La Asociación Centro Maya para la Educación, el Bienestar, y la Asistencia Rural:  A Personal History of the Genesis of a Project

What happened was that early in September of 2000 I began a year-long research project in Chichicastenango, and was lucky enough to land a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant for a Kaqchikel Maya course earlier in the summer to help fund prep for the research.  The course was a movable feast, starting and ending in Antigua, with extended layovers in the Kaqchikel-landia towns of Tecpán and Panajachel.   Chichi natives actually speak K’iche’ Maya, a close but not quite mutually-intelligible first cousin of Kaqchikel, and is more than an hour's journey from any of the course locations.  But every Friday afternoon of the six-week immersion experience I’d jump on a bald-tire express and take the bouncy-swervy relay ride up to Chichi.  After doing planning and logistical chores during the day on Saturday, I’d spend the evening hanging out in one of 3 or 4 cafes around the plaza where I could eat a cheap supper, drink a few beers, and enjoy the town’s pre-market atmosphere.

I was seldom if ever alone.  My primary company was a bunch of ambulantes (walking vendors), mostly a bunch of adolescent and preadolescent girls.  They pretty quickly got the message that I wasn’t going to buy any merchandise, but might be good for a laugh, a soft drink, a champurrada (a kind of plain cookie), or even, if I was feeling particularly generous, a pupusa or chuchito.   I got to know a handful of the vendors by name, and had a good time talking with them.  I apparently made an impression on them, too, as I found out from a young backpacking Dutch couple I met in a café in Panajachel.

“Oh!  You’re Max!  You’re very famous!,” the pretty young Dutch lass said with a thick accent, as she fished one of my business cards out of a vest pocket.   I immediately knew where she had gotten the card: a week and a half earlier I had given one to a girl at the table, whereupon all the rest of the kids hanging around the table had wanted one for themselves.  I had given out about 20 of them. The mystery was how the card had ended up in the the pocket of a wandering European at a watering hole in Pana a week and a half later.  The wandering Dutchmen explained, telling me that after they had declined to buy any merchandise from the kids, one of the girls had produced the card and made them feel guilty by saying that the rich and important American with the beard who was coming to live in the pueblo didn’t buy anything either, but he at least bought them something to eat.  “You cost me twenty quetzales worth of bread rolls,” the jovial young man said with a smile and another pull off his bottle of Gallo beer.   

I flew home early in August, leaving about a dozen confirmed young friends behind in Chichi.  But when my wife, Mary, and I returned six weeks later to take up residence in the pueblo and start my research, we picked up where I had left off, making Saturday evenings in the plaza a weekly routine.  Our social circle of young street vendors expanded, but the core group remained basically the same, consisting mostly of the girls I had met in the summer. We got to know them better, met their families, got to be more or less familiar with their relative wealth and social pecking order in local society, and came to have a better understanding of what they needed, wanted, and were likely to have a chance to attain in life. 

Personal Favors to Personal Project:

Our young friends started school in January.  By March, after Mary and I had lived in Chichi for about 7 months,  it had become clear to us that without encouragement, some of the best and brightest of them would not make it through the first half of the year.  Equally clear was that the only encouragement we could offer that might make any difference was cash: for registration and building maintenance fees, for school supplies of all kinds, for books, and sometimes for shoes or dental work or some other pressing need that collectively made attending school too much of a challenge.  Fortunately, the amount of money required to keep those in school who would otherwise have dropped out was minimal, never more than just a very few dollars and often just pocket change per month.  So we coughed up the required funds, with an evolving understanding that if they finished the year in good standing we would find a way to support them the next year after we had returned to the States. 

In July, all the girls were on track to pass the year, some of them appearing to do pretty well, some of them not so much (although it’s a pretty risky bet to gauge actual academic achievement in Guatemalan schools by report card grades).  So Mary and I started making arrangements with six kids and their parents not just to keep them in school in the next academic year, but to place them in one of the pueblo’s best schools, a primary and basic secondary Catholic institute.  Even with tuition, the price of school proved to be almost laughably cheap, at something less than a total of about $400 for all six of our kids for the entire school year.

As planned, Mary and I returned to the States in August of 2001.  But I unexpectedly found work in  Central America a few months later, and we were able to return to Guatemala in March of 2002.   My new job required me to live in Guatemala City, but even back then large Central American cities were already a war zone, and for the sake of safety and sanity we headed up the mountain toward Chichicastenango, where we maintained (and continue to maintain) a small apartment.  

