You can help by donating funds of course, but we can also use your help in delivering books and educational supplies to our villages. So, if you will be visiting the Yucatán peninsula this year, Por Favor consider  bringing  much needed  books and learning tools to our villages. You will be received with open arms and will have the pleasure of seeing first hand how important your donations, books, and supplies are for the children in our villages.

A few highlights of the past six months include our new PI location in the inland village of Chicxulub Pueblo in a restored traditional  nah ( casa). Programs are once again in full swing in Chicxulub Pueblo with families lining up for book exchange and learning activities See photos of the casita and other recent events on the PI Flickr page.

Proyecto Itzaes summer programs were super successful this year with hundreds of children participating in classes that ranged from sports, dance, crafts and gardening to more academic classes that focused on needed summer school tutoring  in math and reading skills as well as computer classes.   PI asesores, many of them now university students who receive help from PI to complete their education rallied in all of our villages to provide exciting summer learning for families.  The asesores were joined in this effort by Erica Fernandez, a Stanford University junior who is also on the PI board of directors, and Tom McFadden, a recent Stanford Alumni who will continue working in PI villages until October.

Some updates on our university students.  Proyecto Itzaes is immensely proud of our  asesores who have excelled through  middle and high school and are now in the university. They have achieved amazing academic success while balancing family, work, and lifetimes of poverty— and they continue to lead PI programs in the evenings and during the summer.  They are thriving in their studies that include majors in law, mathematics, psychology, business, and graphic design. Congratulations to them for their hard work and success and for their loyalty to their communities.

2010 brought good news in the form of two Rotary Foundation grants that are in partnership with the Los Altos, CA Rotary, Palo Alto, CA Rotary and Club Rotario Nuevas Generaciones of  Mérida, Yucatán. Grants were funded to implement classes and training for bio-intensive gardening and permaculture as well as developing a village based farmers’ market.  Proyecto Itzaes International Program Director, Simon Clopton, is teaching the weekly  agricultura classes for participants from several villages and developing with the farmers a plan to take the crops from the garden to the farmer’s market.  These two grants combined, will greatly improve the ability of PI small shareholder farmers to make an adequate living from their crops while improving health in their communities.

Proyecto Itzaes is also grateful to the Foundation for Global Community (FGC) for their grant that has enabled us to continue essential programs. Gracias and Dios bo’otik  to both  Rotary and  FGC! Your support in the past year has made all the difference.

In other news, two PI programs have gone global! by partnering with other youth organizations. In July, with the help of Erica Fernandez, recipient of the Jane Goodall Global Leadership Award in 2009,  Proyecto Itzaes children started their own chapter of  Roots and Shoots, part of the Jane Goodall Institute devoted to empowering youth to take action on global issues. Erica and PI asesores are working on a conservation and reforestation project in PI villages and will be posting news and photos soon.

PI students under the guidance of asesor Javi Garcia Itza are also collaborating with the REAL program and with students from many countries in  a growing effort to collect water quality data around the  world.

Stanford alum and science rapper Tom McFadden has been working all summer with PI communities on health concerns related to diet and type ll diabetes and has organized a symposium (September 10 in Ixil, Yucatán) with community  members, students, and volunteer medical specialists to  educate the greater community about this very serious health problem.  Tom has brought his talents as a science rapper to this amazing effort and will premier the Proyecto Itzaes rap song on September 10th so watch for it on YouTube!

The past year and this amazingly productive summer in Proyecto Itzaes villages is the result of the generosity and unflagging energy of many, many people yet the  reality is that we desperately need your help to continue this  important work in PI villages.  Please help us provide more books for our libraries, the pens, pencils and crayons that literally change a young persons attitude about education, the puzzles that challenge young fingers, the soccer balls that inspire our kids to be healthy and strong and so much more.  There are many ways you can help:

• Your donation of any amount enables us to buy new books and supplies. $10 buys a hardbound book. $100 buys ten books. Early childhood literacy is key and books change lives!
• Your donation of  $1200.00 will enable one of our pioneer PI university students to travel each day to their classes in Merida and achieve their goal of a college education enriching their whole community.
• Your donation of $15,000 funds a new village.
• Please help us mount a social networking fund raising campaign!!  Click on our website or our Facebook page and  spread the word to your friends.  Enough people with modest donations can create enormous change!

Thank you, Mil Gracias y Dios bo’otik

Cindy

With tens of thousands of young people in almost 100 countries, the Roots & Shoots network connects youth of all ages who share a desire to create a better world. Young people identify problems in their communities and take action.Through service projects, youth-led campaigns and an interactive website, Roots & Shoots members are making a difference across the globe.

Proyecto Itzaes is fostering a new Roots and Shoots group in Ixil, Yucatan—young students and their parents are becoming more conscious every day of the environmental issues that their town faces and are planting new seeds for present and future generations.

(1:12)

One day, Isaac receives a printing set.

(1:48)

A message from our Yucatán children.

(1:27)

The Science in the Villages Program inspires a young student to study science.

Technology is also in great demand to archive  stories in both Maya and Spanish,  to store photos including old photos that  have been scanned for history and to keep a digital record of recordings and video from each village.

Computers, scanners and even a digital microscope are in constant demand with  Proyecto Itzaes science programs. In Ixil, students are creating a digital herbarium of scanned plants that includes the plant name in Spanish, Maya and the scientific name as well as traditional ecological  and ethnobotanical knowledge supplied by elders.

