PAXTOCA, Totonicapán, Guatemala – Martin Pedro Toc Sic is an eco-entrepreneur on a mission. Standing amid the green, forested hills of his native village, this young Maya marketing major explained why he left a good-paying job in the city to try and make his mark in his hometown with projects designed to keep those hills green.
“My father told me a long time ago, ‘Martin, God wants a vocation for you.’ And I always looked for it,” he said. “Then one day, God touched me with fear. I was listening to a radio program about the way the climate is changing and it scared me so bad I ran to my room and hid under the covers and trembled. But then I realized I had to do something about it. Instead of hiding in the house, frightened, it’s time to find solutions.”
Martin is a curious mixture of many things that on the surface don’t seem to blend. He’s a business-minded environmentalist and an evangelical Christian working to revive the Mayan cosmovision. He’s the founder of Projuve, short for Youth Program for Sustainable Development (Programa Juvenil para Desarrollo Sostenible), and his enthusiasm for his subject matter is contagious. A youth leader in his evangelical church, he’s managed to attract nine others to the cause, including Carmina, now his wife-to-be, and they’ve all put their work aside today to meet with me at their new Forestry Center, a small protected plot of tree seedlings they are nurturing for a reforestation project.
The youths begin with a brief and very professional introduction, each telling me which of the Projuve departments they belong to: environment, programs, fundraising and business development. The young women are dressed in corte tipica, the traditional Quiché Mayan woven skirts and lacy blouses. The young men are all business casual.
“Here it’s normal for the young people to wear their hair long and their T-shirts loose, but we don’t want to do that,” Martin explained to me later. “We want to have the respect of the community, so that’s why we dress this way – formally. We are trying to earn their trust.”
In the year since their founding, they’ve garnered the support of a local cooperative, which has given them the land and supplies for their forestry center. They’ve held a Christian eco-concert, Una Sola Voz por el Planeta (One voice for the Planet) to raise money for their cause.
They’ve established a recycling project in their town; in a place where the idea of recycling was once as far from most minds as the moon, villagers are now separating their plastic, glass, metal and paper from their organic waste and saving it for the Projuve volunteers, who collect them every two weeks and truck them to the recycling center in Xela.
On an ordinary day, many of this dynamic group can be found hauling bags of rich volcanic soil and mulch from the surrounding forest to mix into the tiny nursery bags for the seedlings in their Forestry Center. Already they’ve got some 8,000 sprouts here, including white pine, oak, cypress and the endangered pinabete, or Guatemalan fir. Their goal is to plant 100,000 in the surrounding deforested areas by the end of the year.
But this is only the beginning. Their long-range goals include an ecotourism program in the surrounding mountain valley, built around a spectacular waterfall in the forest near here. They’re collecting plastic and glass bottles in a warehouse near here that they plan to use as the base for an adobe Earthship-style ecological house, and they’ve enlisted the aid of a green architect to help them design it.
The only thing standing between them and the conversion of Paxtoca into an ecovillage, it seems, is money – but they have faith it will come.
We took turns telling our stories, and each of the youths, from 16-year-old Nicolas to 24-year-old Carmina, shared their fears of a devastated planet and their dream for a green future for their children.
Martin and Carmina took me for a breathtaking hike through the village, up through the cornfields surrounding the forest and down a trail through the woods to the waterfall, which they’ve used as the backdrop for their stunning brochure and their power point presentation.
Then, since the cooperative had loaned them the car for the day, they took me up into the mountains to see another ecological project in the region, the Aprisco Sendero Ecologico, an educational ecocenter in a virgin pine forest near the town of Totonicapan. The hike among the old-growth pines refreshed the spirit while learning stations along the way taught about the endangered birds and trees this forest harbors.
Aprisco is an initiative of CDRO, the Cooperative for Rural Development of the West, an organization that has been promoting sustainable development in the Western Highlands for a generation. They took me by the organization’s learning center, where I had a chat with Ana Victoria Socop, one of the organization’s directors.
Here are a few comments from each of these young movers and shakers that will stay with me.
Martin:
“Jesus loved nature! Remember the story of how he released the doves from the people who were selling them in the temple? Remember how he said, the birds of the air don’t worry about where they will get their food, but God takes care of them. God gave us dominion over nature so that we would take care of it.”
“Our Maya culture is closely related to nature, but we’ve lost a great deal of that. So why don’t we go back and reclaim what’s ours? The Maya saying is, leave no one behind. This applies to nature, as well.”
“We created the concept, ‘empre-ambiental’ (empresarial plus environmental) because we have to have development, but it doesn’t need to hurt the environment. I said to myself, if they can do this in Xela, why can’t we do it here? Here we have the resources, the natural beauty. We should be able to make it work here.”
“I give talks to the young people and I say, ‘Kids, now is our time, it’s the time for us to show what we are made of.”
“If they support us from outside, that’s great but we also have to learn how to generate our own financing. A lot of times groups will arrive in the villages and the people will say, ‘What are you bringing us?’ We say, ‘what do we have to offer?’ We’re trying to change the paradigm.”
Ana, 20 – “We were seeing that the trash was collecting all around and it was really affecting us. Sometimes the grandfathers cut the trees in the mountains and don’t replant them. So we got together and we said, we have to make the change; if we don’t, nobody will. We want to have a beautiful place to hand down to the little ones when it’s their time.”
Jairo, 21 – “I’d been studying science and thinking already about the way the future is looking and feeling really scared about it. Then one day at church I heard a talk that Martin gave and I said, and I loved the idea, I was delighted to join this team.”
Pablo, 20 – “Now that we’ve been going around picking up the recyclables the people are beginning to trust us. Guatemala is changing and I realized, I wanted to be a part of it – we have to really put out the effort to make it better.”
Nicolas, 16: “Now is the time we can raise up a generation of change. Maybe the last generations believed that you could cut the trees down and they’d come back by themselves, but now we realize they don’t come back by themselves, and without trees there is no life, we can’t breathe.”
Josias, 20: “Sometimes we young people don’t really think about what we’re doing, just throwing trash and such. Now we’re beginning to realize what our environment really needs, and that’s why we’ve started all these projects, which are going to require a lot of work. And since I’m in charge of fundraising, I know we’re going to need some money to make it happen, and I’m not sure how we’re going to do it, but I know we have to.”
Jose, 18: “Up here in the highlands, the sun used to just warm us, but now it burns us. We have to do something for our planet. We can’t fix what’s already been done but what we can do is raise the awareness of our friends and neighbors, saying what are we going to leave our children? We can’t give them a destroyed planet. We want them to be able to have what we enjoyed.”
Carmina, 24: “I had the opportunity to work as a volunteer in an NGO, and I was sharing with many foreigners. I realized that the reality we were living – we went to many places where there were not more trees, the mountains were completely treeless. We saw places where there was extreme poverty. This motivated me to do something, but I didn’t know what to do by myself. I saw how the foreigners came to help, but when they extended a hand to help, the people would reach out and say, give us more.”
“Why do other people come to help our people when we can do it ourselves? But then a friend told me about Projuve, and at first it didn’t really convince me. The third time I said, let me see what they’re doing. Then it was Martin who told me the whole vision of Projuve. Then I said, I think I can contribute something here. So I decided to stay and see what I could do to realize the vision of a green Paxtoca.”
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
