Articles

March 11, 2006

FIRST IN A SERIES; COMING SUNDAY IN OBSERVER: Ten years after the end of Guatemala's brutal civil war, an ex-Calgarian makes a difference in the jungle.

Bill Horne is sitting on a dock at the edge of a lake drinking an ice-cold Gallo. It's sunset and two bats have just dropped from the thatched roof over our heads as we quaff Guatemala's national beer. In the distance, we hear howler monkeys in the jungle outside our modest accommodation on the shores of Lake Peten Itza, not far from the ancient Mayan city of Tikal. Two flea-bitten dogs lie nearby, scratching endlessly. We wonder if we'll be next. The local kids back at the free clinic had mites and scabies, but Horne isn't worried. If we were infected, he figures, the critters were probably shaken off by the bone-jarring ride in the back of the pickup truck that has become our daily transport into town. There is no golf here, no swim-up bar, no poolside waiters serving fruity drinks with umbrellas. Instead of the typical North American winter resort holiday, Horne has just finished a hard day volunteering on a construction project. He's sweaty, tired and dirty and there's no hot water in his room. By the time he returns home, he'll have 200 insect bites on his body. And he wouldn't trade it for the world. "This is the only way to travel," says the retired, self- described "oilpatch rat" from Canmore. "It's just an amazing experience. I think this kind of travel is going to be huge."

Horne is part a group of Calgary and area volunteers who have come to this remote village in the northern Guatemala rainforest to donate two weeks of their time to Project Ix-Caanan, a community- based health clinic, education and environment project started by Anne Lossing, a former Calgarian. In addition to Horne, the visiting Calgarians include two doctors, two nurses, an interpreter, an insurance agent, an acupuncturist, a computer specialist and two teachers, one of them a 75-year-old retiree in a walker. They represent a growing trend in volunteer tourism, where people pay their own way to work for a non-profit organization in a developing country. In return, volunteers get a tax receipt and an experience far more rewarding than playing beach volleyball or listening to bad music on a cruise ship.

Such Third World philanthropy is a way to give back, says Bob Dickson, a Calgary family physician who organized the group for this, his second, visit to El Remate. "The needs are so great and the returns, for both the people and for us, are enormous."

Calgary, with its vast wealth and strong history of volunteerism, has no shortage of people with a passion to change the world like Dickson and his Guatemala entourage are doing. David Damberger, a young Calgary mechanical engineer, formed a local chapter of Engineers Without Borders to work on a water project in Zambia. Calgary's Sandra van den Brink founded the Ayudamos Foundation to provide housing and clean water in southern Guatemala. Canmore's Mary A. Tidlund Foundation works on poverty reduction projects in the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia and South and Central America, including a 2004 partnership on Project Ix- Caanan. Rather than writing a cheque and wondering how it is spent, Third World volunteers roll up their sleeves and immerse themselves in the local culture, often in impoverished settings.

"Volunteers say it's like hand-delivering their money," says Jane Townsend, a Canmore woman who founded the Hearts and Hands Foundation. It, too, operates in Guatemala, using Calgary and area volunteers to provide efficient wood stoves to poor families who would otherwise suffer respiratory ailments from cooking over open fires inside their houses. Sometimes, volunteers can pay an emotional price. Sue Negrych and Deb Ironside, both pediatric nurses from Calgary, volunteered to work alongside Dickson at Project Ix-Caanan's free clinic, started 10 years ago by Lossing and her Guatemalan partner, Dr. Enrique Chapeton. In January 2005, Negrych and Ironside got their first taste of volunteer health work in Zambia, where the average life expectancy is 39 years and nearly one in 20 children do not survive to reach the age of five. "After Africa, I was completely wrecked," said Ironside. "Both of us were useless at work for a long time." "Africa was the worst," says Negrych. "I was haunted. "For four to five months, I was a mess. I said to myself, 'I'm finished. I'm broke. I can't do this.' But now, I'm hooked. "You meet the most amazingly beautiful people. They are so thankful." Their experience is not unusual, Townsend says. "It takes some people a while to put into words what they experienced. It's life-changing for many. Almost spiritual," says Townsend. "When I go home, it takes about two weeks to get into my reality and not feel sad and not feel guilty for all we have."

