The No Violence Against Women March this year comprised about 40 groups and 3000 participants, slightly smaller than last year, but this is probably not because there is less violence, but because people are afraid of violence. One group we work with told us that they didn’t participate this year because of recent death threats.

Our delegates dressed in black with red capes to signify mourning, bloodshed and hope. Mourning for our fallen sisters, the bloodshed that led to their loss, and hope for a better future. A future where women can walk without fear of violence.

We waved the banner of our sister organization, the Guatemala Peace and Development Network, which our founder, Lucia Munoz (shown at right), co-founded in 2001.

This young man was selling nuts and candy on the street.

The delegates talked with one of the police officers patrolling the march route and explained what we were doing there.

We visited our friends at Fundacion Sobrevivientes http://www.sobrevivientes.org who gave us a rundown on some of the cases they are presently dealing with.

Sobrevivientes supports the victims and their families in femicide cases, providing social and legal services, holistic health care, and counseling. They also accompany witnesses to court and provide safe shelter when needed.

A generous organization in Sweden gave Sobrevivientes money to purchase a new home/headquarters just around the corner from their old home. Unfortunately, they are involved with some high-profile cases and there are people threatening them and telling them to stop their work.

All the intense human rights work is satisfying but exhausting, and it’s important to unwind sometimes. We went to Antigua Guatemala, the old capital, which is surrounded by scenic volcanos.

Colonial architecture gives the visitor to Antigua a sense of traveling back in time.

Markets in the city have hand made fabrics available for purchase. This display was in Guatemala City in the market downtown, but all the major cities have areas where hand crafts can be found.

These children are in the day care at Safe Passage, an organization formed by a U.S. American woman who saw the need to provide a better life for the kids who live in and around the city dump.

Several hundred families live at the dump. Until recently, they were able to gather recyclables, e.g. plastic milk jugs and get a dollar for 100 pounds of plastic. But the bottom fell out of the market for recyclables when the recession hit hard in Fall 2008, and now they are basically working for nothing.

It is not clear how they are managing to sustain themselves in this situation.

One of the schools where we deliver the “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” program, in Z. 18, one of the worst parts of Guatemala City.

Near the school lives one of our scholarship clients, Bianca (center) who is in high school now, and we are planning to help her with tuition and expenses to go to college next year.

Her mother runs a small store and restaurant where we ate breakfast. Several delegates said it was the best meal of the whole trip; tamales de chipilin, handmade tortillas, and other hand-crafted foods made it a great meal.

We arrived at Guatemala early in the morning, and had breakfast. Right afterwards, we headed to the “Procurador de Derechos Humanos” or Ombudsman’s office, which has the job of trying to get the government to protect the rights of the people.

The morning after we arrived, we drove to Xela (Quetzaltenango) and met with a representative of Xela Aid, a non-profit that works to help with economic development in the areas in the countryside around Xela. These young men were returning from a morning of helping their parents in the field.

These women told us about some of the agricultural, medical and other projects Xela Aid is promoting. It is impressive how far a few dollars of contribution can go to making life healthier and safer in the poor areas of Guatemala.

This information was previously posted on MIA’s main web site: www.miamericas.info

Shopping and sightseeing were a minor sidelight in this whirlwind visit to beautiful Guatemala. We had important work to do, learning by listening to women who are living there, to individuals and groups involved with solving the sever social difficulties there, and telling what we learned to two Guatemalan Congresswomen and several U.S. State department officials.

he No Violence Against Women March

Societal change is always started by small passionate groups, and our delegation fit that description perfectly. We had students, people active in fighting for women’s rights in the U.S., and college professors in our delegation. All were very passionate about the situation for women in Guatemala, and showed they were willing to work to make their views known. We ate breakfast at 7 or 7:30 am most morning and out the door a half hour later, traveling, marching, learning, and making our presence felt.

After the No Violence Against Women march, we met with Congresswoman Nineth Montenegro

Before the trip, some in the group were considering leaving us for a day or so to do the tourist thing, but the work we were doing was so powerful, so compelling, that they decided to stay with us for the whole time. This was a powerful testimony to how worthwhile and valuable the delegation was.

Several of our delegates have told us they will be returning for future delegations, and some promise to bring students or friends with them. We invite you to consider joining our next delegation. If you are thinking about joining, contact us and we can give you a chance to talk with some of the participants of previous trips.

click here to see more photos of the 2007 delegation

Escuela (School) Oficial Rural Mixta Santa Barbara, is in Zona 18 on the outskirts of Guatemala City. It’s in the highest-crime area of the capital city, and is the school where MIA has chosen to initiate its campaign “Hombres Contra Feminicido”.

This program teaches kids, especially boys, how to interact constructively with each other. Gender stereotypes, gender relations, and gender equality are all addressed in an attempt to break the cycle of men’s violence against women. We are implementing the program using materials from the white ribbon campaign. If you want to help, contact us at miamericas@yahoo.com

Below are some photos of the school from our July 2008 delegation.

The kids put on a skit for us.

Our facilitator at work, with the delegates in the background.

July 2008 we organized a delegation to Guatemala with 9 people: one professor and 8 students.

We visited many organizations (up to 4 in one day!) in the capital and had a field trip to a small village north of Quetzaltenango to visit a group focused on economic development in their small town. The trip into the mountains makes for a long couple days, but it is so worth it to get out of the capital and see the people and the amazing environment that is Guatemala.

We visited the trash dump where hundreds of families live and pick recyclables out of the freshly dumped trash. Often, the people gleaning the goodies from the trash are run over by the earthmovers or buried in trash slides.

We were given the tour of the dump site by representatives from Camino Seguro, which provides child care and early childhood education in a clean, safe environment for the families living at the dump.

We visited an organization that works with the families of those killed in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. H.I.J.O.S. seeks justice for the children of those killed in the genocidal war.

We went to the U.S. Embassy, but did not get to meet the Ambassador on this trip, because Ambassador James Derham had just left the country, and the new Ambassador had not yet arrived. We don’t have any photos of our visit to U.S. Soil inside Guatemala because photography is not allowed in the Embassy.

The students at San Carlos University, the Sector de Mujeres, and Jorge Alvaradoose daughter Claudina was brutally murdered were all important stops on this visit.

Besides the education of U.S. Americans who join our delegations, we are running an education program in Guatemala at two schools where we teach children how to have constructive interaction between boys and girls. We hope this will lead to improved gender relations throughout the children’s lives, a group of boys willing to speak out against men’s violence against women, a group of girls strong to stand up and not tolerate violence.

After 10 days of emotional visits, we were happy to return home and start working to change the sad realities we learned about.

We’re almost ready to take off on another delegation to Guatemala with 10 professors and students. Our first delegation was a year ago, and was very successful, and our second was this summer. A measure of its success is that most of the delegates signed up for this trip were recommended to come by someone on a previous trip.

In fact, two delegates from this past July are signed up for the November trip.

One delegate from July, a college professor in Orange County, California, has enlisted 12 students from her university to come next January.

So what do we do on these delegations? Our main focus is on women’s rights, and we visit organizations that also are involved with women’s rights, plus government officials who need to understand the situation women face in Guatemala. We’ll meet women’s rights organizations, organizations of survivors of the violence that has plagued Guatemala, the U.S. Embassy who has been charged by Congress to help end violence against women, and others.