Making Waves : NUTZIJ (Centro de Mujeres Comunicadoras Mayas)
Stories of Participatory Communication
for Social Change
TITLE: NUTZIJ Centro de Mujeres Comunicadoras Mayas
COUNTRY: Guatemala
MAIN FOCUS: Women development and empowerment
PLACE: Sololá
BENEFICIARIES: Mayan women
PARTNERS: Red de Desarrollo Sostenible (RDS)/UNDP, Asociación para el Desarrollo Integral, Guatemala (APDESI), Autoridad para el Manejo Sustentable de la Cuenca del Lago Atitlan y su Entorno, Guatemala(AMSCLAE)
FUNDING: Padma Guidi, UNDP, FAO/Ministry of Agriculture (MAGA), Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES)
MEDIA: Video and Internet
The camera sweeps around, loose and free, showing smiling faces, feet, objects and animals. It lowers as a small child approaches it until one of his eyes covers the lense and becomes the whole image, he celebrates his feat; then the camera goes up again sweeping textiles of magnificent colours.
Two young Mayan women are filming each other and everyone around. The small video cameras do not seem to bother the Aguilar Reynoso family, Maya Kaqchikel who live in a village near Cantel, Quetzaltenango. Emiliana Aguilar, the daughter, holds one camera; she and her sister Elena were trained to produce videos, and they do it as naturally as they dress or speak their mother-tongue.
A panoramic view of clothes drying under the sun, a close-up of hands that are peeling potatoes, a small dog rushes between legs. The choice of what to film may seem erratic to someone used to television, but it isn't: in only 12 minutes, the life of the Aguilar Reynoso family passes on the screen through vibrant testimonies about culture and life in good times and hard times.
"Things have changed", says an old man, "we used to take care of the sick with natural products; but now there are chemical drugs that cost 1, quetzales. We can't afford to buy them so we continue using our traditional medicine". A woman shows some leaves and explains the properties of each one. "But of course, if you don't have faith, you can't pretend to be cured", she adds convincing. The camera moves toward a group of women washing clothes with small children on their back. "The father of my first child was killed by the military, I never saw him again", says one, remembering the repression in the 1980s. Many fled, leaving everything behind. Some survived. The video continues to flow like a clear stream, regardless of the do's-and-don'ts and the sacred rules of documentary filmmaking. Who made those rules anyway?
Music emerges from a guitar, prompting members of the family to sing and dance. Life goes on, these are better times. Several children play hopscotch, using a stick to draw the cells; then, jumping on one foot, they land in "heaven".
Nutzij (My Word, in Maya Kaqchikel), also known as the Centro de Mujeres Comunicadoras Mayas (CMCM) is a communication access centre in central Guatemala. Locatedat Sololá over Lake Atitlán, it is run by a collective of young Mayan women, mostly teachers at the Nueva Esperanza school in Xajaxac. Nutzij offers hands-on training and employment for indigenous women in visual media communication, mainly concentrating on video and the Internet. The centre aims to provide access to media-awareness and production skills for local communication in rural areas, as well as use of the Internet for marketing and international communication.
The centre initially provided services of technical education and employment opportunities through access to information, communication technology, and video production, as well as workshops on media awareness and participatory communication. Through the use of the Internet they're aiming to provide useful information for development groups involved in cooperatives, farming, fishing, health, education, etc. One of the tasks that Nutzij is developing is browsing the Web for information that can be of use for the local population.
The centre started its activities by the end of 1997 with a private donation of US$50,000 worth of video equipment, which included four Video 8 cameras, editing equipment and three personal computers.
The activities of Nutzij are essentially divided in two: video production and training, and Internet access and training.
The video component is made of three main areas:
- Workshops on interactive autodiagnosis, which helps development projects, organisations and communities include a participatory process in their planning and implementation
- Video productions done by women members of Nutzij
- Training of women as video producers or rural communicators (comunicadoras populares
During 1999 Nutzij developed new partnerships; for example with AMSCLAE, an organisation that requested support for training a team of young Mayan women in video production and environmental issues.
The Internet component includes training on the basics of computer use and Web search functions, as well as research on issues that can be of benefit to the community, such as environment, farming, education, women empowerment, etc.
The strategy of opening telecentres at the community level started in the village of Chaquijya, in partnership with APDESI. This pilot experience will certainly provide valuable information to set up the other planned telecentres.
Funding has been of constant difficulty for Nutzij primarily because all activities, including training and access to video equipment and the Internet are provided free-of-charge to the indigenous populations. By 1999 the centre devised a strategy to raise funds through the establishment of workshops for foreign communication students who would pay for their participation in video co-productions with Mayan women. Other than providing an income to sustain the other activities, this experience is important in terms of facilitating cultural exchanges while maintaining a spirit of respect and solidarity. In 1999, five students from Europe and the United States participated.
