Víctor Peña presents a photo-reportage, in El Faro, on the malnutrition crisis affecting Guatemala and, more particularly, the department of Chiquimula.
Brenda and her three children walk through the mountains to the community kitchen. Chon climbs a hill carrying a quintal of corn —more than 200 pounds— on his back. Rita returns from home after harvesting corn to feed her seven children. A group of women dig at a wall of earth to expand the school’s classrooms. Roberta searches for guanábana leaves to treat her diabetes. Such is everyday life in La Ceiba Talquezal and Pitahaya, two remote Maya Ch’orti communities in the municipalities of Jocotán and Camotán, in Chiquimula, the department with the highest rates of chronic child malnutrition in Guatemala — in turn, the country with the highest malnutrition rates in Latin America, according to a UNICEF report on child malnutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean.
These figures match data published by the international organization Action Against Hunger, which runs a nutritional monitoring program for children between the ages of one and five who live in the department’s most vulnerable communities. Chiquimula is in eastern Guatemala, in the heart of Central America’s Dry Corridor, where the climate crisis has hit especially hard in recent years. Lack of rain has made farming difficult and has destroyed the self-sufficiency of the families who depend on it. Many children die here. Many are also born into the care of midwives, who use ancestral knowledge to tend to the health of the mothers and infants of their villages — ancestral knowledge that is now included in the Guatemalan Ministry of Health’s official manual of care.
In these communities, midwives assist with births alone and use their own resources, without the requisite tools and without support from the government, which, in the past two years, has neglected to pay them the 3,000 quetzales ($378 U.S. dollars) to which they are entitled annually under the Guatemalan Midwives Law. Here, women become pregnant when they are still children. By the age of 30, they are mothers to as many as five, and are grandmothers, too, because their daughters follow the same path. The midwives have watched these girls be born and they have watched them give birth to children who add to the region’s growing malnutrition statistics. In the communities here, most women have mourned at least one child who died of hunger. Here, communities organize to meet their own needs, because the state has consigned them to oblivion.
You can read the full article with lots of photos, here, The Forgotten Midwives of Chiquimula.
The piece was translated by Max Granger and had additional reporting from Yuliana Ramazzini.
Categories: Environment, Gender, Guatemala, Human Rights, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Land, Poverty, Solidarity in Action
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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