FOR A LIFE WITHOUT CONTAMINATION
Alternative Trash Management
Lago Atitlan, Guatemala
puravidaatitlan@hotmail.com
Health and the Environment:
We are working together closely with local health institutions, exchanging
training programs for local health and sanitation promoters.
The average indigenous family from San Juan la Laguna (near San Marcos la Laguna) spends Q800 (approximately US$100) a year on treating illness related to improper trash management, according to the Fundación Solar.
We expand the field of public health to include cultural health. This is our generation’s greatest challenge.
HEALTH!!!
by Susana Heisse
We would like to expand the field of the public health and to include the health of the conscience and the culture... that is the greater challenge of our generation.
Only a clean atmosphere can provide public health!
The contamination and the global heating are becoming the greater threat towards our society. The extreme operation of almost all the essential natural resources has become critical during this last century. This system that dictates the consumption in mass to justify the overproduction is leaving to the planet in the limit of the destruction. To survive individually and collectively has become a challenge at many levels. The health on all levels only can be promoted understanding the cause and the conditions and providing basic solutions to the problems that we all face.
In order to change the conditions that cause problems of health by means of the contamination of the air, the water and the Earth it has become necessary to analyze and to be conscious as much of the chain of reactions of a point of view.
It must happen first in our Consciousness
...in the culture of the old Mayan the food like the sugar, the beans, the tamales and the fish, as well as the changed objects like the incense and obsidian were surrounded in leaves....The clothes were woven with cotton dyed with plants...The cords, morals and webs were made with fiber of Maguey... Industrial forces with the disguise of "development" also bled on Mayan earth. The introduction of a new synthetic material, the "plastic", was only a small component of a shock that paralyzed the culture. And still, the negligent education on the poisonous results of this new material and the difficulties to undo of cause numerous problems of direct health indirectly and. This happens mainly in the rural areas of the Mayan population, where there are not waste baskets and much less organized systems to collect the trash.
The “COSMOVISIÓN MAYA”, like so many old cultures, Integration of the human being like one starts off equal, and non superior, to the nature. In fact, the creation of the human, according to the Mayan beliefs, had the only intention to protect the beauty of the nature. This aspect takes a more modern point of view to us:
Only reconnecting to the old cultural knowledge with an increasing conscience, focused education, collective and individual responsibility and progressive concepts* the crack between the humanity and the nature seems to still have a possibility of curing itself. *Pura Vida