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Travels with V

Guatemala & Belize

Travels with V

Guatemala & Belize

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In a mayan village

Xetinamit

Early one morning a car is waiting for us in the street outside our hotel. It’s Alejandro who takes us on a long trip och winding roads up in the highlands. Our goal is a remote village called Xetinamit. It’s so small it’s not on most maps. And the reason we are on this route is kind of odd. But interesting. 

A few years ago we bought a pack of sugar snaps in our local supermarket Ica. Written on the pack was a note saying that the snaps were grown in Guatemala in a project to improve the lives of indigenous people, and especially the situation for the women. 

We wanted to find out what this was all about. Strangely enough the Swedish supermarket company, who had invested in this project wouldn’t talk to us about it. But we found an importer in the Netherlands who turned out to be some kind of spider in the web. And through them we got in contact with Alejandro and the company Asuncion in Guatemala. Asuncion have their own pea farms, but they also encourage and help mayan villages to grow peas. They provides the villagers with fair loans, teach them better farming techniques and this means increased income. 

Just a few years ago you couldn’t drive a car to Xetinamit because of the terrible state of the roads. But today we drive the rocky last part in a bulky 4wd without problems. And are met by a delegation from the village, who show us the pea cultures. We’re also walked up a steep slope to admire the village pride and lifeline, a huge water tank that irrigates the cultures.

Down in the village itself every household that takes part in the project has got a new and 200% more effective wood stove and a water purification system. This is extremely important in a country where 80% of the ground water is polluted, and stomach illness is a constant plague in the villages. 

Joining us on this visit is Eduardo, a translator. This is necessary since the villagers don’t speak Spanish, only the Maya Kʼicheʼ language. It sounds quite exotic, you can listen to the village elder Don Matteo speaking here: 

For many hundreds of years corn was the dominant crop that the maya were growing, both for themselves and to sell in markets. But in this project they deploy crop rotation, corn one year and peas the next, This will greatly improve the condition of the soil and give a bigger harvest.

WEAVING ON A TYPICAL LOOM

For us it was uplifting and exciting to see that buying sugar snaps at home in Sweden we became participants in a change with so many positive factors in Guatemala.


And up next is another surprise in wait for us. A woman born and raised in Guatemala, who speaks perfect Swedish with a dialect typical of Scania, the southernmost part of Sweden, where we live!

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