Despite its rigours, Third World volunteerism attracts people of all ages. Kathleen Gleeson, 75, came to El Remate with her walker to teach basic health to women and children at the clinic. Fifteen years ago, the former Calgary teacher founded a volunteer Calgary group to sell alpaca sweaters to support 41 women in a knitting co-operative in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Gleeson, who also raises money for a street kids program in Cochabamba, has been to Bolivia 10 times. But with its altitude taking a toll on her, she decided to go this year to El Remate. "I thought, I'm not finished yet," Gleeson said. "If I can use my Spanish to help out, I will."

Van den Brink, whose work is supported by Alberta's Wild Rose Foundation, says small-scale groups can be more effective at Third World development than big organizations. "These little efforts make an enormous difference in the developing world. Large organizations are sometimes disconnected from the work," says van den Brink, who has come to El Remate to meet Lossing. Like others, van den Brink says the work has had a profound effect on her. "I am so thankful that I live in Canada," she says. "I have a high sense of appreciation for this birth lottery that I have won." Ironside says her work in Africa and Guatemala has kindled a life- long passion for international volunteerism. "I've done the tourism thing and the all-inclusive thing and after two days of sitting by a pool I've had it. After Guatemala, I'm already thinking, 'OK, where next?' " Negrych agrees. "I just can't go on holiday and sit on a beach anymore. It seems too selfish."

rremington@theherald.canwest.com

[Illustration] Photo: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald / A mother and her child are checked by nurse Deb Ironside, of Calgary, while they wait outside the clinic in El Remate.; Photo: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald / Former Calgarian Anne Lossing and Guatemalan Dr. Enrique Chapeton run a free clinic in the village of El Remate.; Photo: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald / Kathleen Gleeson of Calgary entertains children while they wait to see Canadian doctors at the free clinic in El Remate.; Map: (See hard copy for graphic).

March 12, 2006

One day soon, Juana Melendez is going to show Anne Lossing how to milk a goat. This will be a significant event in El Remate, a simple village of 300 families in the Peten region of northern Guatemala known for its skilled woodcarvers. Lossing, a former Calgarian, has done so much for the community that teaching her to milk a goat will be one way for locals such as Melendez to give back. Goat milking is not a simple procedure for an ex-city girl such as Lossing, who once co-owned a chain of Calgary video stores. One technique involves placing the hind leg of the goat around one's neck, which exposes the udder and immobilizes the goat. Lossing thinks the manoeuvre might be beyond her limited agricultural skill set. She had a tough enough time with chickens. Goats are quicker, stronger and more cunning.

Yet, if any ex-Calgarian can learn goat milking in the jungles of Guatemala, it is Lossing. Ten years ago, she and her partner, Guatemalan doctor Enrique Chapeton, were flat broke and running a free clinic for El Remate's poor, out of a roadside shack, providing basic medical services in exchange for beans and tortillas. Today, Lossing and Chapeton still operate their free clinic on a shoestring, but in a permanent building, with assistance from visiting Calgary doctor Bob Dickson and other volunteer health-care professionals from North America. In an economy still crippled 10 years after the end of Guatemala's brutal, 34-year civil war, 80 per cent of the population lives in poverty with little access to health care and other basic services.

The clinic is part of Project Ix-Canaan, which Lossing and Chapeton helped establish in 1995. The project's ambitious goal is to preserve the surrounding jungle -- the third-largest rainforest in the world -- and improve the living conditions and self- sufficiency of people in the region. "The people are primarily illiterate campesinos (farmers) whose livelihoods depend upon the destructive practice of slash-and-burn agriculture to grow their subsistence crop, corn," wrote Lossing and Chapeton, in a 1995 proposal for Project Ix-Canaan. "Very little is grown or manufactured in the region. The transportation system is obsolete. Services (health, water, power, communications) are either non-existent or inadequate and obsolete. The people are poor, uneducated, in ill-health and war-weary. The rainforests and archeological sites are being destroyed at an alarming rate." In a region of the world where nothing is easy, the impact the tireless Lossing has had on this community is profound. Children now have access to computers at a learning centre at the clinic, women are growing vegetables and selling food and crafts, and a women's centre has been built on a hill above the town -- all through various initiatives Lossing helped start in co-operation with independent international aid groups.

Long-range plans for Project Ix-Canaan -- Mayan for "guardians of the rainforest" -- include a centre for Mayan culture, a research centre for jungle medicines and a marketing plan for El Remate to help it take advantage of the international boom in eco-tourism.

