(Above: Río Cahabón, Alta Verapaz, photo by Lon&Queta, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.)
GUATEMALA CITY – Bayron Medina was like most Guatemalan farm boys; he loved the outdoors, and he spent long hours tramping through the woods, hunting, fishing, and listening to the birds, many of which he could identify by their song.
“I would say listen, that’s woodpecker, that’s a dove – because living in the country you become accustomed to hearing them. A hunter knows what kind of an animal it is when he hears the sound.”
He was one of eight children, and the whole family had to pitch in to make ends meet. They saw themselves as pioneers, wresting a decent life from the jungle in the mountains of Alta Verapaz near Coban.
“We were in the process of planting corn, and preparing the land for the cattle, and my father said, ‘Look, kids, I can only support you in your studies until the 6th grade because there are so many of you. But what I’m going to do is look for institutions with the government that give scholarships, and you’ll have to study hard.’ So that’s what I did, and by the grace of God, I was able to succeed.”
He had just returned from a long drive from the provinces, but invited me to his home in these suburbs up in the mountains above Guatemala City, sharing dinner and a little local hospitality. “This is where the rich people live,” said the taxi driver, but it was similar to any comfortable middle-class home in the states. I had come to learn about a program funded through the United Nations with a mouthful of a name, “Joint Program for the Strengthening of Environmental Governability in the Face of Climatic Risk in Guatemala.”
But before we got to that, he shared with me a little of his own story.
“I want to show you the place where I was born,” he said. “Here are the rivers… When I was young, there were tigers here“ – “tigres,” meaning any wild feline in Latin American vernacular, but most often referring to jaguars. The blue waters, the misty green mountains matched the images in my mind of the mountainous region around Coban.
“We were hunters, and I killed deer. We dynamited the rivers, with grenades, we called them bombs, to kill the fish, and we’d put the battery in the middle of a bottle and when we put the cables together there was an incredible number that would die and float to the top.”
Why was he telling me this? I began to wonder why I was here.
“And we set fires – we burned the tropical forest so we could have our cattle. Here, here’s my mother…” The faded photo showed a woman cooking in a traditional country kitchen.
“It was a really beautiful place, but to raise cattle we had to cut the forest. We cut cedars, mahoganies, it was a really beautiful place – look at these rivers – we dynamited them. Look, this is the house where I was born – but when we arrived it was a jungle, with tigers. We killed two jaguars.“
His face was smiling, but his voice was tinged with sorrow. It felt like he was unburdening his soul.
“You don’t do that anymore, right?” I asked, somewhat taken aback.
“Ah, but then came the change,” he said. “Nowadays, I feel myself with a great debt. I feed the squirrels and the migratory birds; maybe there are ten different species that come in the mornings… We practically tried to eliminate nature, contaminating it and using it up. Having been able to be there and to enjoy the nature, and the fact that now it’s no longer there… I remember my father would throw the trash in the river.
“Now we have children of our own, and we teach them to recycle the trash and we use earthworms to compost with vermiculture – look at how the world changes. We can’t keep on doing things the same way, we have to change.”
And change he did.
It was a long road, however – one that took him to a military academy, where he was able to get a good education and, he says gratefully, avoid combat during the long civil war.
He remembers clearly the day that he realized that things had to change, and that he wanted to be a part of that change.
That day he saw a long line of campesinos – maybe 500 of them – lined up alongside the road in a village near where he’d grown up. He stopped to ask why the people were all lining up there. “There’s no water,” they told him.
“I asked them in Kekchi – everyone in Coban speaks Kekchi,” he explained. “My grandfather was a chiclero, who harvested chicle from the rubber trees; I have aunts who are totally indigenous, and we all speak Kekchi.
“So I approached an older man, about 75 years old, and he said, ‘We’re in a very difficult summer.’ He said he has to get up at 4 in the morning, and he gets to this place around 9 to stand in line, and it takes till 3 in the afternoon to fill his container – but the water is completely dirty.
“But I asked myself, how is it possible in Coban, in an area where there’s so much rain, that there’s no water? We were in a zone that gets about 2,000 millimeters of rain on average.
