Human Rights and Wrongs
The Humm, March, 2006
This article was written by Tom Clarke on Feb. 21 2006, while he was in Xela (Quetzaltenango) as part of this year's Guatemala Stove Project trip.
Trying to compare life here in the rural altiplano (highlands) of Northwest Guatemala to Lanark County is a bit of a stretch. Extreme poverty is all the majority of these people have ever known, as it has been a raw deal for the Maya since the Spanish Conquest.
By the UN statistics 65% of Guatemalans are indigenous Maya. While being the majority, they only hold ownership to 6% of the land. It is by and large the same 65% that earns less then $2 a day, while 27% of this group is trying to survive on less then $1 a day.
Most of these people are born and will die at home with a very small chance of ever receiving any medical care or education. These ancient people are also incredibly strong and fit from living off the land by subsistence farming these mountains. The Maya have farmed corn, beans, and other crops here for thousands of years.
The UN predicts that in 10 years the Maya will grow to be 75% of the population. While currently the Maya have no political representation, as they become a larger and larger percentage of the population it is only a matter of time before they will once again rule their own land. For now brutal oppression at times bordering on Genocide is what deprives the Maya of justice and their fair share of the wealth and natural resources of their homeland.
The Guatemala Stove Project (GSP) is now in its eighth year of building masonry cookstoves for impoverished people in Guatemala. Most of these people cook over an open fire inside the house, which has terrible health consequences. 20% of children don't make it to their fifth birthday, 10% of people have TB, and all the older women have seriously impaired eyesight from cooking in a cloud of toxic smoke. It is believed that living with indoor air pollution (smoke from cooking fires) reduces the average life expectancy of everyone in the house by about ten years.
GSP has now built over three thousand stoves for as many families. We visit each home to take a picture of the stove and the family it has been built for. We also record the names and ages of everyone in the family. They are mostly large families with a majority of them being run by single mothers whose husbands have left to work illegally in the United States.
The current estimate is that two and a half million of Guatemala's 14 million people are illegally living and working in the US. The immigrants pay the equivalent of $9000 Cdn to coyotes (human smugglers), who help them cross Mexico and the US border as indentured labors. The coyotes are members of organized crime rings dealing in both human and narcotic smuggling. They are certainly not concerned with human rights.
To find out more about the Guatemala Stove Project, please visit our website at www.guatemalastoveproject.org.
- Tom Clarke