This “real-work”  approach to technology is a very hands-on way to become proficient with programs and hardware as well as producing  tangible products.

WIFI in the villages! In late 2007 with a grant from the Foundation for Global Community, PI began an ambitious project to provide  wireless network to our villages. Working together with Solitech, towers have been installed with solar powered radio relays  and in March, 2009, Yahel Ben-David,  of the Airjaldi Organization will be flying to Yucatán to work with PI staff, Simón Clopton and local volunteer, Jorge Carlos Berny to get the much awaited wifi up and running.

In 2005, Rotary donated the technology for the studies, including computers, scanners, printers, cameras, recorders and supplies and members of the communities continue to contribute hours and hours of work interviewing , researching , and teaching in their own villages.

Middle and high school students from each community interview elders (grandparents, aunts, uncles and neighbors) and interviews are digitally recorded, transcribed and burned to CD to archive information. Old photos relating to family life, milpas, animals, and food are scanned and preserved to disk as well.

Sample questions include:

• When you were young, how did your family get their food?
• What were the ten most common foods that you ate.
• What were the most common liquids that you drank?
• Did your family have a garden, milpa, huerta etc?
• If so, what kinds of food did you grow?
• Did your family raise animals for food? If so, which animals did you have for food?
• Which did you eat more often, corn tortillas or bread?
• Did you drink refrescos? If so, how often?
• Did you drink Jamaica? Horchata? Jugo?
• Did you have desserts or sweet food very often? How often?
• Did you have candy for special occasions or every day?
• Which vegetables did you eat often?
• Which fruits did you eat often?
• Did your family hunt for food? Which animals?
• Did you eat cereals like avena? Did you have prepared cereal in a box?

Students then compared the foods traditionally eaten in their villages to their own diet and came to their own conclusion that foods eaten today are less nutritious and too high in sugars and empty calories. Older students and PI asesores share with children and families the importance of healthy diet and exercise in preventing type 11 diabetes.

In recent years, children and families in Proyecto Itzaes’ six other villages have also begun to record and archive oral histories. The goal of the oral histories project is twofold: for the young people of Yucatán to learn more about their own family and village history and to preserve Maya cultural heritage.

 The cultural preservation project involves the entire community. Young students, guided by a library specialist and archivist, interview the town’s elders. Using a digital tape recorder and camera, the students (primary and middle school age) ask a series of basic questions of grandparents, aunts and uncles, recording invaluable information about the town’s traditions, customs, myths and legends.

The children have also started to preserve old photographs by scanning them and saving copies of the images to compact discs.  PI students and volunteers are slowly transcribing the stories and using Adobe Photoshop to edit and save the photos they have taken. Completed stories with both the text and photo files are saved to compact discs and families each receive copies as well.

Help us fund our cultural preservation project

Proyecto Itzaes needs funds to expand this invaluable cultural history and to create a website of the stories, local legends and photos, in order to share Maya culture and history as a primary source. Funds are needed for essential technology, computers, scanners, cameras, digital recorders as well as funding for archiving and oral history workshops provided by a library/archive specialist.

Please help. Every donation makes a difference!

*Proyecto Itzaes in Chicxulub Puerto is now an independent, community sustained program led and funded by the people of Chicxulub Puerto.

A grant funded by the rotary Foundation, the Los Altos Rotary Club and Club Rotario Nuevas Generaciones of Merida.

A new PI project for 2009/2010 providing biointensive farming workshops for up to 75 local farmers from our villages taught by Proyecto Itzaes International Director Simon Clopton. Gardening and food production has significant cultural and historical meaning in Maya villages. In the past several years as our young students participated in the diabetes prevention project and interviewed many of their elders about food and farming, they realized how this knowledge was being lost within their own families and villages.

Milpa agriculture is an integral part of Maya and Mexican culture and a healthy and sustainable healthy lifestyle. The three sisters: corn, beans, and squash have long been the dominant garden foods in Maya gardens, along with locally specialized cilantro, chives, and radishes and families are eager to revive their garden traditions.

In 2009/2010 participating families attend workshops over several months to learn how to organically and sustainably increase food production on their ejido lands. Each receive a Spanish language copy of John Jeavons’ book Cultivo Biointensivo de Alimentos.

This permaculture organic farming course will provide the crops and other products for a farmers’ market — a second rotary foundation project funded with the Palo Alto Rotary and Club Rotario Nuevas Generaciones for 2010/2011.  The farmers’ market  model will  attract  people from Merida and surrounding villages who wish to purchase organic, local and heirloom foods, as well as enjoy a day of family fun and local  arts and crafts. For the PI farmers and families, this will  mean that they  will receive the full value of their crops and not have to sell to food dealers at unfairly low prices. Equally as important, the market will celebrate the work of the community and showcase the families and their community based hard work.

During spring of 2008 and 2009, students from Menlo School in Menlo Park, California traveled to Yucatan as youth mentors and worked side by side with PI asesores. Menlo School raised funds to provide beautiful books and bookcase libraries from Bring Me A Book for the villages of Cholul and Chicxulub Pueblo and inspired our youngest students; reading aloud to them, creating new stories, folding origami animals, dancing together and much more.

During Summer 2010, Stanford University students Erica Fernandez and Tom McFadden are working with the PI aesores on several programs to benefit our PI Villages and develop leadership skills for local youth.

PI mentors, local and international, spread their reading and learning to others and are essential role models for the younger children.