Don't Forget About your Hometown

by Corbyn

Tequios (tech-key-os), 'is a form of communal work which is unpaid and done by community members for the public benefit.' Tequios, I learned today, is a rural indigenous custom that is still practiced in the Mexican state of Oaxaca where Plant With Purpose has worked for over 11 years. It is because this piece of cultural history is still in existence that Plant With Purpose has adapted its programs in Oaxaca to conform with the local tradition.

Every Tuesday at our office here in San Diego we have staff training. Today our training was led by Milmer Martinez Vergara, our Mexico and Haiti program officer. I was captivated as I sat and listened to the strategic thought process that our 16 Oaxacan staff go through to develop longterm relationships with the rural indigenous Mixteco people in 52 communities throughout Oaxaca.

It is always interesting to think about how I can take the stories and testimonies we receive from the field and translate them (figuratively) into dialogue that will be relevant and engaging here in the US. One thing that has become increasingly popular in conversation here in the United States is sustainability. Are we driving cars that emit less emissions, using energy more efficiently, looking for cleaner ways to power our cities, reusing everyday items like plastic bags and water bottles etc.? Well, sustainability is something that has been around since the beginning of time, and when we look at the situation in Oaxaca where families are being forced to migrate because they can no longer provide for their basic needs, we have to enter into a relationship that allows each party (Plant With Purpose and the farmers) to learn from each other and adapt.

Oaxaca has one of the highest migration rates of any Mexican state. Families are leaving the land they have grown up on for generations to try to find some other sort of opportunity. Take a look at this picture of a sign on the way out of one of the communities where we have started to work. It is a sobering reality of the situation in Oaxaca. Translated, the sign says, 'Thank you for your visit- if you emigrate, don't forget about your town.' Plant With Purpose is committed to being a part of the long term development in Oaxaca, and it is so encouraging

to see families benefitting and growing stronger in their communities as they partner with our organization. Whether it be greenhouses, family gardens, chicken and rabbit coops, ecological latrines, cisterns, business training, savings groups, tree nurseries, goat and sheep pins, or any other of the many programs that help families to have the ability to live sustainably and provide for the needs of their loved ones, there is a lot of good work that is being done in Oaxaca.

The programs have been developed specifically with the long term in mind, and they have used the cultural history of community (Tequios) that already exists in Oaxaca as the foundation to build upon. We have to thank those of you who are supporting the work in Oaxaca; without your commitment, the exciting advancements would not be possible.

We would love to have you join the transformation that is taking place. Through our Sponsor a Village program, for as little as $30 a month you can commit to supporting the work of an individual village in Oaxaca. You will receive updates and testimonies from families like Godofredo's (pictured here with his Wife Luisa and their three children) about the progress being made and the barriers being

overcome.

When you sign up to sponsor a village your recurring donation will be matched for an entire year, doubling your donation! Please take a look at the villages that are available for your partnership here.

International Woman's Day

Today is International Woman’s Day, and people around the world are celebrating the economic, political, and social achievements of women.

In honor of this special day, we would like to introduce Eloída López Lopéz, a member of the El Oro community in Mexico. A mother of three, Eloida and her husband, Odilón, used to struggle to find enough food to feed their family. Then Eloída heard about Plant With Purpose’s family garden project, and her and her family began participating. With the help of Plant With Purpose, Eloída planted a garden that is now producing nutritious vegetables—maize, beans, squash, and peas, just to name a few. Now there is enough food for everyone!

Eloída has been particularly blessed and excited by the family garden project. She says, “I am very happy because Plant With Purpose has supported me with the project of vegetables. I always have my plants; I eat them and sell them also. Thank you to those who have supported me.”

Additionally, Eloída has joined a basket- and bag-making group and a revolving loan fund, both of which provide Eloída with alternative income sources and have empowered her to follow her dreams and provide for her family.

On behalf of Eloída, the Plant With Purpose staff, and all the women Plant With Purpose works with who are experiencing empowerment and transformed lives for themselves and their families, happy International Woman’s Day!

Oaxaca Wednesday: Food for Families

by Aly Lewis

For Oaxaca Wednesday I’d like to tell you about my favorite Plant With Purpose project: family gardens. Family gardens grab me from the get-go. I like families. I like gardens. What’s not to like?