“So what happened? Well, it’s a region that doesn’t hold water – because of the karst topography, it all flows away. They always used to get their water from a spring that never dried up – but now it was dry.
“When I saw this, I said, I have to find the opportunity to study the question of water. So God gave me the opportunity to take my family and study in Costa Rica with a scholarship. There I learned about the water, watersheds, how to manage the resources, and then I returned to try and apply what I had learned. So that’s what I’m doing, trying to have a vision of how we can care for our rivers. We have so many rivers in Guatemala – so much water – but we just let it pass through and we don’t take advantage of it.”
That’s how Medina came to be the Environmental Services Manager for this joint project of the United Nations Development Program and Guatemala’s Environmental Ministry. This three-year program has returned Medina with a team of specialists to the mountains of his homeland and beyond, working with community leaders to build awareness about the value of their resources.
For Medina, as for the UN in general, there’s no doubt that the climate is changing – and that we’ve only begun to see the effects of deforestation and the carbon the industrial revolution has pumped into the atmosphere.
In the workshops he gives on the subject, he points to an example from his own life: his sister’s house, where he lived while he was attending high school. In 1974, Hurricane Fifi hit the Caribbean, killing an estimated 10,000 in neighboring Honduras, and an additional 200 from flooding in Guatemala. His sister lived on the banks of a river in Alta Verapaz, far from the ocean, but it rained for seven days and the flooding was so intense that her home was flooded.
“It was terrible; the house was underwater for 10 days and it was all ruined. We had to rebuild it, and this time we put it a meter higher, to avoid anymore flooding.”
All was well until Hurricane Mitch, in 1998, which killed an estimated 20,000 and left 2.7 million homeless. Once again, his sister’s house was flooded – but this time, the rain fell for only three days, but the intensity was much harder.
“Once again, my sister cried; once again, we rebuilt the house – this time 2 ½, 3 meters higher.
“Then came another flood – it wasn’t a hurricane, just a tropical storm. It began to rain at 9 at night. By midnight it had risen to these levels, and it flooded the house again. The intensity of the rain – 200 millimeters fell in half a night.”
Medina decided to do a study, and he went to the meteorological station in Coban and collected the historical data showing the quantity and the intensity of rain events in the area over time. It was as he had suspected; the rain was increasing in intensity and frequency.
“I show them the graphics – and I tell them, climate change is doing this. We’re seeing that the storm events are more frequent, more repetitive. When the droughts come, they are more severe, and the river levels will be lower. And during the rain events they are higher.”
So now the question was, what to do about it?
Medina’s program is working on multiple levels: to teach people in the region about the importance of maintaining the forest cover to let more water filter in the ground, instead of letting it run off; to help them quantify the value of keeping the trees in place, or reforesting areas that have been deforested, in terms of watershed protection; to help them map the recharge zones for their aquifers; and to help build environmentally aware, transparent leadership in the villages.
He’s also helping communities to design projects that will help keep the water in the watershed, and helping them to conduct feasibility studies and brainstorm ideas to generate funding. At the end of the three-year project period, three of the ideas will be funded.
The project period is halfway through, and with just a year and a half to go, Medina is feeling the pressure. It’s an enormous challenge; many of the people they’re working with are illiterate, with primary school education or less, and most are extremely poor. Some still think the government is going to come in and do the projects for them; he’s had to explain several times that they are only doing mapping and feasibility studies, and funding the three best projects.
“Three years is so little time to build the types of relationships and awareness that we’re trying to build – but it’s what we have. So that’s our challenge,” he said.
To learn more about the United Nations Development Program’s climate change initiatives around the world, visit their website.
The unseasonable warmth had us removing layers as we scrambled up to catch a glimpse of the world from on high. Another climatic oddity in a year that was full of them. Change is in the air, for those with eyes to see: We are closing the book on a year that saw vast swaths of the American Southwest go up in smoke, millions of dollars of hurricane damage in Vermont, a monster tornado that erased big chunks of Joplin, massive flooding in Australia, the Phillippines and Southeast Asia and record-breaking heat waves in Europe and much of the United States. 