The village, located on the shores of Lake Peten Itza, is 25 kilometres from the temples of Tikal, the greatest city in the ancient Mayan world, and less than an hour from Yax-ha, the site of the TV reality series Survivor Guatemala. The area is poised for an influx of tourism expected to peak Dec. 21, 2012 -- the date of the end of the current Mayan baktun, the cyclical, 144,000-day epoch of the ancient Mayan calendar. Already, Lossing has hosted one of seven annual events, called Activation Maya, leading up to the new baktun. "She is the motor behind all this," says Dickson. "Without her contacts and connections and her ability to shake and move, there would be not much happening here."

His words are echoed by Eduardo Cofino, the commissioner for Peten, and owner of a local hotel managed by Lossing. "In this world, you can't change everything, so you change what you can. The difference she has made to my hotel and the entire town is incredible," says Cofino, a co-founder of Project Ix-Canaan and its major benefactor. "She started with nothing, just scraps, and now this."

Dickson, who recently made a return visit with a team of volunteer medical professionals from Calgary to assist Chapeton, says the health of the community has improved dramatically since the clinic opened in 2000. "The ongoing care Dr. Chapeton is giving is better. With more input from doctors from the North, he has been able to upgrade his skill set. The medicine and supplies we bring help, as well. It's a testament to all that (Lossing and Chapeton) have achieved."

In 2004, Dickson and Canmore's Mary Tidlund raised money to build a library and learning centre next to the clinic, the first such facility in the area. It will be officially opened later this year by Guatemalan President Oscar Berger.

There is no sign to the clinic, but everybody in the region knows where it is. Some, such as the mother of a 10-year-old boy with a head injury, have travelled for days from the frontier border with Mexico to be seen by the Calgary medical team. The Canadians have brought with them six boxes of medical supplies to stock the nearly empty shelves of the clinic. The medicine will last about six months, until the arrival of more supplies with Calgary doctor Heather Baxter this summer.