What is a family garden?, you ask. Well, a family garden in the Plant With Purpose context is a small vegetable plot that families (usually women) garden in order to provide food for their families and income from the vegetables they sell. These gardens consist of vegetables, medicinal plants, fruit trees, nitrogen-fixing trees, and small animals such as chickens, sheep and rabbits.

For this project, Plant With Purpose teaches women how to create gardens that will diversify the family diet, better use the limited space available for growing food, and improve the fertility and production capacity of their plots. Our agronomist, Raul, conducts the training on topics such as composting and fertilizing, grafting, crop rotation, animal care, soil preparation, nitrogen-fixing plants, harvesting, and food storage. Plant With Purpose also partners with local health clinics, which have unmatched credibility in rural areas, to conduct nutrition seminars. Those topics include the importance of having a balanced diet and the nutritional value of vegetables.

Since the first family vegetable gardens were implemented in Oaxaca in 2002, hundreds of Mixteco families have benefited from the increased nutrition of a more varied diet. Four hundred and fifty-four family gardens have been established to date, producing a wide variety of vegetables supplemented by proteins from meats.

This all sounds well and good—because it is—but I didn’t understand the radical impact of this project until I visited Oaxaca and saw for myself what a difference they’re making in the lives of the farmers and their families. Without family gardens, most farmers only grow corn and beans, meaning they’ll only have corn and beans to eat unless they produce enough to sell extra. If that doesn’t sound unvaried enough, last year a drought caused farmers’ corn and bean crops to fail—dead cornstalks haunted the steep hillsides—and the price of corn and beans skyrocketed. Farmers didn’t grow enough to eat or sell and they couldn’t even afford to buy their staple crops. Even before the drought, doctors estimated that as many as 90% of Mixteco children younger than 5 years old suffer from malnutrition. The devastating effects of malnutrition include stunted physical growth, arrested brain development, and inability of the body’s immune system to effectively combat disease.

But there is hope. Plant With Purpose’s family garden projects make a huge difference in the lives of these children who would otherwise only have corn and beans to eat. To combat drought, Plant With Purpose works with families to construct cisterns to collect and store rainwater during the rainy season so that there is water available to nourish the plots and ensure vegetables—and improved nutrition—year round!

So there you have it, my favorite Plant With Purpose project. Families. Gardens. Improved nutrition. Better lives. What’s not to like?

To donate toward family gardens and help a family improve their nutrition and quality of life, Click here.

***

Aly Lewis is Plant With Purpose’s Grant Writer. She researches funding opportunities, writes proposals, and submits progress reports on funding received. She also writes the content for Plant With Purpose's Sponsor A Village program.

Plant With Purpose Celebrates 10 Years in Mexico

by Aly Lewis

It seems like we’ve been celebrating a lot of spectacular milestones lately: Plant With Purpose now has 25 candles on its b-day cake, our Programs Director is ringing in his 11^th year tomorrow (woohoo Armando!) and I am coming up on my 1 year and 10 month anniversary as Plant With Purpose’s Grant Writer. Alright, alright, that last milestone is not significant, but what is exciting is that we’re celebrating our 10^th anniversary of working in Oaxaca, Mexico!

And what a great ten years they’ve been! Starting small and building off of our successes, our Oaxaca program has really grown from the early days of working in two villages in one municipality to a thriving, multi-faceted program in 47 villages in six municipalities. In collaboration with our local partners, Misión Integral, we are currently working directly with over 1,500 individuals.

Some of you like numbers; surprise, surprise, creative writing major that I was, I prefer the stories, the anecdotes, the little sketches of changed lives. I could tell you that we’ve planted over 386,561 trees across 35 acres of land and worked with farmers to establish 454 family gardens that provide families with improved nutrition and an additional source of income. I could tell you that 566 micro loans, in the total amount of $70,813, have been granted to program participants to invest in their land and start small businesses. Or that 238 fuel-efficient stoves have been built to improve air quality, lower the risk of respiratory illness, and significantly decrease the amount of wood needed for cooking and heating.

