Alexandria Schmall

Alexandria Schmall

12/19/14

IARD Final Reflection

MiVeranoChiapaneco: My Chiapan Summer

This summer, I was able to travel to Chiapas, Mexico with the International Agriculture and Rural Development Department, as part of my field experience. I spent the first two weeks with classmates from the IARD 4010 class, Experience Latin America. We were able to travel together around Chiapas, getting to know many of the places and cultures we had learned about during the semester. I spent the second part of the summer, about 10 weeks, working with a child and maternal health non-governmental organization (NGO), called Sanut. I collaborated with community mothers in the highland communities of San Juan Cancuc, to identify ways to reduce the burden of malnutrition in children less than five years of age locally.

The first two weeks of the summer were really wonderful, I had a fantastic time getting to know Professor Hobbs, Professor Castillo, and Professor DeVoogd, along with the rest of my classmates who attended. In Mexico, we met up with a group of Mexican students from Tecnologica de Monterey. It was really fun to be able to take a trip together, especially after having spent the whole semester working together in class, either in person or through video-chat. Some of my favorite parts of the trip were being able to visit the cacao plantation and learning how to make Mayan chocolate. It was great to be able participate in an activity that had been so important to the Maya. We roasted, ground, and kneaded the cacao, to prepare it for the traditional chocolate drink that the Maya had so cherished. It was a great experience.

Another experience that I really liked during the trip was the opportunity to go to the Cañon del Sumidero. It was so beautiful and well preserved, despite being a few million years old. We took a beautiful tour of the canyon, accompanied by a great guide. The tour lasted about 3 hours total and we snacked on fresh coconut with lime and chili throughout the trip. There was mist that morning, so the canyon was covered in a mysterious haze for a while until it eventually burnt off. After the canyon, we were able to explored Chiapa de Corzo, the first Spanish city in Chiapas, established in 1528. We ate at Jardin de Chiapa and it was delicious! It might have been my favorite meal of the entire trip. It was a buffet set up and it had every Mexican delicacy you could think of. There were tamales of every flavor, three different kinds of beans, rice, four different ceviches, pork, chicken, and beef tacos, and a host of appetizers to name a few. The dessert table is another story altogether, as there were probably at least fifteen different options to choose from.

My first two weeks in Chiapas were a wonderful compliment to the knowledge I had acquired at Cornell, through the IARD 6010 course. Not only were the two experiences that I listed, really enjoyable for my personal tastes, they also highlight the culture of Chiapas, the tradition of the Maya, and told the story of the famous Cañon del Sumidero. The two week trip gave me a really great background about Chiapas that would serve me very well for the summer internship I planned in San Cristobal.

On the morning of the 16thof June, the rest of our classmates left. Tim and I were the only ones left at our beautiful hostel. Given, it was really nice to sleep in, but at the same time, it was really scary to be alone in a new city by myself! Around two in the afternoon, my boss for the summer, Liliana, and my coworker and soon-to-be roommate, Mara picked me up at the hostel. We went out to dinner and got to know each other over some delicious Mexican food. That night, I stayed with Conchita, our gracious hostess and tour guide from the class trip. Conchi allowed Tim and I to stay with her family one night. Those first couple of days alone in San Cristobal really dragged on, the first 72 hours without our classmates feeling like forever. However, the rest of the summer flew by.

The next day, Mara, Tim and I moved into the house that we would share for the summer. It was a bit far away from the city center of San Cristobal, but we didn’t mind. I started working with Sanut, a non-governmental organization geared at reducing malnutrition in the highland indigenous communities of San Juan Cancuc. The first two weeks were spent in the office in San Cristobal, researching about child health and nutrition in the highlands of Chiapas.

The following week, we made our first trip to the community. The community was wonderful. We were warmly greeted with fresh tortillas, donated by many families, creating a stack of blue, yellow, and white corn rounds. We walked around the community for many hours, talking to families about their living conditions and daily lives. In addition, I began to ask mothers about their understanding about nutrition and health of children. Over the course of the summer, these home interviews with mothers of children under five would be my main area of focus.

Specifically, I was to be working in the highlands with mothers of children under five years of age to learn about what they knew, and what they were interested in learning, regarding child health and nutrition. Within the community, over 80% of the children were malnourished, so my role for the summer was to work with mothers in order to identify ways to reduce malnutrition locally, through a series of interviews about their families’ lives. Over the summer, I would interview over 50 mothers about their understandings and beliefs about child health and nutrition. After the three months of visiting the community were over, I was able to learn about the overall health and nutrition knowledge that existed within the mothers of the community, to the affect that I was able to provide recommendations to the NGO about possible interventions they could implement in the future about how to improve local child health and nutrition. The NGO Sanut decided to implement some of my recommendations, beginning with providing nutrition seminars, family planning meetings, and mother-to-mother support groups for nutrition education.

Overall, my summer in Chiapas was one of the most formative experiences of my college career. Not only was I able to spend time in one of the most beautiful states in Mexico, but I was also able to explore my career interests and passion for social justice. I learned more than I thought possible and can’t wait to return to work with the community this winter break!