Amy Glasser

View My Profile

View My Projects

Snapshot
Programmatic Focus:
  • Leadership Development
  • Health Education
  • Holistic Community Development
Country:

Guatemala

Participating Communities:

Partner Organization:

FUNDENOR AQ`AB`AL

Artistic Medium:

baking, oven-building, sculpture

Community Bread Making
(04/28/2010 - 08/28/2010)
Project Planning
Background and Needs:

Miguel, a baker in his village, has the desire to share his art of bread making with members in the surrounding communities. On his own, and with the funding of FUNDENOR, he was able to organize a workshop every 15 days, teaching different methods and tecniques of bread making. People from the outside communities have the desire to come and learn different making techniques from Miguel, so that they can eventually apply them to their villages and personal lives.

Collaborative Goal:

To create more leaders within the communities.

To share skills and talents within the community members.

Project Objective:

To open the minds of the community members to different practices.

To show community members how to make bread, so that they can eventually make their own and not rely on the outside world for their daily needs.

To create leaders within the community.

To share ideas.

Project Description:

Members participating consists of mostly of youth, women, and some men and children. They come from communities in the surrounding area. They come every 15 days to learn a new bread making tecnique.

Partner Organization Collaboration:

FUNDENOR is supporting the project economically, while one of the community members is the facilitator.

I am helping out the facilitator, showing him the techniques that I know, utilizing resources that they have within their community so that it is more economical and healthy!

Community Collaboration:

This project was born from the ideas of a community member himself. He thought of the idea, and he is executing it.

Planned Activities:

  • facilitate cornbread workshop
  • pizza, flat bread
  • building oven out of earth

    • Project Resources
    Picasa Albums
    Updates and Completed Activities
    Completed Activities Date

    June 19, 2010

    In the last workshop, I demonstrated a new way to use tortilla dough: turn in into corn bread. At this most recent workshop I was going to teach a new recipe; but when I got there, I was suprised to see all of the women with their containers filled with tortilla dough. It turned out that they wanted to make corn bread for a second time. I was happy to see that they were motivated to make corn bread again and to see that they actually liked this new recipe. So we all actively mixed the dough together. Then the women started to shape the dough into tortilla-like shapes, which adds a little bit of their own twist to the process. All of us, from older women to young kids, put drawings on each of the corn bread-tortilla dough masses with our fingers. We all had smiles on our faces from the beginning to end, because our bellies were filled with motivation and corn.

    		06/28/2010
    Updates
    Updates Date

    June 5, 2010

    The first couple of workshops I participated in have mainly been for me to get to know Miguel, the bread baker and workshop facilitator, and the community members. Miguel has taught the participants various recipes for different types of bread. I have been getting to know the community members by laughing with them, attempting to talk to them in their language, Poqom, which I am slowly learning. I try to add a little dab of creativity into the activities, whether it's decorating the oven with charcoal from the fire, making faces or pictures in bread dough or drawing pictures in the flour. The community members seem to enjoy these activities, as it puts a smile on their faces.

    		06/28/2010

    now that the bread making workshop has ended, Miguel, the community bread maker master, went through all of the steps to obtain funding through FUNDENOR to build his own oven. Because he has funding, he wanted to only build the oven with the best materials, meaning if it isn´t local. Made of brick and cement, and some local mud, the oven was built with the help of myself and mostly his brother. I brought up the idea to Miguel of natural building, and that the best material he had was right there in front of him, mud! But I did not want to impose too much, and let him execute the project on his own, because afterall, it is his oven, and the most important is that he is motivated to build it on his own. Now that it is built and in a beautiful circular form (with the help of cement), he decided that he wanted to decorate the oven in with a mosaic. With broken mirror pieces scrounged from a glass shop, and some glue, we and community members are piece by piece putting together a mosaic of a quetzal, along with the other designs thought by miguel and other community members.

    		09/17/2010
    Results & Reflections
    Results & Impact:

    Community members enjoyed learning new ways to make bread and they are now eager to start their own panaderia in their community.

    Post Objective:

    The program changed because we did not have enough funding nor time to complete all of the prepared activities. Nevertheless, the objective stayed the same: to learn and apply new bread making skills in the community in a creative manner.

    Partner Organization Collaboration:

    FUNDENOR did not clearly explain their purpose for the bread making project and I did not realize until the end of the year that we did not fulfill all of our goals for the project.

    Community Collaboration:

    The community itself had the greatest impact on the project as they were motivated to make different types of bread and then subsequently make an oven.

    Community Participation:

  • Communities/Institutions: ___4 communities___
  • Total Participants_34__
  • Total Adults_13__ (Men_5__ Women__8_ )
  • Total Youth (13 to 25 years) _12__ (Young Men_5__ Young Women__7_)
  • Total Children (0-12 years) _9__ (Boys_4__ Girls_5__)
  • Total Indigenous_all__ (Men___ Women___)

    • Sustainability:

    The project was founded by one of the community members who has all of the skills and motivation necessary to ensure that the project continues.

    Personal Reflection:

    This project was a good way to bond with the community. Making bread is such a communal and engaging activity that no verbal communication was needed. I was able to better understand the role of FUNDENOR in the community and their objectives for funding projects such as these.

    Post Lessons Learned:

    It is important to observe how the community members communicate with one another and accomplish tasks. Once I learned how to participate like any other member of the community, it was easier for me to lead the workshops and connect with the community members.