I could tell you all of these snazzy numbers, but they wouldn’t tell the whole story. At Plant With Purpose, the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts. (Insert corny joke about holistic ministry here) In just ten years, we’ve seen the economic stability of the region improve as communities work together to improve their land and diversify their income. We’ve seen families grow nutritious food in their gardens and even have extra left over to sell. We’ve seen parents able to send their children to school and we’ve seen entire communities transformed.

We are encouraged by testimonies such as Señor Raúl López’s of El Oro. Raúl told us about his community’s growing enthusiasm for Plant With Purpose’s programs: “When Plant With Purpose began these activities, some people said that even their great-grandchildren would not see these pine trees, but now they are seeing the results of their work and acknowledging that this work of producing and planting should be a permanent program. Just as we cut down wood and use it to heat our tortillas, we should therefore produce and plant trees.”

As our work continues to take root, we look forward to the next ten years of partnering with rural Oaxacans to transform their lives and land. Stay tuned for more highlights from our Oaxaca program—like our exciting new Church, Community, and Change project that equips local churches to meet the needs of the community—as part of our 25^th Anniversary blogging series.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Plant With Purpose and Misión Integral!

Women, Children and Winos

by Doug Satre

Earlier this month I had the privilege of visiting Plant With Purpose’s work in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca is one of the poorest parts of Mexico, and the “Mixteca” is the poorest part of Oaxaca, seen by most outsiders as a hopeless backwater. On the day we spent in Oaxaca City, our tour guide, Raul, summed it up like this, “The only people who live up there are women, children and winos. The men are all gone.” While this was something of an overstatement, it pretty well summed up the challenges the Mixteca region faces; poverty has caused most of the working-age men to look for work elsewhere.

I don’t think Raul had actually ever been to the Mixteca, or at least not to the communities where PWP is working. If he had, he might have come away with a different impression. PWP works among 47 communities and is seeing a dramatic improvement in the economic development. I was especially impressed to meet a young couple, Alier and Isabel, who have become respected leaders in the community of Loma Chimedia.

Alier is the leader of the local farmer’s cooperative. The greenhouse that they share with five other families produces a total income of about $2,500 per year, essentially doubling their household income. By working together the farmers are overcoming a variety of obstacles to their success, and have recently purchased a truck in order to transport their produce to town to sell. Not only are they succeeding economically, they are giving their community more reasons to be proud of their heritage and their community and creating reasons to hope for a better future.

As I listened to the stories of their success, I wondered what our tour guide would have thought. Maybe next time we can bring him to the Mixteca with us.

Plant With Purpose Vision Trips

by Corbyn Small

Each year Plant With Purpose staff leads a few trips to visit our partners in the field. The trips usually will include between 5-12 people who are interested in learning more about Plant With Purpose and seeing its programs firsthand. This creates advocates who become our best “story tellers” who can share their firsthand Plant With Purpose programs experience with their friends and family.

The trip that I wanted to highlight today is to Oaxaca, Mexico on October 21-26. This will be my first trip to visit the field and I could not be more excited. Oaxaca’s Vision Trip provides an incredible snapshot look at all of the Plant With Purpose programs as the group gets to visit about 6 of the 47 villages where we have partnerships with local leaders.

The trip starts in Oaxaca City, one of the most beautiful and historic cities in the new world. After the team orientation we will get to visit a few of the communities and see firsthand the challenges that farmers face and the dramatic progress they have made to better their lives. The trip is set up to take a linear progression from villages where Plant With Purpose has not been a part of the community for very long, to a village where our programs have been embraced and enacted for years.

The trip costs $600 dollars plus airfare and provides a rich time of fellowship and an in-depth

 learning experience of the social, economic, and environmental issues facing the rural poor in Oaxaca. To learn more about visiting Mexico, Tanzania, or the Dominican Republic email Doug Satre at Doug@PlantWithPurpose.org

Village of the Week: Help us reach our goal of 100% funding for La Muralla, Mexico

One of the coolest parts about partnering with Plant With Purpose is that you can sponsor and get to know a specific village where we are working. If you sign up to sponsor a village, you'll receive pictures, updates, and testimonies from community members whose lives are being transformed by Plant With Purpose's programs. Right now we have nearly 20 villages in 6 different countries to choose from. Of course our goal is to have all of our villages fully sponsored so that we may expand our work and increase our impact. So for the next month we'll be highlighting one village per week on our blog. The first Village of the Week is...dun, da, da,da... La Muralla, Mexico.

