It's unbelizeable!: Realization

It's been a few days since I've been able to post, but its because we've been off doing some both incredibly fun and incredibly eye-opening things.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, we spent our days in the city of Punta Gorda contacting the various NGOs (non-governmental organizations) already doing nutritional intervention projects in the Toledo district. The breadth and cleverness of these projects was impressive. A group called Sustainable Harvest International is attempting to decrease the dependence of the villages on outside aid. They supply seeds and saplings of plants producing fruits and vegetables to supplement the villagers diets while also educating them how to collect and replant seeds for sustainability. In addition, the group has installed latrines that separate urine from feces, showed the villagers how to sterilize the feces in the sun for use to fertilize their crops and gardens. Another NGO called Humana People to People delivers chickens, coops, and feed to the villages. The people are taught to let the chickens reproduce and then can be used for meat and eggs. The chickens and their eggs can also be sold to help the family make a profit.

The truly educational piece for our student group was the realization that many of our ideas for interventions had already been put into place by people much more experienced and with a better understanding of the cultural barriers. We began to question the basis of our project when so much has already been done in the nutritional field. Upon further probing of our contact with the Punta Gorda hospital who has ties to the Belize Ministry of Health, we found that she had a pre-formed agenda. Her desire is to establish school feeding programs for the kids who have long, very early bus rides every morning. While this is an admirable goal, it was frustrating to find that our nutritional surveys and the hard work done by the students in the last month was set up to cater to her pet project.

This last week has been a lesson in politics- we have seen the competition between the NGOs and how our student group has been used to support a hidden agenda. Our challenge now is to learn how to navigate these political relationships while maintaining the independence and integrity of both our group and our data.