The Chiapas Project

The Chiapas Project : A Catholic Worker Community

The Chiapas Project is shifting support to a rural community for a new carpentry and welding workshops. The shops focus on education and use of the tools for local carpenters, plus those from around the state who have attended our woodworking classes. Araceli, Richard’s Zapoteca wife, continues to work with local women both in San Cristobal and in the new community of Betania by organizing, cooking, teaching ways of making and selling crafts and there are a started a series of small projects to introduce new concepts into the indigenous community.

THE BUNNY PROJECT : $1200 will build hutches with local welders and buy alfalfa pellets and feeders. Rabbit meat currently sells at $5.50 a kilo with hides at $3.00 each. Excrement goes to our worm farm. Once it is up and running we share with the neighbors and release 10% into the wild to reproduce for our neighbors who hunt, etc.

WORM FARM :  Using rabbit and chicken excrement combined with coffee husks, we can produce 100 kilos of organic fertilizer and 4 kilos of worms for each trough. We give one kilo at a time to neighbors, who pays us back 2 kilos after their first crop. Worms sell for $50 a kilo, mostly to organic coffee farmers. We sell part of the fertilizer (at 50 cents a kilo) but mostly use it for our own fruit trees on the land. $600 will build four concrete canals with a canopy overhead to support 4 kilos of red worms.

BACK TO SCHOOL : To send a child to school, $360 pays for a complete uniform, shoes, books, school supplies for a full year and supplemental food for the mother (one time) setting out a breakfast diet which can be subsequently followed.

SHELTER FOR MIGRANTS :We are already providing short term work for a bit of cash and food. We would like to build a dormitory and a small chapel to house as many as 12 passing migrants  as we are three hours from the Guatemalan border on the Pan American highway. The total cost of this project is $8,000. 

NUBIAN GOAT PROJECT : $10,000 will buy five milk goats (4 females and a male from five different families) to start making cheese. A secondary but important purpose is the bettering of the goat races locally since goats are badly inbred. The money covers the purchase of the goats, a trailer, transportation (around $1200) and legal work to get them into Mexico.

WORKSHOPS IN BUSINESS FOR 2 WOMEN : $5000 will cover University courses and an internship for two women to learn accounting, how to form a cooperative, open a bank account, comply with Mexican tax laws, etc. A year in school with each of the women reporting back to their cooperatives (one woman is from San Andreas Larrainzar and works with a weaving cooperative, the other in San Cristobal working with women in crafts and herbs.)

WOODSHOP IN SIMOJOVEL FOR A CARPENTRY COOPERATIVE : The existing cooperative works with the Zapatistas in reforesting and building doors and windows- among the 16 young men they have one table saw, one router, two hammers, one screwdriver and two chisels. The plan is to get them a combination of used and new tools from the States (most of which are not available here) and bring them into Mexico. Half the money is for the importation taxes. (Free trade in action!) The total cost of this project is $10,000.

SEWING CIRCLE : $350 will buy a new sewing machine and send 2 women to the sewing classes at SYJAC for 8 weeks of training. There is a Singer Sewing machine plant nearby with parts readily available. We have tried to bring machines down from the states, but can`t get parts and end up paying exorbitant importation taxes.

BAKERY : $3500 will buy and make wood-fired/solar ovens with a small building and storage for local women to make and sell bread. Thw women split two thirds of the money while returning one third to us for maintenance.

Large Projects

DVD DOCUMENTARY CENTER : In order to produce DVD`s in the languages of this region from young people, send them out with video cameras to reveal their lives on film in their native languages and edited them at our center and shipped to SCOLA t.v. in Omaha for broadcast around the world, we need about $30,000. This will purchase the necessary equipment, build a small studio, etc.

SMALL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY : For local NGO`s but mainly for training young people- working with Habitat for Humanity and other groups. $200,000 would get us a tractor, dump truck, bulldozer, tools and around $20,000 in working capital to build roads, small bridges into isolated communities, etc.