utopias

Letter From the Autonomous Maya General Health Coordination

The Guadalupe Clinic

Oventic, Chiapas, Mexico

May 24, 2001

To Cloudforest Initiatives:

By way of this letter we would like to let you know about our longstanding health needs specifically about the conditions in which we live as indigenous people of the Highlands of Chiapas. The government wants to exterminate our elderly, men, women, and children with hunger and inattention to curable diseases. Despite this, we resist by looking for a way to train our community health promoters from the counties of San Andres, El Bosque, Simojovel, Pantelho, Tenejapa, some communities from San Cristobal and Tzimol. So that our health promoters can better serve their communities, we have a team of promoters that do training in three different centers: Oventic, La Estacion, and Nueva Libertad. The training courses are given each month and the themes repeated at every center. To date we are training 150 health promoters and have another 30 health promoters from Sitala waiting for training but we have yet to begin with them because we lack economic resources, trainers, and funds for the following needs:

All communities are coordinated centrally from the Guadalupe Clinic in Oventic which does general consultations, dental work, gynecology, simple surgery, has three hospital rooms, a clinic laboratory, a medicinal plant laboratory, a nursing station, and a space for sterilizing equipment. The Oventic health center has 15 permanent volunteer health promoters.

We hope that our words reach you and that you can help us in some form so we can continue with our plans of training and attention to our people.

We thank you for your attention,

The General Health Coordination from the Chiapas Highlands