The situation of education in Guatemala is dreadful. Succesive ladino and military governments have bluntly ignored the education needs of the Mayan population, which constitutes the vast majority of the country. As a result, the illiteracy rates are very high (45 percent),particularly among Mayan women; and Guatemala ranks the second worst in the Americas, Haiti being the last. The attempts of forcing the Mayan population to learn to read and write in Spanish has proved a failure, but governments blindly persist in spite of UNESCO recommendations that early education should always take place in the mother-tongue, before gradually introducing a second language.
Mayan communities in Guatemala speak twenty different languages; in the central part of the country, in villages surrounding Lake Atitlan, three are most important: Tzutujil, Quiché and Kaqchikel. Because of attachment to language and tradition, these Mayan communities have a strong cultural identity, which has survived not only the Spaniards conquest and colonisation, but also nearly 40 years of civil war and massacres where the Mayan population, women and children included, was specifically targeted.
In that context, the ability of the Mayan even the illiterate to adopt audio-visual tools and place them at the service of their culture and their social struggle opens extraordinary opportunities moreover when these tools are integrated with the Internet and modern communication technologies.
Nutzij debuted by the end of 1997 when Padma Guidi who had been working with women in India, Czechoslovakia and on Indian reservations in the United States trained a group of Mayan women in video production skills. Four of these women organised in the Asociación de Mujeres Comunicadoras Mayas. Padma Guidi provided funding, donated her own video equipment, subsidised the initial activities and remained as their technical adviser.
Video is cheap and easy to use and distribute. It has been successfully utilised by development projects, sometimes as a tool for self-reflection, analysis and evaluation, and other times to support organising within groups. It is particularly adapted to rural Guatemala where TV sets are found in many homes lacking basic services, and where local cable television operators are happy to broadcast locally made programmes.
Women who never dreamed of a life beyond carrying water andhaving babies, who never learned to read and write, are able to manipulate small video cameras, make personal choices about values and representation, document important community events and contribute to revitalising their culture while interacting with other cultures. "People here have been continually misinformed or uninformed about everything from economics to health care. Seeing is believing, and videos made by the indigenous community can bring information in people's own languages and in images they can recognise and relate to", says Padma Guidi.
Another contribution of Nutzij is making video tools available to communities, organisations and development projects for auto diagnosis, which has enormous implications in generating community participation for development purposes. This type of approach was conducted in collaboration with FAO and MAGA (Ministry of Agriculture).
Nutzij values the role of visual communication especially in a culture where from one generation to the next the oral transmission of human values and history is the most important system of communication.
The Nutzij strategy takes advantage of the full potential of video and Internet tools, and combines both adequately according to the needs of training and service delivery. The video component wisely combines training with the use of cameras for production, research and auto diagnosis. Consequently video is conceived as a tool for production of messages ready to be disseminated, and as a process for stimulating dialogue within communities, projects and organisations.
Though at its initial stages, the Internet component is as participatory as the video component. Management of the existing telecentre is in the hands of local people who receive support from Nutzij
The access to the Internet is certainly a challenge among the Mayan population, especially women, who speak little Spanish (and read none) and even less English. Knowing that 9 percent of the Web is in English is not very encouraging for a project that intends to use the Internet to link the indigenous population with the outside world. Nonetheless, the women associated in Nutzij are making enormous efforts to trace Web pages in Spanish, that bring the information needed a step closer to the community. Only the development of new Web sites, with contents adapted to the needs of the local population, may change this.
Because of the style of life in rural areas of central Guatemala, Mayan women are not easily available for training or group activities. The curriculum and schedule of training at Nutzij had to adapt to this reality.
Rural areas of Guatemala are not yet well served in terms of telephony and electricity, which limits certain activities of Nutzij in particular, those involving the use of the Internet. Telephone land lines are unreliable when they exist, making Internet access a tortuous operation.
Funding has been a major difficulty for Nutzij From the beginning the activities and equipment of the communication centre had been funded through sources personally related to Padma Guidi.
Information provided by Padma Guidi (technical adviser) and Fermina Chiyal Jiatz (president), during a visit to Nutzij centre in Sololá, in May 2000.
The video productions from Nutzij were reviewed by the author. Among other documentaries: La educación como una luz, La mujer guatemalteca y su mundo natural Abriendo voces and Un día en la vida
Annual Newsletter 1999 Centro de Mujeres Comunicadoras Mayas.
Web site.
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