write a diary entry in
the year 2050 and imagine how their lives would change due to climate
change. Some of the kids had some really thoughtful ideas, and some
didn’t hesitate to say that cars would be illegal!

On days when we don't teach we regularly go with Marvin (our FIPAH
coordinator) to the fields to work with some local farmers. Usually we
learn (along with the farmers) about new, more sustainable farming
techniques from Marvin and then spend several hours helping plant and
clean the fields. All of this has been rewarding work and has helped
us integrate ourselves even further into the community. We have been
planting a lot of experimental seeds to see how different varieties of
corn and potatoes will grow in the region.

It hasn't all been work though. We've had ample free time to explore
San Isidro and also had the opportunity to travel to Jesus de Otoro to
spend time with the other Nourish folk. In San Isidro, we love to walk
down to Las Quebradas (a small river and waterfall that dries up
during the summer months) to cool down. This is especially enjoyable
when the running water isn't functioning and we haven't showered
recently.

In our free time we´ve also helped out some members of the community
with their own farms, played games with the local children, and spent
time learning how to bake bread and make tortillas from our friends
and neighbors. Our trip to Jesus de Otoro the weekend before last was
enjoyable because we got to reunite with 4 of our original group
members that we haven't seen since we were in La Ceiba and because we
learned a lot about how FIPAH operated in that region. Otoro is
metropolitan compared to San Isidro and all group members were very
happy to return to our wonderfully small and close-knit community of
San Isidro.

Next time we´ll be writing from Yorito where we´ll be attending a
Biodiversity Festival and helping out with FIPAH operations in that
region. Hasta pronto!

We are here representing Nourish´s first group to work in Vallecillo.
What an amazing initiative FIPAH has here! We arrived at night, after
a 10 hour trip from La Ceiba through bumpy mountain roads. When we
woke up the next morning, we were amazed by the beauty of our town,
San Isidro. We are surrounded by rolling hills dotted with grazing
cows, horses, chickens, pigs, and donkeys, and an angry burro who
brays every hour on the hour.

On the morning of our arrival we met with Marvin, the
FIPAH--Vallecillo director, and staff member Carlos to discuss the
role of FIPAH and our role here this summer. FIPAH--Vallecillo works
with 15 communities and 12 CIALs (Local Agriculture Research
Commitees) on participatory research. One of the projects that the
Vallecillo staffers have been working on is the S.O.S. seed banking
campaign, where they are working towards conservation and maintaining
biodiversity in the region. We have already visited three sites where
members from different CIALs are planting avacado, plantains and
coffee plants together to measure how an increased biodiversity will
increase the yields come harvest time. FIPAH has also been working
with the adult groups on climate change programs. By spreading
awareness about the effects of climate change and how to adapt crops
to these changes, the FIPAH workers help farmers prepare themselves
for possible increases in droughts and floods, like the ones they
experienced last year when almost the entire harvest was rained out.
FIPAH has also conducted personal finance workshops to dozens of
people in the villages. In fact, just this week, we bought jelly from
a very successful new microempresa (very small business) in town and
went to visit a small scale organic fertilizer business operated by an
18 year old farmer.

This week we also met with three of the five schools we will be
working with. The teachers were all excited to allow us to come and
share time and knowledge with the students. We have been working hard
to improve and make each lesson plan specific to the needs of the
different schools. Marvin and the teachers are both really open to the
idea of promoting knowledge about the upcoming elections, as well as
about sexual education--topics that are a bit more sensative than just
teaching English. We´re looking forward to exchanging points of view
with the kids on these important issues.

It is so exciting to observe and learn about the work that FIPAH does
here in the communities of Vallecillo. Having already seen the impact
of the organization thanks to the kind members of FIPAH, we have each
been inspiried to find a focus in the various activities FIPAH is
involved in. We know two months will fly by, but for now we are
excited as every day will bring new adventures and new knowledge.

Hasta Pronto,
el equipo de Vallecillo