When sow this video my soul was filled with sadness to see our people living that way but this is the true.
Background
As a Guatemalan citizen can´t understand why the great Mayan civilization that dominates most of Central America now is in decadence, and as I learn from Estuardo Zapeta, a combination of historical and contextual factors has profoundly influenced Guatemala’s performance in key human development areas such as education, health, and nutrition. Policies in place since colonial times have limited the country’s economic growth and productivity.
Today, Guatemala’s income distribution is among the most unequal in the world, with the wealthiest ten percent of the population earning about 42.5% of total income while the poorest ten percent, primarily rural and indigenous people, earn only 1.3%.
The effects of the civil war that lasted nearly four decades (1960-1996) continue to be felt today. The war, which resulted in 200,000 deaths and many more displaced persons, was triggered primarily by the fear of “mounting communist influence” and guerrilla movements that were active in rural areas throughout the region. All of Guatemala suffered, but the greatest impact was felt in the Highlands region, which was and still is predominantly Mayan.
Poverty
According to government statistics, 56% of the Guatemalan population of 14 million lives in poverty. However, non-governmental organizations estimate that up to 80% of the population is poor, particularly among the Mayan people.
Guatemala has the sixth highest rate of chronic child malnutrition in the world and the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the World Food Programme (an agency of the United Nations). UNICEF concurs, stating that Guatemala has the worst malnutrition problem in Latin America, even higher than the 35.2% average in Africa. The situation is worse in rural areas of the country where the indigenous population is concentrated (some 50% of the total population.) While it is estimated that nearly 80% of Mayan children are malnourished, we believe that percentage to be much higher.
One of the major factors contributing to the high rates of malnutrition is the lack of clean water and sanitation systems in most rural areas in Guatemala. Many families have very limited access to an adequate diet due to a lack of education and other economic and environmental limitations. Malnutrition is often a product of the condition of being “food insecure”; families, particularly those who have found themselves in a chronic state of economic hardship, have limited ability to produce or purchase sufficient amounts of food. In rural areas where a majority of the population is dedicated to agricultural activities, families’ incomes may vary substantially due to price fluctuations of basic food staples on the global market. At the same time, any basic minimum wage they may receive covers only about 75% of the basic food basket, making it nearly impossible for these families to afford sufficient food. Moreover, simple environmental factors such as drought often damage the livelihoods of families living in vulnerable areas and whose well-being depends primarily on the seasonal harvest of crops.
Natural disasters that occur in Guatemala include hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and frosts. In 2010, Tropical Storm Agatha left behind severe damage throughout the country, affecting communications, infrastructure, food security and livelihoods.
The Video
So in this context Chris and Zach, comes to Guatemala with only $56.00 per person for 8 weeks they said that 1.1 billion people live just with $1.00 per day.
They were astonished when discover the financial services they create in order to better their life using the most great ideas to obtain their daily income.
2 Key aspects of the video:
1 The pour people often don´t know where will get their income, this is highly unpredictable.
2 The pour people use complex combinations of financial instruments in order to survive.
They were interested in 3 questions.
1 How the pour manage their money
2 What services they do in order to do so.
3 How they can improve this services to fit their financial need.
In the video they discover that pour people are very active money managers that spend all in food…and the same the next day. All this money management is done amazingly in their heads and incredibly is very accurate, when they ask to the Mayan descendants how they keep that in their head they said that always is in their mind all day long.
They use different financial tools because one is not enough to cover all their needs. They discover that Guatemalan pour people is very clever, innovating and designing services to meet their needs, services not available for them in the local banks.
Also they discover or they believe that microfinance is the way to empower the pour, in this case you are not borrowing from a friend, you are borrowing from a institution, in this case you have to pay interests.
Other questions they didn´t consider
1 Mayan people are strong people, Chris and Zach start getting weak as the time passed in Guatemala, because they was not really prepared for that. Mayan people are strong and can work under the sun all day long.
2 Mayan pour people eat very well in their villages, not only rice, beans and pork butter. Because of the poverty they started finding new kind of herbs, as macuy, berdolaga, ichintal, yucca and many, many other natural resources unknown for city´s people like me. Also they hunt animals from the forest, which means that Mayan descendants how live in the jungle eat well.
3 Many of that people not just work the land also make nice handicrafts; most of them have their own farm animals like chicken, turkeys, pigs, etc.
4 They are wise and know very well how to survive in the mountains, even without $1.00 a day in some cases.
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