Taking up our old pre-market posts around the plaza on Saturday afternoons and evenings, we continued to hang around with old and new friends, some of whom were tourists who had come to see the famous Thursday/Sunday markets.  On weekends when pleasure or duty called another direction, we often went to Lake Atitlán or Antigua or Xela or Cobán, or other places where we also often met tourists.  As we talked to them, we of course told them about our lives in Guatemala, at which point the subject of our little covey of scholarship girls inevitably came up. 

Something about the notion of sponsoring Mayan girls in school appealed to one after another of the people we met.  For some people, the appeal was catalyzed into opportunity when we told them that basic supplies could be bought for about $4O a year for a grade school student, while junior high kids ran to about $60.  I don’t think we ever brought up our pet project as a strategy to raise money, but that didn’t seem to matter.  Just hearing about the project had that effect.  One after another, people we had just met a day or an hour ago heard the amount, and said, “I would give that much to keep a kid in school,” and then ask if they could give us some cash right then or send us a check when they got home.   By the beginning of the next school year in January of 2003, Mary and I were paying out of pocket for eight kids, but almost entirely through chance had acquired funds for another 28.  

Personal Project to Shared Program

The job that took Mary and me back to Guatemala City was as Central American Field Director for an outfit called Volunteer Missionary Movement USA, a secular organization with a strong Catholic orientation that fields and supports long term volunteers in Guatemala and El Salvador (VMM still fields volunteers in El Salvador).   In summer of 2002, a few months after I was hired, I attended the biannual VMM conference in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was approached by an ELCA Lutheran Pastor from California who asked if I might be interested in coordinating a tour of Guatemala for him, his family, and some members of his parish the next summer.  Some months later I began participating in conference calls with the pastor and a small group of parishioners committed to the trip.  The first thing the pastor wanted to know was what the theme of the tour might be.  In the ensuing conversation he answered his own question.  “Your passion is education,” he said to me.  “That should be the theme of this tour.”  

And so it was that one night in mid-June of 2003 I met a bunch of Lutherans at the airport in Guatemala City, and spent the next 12 days with them.  We visited schools, talked with teachers, met scholarship recipients, climbed on Mayan ruins, and shopped and [a couple of people who thought they were smarter than the local talent] got pick pocketed in busy markets.  At the tail end of the experience, ten days into the trip and recovering from a long, hot day at the ruins at Tikal, a young couple by the name of Ray and Lynn Waespi asked me if they might have a few minutes of my time.  Meeting in the restaurant of our lakeside hotel, they very graciously thanked me for the experience in Guatemala, and proposed that we work together to expand the educational projects in Chichicastenango.  It was an exciting proposition, and one which I somehow really couldn't refuse. 

ACEBAR Goes Local

Given suddenly much greater resources, Mary and I really didn’t have a clear idea of how to proceed.  So we turned to Catalina (Kata) Ventura, a local Mayan woman who worked with a women’s organization in Chichicastenango and had introduced us to several “cells” of rural women during my period of research a couple years earlier.   Catalina, a teacher who at that point was employed as a UN consultant, is admirably ambitious and not infrequently visionary.  She immediately agreed to work with us to design a program that would provide maximum benefit for minimum cost, and to serve as a consultant to get the new organization up and running. 

Meanwhile, Mary’s and my old friend Tito Morales, from Cantel, Quetzaltenango, agreed to help us with obtaining legal status as a Guatemalan non-governmental organization (NGO), and to set us on the path to organizational legitimacy.  It was Mary and Tito and I who decided on the unwieldy name, Centro Maya para la Educación, el Bienestar, y la Asistencia Rural.  We chose the name because it seemed sufficiently broad and mission-inclusive that it covered our plans and hopes for the organization.  The name was altered slightly to ACEBAR the next year, after the granting of official status as a non-profit Asociación by the Guatemalan equivalent of the IRS. 

The original scholarship distribution plan that Catalina recommended for ACEBAR was to award about 100 low-cost scholarships, with a strong preference for girls in the first and seventh grades.  The idea was to start with students just beginning primary or junior high studies (called básico, or basic secondary, in Guatemala), with the promise of continued funding year after year for those girls who made satisfactory progress.   The funding itself, especially for primary school students, was to be minimal, consisting of a large bag of school supplies and payment of any enrollment or building maintenance fees charged [technically illegally, but understandably] by the local public school directors.  Funding for básico scholarships, meanwhile, would consist of an even larger bag of school supplies and monthly tuition for all rural "cooperative" schools, since no public junior high schools are located in rural communities.  A number of students who attended the only public básico institute in Chichicastenango, a vocational school located in the pueblo itself, were to be reimbursed for registration fees and receive financial help to pay for most of the high costs of materials for the trade/vocation “areas” (vocational concentrations)  being studied at the public school. 

