Economics < Feature Story

Guatemalan Women Improve Economic Status, Will Meet Silicon Valley Visitors 

Members of a Guatemalan women's association show off their corn mill.

"It used to take me three hours each day to grind my corn by hand with a stone. With this mill, now it takes only five minutes." - Maria Beb Caal

By the first gray light of dawn, a group of women quietly makes its way to a hillside village in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. Babies are strapped on backs with bright fabric. Small woven sacks bulge with corn boiled the night before.

The women arrive at a wooden hut near the village, and soft voices greet each other in Q'eeqchi, the local indigenous language. Inside, a diesel engine coughs to life and rattles the still morning air. Women take turns passing their bags of corn to three women operating the grain mill inside. The corn comes out minutes later as masa, a moist corn meal for tortillas. The women each pay a small fee, and within an hour the mill is silent again.

"It used to take me three hours each day to grind my corn by hand with a stone," says Maria Beb Caal, a stout mother of four. "In April our women's committee got this mill and now it takes only five minutes. Now we have more time to work in the fields. We're not getting up as early and we have more time to work around the house."

The women's committee was formed two years ago when BAIDO member organization World Neighbors began helping local women with small development projects.

In the last year alone World Neighbors has worked with more than 800 women from five villages in the Polochic Valley on starting corn mills and market gardens. Women's groups in five more villages will start mills and collective gardens this year.

In October, a World Neighbors delegation will travel to Guatemala with representatives from a Silicon Valley Rotary Club - Woodside-Portola Valley - whose members have also sponsored programs in Oaxaca, Mexico.

"It's one example of the civic support that we've gotten here," said Gregg Biggs, World Neighbors' Regional Development Manager for the Bay Area. "They're particularly interested in the economic development side of it."

Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, has only in the last few years begun to recover from a devastating three-decade civil war. World Neighbors, active there from the early 1960s, went on hiatus during the 1980s.

"A couple of our leaders were killed, and others were on death lists because organizing of indigenous people was viewed as a threat to the government at that time," Biggs said.

However, since the 1996 peace agreement, economic aid is slowly returning to the neediest areas. World Neighbors returned in 1999 and will distribute some $150,000 there this year. The Silicon Valley visitors this fall will visit a range of women's alternative economic projects, including traditional medicine clinics, and hear more about the challenges the rural dwellers face.

World Neighbors has worked for 50 years to eliminate hunger, disease and poverty in Asia, Africa and Latin America. For more information on its programs contact Gregg Biggs at (415) 648-9577, or email gbiggs@wn.org.