This Saturday I dived into another world.
My friend Damon invited us to spend the day with an indigenous community (of about 90 members) in Tenango de Doria. He has been working with the local organization PSYDEH for about 2 years, a NGO focusing on the empowerment of women as community leaders in the state of Hidalgo.
When we entered a little unpaved road — I had lost cell phone reception some time ago — I wasn’t sure what to expect; even our poorly tempered street-shepherd was quietly staring out of the open window not making the slightest sound.
Families, dogs, and horses residing in front of their porches were starring at this unusual convoy from the city. The few buildings along the road were simple and although the weather was grey I have a colorful memory of driving down the hill toward our host family’s houses.
I was truly excited to join this once in a lifetime occasion, but at the same time I felt slightly uncomfortable about this planned invasion of expats to a small village. We can romanticize our trip as much as we want, that this was an experience designed for foreigners and native people to exchange ideas — but at the end of the day many of us were leaving Mexico City with the objective to observe the everyday life of one of the poorest communities in the state of Hidalgo. However, our host family showed extreme pride in presenting their daily routines, indigenous rituals (the Temazcal), and the stunning natural surrounding that enclose their frugal home.
While I use the backdoor of my apartment to hide our garbage from the dog, the teenage daughters of our host family use their’s to enter a world of recreational silence and untouched beauty. And although they were wearing worn out ballerina shoes with socks, they seemed to dance along the little muddy paths that connect their property with the top of a breathtaking canyon.
The bushes all along our hike were covered with an orange plant none of us had ever seen before. What seemed to us as unbeknown prettiness is the nightmare of Reyes, a delegate in the communal committee that runs this Ejido and who serves as forest ranger. Even though the strings can be used as a medical herb combating ostealgia (pain in the bones) they are still killing the young pine seedlings and plants beneath; unfortunately freeing them is no activity paid for by the government and there are more urgent thinks to do.
Reyes is currently executing a wide-ranging reforestation project he started earlier this year. He successfully secured funding from the national forest protection institute (CONAFOR) to plant 50,000 pine seedlings over 50 hectares of forest.
This kind of project is not common for such small communities. Bureaucratic obstacles and lacking information about opportunities and rights often hinder poorly educated and in poverty living indigenous tribes from changing their insecure economic situations into sustainable living conditions.
Over the course of multiple years the young man participated in various capacity building workshops with his female family members and other native women leaders — organized by PSYDEH — where he gained the necessary skills and support to take action for his community.
Although you may not live in Mexico you could still help this and other native women in building self-reliant communities:
PSYDEH (Psicología y Derechos Humanos, A.C.) is currently raising money for their first ever global crowdfunding campaign Fruits of Change and asked some of their friends and supporters to visit one of their sites as part of this newly born initiative at Global Giving.