Mary and I bounced the ideas and numbers off Ray and Lynn Waespi, and they said it sounded like a plausible plan.  We also agreed that administration of the planned number of scholarships – another 100 in addition to those Mary and I had already been carrying – would require a local office.  Rental space in Chichi is extremely hard to find, but we were lucky and found a suitable office in short order, in the second and third floor of a four-story brick building next to where the Despensa Familiar supermarket was then being built.  Catalina, Mary and I started a search for a Maya woman who 1) was a native speaker of K’iche’ Maya; 2) had the ability to direct the program and deal firmly but justly with sometimes difficult applicants and beneficiaries; and 3) had the secretarial and organizational skills to maintain appropriate and accurate records and reports for evaluation of project effectiveness and accountability. 

Unemployment is high in Chichicastenango, and there proved to be multiple good candidates for the position.  Mary and I helped to whittle the stack of applications down to the three most likely candidates, and then the three of us interviewed the finalists in back to back meetings.  Two of the three impressed us greatly, and Mary and I would have been happy with either one.  So with clear decisiveness and appropriate authority ringing in our voices, we told Catalina she should decide.  It was good that we deferred to her judgment, because she chose well enough that by the time Mary and I had to move back to the States again, at the end of ACEBAR’s first year, the organization had become essentially self-managing. 

Catalina’s choice was Manuela Larios, a young woman who had been orphaned in adolescence and subsequently labored at the usual pennies-a-day jobs normal to Chichicasteca señoritas.  As  the oldest sister taking care of younger siblings, she scrambed to put herself through a government radio education middle school program before going on to a secondary program in secretarial skills at a local cooperative institute.  From the beginning, it was clear to Mary and me that Manuela possessed a certain poise and innate ability to be at once compassionate and assertive with beneficiaries.  The only problem that I observed in her comportment as the day-to-day administrator of ACEBAR was that, in the early months, she had a slight problem with being timid with los norteños Max and Mary.  She got over that, as I realized rather suddenly one day maybe a year later, when she shouted at me for failing to do something or another that kept her from doing her own job.  At that point, I knew she had arrived  (She continues to arrive, from time to time, in that respect when I lose track of priorities).

Manuela and Julia Tebelan, one of the original crew that Mary and I supported and at that time a “work study” helper at the office, began work on November 17, 2003.  In December, ACEBAR began to accept applicants for scholarships for the 2004 school year to begin in January.  As is always the case in the implementation of a new project, there was a lot of basic adjustments to make, especially in terms of ensuring that our beneficiaries understood the qualifications and rules we had established for the scholarships.  We quickly realized, for example, that a number of children to whom we had given scholarships were also receiving scholarships from another NGO.  The amount of the scholarships was such that few of the families were disqualified from our own means-testing criteria, but because intentional deceit was involved in a few cases, several families were dropped from the ACEBAR program.

Trying to Meet the Needs

The biggest problem was not the very few applicants who tried to work the system, but the unending stream of students and parents showing up at the office in hopes of landing a scholarship.   The truth is that a large majority of families in rural Chichicastenango need scholarships (see [page] of this site), and that a large percentage of those who don’t get scholarships will either not finish primary school or will abandon studies January of 2004 was our first run at trying to decide which of the many hundreds of students and parents seeking scholarships should benefit from ACEBAR largesse.  It was also my first experience with listening to one heartbreak testimonial after another as tearful mothers, or occasionally a grim and solemn father, explained why they needed the scholarship for their child or children.  It was hard work.  Although as an anthropologist I listen to people’s life stories as a stock-in-trade pastime, the succession of tragedies I heard in those early years when I interviewed many potential scholarship recipients was emotionally exhausting.