Children of La Muralla work together to plant seedlings.

La Muralla is a community rich in history and boasting pre-Colombian ruins. Perched on the very steep, deforested hillsides in the mountains of the Mixteca Alta, environmental degradation threatens the Mixtec people's way of life and very survival. Water only flows to community members' homes four months a year; the rest of the year they carry water home from the nearest spring with burros. Many live as much as a two hour walk from the village center. The people grow their corn and beans only for home consumption, and traditionally the only income has come from selling charcoal and firewood for use in the city, putting extreme pressure on the surrounding forests and depleting soil for generations to come. By supporting Plant With Purpose's work in La Muralla, you will help farmers diversify and improve their incomes while preserving and protecting the land they have lived on for hundreds of years. Your contribution will go toward Plant With Purpose's empowering community projects. For example, the construction of greenhouses will allow farmers to produce tomatoes and other nutritious fruits year round. They can in turn sell the excess fruits to supplement their income and even send their children to school. Join with Plant With Purpose and the people of La Muralla as we work together to protect the land and improve their lives.

By sponsoring a village, you will make a significant difference in the lives of the rural poor by helping to improve and support their communities. You can make a one time donation of $30, or we encourage you to consider a recurring donation of $30 per month for one year. Every recurring donation will be matched for the first year, therefore this is an easy way to double your donation to be $60 per month and make an even bigger impact!

We're almost there! La Muralla is currently 75% funded; click here to help us reach our goal of 100% funding for La Muralla by the end of the week. We only need 5 more sponsors at $30 per month to meet our goal! Together we can make a big difference in the lives of the rural poor in La Muralla, Mexico.

Let Freedom Ring!

by Kate McElhinney

There is something undeniably magical about holidays. Today is the last day of work for this week, and around our office there is a tangible buzz of excitement as my co-workers share their Fourth of July plans and count down the hours until freedom.

As we gear up for a celebration here in America, Plant With Purpose also views this occasion as an extra special time to reflect on our programs. For us, witnessing the independent victories in the lives of the rural poor has been inspiring.

This morning, we had our own mini-celebration. There were no fireworks or flag waving, but simply a group of us gathering for prayer and praises. Today, we praised God for the restoration of peace in Burundi as the war comes to an end, for the health and sustenance of our Thailand team, and in Haiti, the financial support received by victims of the hurricanes last fall. These are big praises, indeed!

Since Plant With Purpose started working with the rural poor 25 years ago, it has been amazing to witness how the bonds of despair are broken as empowerment is restored. And the communities experience freedom in more ways than one. Environmentally, their lives are transformed as reforestation efforts replenish the land, providing abundant crops and a clean water supply. Economically, farmers become empowered through microcredit loans, which help them to start a business and generate a steady income. And spiritually, communities come together to pray for the future and praise God for his restorative work.

Although reversing the effects of deforestation and eliminating poverty worldwide can seem like huge undertakings, it is encouraging to see examples of empowerment in the lives of the rural poor. When lives are transformed and freedom is restored, then the true celebration begins! This Fourth of July, let’s celebrate the freedom of our nation, but also remember the silent victories of the rural poor in Burundi, Thailand, Tanzania, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Mexico.

Village Spotlight: Nuxiño, Mexico

Nuxiño, Mexico, with a population of 1,000, is one of the larger communities where Plant With Purpose works. Located 2 hours Northwest of Oaxaca City, this community is a local capital and therefore the area has schools up to the secondary level, a jail, and a health clinic. Although community members have access to more services than many of the farmers in more isolated communities, poverty and environmental degradation are critical problems that threaten the very livelihood of the people of Nuxiño. To the north, the land is dry and barren; to the south, there are thinning pines. Without adequate access to water or proper forest management, the people of Nuxiño will become further entrenched in desperate poverty. Plant With Purpose's life-changing projects in Nuxiño include soil conservation, credit cooperatives, reforestation efforts, community tree nurseries, church partnerships, and handicrafts, and are designed to help farmers care for their land, provide for their families, and build a better future for their children. Partner with Plant With Purpose to plant hope in Nuxiño. Click here to find out how you can help make a difference in the lives of rural farmers in Nuxiño, Mexico.