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A brave hen.
This is how Vitalina Mejía describes this species of Creole bird capable of resisting the inhospitable climate of the Dry Corridor of Guatemala.
"They endure until the storms," he says.
For five years, the Mayan Ch'orti 'leader has raised wig or bare-necked chickens
(Gallus domesticus nudicullis)
in Chiquimula, one of the epicenters of famine in the country that has the highest rate of chronic malnutrition in all of Latin America .
More information
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"Everything here is dry and hot, sometimes we have to go far to fetch water for ourselves and the chickens," says Mejía.
At 47 years old, she has been community mayor up to three times in the Chispán Jaral village that is part of the Dry Corridor.
In this arid strip, which runs through El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala, it does not rain regularly due to the El Niño climate phenomenon.
And if it rains, it is thanks to hurricanes, such as Eta and Iota, which destroy the bean, corn and coffee crops.
Thus, Ch'orti 'families suffer from hunger more than once a year.
“There are months harder than others where there is no work for anyone and people migrate due to lack of food.
We even sell our chickens to survive ”, she adds.
This is one of the toughest faces of the climate crisis that has hit villages in the eastern part of the country since 2012. There the IDB Lab, an innovation laboratory of the Inter-American Development Bank, has financed a climate adaptation model together with the Commonwealth Copanch'orti '.
The idea was to recover the natural capital lost due to deforestation and, with this, the production of water in four municipalities of the territory.
María de los Santos is another of the leaders of the region.
At 50, she remembers well what life was like in Los Encuentros village when she was a child: “We had large forests and there was water, mangoes and avocados everywhere, but about 25 years ago they started destroying everything with chainsaws”.
To reverse this loss, the adaptation model worked with communities to plant trees that restore soils depleted by drought and, at the same time, shade corn, beans, and coffee crops from the high temperatures.
We had large forests and there was water, mangoes and avocados everywhere, but about 25 years ago they began to destroy everything with chainsaws ”, says María de los Santos, another of the activists in the region
“If we throw away the little trees, the heat will hit our land hard and it will not produce water or anything.
I tell my colleagues to remember that when they work shirtless in the sun and it burns them, ”says de los Santos.
As coordinator of the women of her village, she encouraged other women to participate in the reforestation of the area.
With economic incentives to protect the forests, men and women recovered 5,000 hectares in the places most needed to generate the scarce resource of water.
But saving the forests was not an immediate solution to the recurring famine that, according to data from the Guatemalan government, more than half of Chiquimula's children suffer from chronic malnutrition.
“We had a great challenge because any forest incentive program takes time.
You plant today and they pay you in one or two years later, ”explains Lorena Mejicanos, a specialist at the IDB Lab. At that time, the team of technicians had to discern between the priority and the urgent for the villages.
"We could not promote this program while people were starving," says the expert, "With the same communities we found that one of the causes of malnutrition was the lack of animal protein and that was when we learned about the wig hen."
It had been several years since a group of scientists from the Centro Universitario De Oriente investigated various backyard birds in order to alleviate food insecurity in the Ch'orti 'region.
It was on one of the field visits that a village gave them two wig hens.
Thus they discovered that this two-kilo species was more resistant to climate and hunger with a survival instinct typical of the Dry Corridor.
According to Raúl Jáuregui, coordinator of the research, what they did was transfer the ancestral knowledge of the communities to science and begin to reproduce this almost extinct bird due to the introduction of other varieties and the deficient sanitary management of the animals.
"Each place has its hen wig, that is, an animal that adapts to local conditions," says the zootechnician who is now studying other native species that can withstand the extreme climate of the area, such as the native turkey.
To repopulate the villages with these chickens, it took at least 60,000 of them.
The IDB Lab initiative then turned to the “chain pass” and relied on the leadership of women for its success.
“We very much wanted a project that worked with us, because it is always with men,” says Rosa Alonzo.
This inequality to which the coffee grower alludes is constant throughout the Dry Corridor and has an impact on the fact that, for example, families headed by women have 26% less income than the average;
and that of these, more than half suffer from hunger, according to the study
Here What There Is Hunger
by Oxfam.
Field schools were set up in the villages for women to learn in two months about the care, reproduction and provision of vaccines for wig chickens.
Each one took care of 10 hens and two nine-month-old roosters.
“We took care of them and when they reproduced we passed a dozen of their young to other families and thus they multiplied,” says Alonzo who, like other Ch'orti 'women, now has a production of 50 eggs per week to feed her family and sell the surpluses to your neighbors.
Each one took care of 10 hens and two nine-month-old roosters.
“We took care of them and when they reproduced we passed a dozen of their young to other families and thus they multiplied,” says Alonzo who, like other Ch'orti 'women, now has a production of 50 eggs per week
However, starting this process was not easy for women.
Machismo still pervades all life in this rural area to such an extent that, before the wig hens, food was prioritized for the boys because of their work in the fields, relegating the nutrition of the girls.
"At first they criticized us too much, they even said that we wanted to kill the men," says Mejía who, thanks to the sale of eggs, has joined a women's savings and credit association.
"Although life here is difficult, we have learned that we have the right to work so that our daughters do not go through what we live," she adds.
With the female effort in the production of chickens and eggs, the initiative has achieved that a third of the girls gain weight and height by 27% and 23% respectively.
"There was a time when the population came to ask us: is it not harmful to consume so much eggs?", Recalls, with laughter and satisfaction, the expert from the IDB Lab. Shortly before the covid-19 pandemic, in addition, the 6,000 families in the villages generated around $ 3.2 million –2.6 million euros– a year in income from the sale of meat, eggs, corn and beans, and forestry incentives.
Shortly before the covid-19 pandemic, in addition, the 6,000 families in the villages generated around 3.2 million dollars - 2.6 million euros - a year in income from the sale of meat, eggs, corn and beans, and forest incentives
Despite the fact that hunger in the region has worsened with the coronavirus and the hurricane season, the bare-necked hens have resisted and helped families with their eggs to better cope with these crises.
For the IDB Lab, this is the result of a climate adaptation model that breaks with the welfare paradigm very present in the Dry Corridor.
In effect, it is a model in which the courage of women and their birds fuels a change in the next generations of the Ch'orti Maya that, in the words of Alonzo, will never again "give way to machismo that only brings more poverty".
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