Still, the kickoff of that first school year was exhilarating.  Ray and Lynn Waespi came for the big event, making themselves very busy unpacking what seemed like dozens of huge suitcases full of supplies they had hauled form California, setting up a computer lab for teachers, and offering sage advice for administrative procedures.  Lines of applicants ran halfway down the block for several days, and we were all very busy.  But enrollment week was in every important way a success.  We had originally intended to distribute about 125 scholarships.  But as the days rolled along, one story of family privation and tragedy after another forced us to reconsider the year’s budget ceiling, until in the end we approved more than 200 scholarships, establishing ACEBAR as by-far the largest education-centered NGO in Chichicastenango, and raising the bar for US fund-raising efforts. 

At the end of 2004, after spending a year working more or less full time on the ACEBAR project, Mary and I were forced by circumstance and finances to return to the United States and take up residence in New York.  By that time, Manuela had grown into her position, and something resembling a dependable routine was evolving.  Mary and I, along with the Waespis, returned to Guatemala in 2005 to kick off another academic year in which more than 235 scholarships were granted.  In March of 2005, the application made by Tito Morales for status as a Guatemalan NGO was approved, and ACEBAR gained official status. 

ACEBAR Now

As of 2011, ACEBAR continues to grow.  Its focus remains educational projects, although in 2006 a dental hygiene program directed by Lucía Panjoj was made an integral part of the facility, and ACEBAR continues to work in collaboration with other public health projects.  My own role in the organization is advisory in terms of serving as the liaison officer with ACEBAR’s primary and only real funding source, the Maya Center for Rural Education and Well-Being (MayaCREW), which Ray and Lynn had managed to get up and running in the States.  In ACEBAR’s “Protocolo,” or articles of organization, Mary and I have a title that translates to “honorary non-voting board member.”   I have an additional title of “Project Assessor,” and frequently talk with ACEBAR directors to talk about plans, and MayaCREW’s expectations of accountability and efficiency.  Neither Mary nor I involve ourselves in any regular way in ACEBAR management, however. 

Staying in touch with the organization through Manuela, Catalina, and Lucía is still an important part of my life and no less exciting for me now than it was nine years ago.  It helps that by luck or genius or both, we continue to do things right.  ACEBAR tends, in fact, to be on the leading edge of social development practices, as reflected in the fact that too infrquently I see reports about the positive results some large development agency is  having with a particular strategy somewhere in the world, only to learn the details and see that the projects are pretty much what ACEBAR started doing a year or two earlier.

It would be nice to think that much richer and universally recognized names like USAID and the UN have copied us.  I know, of course, that’s not true, most obviously because there’s little chance that they’ve even heard of ACEBAR, much less had a chance to study what we’re doing.  The most likely explanation, however, is also gratifying: that ACEBAR has been quick to recognize the same problems and arrive at the same possible solutions as the high-flying experts funded by the biggest names in development. 

At the intellectual level, that’s enough.  But of course the projects, organization, and even the fact of education itself, are not so much about the intellect as about basic needs that go beyond measurable project outcomes.  Evidence of successful strategy, I mean, is nice, but doesn't really hold a candlestick to the gut satisfaction Mary's and my Saturday evening chats with the girls in the plaza imparted, and couldn't possibly ring nearly so clearly of human experience as facing long strings of crying mothers begging for resources that ACEBAR doesn't have to share.  That's not to denigrate the importance of good statistical outcomes and knowing that ACEBAR responds to challenges in a competent way: it's just that one doesn't set out to get good numbers, but in one way or another to find a meaningful part in a human drama.

And so it continues.  In 2011, ACEBAR carries 253 scholarships.  A large majority of these are secondary students nowadays, most of them having never attended school without an ACEBAR scholarship.  Costs have skyrocketed since the early days, as tuitions have increased dramatically, and ACEBAR has expanded to include required participation in community service projects and adherence to a regular regimen of hygienic dental trainings.  ACEBAR also continues to collaborate with various groups of  medical professionals, and to coordinate clinics staffed by US professionals offering services ranging from very low cost dental extractions and fillings to complete reproductive health exams for women.  ACEBAR increasingly works within a community context, meanwhile, relying on the assistance of parents and leaders in small rural communities to provide direction and support for local schools, and distributing information over such topics as women's rights and family violence. 

Time will tell what the future holds for ACEBAR.  For the foreseeable future, I will stay intimately involved as an advisor for the organization because I like the work and the people, and because while there are moments of empathetic pain and occasionally even a small dose of stress, in general my work with ACEBAR is entirely enjoyable. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t close with a reminder that if anybody who has actually read this history would like to support the educational projects at ACEBAR or to stay in touch with what the organization is up to, they may make a donation or subscribe to an online newsletter by visiting the MayaCREW site.