#tribelab

Olympic week in Sanjuanerita.

A way to unite in sports and competition. 

The week of April 20-24 all of the schools in San Juan took a break from classes to hold a week of sports activities throughout the town.  The events include everything from football, basketball to relay races.  The goal of this week is to bring the community together and promote exercise through athletics.  In San Juan La Laguna there can never be too many reasons for everyone to get together.  The local soccer stadium and the town’s recreation areas have all been reserved for this community wide event.

Primary school students occupy the morning, while the afternoon is for the older kids, and in the night the teacher and parent play one another.  For this event the town created a track out of chalk on the main road.  The circular main street represents the four directions of the world.

The week is broken up into competitions between the classes in each school, and the teachers of each school playing one another in football and basketball.  Then at the end of the week each grade competes with students of the same grade from the other schools in the community.  

Guatemala suffers from a level of inequality and widespread poverty that is extreme even within Latin America. According to the World Bank’s Guatemala Poverty Assessment, many developing countries are poor, multi-ethnic, and overwhelmingly rural. Yet Guatemala stands out for the magnitude of these characteristics.

More than half of Guatemala’s people live below the national poverty line, 15 percent in extreme poverty, and the country ranks 13th in the world for its level of income inequality, according to the GINI Index. Many families struggle to provide the basic needs for their families and cannot afford the expenses associated with school. Guatemala struggles with high illiteracy rates and low school attendance beyond the 6th grade. Access to quality health care and housing is also scarce. Preventable diseases often result in death, malnutrition is common among children, and infant mortality rates are high. Many homes are made of scavenged materials, with dirt floors, no toilets, and no drinkable water.

In addition to extreme poverty, Guatemala struggles with the after-effects of a 36-year civil war, ended in 1996, as well as persistent political corruption, unemployment, and alcoholism, all of which have had destructive effects on families and communities. Plus, the country’s diverse ethnic heritages—including 23 recognised indigenous languages—make broad-based solutions more difficult, instead requiring localised, culturally-sensitive solutions.

Sources and further reading

World Bank, Guatemala Poverty Assessment: Education and Poverty in Guatemala (2002)

World Bank, Guatemala Poverty Assessment: Good Performance at Low Levels (2009)

UNDP, Human Development Report (2011)

Population Reference Bureau, DataFinder: Guatemala

Today is Earth Day! It’s a day to focus on ways to preserve our environment. 

Inspired, we reached out to IMAP: a Permaculure Institute at the Lake Atitlán to ask for collaboration on our design projects! 

IMAP’s mission resonates with ours:

not-for-profit community organization focused on the development of self-sufficient communities through the responsible management of natural resources, using permaculture techniques and ancestral and traditional knowledge.

We think they could be potentially a great match for us!