Beyond our project

As I've mentioned in previous posts, part of our mission here in San Miguel is to establish good community relations and take advantage of unique opportunities.  With this in mind, we've been working with two community organizations:  Feed the Hungry and CASA.  I described the mission of the organization Feed the Hungry in a previous post after we had visited their headquarters.  Today, we went out to a community called Clavallinas where they have a kitchen for the kindergarten, primary and secondary schools.  It was great to see how much the kids enjoyed the food there, and we even got to try some.  I have to say it's much better than most of the junky cafeteria food I've ever had in the United States.  

FTH not only wants to provide food to rural communities, but they want to ensure that it's actually nutritious.  This is how they differ from other programs like the DIF school meals.  They have a main chef, Mario, that trains all the cooks in the kitchens.  In keeping with their mission to provide nutritious meals, FTH makes the community agree to not have junk food vendors at the school.  Sometimes this can be a rather difficult deal to make, but FTH has sometimes hired these junk food vendors as their cooks to ensure that they're not depriving them of their livelihood.  Soon, FTH won't have to be making these deals anymore.  Starting next school year, junk food vendors will be outlawed from all schools in Mexico.  It's a very exciting step in the direction toward a healthier generation.

After getting a tour of the kitchen and the school, we were taken to see some of the family gardens that I spoke about in my "Feed the Hungry" post.  In Africa, similar community gardens have been successful due to the community structure of the villages there.  In this part of Mexico, the social structure is more family oriented so FTH is in its second year of establishing family gardens in the communities.  In its first year, FTH started seven gardens in this community and then expanded to about seven gardens in each of nine more communities.  They now have around 65 family gardens established.   They provide the compost, the protective netting, and seeds while the families provide the work and labor.  To measure its success, the evaluate three factors over three years.  After year 1, they evaluate how many gardens were successfully established.  After year 2, they count how many gardens are actually producing.  After year 3, they determine how many gardens are actually putting food on the table.

As we were given a tour of several gardens, I asked some of the people how they felt about working on their garden and what they thought of the program overall.  In general, I got a very positive response.  One woman told me that she loves growing the cilantro because she sells tacos and like to use them as an ingredient.  Another told me that her children love eating the fresh vegetables.  But the garden is not without its difficulties.  Since water is such a commodity in rural communities such as Clavallinas and the rainy season has barely begun, one family uses soapy water left over from washing their clothes to water their garden.  Obviously this is less than ideal, but until the rainy season is in full swing, it'll have to do.

I was very impressed with the work that FTH has done in these communities, and I think that there are a lot of opportunities for our group, Proyecto Puentes de Salud, to collaborate in future years.

Apart from FTH, we've also started volunteering at a maternity hospital called CASA.  So far I've only been once, but I shadowed a gynecologist for a few hours in the afternoon after work.  We saw about 8 patients, and it was a great opportunity to work on my medical Spanish some more.  At first we saw mostly pregnancy ultrasounds, which were really interesting and exciting for the new mothers, but we also saw a wider range of patients including a woman with gall stones (piedras de la vesícula) and a woman with HPV (el virus de papiloma humano) and genital warts (verrugas genitales).   The gynecologist (ginocólogo) we're working with was great at explaining things.  I'm excited to go shadow some more and pick up some more medical terms, and maybe even see some babies born!