This photo is representative of the 131 inhabitants (29 families) in the Mayan Village of San Marcos, Municipality of Tekax, Yucatan, Mexico. That's me standing in the doorway. As a volunteer, I selected this village in October 1987 to do a self-designed economic development project to assist them with recovery from Hurricane Gilbert which struck the Yucatan Peninsula with a vengeance, one month before my arrival.
The building behind us was unused so with donated paint and supplies we turned it into a schoolhouse.
Through affiliation with PARTNERS OF THE AMERICAS village projects were designed to meet the people's own priorities, water, food and sustainable economic independence. Weekly trips to the village to assess needs and plan future steps brought close interconnections with the people of San Marcos. Their number one priority for crop irrigation and daily needs was water. A well project was established to replace their centuries old method of pulling up water from the 150 foot depth to the surface in a one gallon bucket on a rope windlass. It took two women or one man eleven turns around the well to lower and then raise one bucket full. An electric pump was installed with a faucet by the well and pipe was run to the schoolhouse in the center of the village.
One hundred baby chicks were purchased and a hen house built to start a sustainable food and economic development project. The talent of the women for handicrafts, sewing and adding decorative embroidery to their daily apparel offered another means of economic development. The products of their labors were marketed in Yucatan's Sister State of Iowa.
The normal diet of the villagers was tortillas, beans and rice. Their homes were constructed of sticks and a palm leaf thatched roof.
The men normally labored ten hours a day in the fields tending their crops and cutting wood. In order to add a recreational activity to their day and to build a sense of community cooperation, one weekend my partner in the project, Javier Camara Mejia, a rural development engineer, asked the men to clear an acre of ground for a baseball field. When we returned the following week, the jungle-like overgrowth had been cleared and the men were ready to play with the equipment we brought. Now, ten years later, I received a letter announcing the annual baseball tournament with the ten village teams competing in a stadium which we dreamed of, and the Mexican Government built.