Well-Being For All

MeA Creates Hope For Indigenous Guatemalans

Mujeres en Accion – Women in Action (MeA)

Centro MeAi, El Tejar, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, August 24, 2006

Our team of three from World Accord has arrived in Guatemala from Honduras. It rained every day in Honduras and Guatemala has welcomed us with rain too. But the cool dampness does nothing to dampen the warm welcome from these incredible women.

Women in Action or Mujeres en Accion (MeA) was born of the desire of local women to help the thousands of widows created by the government sponsored slaughter of male community leaders. The “war” was against the majority - Indigenous peoples of Guatemala - through the 1980’s and well into the late 1990’s. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in a move to strike fear into the poor. This is tantamount to genocide.

Undaunted, Felipa Xico brought some small groups of widows together into a Program to help them replace the family income that was lost when their husbands were killed. World Accord was their first and only major funding source since the inception of MeA. Over the years, the women faced many challenges and some setbacks. But the women in the leadership never stopped trying new approaches to address their family needs for shelter, health care, education for the children and food security.

Today, more than a thousand women are a part of Women in Action. Community groups (of about a dozen women each) work together in agriculture and their traditional weaving to earn a living. Many of the women in the project are now married. The terror of their recent past is behind them in the current political environment but the architects of the past attempted genocide are still politically active among national leaders. In this season of relative Peace, the women are articulating to us their new dreams to address the issues of poverty and political oppression exerted upon them.

This is why we are here. To allow them to tell us their story … to listen to their dreams and to help them write their systematic plans to improve the lives of the poor. To forge with them the new World Accord Program.


Terry Fielder

posted by World Accord Staff @ 12:44 PM