Sowing Opportunities, Inc.

What is your organization aiming to accomplish?
Our associate in Guatemala, Ricardo San José, and his team of agricultural engineers, have traveled several times since 2015 to the village of Chajmaic, providing food and water filters, doing field research, and establishing good relations with the village leaders (COCODE) of Chajmaic and with the mayor of the nearby municipality, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.

We wish to accomplish three objectives:
1. Create peace and healing between the village and the government, in response to historical intentional disregard and destruction of indigenous people and their land.

2. Deliver water from the river, purify it, and bring it to stations within the village.

3. The team will use the clean water for growing crops, which will provide food (agriculture) to sustain them, and a livelihood selling the food that they grow.

What are your strategies for making this happen?
1. In December in 2017 they met with the mayor, who showed them the water filtration system in Fray on which Ricardo and his team will model a pump system for Chajmaic. They are visiting again in May 2018 to further this strategic mission.

2. Pump water that will deliver suctioned water uphill from the river and draw it into a tank to purify the water. They will send this water to the entire village by force of pressure and gravity push, approximately 450 gallons per hour, 24 hours a day. This will eliminate gastrointestinal diseases.

3. Rent a relatively small portion of land to build a tiered greenhouse, bringing in vegetables that are not native to Chajmaic.

Fern Remedi-Brown has expertise is in designing successful programs that understand the needs of multicultural and multilingual populations, and she has a passion for eliminating global healthcare inequities. She has traveled multiple times to Guatemala and is working closely with the Guatemala NGO CorGuate. She is an educator with a Master's of Education and an MBA in Global & Healthcare Management. She has done extensive fundraising on a small scale, raising over $65,000 over six years with grassroots funding.

Our associate in Guatemala, Ricardo San José, Board member, is the project manager for our team in the region. He has directed projects and has connections with the Catholic church, as well as having developed personal trusted relationships with members of the village of Chajmaic. He has knowledge of business practices, as well as organizational capability.

The initial plan for the village of Chajmaic was to create a chili pepper farm because that is one of the only crops that will grow on the land. We sent Ricardo and Antonio to do field research in Péten, in the north, to visit a functional chili pepper farm. When we realized the cost of renting a large amount of land and hiring farm hands, we decided in March 2017 to start smaller for our pilot project and to go with the most pressing need – that of clean water, which will help the villagers to stop getting sick from the river water, which they use for all their needs.

At the December 2015 trip to Chajmaic, Ricardo and Antonio visited the COCODE, the village leaders, and got their approval to do a project that will help them to move out of poverty. At that time, we were thinking about the chili pepper project. At the December 2017 trip to Chajmaic, they also visited the mayor of Fray Bartolomé, which was a necessary step in creating a bridge relationship between the village and this municipality. There are long-standing issues of trust between the indigenous people and the local government, so this work has to be done with finesse. Ricardo and his team are approaching this strategically.

In August 2020 we conducted a needs assessment with 125 families, which confirmed our agricultural direction. Water filtration will be Phase 2.