Mud, Mam, and Marigolds: Two Weeks of Quiet Persistence in the Field
By Moises P. | Program and Data Manager
Food security doesn't grow in perfect conditions. During the first two weeks of June, it grew through heavy rains, muddy roads, language barriers, and the steady determination of families and field staff working together across rural Guatemala.
What does resilience look like in a small farming community during the rainy season? Sometimes it looks like rerouting an entire day's plan because the rain won't stop, and finding a way to be useful anyway: covering compost, calling a Program Member's neighbor to track down a phone number, or sitting with a community that's grieving a tragedy and simply respecting their space.
Across the first two weeks of June, the Seeds for the Future field team moved between the mountain towns above Lake Atitlan, the coffee country of Chocolá, the boca costa (area where the guatemalan highlands ends and the coast begins) communities of Pasac and Xejuyup, and a new frontier in San Martín Sacatepéquez, delivering not just seedlings, but water filters, animal care, and technical know-how passed hand to hand.
In just one week, 50 water filters were delivered and installed across Pasac and Chocolá, with 22 more distributed in San Pablo Jocopilas, each one paired with hands-on training so families could tell the difference between this system and the other clay filters they'd seen before. By the second week, the last individual filter in the program's current distribution round reached Xejuyup, completing a months-in-the-making milestone.
Stories from the Field - How Progress Takes Shape, One Family at a Time
Translating with mother and daughter, San Martín Sacatepéquez
As the arrived at Doña Claudia's home in San Martín Sacatepéquez, her mother, who speaks the local Mayan dialect Mam (not Spanish), needed help understanding the visit. Doña Claudia immediately stepped in as translator. While she relayed instructions, the team dewormed the family's pig, cleaned its pen, and showed her how dry leaves could keep the animal warm through the cold, damp, season. The family had let the animal's care slip while tending to a sick relative. They estimated a sales window of two to three months if the pig stays well-fed.
What the family walked away with was a healthier pig, a language everyone in the house could understand. Before the team left, Doña Claudia's family shared a local tradition: the first cutting of corn leaves is used to make ritual tamales meant to bless the coming harvest. Knowledge moved in both directions.
A community in mourning, and a team that knew when to step back, Paculám
Don Julio returned to Paculám to deliver two more water filters, routine, necessary work. But when the team arrived, they found the community gathered, raising money for the family of a child who had tragically died in a landslide. The rain was falling hard again. Rather than press forward with the day's agenda, the team paused all activity and gave the community room to grieve.
Not every visit produces an outcome. Some of the most important moments are the ones where the work simply waits.
Building on existing knowlodge, El Jato
Don Nicolás had been farming for years entirely on his own, through trial and error, with no formal training. When the team reached his land in the El Jato sector, they built two new garden beds with him on the spot and planted yellow flower, cabbage, hierbamora, and tomato. Because his land sits close to where families draw water from artesian wells, he was also given a water filter and training on safe water use.
Don Nicolás told the team that what he values most wasn't the seedlings — it is the exchange of knowledge. After years of figuring it out alone, he said, he's learning something new every day.
When the rain becomes the lesson, Pochol & Paculám
Heavy, sustained rains across the boca costa created a real problem: too much humidity in the seedling trays at the Pochol nursery means fungus on the stems; too little water during a dry stretch means roots rot when finally watered. The team's response was constant, careful monitoring, adjusting irrigation by the day, sometimes by the hour.
At the Paculám nursery, chard seedlings developed "mal de talluelo" (damping-off disease) from the excess moisture. The fix required no purchased fungicide: tighter control of watering cycles and better ventilation in the growing structure. It's the same lesson as a fish tank turned nursery — the solution to the problem was already built into how the space is managed, not in a product that needed to be bought.
A delegation walks the rows, Chocolá & Santa María Visitación
This wasn't just a field-team week; it was a week with visitors. A delegation including Leilani (Executive Director), Jim (Board Advisor), and Verónica arrived in Chocolá, where each local technician presented updates on the families under their care directly to the group, sector by sector. The team then visited three beneficiary families: Carmen Oliva, Karina Ovalle, and Lesly Gonzales, reinforcing a key lesson about preventing "mal de talluelo" before it starts.
Later in the week, Leilani returned to Santa María Visitación with an international delegation of cooperating partners, visiting the homes of María Chacom Tambriz and Patricia Tzunun Santos, giving visitors a direct, ground-level look at the program's daily work.
The Bigger Picture: Logistics Is Care
It's tempting to think of program growth in terms of seedlings planted or families enrolled. But this fortnight's numbers tell a quieter story about the infrastructure behind the infrastructure:
- 71 sacks of chicken manure (gallinaza) were hauled to the Pochol nursery in a single trip — enough organic fertilizer to supply beneficiary families across the Boca Costa region for weeks. The remaining 14 sacks were distributed directly to families in Chocolá.
- 15 bags filled with cashew (jocote marañón) seed, planted using a direct-sow method specifically to measure germination timing, the kind of small experiment that, multiplied across seasons, builds a body of local knowledge no manual could replace.
- A single mushroom grower in Patsulí saw her oyster mushroom bags recover from a larval infestation that had been treated with a kitchen-ingredient concentrate weeks earlier. The bags are now colonizing successfully, with the first new growth already visible.
- One new beneficiary, Nicolasa Tzunun Santos, joined the program just two weeks prior and told the team — living alone, in a remote caserío — how grateful she was for the support.
Every one of these numbers represents a logistics decision made in the rain: a truck rerouted, a nursery covered, a phone call made to a neighbor because a beneficiary wasn't home. The work doesn't pause for the weather. It adapts to it.
What Comes Next
Several threads from these two weeks are already shaping the weeks ahead: continued animal health follow-ups in San Martín Sacatepéquez, a planned mushroom harvest in Patsulí (on a strict 3–4 day window once the first flush appears), and the slow, patient work of finding families who weren't home, one neighbor, one phone number, one return visit at a time.
As always, the seedlings get the headline. But behind each one delivered this fortnight was a translation across a language barrier, a pause for a grieving community, a truck full of manure in the mud, and a farmer who, after years of working alone, finally has someone to learn alongside.
