News from Communities
Update From Cinquera, November 1, 2006
November 1, 2006
ARDM-Cinquera Monthly Update #1
Introduction:
This document should be the first in a series of monthly updates on the work of the Association for Reconstruction and Municipal Development (ARDM) and the social, political, economic and cultural panorama in Cinquera. The ARDM, with support from U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities local staff, has decided to share in this format news about its activities as well as reflections, reactions and analysis. These updates are written first and foremost to share with Cinquera’s Sister City of Chicago, but should also be suitable for general distribution. Information was presented to me in an informal and open style, a veritable barrage of activities and alliances that were persistently and patiently mapped out over the course of 90 minutes of talking and furious note-taking. It was such an energizing and invigorating break from the formality that often obscures the exciting nature of all the good work going on the author has decided to present the information below in much that same format.
– Jesse Kates-Chinoy,
Sister Cities E.S. Staff
Community Organizing Structures:
The ARDM works constantly to support community organizing structures, with a specific focus on strengthening Community Councils (“Directivas Comunales”), in 7 rural communities that make up the Municipality of Cinquera. An important mechanism of this work is supporting the legalization of Directivas in each community into an Association for Community Development. The acronym is ADESCO in Spanish. These ADESCOs are the legally recognized authority in the communities, and have power to find funding and support for community projects, as well as be the legal reference points for governmental organizations and other institutions that come into the community, making them a crucial structure for community autonomy and democracy.
Each month the ARDM organizer responsible for working with ADESCOs, Pantaleon Carmelo Noyola (known widely just by his nickname: “Lito”), visits each community and meets with the Directivas and helps them work toward carrying out their work plans. As past president of the ARDM and current project organizer Rosa Alvarenga said: “We don’t solve problems for the communities, rather we try to make sure that they have the organizational capability to create their own solutions.”
This past month (October), Lito prepared and carried out the monthly meetings with each ADESCO, as well as community assemblies in 2 communities to elect new ADESCOs, as the previous term was up: the communities of El Guiligüiste and San Benito.
The immediate challenge for Lito and the ARDM in each of these communities is to promote internal unity and cooperation to elect these representative structures. In the community of San Benito, there has been an historic divide between 2 or 3 large family groups. These families are not originally from Cinquera, rather they immigrated after the war and the initial repopulation from the eastern provinces of San Miguel and Morazan. They consequently don’t have the history of organizing and unity that is prevalent in other parts of Cinquera, and the first job of the ARDM is to talk about the need for organizing and working together. “I went to visit each family,” said Lito, “and we talked about the problems that they have in the community: delinquency, alcoholism and the beginnings of marijuana abuse. I explained that only they could solve their problems, and only if they got organized….” Lito seems pretty sure that these weeks of work talking to households and residents paid off, as the general assembly in October was attended by 90 participants who wanted to be members of the community association (ADESCO) and in the end they elected a 7-member Community Council made up of representatives from each of the different family groups.
Another assembly of note this month took place in the community of El Guiligüiste. The ADESCO of El Guiligüiste successfully found donors to build a drinking water system in the community, including laying the pipes and faucets and buying a pump and digging a well, and the Mayor’s Office of Cinquera will pay for the electricity to run it. To be able to turn on the system the ARDM is working with the community to create a Water Committee, which would administer the system, make sure it collects only just enough money to continue maintenance, and is timed so that all households have access to water. It is just one of those things that couldn’t happen if the community wasn’t organized to run their own public services, and Lito has been holding workshops and meetings on how to elect a representative committee to effectively run the community water system.
Alliances and Local Coalition Building:
The ARDM has been coordinating its community organizing work in Cinquera with similar organizations in surrounding municipalities: Tejutepeque, Jutiapa, Tenancingo, and Suchitoto. With support from different NGOs including CORDES and Swiss Worker Aid, the ARDM is part of 2 “micro-regions”. These coalitions bring together the work of legalizing ADESCOs, and supporting youth groups, womens groups, and other structures in each of the communities. They work together on shared issues in their municipalities, such as access to potable water, health services, and education. Another main component of this work of coordination is that of environmental protection, as the Cinquera forest extends into all five of those aforementioned municipalities. Manuel Reynado, the ARDM President and youth organizer, as well as Lito get small salaries (stipends) for their organizing work from these projects.
Defense of Public Services and the Local Health Clinic:
The ARDM has helped to organize and still leads what is called in Cinquera the “Support Committee for the Health Clinic”. This is interesting: In the years following the repopulation of Cinquera the government Ministry of Health was forced to again recognize the local health clinic, for which they supplied the salary for 1 doctor and 1 nurse, to cover the health needs of the entire municipality (the urban center and the 7 surrounding communities.) As the population of the municipality grew, it became more and more evident that the clinic needed more materials and more medical staff. The community started to raise money on its own to pay stipends to more medical staff, wnile putting pressure on the government, specifically directed toward the Ministry of Health, to recognize the new workers and take on paying their salaries. Today the clinic has 9 paid staff, and the community, through its “Support Committee for the Health Clinic” is still raising money and covers the “salaries” (100 dollars/month) of the registrar and the pharmacist.
