Seeds of Confidence
The blog was written by HSP employee Alyssa Ondarza
The Highland Support Project (HSP) and our sister organization, the Association of Highland Women (AMA), have partnered for over two decades to foster healing in communities with historical trauma.
One of the foundational programming areas has been organizing around increasing access to improved indoor cookstoves. An essential need to address for empowering women is the cost and labor associated with firewood.
AMA initiated a reforestation program to provide member community committees access to saplings, training to develop the political will to dedicate land, and technical training in arboriculture. AMA was purchasing trees from municipal programs supported by international organizations.
The women of Espumpuja initiated Las Campanas forestry social enterprise after identifying social and ecological problems associated with the invasive Eucalyptus tree species promoted by international institutions. The women understood that these trees were harmful to the environment and expressed that they were "a bad neighbor that makes the land unhappy."
Although this form of expression appears overly simplistic for an audience accustomed to Western academic language, it holds profound weight when considering what it truly means to make the land "unhappy."
These Mam-speaking women of Espumpuja have a profound spiritual connection with their environment. As horticulturalists with an identity directly associated with belonging to a specific ecosystem shaped by their ancestors, they have a deeper hyperawareness of the relationships that produce a healthy environment.
There is a story that community organizers often tell in Guatemala that helps develop a better understanding of the wisdom and the "science" demonstrated in Indigenous cultural practices.
The tale goes that an archeological team from the University of Pennsylvania was in Guatemala's hot tropical jungle region to excavate an ancient Maya city site. The team asked local peasants to build traditional structures with thatched roofs constructed from abundant local plant materials to keep them out of the sun and rain.
The visiting archeologists were not amused when informed by the locals that they would have to wait for a month because the project would not turn out well if it did not agree with the moon. According to customs, the moon was not in the correct phase to initiate, and anything started would be out of balance with the cosmos. It would be cursed!
The archeologist responded that they had a schedule to keep and that their budget did not permit them to be constrained by silly local superstitions.
The local folks, accustomed to doing what they are told and not questioning the orders of those in charge, built the structures as ordered.
The cursed structures were useless a few weeks later because the roofs had rotted.
The local folks understood that there were times of the month when the leaves were full of water. At other times of the month, the water was in the roots, and the giant palms would crystalize in the sun and last for years.
Like with the palms from this story, the women of Espumpuja were innately aware that the eucalyptus tree created disharmony on their lands. This symbolic relationship with nature pulls from ancient generational knowledge often overlooked in Eurocentric thinking.
Las Campanas social enterprise is a crucial part of an empowerment ecosystem.
Las Campanas plays an integral role in increasing women's sense of control in themselves and their communities for addressing the problems that cause them stress.
The mission of AMA and HSP is to increase the resilience of Indigenous women working to adapt to rapid social and environmental change. In social work, we identify the importance of the locus of control for people to successfully develop the agency to create the lives they desire.
AMA started the reforestation program as part of a behavioral health program to develop healthy and effective coping mechanisms that place the power to effect change in the women themselves and their community.
In addition to helping women participate in society by reducing domestic burdens associated with domestic life, the reforestation program assists women in developing positive coping mechanisms to disrupt the inefficient processes developed through colonization.
When people do not feel they can control their own lives, a typical response is a form of pessimism in which they transfer their agency to outside actors. They may pray for a supernatural being to solve their problems or place their hope in a charismatic political actor or structure. They may even become paralyzed from the action with the belief that only professionals working for an international agency have the power to solve problems.
A significant source of stress that we identified working with rural communities was the fear of mudslides that have claimed thousands of lives. A contributing factor to many of these calamities is the rapid rate of deforestation throughout a region once designated as cloud forests.
Through this reforestation program and the purchase of genetically diverse local tree species, women develop the skills to identify problems and take action to solve them. This places the agency directly in the community as the empowered actor to make life better.
This is empowerment!
Years of academic research demonstrate the validity of this approach. We all face a variety of stressors in our daily lives, and coping mechanisms are paramount in maintaining healthy lifestyles. Plickert and Schieman (2008) state that "stressors often have less deleterious health consequences among people who possess a high sense of control" and "Folkman & Lazarus (1980) defined coping as cognitive and behavioral efforts made to master, tolerate, or reduce external and internal demands and conflicts" (Aneshensel, 1992).
Anashensel (1992) describes coping functions as "avoiding or eliminating the stressor, containing the proliferation of secondary stressors, altering the meaning of the situation, and managing states of arousal." Another way to categorize coping strategies is avoidance, accommodation, and addressing. Institutions and social structures program different coping mechanisms resulting in controlled outcomes. For instance, accommodating coping mechanisms may control the impact of stressors, but they often fail to identify a problem and solve it.
Education institutions, religious organizations, and the media frequently create responses to control a stressor that reduces independent agency through programmed dependence on an external actor. It has been observed that "a considerable accumulation of evidence links persistent and recurrent stressors to psychological distress, physical morbidity, and mortality," with "women, the young, and those of low socioeconomic status encounter the most severe role strains (Aneshensel 1992 and Pearlin & Lieberman 1979)
Research demonstrates that "active, problem-focused coping is most likely to occur among persons with a sense of subjective control. Exposure to stress, however, may wear away self-efficacy (Aneshensel, 1992). The current phase of the forestry enterprise is seed germination. The women have successfully harvested seeds for the sustainability of the nursery, which is presently undergoing what can be considered one of the most delicate and complex phases in tree growth. As the seeds germinate, women continue to harvest water and prepare soils to implant new trees.
HSP, AMA, and the community of Espumpuja are so thankful for your continued support in cultivating change and breaking barriers to opportunity by providing the seeds of confidence.
We invite your continued support as we watch and care for this nursery of hope together.
Resources
Aneshensel, C. S. (1992). Social Stress: Theory and Research. Annual Review of Sociology, 18, 15–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2083444
Pearlin, L. I., Lieberman, M. A. 1979. Social sources of emotional distress. Res. Commun. Ment. Health 1:217-48
Thoits, P. A. 1987. Gender and marital status differences in control and distress: Common stress versus unique stress explanations. J. Health Soc. Behav. 28(1):7-22
Ross, C. E., Mirowsky, J. 1989. Explaining the social patterns of depression: Control and problem solving-or support and talking? J. Health Soc. Behav. 30(2):206-19
Schieman, S., & Plickert, G. (2008). How knowledge is power: Education and the sense of control. Social Forces, 87 (1), 153-183. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.0.0065
Seeman, M., Seeman, A. Z., Budros, A. 1988. Powerlessness, work, and community: A longitudinal study of alienation and alcohol use. J. Health Soc. Behav. 29(3): 185-98