Visionary Leadership
Transforming Communities

Many ingredients go into the recipe for lasting social and economic change in developing countries. Although economic support from donors in the United States and elsewhere plays an important role, we couldn’t accomplish anything long-lasting without the committed leadership at the community level. After all, how many well-meaning people have visited a poor country, gone home, raised money to buy and send a top of the line tractor (or some such gift that they think the community needs), and then returned two years later to find the tractor unused and rusting? Local leadership makes it possible to harness economic and human resources to make lasting change.

Antonio Amaya (center) receiving his award for “Dedication and Grassroots Leadership” from FSSCA founder Chencho Alas (left) and chairman Harold Baron (right). Amaya has selflessly served his community, Ciudad Romero, since before its exile in 1980 and continues, despite his age and poor health, to provide leadership locally and at the Coordinadora.

Antonio Amaya of Ciudad Romero in El Salvador has provided that special local leadership that makes magic happen. Amaya played a key role in organizing Christian Base Communities during the 1970s. Then, days after Archbishop Romero’s assassination in 1980, the army arrived and burned his community to the ground. They fled to Honduras and eventually lived for 10 years, exiled, in a remote Panamanian jungle. During those years of hardship, the community could have disintegrated and many could have died. Visionary local leaders, including Amaya, helped keep people together and overcome extraordinary challenges.

When the community returned from exile to El Salvador, they still faced many obstacles. They ended up resettling in the Bajo Lempa region, where the government intentionally resettled former soldiers alongside communities of former refugees and former guerrillas to breed conflict and distrust. However, neighboring communities quickly learned that they could all trust Antonio Amaya: he didn’t care just about his own family or his own community, he honestly cared about the people in neighboring communities too, no matter what side they’d fought on during the civil war. Following in Gandhi’s footsteps, he provided the example that others followed: “A peace-bringer must have a character beyond reproach and must be known for his strict impartiality.”

The trust he sowed, and his vision for building a new El Salvador where people would be united by their shared challenges rather than divided by their past, helped to make the Coordinadora, our partner in El Salvador, possible. Elsewhere in the country, you’ll find Evangelicals and Catholics don’t usually get along. In politics, you’ll find that the country remains divided, despite the peace accords, in a way that makes the United States’ “Red State and Blue State” battles seem tiny. Antonio Amaya, through his leadership and example in the Coordinadora, has helped them overcome those obstacles and achieve a level of cooperation and organization that makes them so successful and has brought international recognition.

Helping Grassroots Leadership Flourish
by Brianne Sheets

The word brave comes to mind when I think of the Mesoamerican Peace Project. The project has brave methodology and goals, but even braver are the participants. The project demands that the participants look to their own experiences in order to create change. Instead of waiting for someone else to improve their lives, they take responsibility to develop local talents and resources. While attending the Peace Institutes, training sessions for community leaders, I met Catarina Morales, an indigenous Maya, who really impressed me. She started a program to reuse plastic bags. Last year, the Xela community reused more than 5,400. This project continues to build awareness and reduce pollution. Meanwhile, Geremias Santiago, an agronomist from Chiapas, Mexico, organizes workshops for youth. He creatively teaches 10 through 19-year-olds to respect the environment, themselves, and one another.

Catarina Morales in Guatemala

The Mesoamerican Peace Project plants seeds in minds of children and elders alike from Panama to southern Mexico. The impact grows every year. Each participant and each activity nourishes their capacity to organize and create their own, long-term solutions to the challenges and opportunities they face.

Summer 2007 Tour

Please join us July 22-29 in an inspiring journey of solidarity: sharing with, working alongside, and learning from the Salvadoran people as they create a brighter future for their children and communities. Lend a hand and, more importantly, lend your heart and watch hope come alive.

Costs:
$900 per person (this does not include airfare)

Deadlines:
Space may be limited. Please contact us as soon as possible to reserve a space.

PLANT A TREE, GROW A FOREST by Harold Baron To commemorate Archbishop Oscar Romero, the FSSCA 2 years ago launched the Romero Memorial Tree Project. With a $10 donation, individuals and organizations plant trees and immediately become part of the resurrection of El Salvador. This campaign has drawn an amazing response, with more than 100,000 trees planted to date.

FSSCA Chair Harold Baron

North American delegations, who were visiting the Coordinadora and its member communities, have done much of the planting. Readers of this newsletter have seen pictures of people from 3 to 73-years-old doing this work.

The Coordinadora, a peasant-governed organization, runs the tree project from growing the seedlings in its nursery to supervising the planting and monitoring the sites. This work is embedded in its overall strategy, which has the following priorities: to sustainably diversify the peasants’ agricultural production, to market their surplus, and to restore and protect the environment.

Autumn, from Chicago, helps to plant mangroves along the shore of the Bay of Jiquilisco.

Because of the urgency of restoring the environmentally sensitive Bay of Jiquilisco, where many endangered species live and reproduce, the Coordinadora has planted most of the Romero trees as tidal mangroves. The mangrove forests provide important nurseries for aquatic life even hundreds of miles out into the Pacific. The nearby communities not only engage in the reforestation, but have also reduced their firewood consumption by switching to more fuel-efficient stoves and begun planning for community-scale ecotourism.

The Coordinadora’s growing strength and capacity make this large venture possible. This organization is something like a mighty tree itself with its roots sinking deeper and deeper into the communities’ rich soil while its branches reach out to cover a larger area. The Inter-American Foundation has provided them resources to organize a new peasant group, modeled on the Coordinadora, at the eastern end of the Bay. Meanwhile, international environmental groups have asked the Coordinadora to extend their reforestation projects miles upstream to the mountains and include the aquifers that feed their groundwater and watersheds.