In 2002 the President declared that “Health services are free!” and he prohibited the local health clinics from charging for services. However, the Ministry of Health refused to increase the public budget for health services. In effect, the President got to declare health as “free”, while the lack in resources had to be picked up by the public clinics and hospitals themselves, who in turn began to secretly charge patients for services to cover the cost of doctors and nurses salaries, and medicines.
In light of these situations, the Support Committee for the Health Clinic in Cinquera raises money selling food, snacks, organizing trips and raffles. This money is what keeps the health clinic functioning. At the same time, the Committee believes that fundraising should only be a temporary measure, and their main focus is to struggle to get the Ministry of Health to recognize the community-paid staff by committing to pay them salaries. As it stands right now, the Ministry of Health claims that they are the employers of the 2 community paid staff (while refusing to pay them salaries), and has tried to force them to take government discounts on their stipends and be responsible for up to 6,000 dollars of losses from clinic property.
The Support Committee recognizes the need for another doctor or nurse in the clinic, but has decided that they cannot pay another salary, due not only to fundraising limitations but also because, as Manuel Reynado put it: “We refuse to validate the attitude of the Ministry of Health that washes its hands of all responsibility when the community shows that we care for each other…” He went on to say that “our job now is to organize and to fight to make sure that the government can’t shift blame, and takes responsibility for providing services for its citizens.”
Of particular note is that the ARDM at our meeting identified this issue as one that they want support from Chicago on in the upcoming year, in the form of political support in putting pressure on the government and ministry of health, and exploring what other ways their sister city can accompany this struggle.
Youth Organizing:
The ARDM continues to run a Scholarship Program with financial support from certain Basque cities. Through this program there are a total of 16 young people from Cinquera who receive economic support that is half donation and half no-interest loan to be paid back to the program itself to continue to give scholarships to other students.
The ARDM has been instrumental in setting up Municipal and Micro-Regional youth committees, which are doing leadership trainings for young people from the communities and promoting youth for leadership roles in ADESCOs and other organizing structures.
In Cinquera the ARDM is supporting and organizing an adolescent theatre group called “Los Radiola”. Kids ages mostly 9-12 have been learning street theatre techniques and putting on plays about issues ranging from forest conservation to free trade to domestic violence.
The Youth Local Radio project continues, and October saw the completion of a small broadcasting studio (an extra brick room walled off in the ARDM courtyard). The radio still plays from 5-7 pm each day over public speakers throughout the urban center, and the young people have daily music and informational programming.
The Oral History Project nears a close in October as well. All the interviews and systematizing of the information has been done, and the Radiola theatre group is putting together presentations to give the oral history back to the community. Theater presentations and the presentation of the official oral history document are scheduled for November.
Environmental Tourism Services:
The ARDM continues to work on providing services to promote the eco-tourism attractions of the Cinquera forest, and in October they made serious progress on 4 separate initiatives:
– Family initiatives for tourism: the ARDM is working with families in El Tule and San Benito who are developing certain infrastructure (trails, ropes course, etc) on their land within the forest.
– A community restaurant is being built on land that has been bought by the ARDM within Cinquera’s urban center. It will be run by the community women’s group.
– A youth craft workshop is being re-invigorated with the training of kids ages 14-16 in wood carving and other selected crafts.
– The Ecological Park in the forest is being improved, including more trails, a new lookout tower, and adolescents and youth being trained as local community guides to take groups up into the forest.
As well, the group of forest rangers, (“Guardarecursos”) continues to make daily patrols as a preventative measure to poachers coming into the forest.
9th Annual Ecological Forum:
The ARDM held on October 27th its 9th annual Ecological Forum. Every year the ARDM together with the Cinquera Mayors Office organizes a forum to discuss how the community of Cinquera, and specifically its 110 families that are patchwork owners of the forest itself, are going to coexist in positive ways with their natural resources. There were at least 200 people at the forum, including landowners, children from the local schools, and farmers. The participants divided into 5 working groups: Alternatives for rural tourism, Reduction and treatment of solid garbage in Cinquera, The impacts of the new forestry laws for the Cinquera forest, Creation of an environmental management plan, and Alternatives for agricultural development.
There was vigorous and excited participation in each of these discussion groups, and new proposals were made. The ARDM, Mayors Office and CORDES have put together a follow-up committee to plan the implementation of some of these proposals. The progress made in their implementation will be presented at the 10th forum (next year) as a way to motivate participants, so they can see that their ideas are really being put into action.
