la comunidad
humbly calling for your support!
Hi Long View readers!
As I’ve chronicled my journey so far, I can now share that the next chapter will involve you readers as well. The summary: my work partner and I are collaborating on a community-led project of nutritional education fairs. These fairs will take place in the rural communities of my town and will feature talks on healthy plates, a live cooking demonstration, and a cookbook for each participant to take home. To be able to realize this project, we need your financial support!
An optional aspect of Peace Corps service is to “do a project”. This is always presented as a nebulous thing during our training sessions and now, after almost a year and a half in the field, I understand why. One reason is that a project does not “make” a service; a pcv who does a project doesn’t always have more of an “impact” on their community - the being is always more important than the doing. Another reason is that a project can truly be anything. If you had told me when I started service that my project would involve nutritional fairs and developing a cook book, I would have been very surprised as none of my prior experience focused on these areas.
This here is the beauty of my project. I didn’t come up with it; the community did. As 2025 began, I started talking with my work partner about potential projects. I opened that convo by asking her what her dream wishlist is for the CAP and the community of San Lucas. After brainstorming a few ideas, we decided that nutritional fairs would be the best use of our talents and resources. As these projects are by, for, and with the community, we presented this idea at the nutrition commission meeting. As we opened the presentation to discussion, we discovered a local NGO representative was already planning the same thing! Naturally we decided to join forces with the NGO and the local nutrition agency representative and have been collaboratively working on project design thus far. In terms of budget, the local NGO will be covering the snacks at each of the 5 fairs in the rural communities of my town. My fundraiser is for the other necessary things like markers, posters, banners, cooking demonstration supplies, and most importantly - cookbook printing.
My work partner and I are creating a healthy recipe book focused on nutrient dense recipes. She has been crucial in this process to develop culturally relevant recipes with readily available ingredients. We want these fairs to be as interactive and sustainable as possible. As such, we will be doing a live demonstration of one of the recipes with the participants and will be sending them home with a bag of prote más (texturized soy protein) so that they can cook with it in their own kitchens.
So this is essentially our project so far. We aim to host the fairs in late October/November and you can expect a blog post recapping them of course! With these fairs, I am reminded of a line from the Romero Prayer (a staple of this blog of course).
“We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it well.”
These fairs will not be a magic pill that cures all childhood malnutrition in San Lucas, but they are something we can do well. I certainly won’t see the end results in my service, but I have faith that the results will catalyze positive change, poco a poco, for years to come.
I also cannot talk about my project and its fundraising without acknowledging how different the process has become. Due to the closure of USAID, PCVs no longer have access to any sort of grant funding. That means all projects must be fundraised for - either within the community or through the Peace Corps’ version of GoFundMe. Even to be able to solicit funds like I am, a project must be at least 25% community funded. My project is 31% community funded (not including all the funding from the NGO for snacks). This project would have qualified for a grant, but this is no longer a possibility. That means your support is needed now more than ever, and not just for my project. I encourage you to scroll through the many other projects listed on the Peace Corps website to see how volunteers are persisting in efforts despite how bleak US foreign assistance looks and feels at the moment.
I am so grateful to all of you who have supported me by viewing this blog. From my other posts, I hope you can tell just how needed these fairs are and how you can directly help the community of San Lucas Tolimán for years to come. After all, by empowering moms to lead their families in healthy lives, we can work to decrease childhood malnutrition for the next generation of Luqueños.
I greatly appreciate any donations and any shares you can give to our project! Juntos, we can plant the seeds of change.
****Consent to share these photos was obtained from all pictured****