The poor of the area suffer from intestinal parasites, fungal- related skin diseases, headaches from dehydration and lung problems from cooking over open fires in their homes. One elderly woman arrives with a collapsed bladder. She has had 15 children. Vincenta Garcia Ramirez, 77, has walked the one kilometre up the rutted dirt road to the clinic and is waiting to see the visiting medical team, which includes Dickson, Calgary nurses Deb Ironside and Sue Negrych, and Rich Renner, a doctor from Washington state with a long history of Third World volunteerism. "Before the clinic, there was nothing here," says Ramirez. "If people didn't have money to go to the hospital in Santa Elena (an hour away), they would die." Ramirez, who survives on a diet of only tortillas, has symptoms of dizziness. As she waits in line, her conversation drifts back to Guatemala's civil war, which ended with a UN-brokered peace agreement in 1996. "It is calm now. Because of the war, many people died," says Ramirez, who lost a son. Her eyes well up and she can speak no more. "I think about the horrible times." In relative terms, the Peten region escaped much of the violence of the conflict. According to the 1999 report by the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, established by the United Nations in 1994, the number of documented lives lost during the conflict was 42,275, including 23,671 from arbitrary execution and 6,159 who were victims of forced disappearance. But those are just the bodies that could be accounted for. The estimated number of those killed, according to the report, is believed to be as high as 200,000. The vast majority of the dead, 83 per cent, were Mayan. According to the report, most were killed by the army and civilian death squads, with CIA support, for being suspected sympathizers of insurgent guerrillas. Their deaths were also attributed to historic and endemic racism. "In the majority of cases, the identification of Mayan communities with the insurgency was intentionally exaggerated by the state, which, based on traditional racist prejudices, used this identification to eliminate any present or future possibilities of the people providing help for, or joining, an insurgent project," the report found. The Peten region suffered 13 of the country's 600 documented massacres -- far less than the 344 of the Quiche district northwest of Guatemala City, which bore the brunt of the atrocities. About 700 Mayan villages were wiped out. One of the most infamous massacres involved the army-led slaughter of 200 people in the central Guatemalan village of Plan de Sanchez, about 200 kilometres by air south of El Remate. On July 18, 1982, soldiers overran the hamlet, raped and tortured villagers, herded them into a building and blew it up with hand grenades. Most of the victims were Mayan women and children. Earlier this month, survivors of the Plan de Sanchez massacre began receiving the first government payments in a landmark $8-million compensation package for the killings. In the Peten, one of the most remembered massacres occurred in May 1981 when the army bombed El Remate's neighbouring village of El Caoba, ostensibly for harbouring guerrillas. One month later, 19 rural co-operatives in Peten were attacked by the army. Today, the most prominent feature in El Caoba is a large cemetery. The war resulted in an estimated 1.5 million displaced persons, many of whom fled to Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. Sitting at her kitchen table, which has a pressed maple leaf in the centre, Lossing recalls her early days in El Remate as the conflict wound down. "When I arrived here in '95, there were regular stop checks by the army, that sort of thing. The Peten, in my experience, has always been a calm, beautiful place. This is where people from the South came to escape the war because it is so sparsely populated. There was land. But that's not to say people weren't taken away in the middle of the night." Most of the violence in rural areas occurred during the height of the army's counter-insurgency tactics in 1981 and 1982. "The locals were told to cut down trees because the guerrillas could hide behind them," says Lossing. "El Caoba was bombed because the army heard there were guerrillas hiding in the village. Caoba means mahogany in Spanish. Now, there's not one mahogany tree left." Among the local acts of violence in the 1980s was the church killing of the head of an army garrison who was stationed in El Remate. A guerrilla leader stormed into the church and held a gun to the head of the priest, demanding he identify the military leader. When the priest refused, the guerrilla leader ordered the army leader show himself or the priest would be killed. When the military man rose, the guerrilla commander walked up to him, held a gun to his head and blew his brains out. Lossing almost gave up her dream for Project Ix-Canaan in the late '90s when a parcel of land she had been promised was sold instead to an evangelical church. She wanted so much to help the village, especially the women. The life of an indigenous woman in this part of the world is, to put it mildly, difficult. One 23-year-old seen by the Calgary medical team has already had five children. Rape and incest is no stranger here, even for girls as young as five. "I've heard horrible, horrible stories," Lossing says, recalling the emotional low she had sunk to after missing out on the parcel of land. "I went home and I cried. Everything was so rugged, so difficult. I said: 'God, if I was meant to be here, give me a sign.' " The sign came at 5 a.m. with a knock on her door. It was an Italian man whose mother-in-law didn't like her grandchildren being raised in an impoverished, Third-World village with untreated water and an infant mortality rate of 35 per cent. He had heard of Lossing's ambitious plans and offered to donate the land on which the clinic, the women's centre and the education building now stand. Cofino gave the man a payment so he wouldn't return home empty handed. "People just seem to come out of the woodwork at the right time," Lossing says. In addition to the Calgary medical teams, she works with about a half-dozen charitable and volunteer organizations from North America. "We are grateful to Anne and Dr. Enrique," says Melendez, who heads a local women's group Lossing helped start. A play put on by the women of El Remate includes a scene in which a 16-month-old girl died prior to the opening of the clinic because the family didn't have the money to send her away to the hospital in Santa Elena. Lossing got her goat, Snowflake, in October. So far, the goat has been unco-operative with Lossing, whose awkward attempts to milk Snowflake have frustrated Lossing and frightened the goat. Now, when Lossing approaches, Snowflake runs away. Goats, which are new to the village, are just one more initiative Lossing has had her hand in to help impoverished families here become self-sufficient. With milk in scarce supply, infant children are often given coffee and pop. Their teeth rot by mid-childhood. Lossing also hosted an American organization, Global Coalition for Peace, that has taught intensive vegetable gardening to the women of El Remate. "All you really need to survive is some vegetables, a goat and some chickens," says Lossing. "You can live quite healthy on a diet like that." She already has the chickens and the vegetables. Now, if she can only milk the goat. rremington@theherald. canwest.com [Illustration] Photo: Photography Leah Hennel Calgary Herald / Mothers and their children wait outside the free clinic in El Remate. The village is located in the remote province of Peten in the jungle northeast of Guatemala City. It is in the heart of Maya country near Belize.; Photo: Photography Leah Hennel Calgary Herald / A young Guatemalan waits to see the Canadian doctors outside the El Remate clinic.; Photo: This Guatemalan woman is in her 80s and lives in El Remate. The poor of the area suffer from intestinal parasites, skin diseases and lung problems from cooking over open fires.; Photo: Photo, Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald / Calgary nurse Sue Negrych gives a young boy some anti-parasite medicine as his mother holds him inside the free clinic in El Remate.; Photo: This Guatemalan man has seen a lot of changes in his country since the end of the civil war.; Photo: Dr. Bob Dickson of Calgary examines a woman. The life of an indigenous woman in this part of the world is difficult. One 23-year-old seen by the Calgary medical team has already had five children, and rape and incest are common.; Map: (See hard copy for graphic).

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