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The chicken and the micro-enterprise egg

 

A Canadian volunteer helps an integrated food security project take root in the Southwestern Highlands of Honduras.

High in the hills of Southwestern Honduras, at the end of a long road that snakes through lush green vegetation, lies the municipality of Belen Guacho. With a population of 17,000 and wealthy in arable land, it is also a place where poverty has stubborn roots.

Foreigners and their development ‘projects’ have come and gone, many with an emphasis on the production of saleable crops – carrots, broccoli and cabbage – staples foreign to the local population but popular elsewhere. The result has been some ready cash, but with less indigenous fare and without education on nutrition, the money has often been spent on junk food shipped in from outside regional borders.

The latest statistics show that more than two-thirds of children under five in this area are malnourished.
Sanitation too has an unhealthy history. Latrines provided by foreign organizations often came without proper education in their use or maintenance, and so many stand abandoned in the countryside. Last spring, as happens in many a spring, an outbreak of hepatitis-A from the main water source struck down people as varied as the director of the local college, farmers and young children. No one died, luckily, but it strained local health resources.

A Cuso International volunteer helps build food security

Now a different kind of project, a collaboration between Cuso International, Canada World Youth, and local community umbrella group ASONOG, hopes to bring more lasting change to the area. It's a five-year integrated approach to create food security by focusing on helping the community not just economically develop the land for cash crops, but also to use some of the harvest to better nourish themselves and their children.
And the project will build infrastructure including latrines; but this time the privies will stand alongside training on how to maintain them.

Gaetane Danielle Carignan, known here simply as Daniela to make things easier, is a Cuso International volunteer helping to co-ordinate this concerted push against poverty. The British Columbian – who took a leave from her job as a rangeland agrologist with the B.C. government to work in Honduras – is based in the charming colonial town of Santa Rosa de Copan.




"I believe more in this work than any other I've had in the past," says the 31-year-old, who's been here for nine months.

As Carignan set out on a recent mission into the hills south of Santa Rosa, the signs of poverty were everywhere. Small children, faces covered in dust, plugging potholes and stopping cars along the dirt road, hoping for a tip for their efforts. A pretty, young-looking fourteen-year-old, chopping and selling roadside pineapples – she'd finished grade six, she says, but there was no money for further education.
Daniela and her Honduran co-worker, Francis Chinchilla from ASONOG, are on their way to help launch one of the initiatives. Re-launch actually. They came to meet eight young Hondurans chosen to pilot the first micro-enterprise in the municipality. They are a replacement group for an original bunch that didn't cut it.
This new group, six young men and two women aged 19 to 23, will be given financial and technical assistance to build a small poultry business.

There are few employment opportunities for young people here, and many leave to look for work in larger urban centres – and all the potential and peril they offer.

Which came first, the chicken or the micro loan?

Bunched in the secretary's cramped office, members of the 'Vision Juvenil' (Youth Vision) micro-enterprise explain their dream. "We're thinking big," says Edras Adonay Vasquez, the young 20-year-old president of the newly formed company. "We want to start small but plan to become a large enterprise, God willing."
That’s optimism for sure, but they'll be assisted with seed funding from Canada World Youth along with technical assistance from the people at ASONOG and Cuso International’s Gaetane Carignan. And last, but not least they say, they'll get help from their mothers who will cook some of the chickens to sell.
At the moment, eggs are trucked in from a town three-and-a-half hours away, protected by gun-toting security officers. These mountains are now a pathway for drug runners, and several of the state's villages and towns have become 'narco-municipalities' controlled by drug lords. Even eggs now need armed guards.




















The youths pile into ASONOG's truck for the short ride up the hill, to the spot where the chicken coop will stand. Construction, the company president proudly says, will start any day, and soon fresh eggs and chickens, locally produced, will be available to the community.


















 Vasquez and his teammates hope that this enterprise will one day help fund their dream of owning their own modest homes in the municipality.

Gaetane Carignan, a.k.a. Daniela the Canadian volunteer, says that “Vision Juvenil represents hope for this community's future.”

The initiative is just one spoke in a larger wheel, but if they are successful, the young men and women in the microenterprise may also become community leaders, torchbearers in the march toward a better future. And that hope, Carignan believes, is what really comes first.

Story by Giselle Portenier
Photos by Brian Atkinson