The Coordinadora’s hard-won accomplishments bring to mind one of Archbishop Romero’s homilies delivered just weeks before he was assassinated. He said, “I might be killed soon. But if I die, I shall be resurrected in the people of El Salvador.” Coordinadora provides an example for El Salvador in realizing the recreation Romero envisioned. The Romero Tree Project permits North Americans to participate in this amazing endeavor taking place in human communities, and on land and sea. The Coordinadora has a special invitation to all of us: to plant a tree and partner with them in growing a forest.

The mangrove seeds, called “candles” in Spanish, being planted in soft mud or sand. Mangroves do best along the shore where high tide provides plenty of water and nutrients.

Give Trees! Don’t know what to give that special someone who already has everything? Why not plant some trees in their honor? At $10 per tree, you can plant a fruit tree at a school to feed hungry children or a mangrove tree to help conserve the Bay of Jiquilisco. “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fruit Trees & the Four Churchwomen Every December we remember how four brave churchwomen sacrificed their lives in service to El Salvador’s most vulnerable. In memory of Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan, the FSSCA began a campaign to plant fruit trees at low-income schools to help feed the children.

Last year, generous donors provided the funds to plant fruit trees at three low-income schools in honor of these martyrs. We waited until El Salvador’s rainy season to start in June, to make sure the seedlings would get plenty of water, then international delegations worked together with students to plant the trees. The communities of San Marcos Lempa, Río Roldán, and Mata de Piña now have fruit trees growing around their schools, the soccer fields, and health clinic.

To help introduce the new generation to the four churchwomen, each school will receive a mural, like the one above, painted by students in the Rays of Light Youth Art Project. A plaque accompanying the mural will tell their story.

The Fruit Tree project continues as individuals, synagogues, and churches sponsor single trees or whole schools. For a gift of $10, you can plant a fruit tree that will help feed a hungry child. A gift of $2,000 will provide enough trees for a whole school!

Staff Update Brianne Sheets joined the FSSCA team this fall. Armed with her fresh Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Gonzaga University, she will volunteer with the Peace Project for the next two years. Though based in El Salvador, she spends much of her time traveling with FSSCA founder Chencho Alas around Central America helping in various project activities.

We also have two dedicated staff members who have moved on.

Leonidas Maravilla, who filled in for our El Salvador Representative Anabella Mejía while she was on a leave of absence, has taken a position with a charity run by the Catholic Church of El Salvador.

In August, Alonso Sanchez finished his Master’s degree in Latin American Studies and Public Policy at UT-Austin. He’s taken a position at the World Bank in Washington, DC.We wish them both the best with their new endeavors.

THANK YOU

The solidarity of many generous individuals and organizations make this work for peace and self-sufficiency possible. Outstanding donor organizations during the last few months include:

We are also thankful for the gifts made in honor and memory of hundreds of people, especially as part of the Tree Projects.Finally, we are grateful to those who volunteer, raise money for the Tree Project and other purposes, and promote this important work in general.

Acting Up: Teaching Theatre in El Salvador by Aryeh Shell I came to El Salvador in February. I’ve had a long journey into both the heart of solidarity and loneliness; of coming into a deeper understanding of the word lucha (struggle). I came here as a volunteer to teach popular theater and art to youth in the rural flatland communities of the Bajo Lempa. These people know the word struggle in their bones; their children know the revolutionary songs by heart.

But the people of the Bajo Lempa don’t have easy lives. Only one out of a hundred youth go to college. For those few who have jobs, they often earn less than $4 dollars per day. That’s why over one third of the village’s population now resides in the United States, forced to leave their families in order to sustain them.

I work with the Coordinadora, the FSSCA’s sister organization, with support from Artcorps.

Because of high rates of illiteracy in the Bajo Lempa, I have worked with the Coordinadora’s agronomists and the youth to develop more visual and creative ways to educate communities about the problems that they face. For example, a group of local talented youth from the Rays of Light Art Project has helped us paint large illustrated storybooks to serve as visual aids in trainings around the construction of composting latrines, wood-saving stoves, the establishment of family gardens, and the dangers and alternatives of pesticides. I have especially used popular theater to educate, motivate, and develop the leadership skills of women and the youth to think creatively and critically of the conditions and challenges of their lives. Through this process, the youth develop their abilities to express themselves publicly and feel empowered as agents of change. The youth have performed in schools, festivals, community events, environmental conferences, and international interchanges. We have also engaged in projects about the recuperation of historical memory.

Zaira, an artist from the Rays of Light Art Project, shows a page from one of the illustrated storybooks she helped create. This page helps to illustrate the benefits of the Coordinadora’s wood-saving stoves: less respiratory disease, faster cooking time, increased safety, and less wood used.

A theatre festival hosted at the Coordinadora’s Production Center in Ciudad Romero. Many people came from the surrounding communities to see what their friends, family, and classmates had done. This project has helped develop young people’s self-confidence, knowledge, and speaking ability.

The theater groups have explored various themes that impact their communities and through the rehearsals, performances, and discussions that follow every presentation, they actively generate spaces and dialog to find solutions to their personal and social problems. We have created pieces about gender equality, global warming, the prevention of pregnancy and AIDS, gang violence, the impacts of the Free Trade Agreement, the proper disposal of garbage, the recuperation of indigenous agricultural practices, natural disaster preparedness, and the importance of an organized and unified community.

Fall/Winter 2006 Newsletter

The Foundation for Self-Sufficiency in Central America is a US non-profit organization (501c3) supporting Peace and Justice in Central America.