Saturday we went on a moving and rich tour of the Ahogado watershed and a portion of the Santiago watershed with two classes of students from Iteso, a Jesuit college located on the outskirts of Guadalajara. While we are still wrapping up our workshops in Juanacatán and El Salto, we began workshops with approximately 50 students at Iteso in collaboration with the professor and our friend, Étienne. There are some great photos of the journey, click here to peruse them all. Read more »
We are incredibly excited to share the first of many videos created in the popular education workshops we are running in Juanacatlán and Guadalajara. Karen, Lety, and Cristian live in and around Juanacatlán, and are students at the local high school. Their video is moving and they worked very hard to piece it together. We are so proud! Please ost the video and share it; they made the video to make positive change for their communities and we want to help spread the word.
Here at Adapting to Scarcity, we strive to be transparent, participatory and community-centered. We believe that lasting, positive change flows from the bottom up and requires open access to information and democratic collaboration. This ethos permeates all of our work – from our documentary and workshops to the information and technology that we create and employ.
While most of our blog posts have been focussed on our experiences here in Mexico, our community organizing and the documentary, a crucial portion of our work happens behind the scenes in front of a computer. We are also building and extending software tools to help people connect, produce and share digital media. And, while it might seem like a bizarre notion to extend the ideas behind our ethos to the process of developing software, we’re absolutely doing it.
Last week the Secretary of Health sent out a declaration stating that the Río Santiago was not effecting the health of the inhabitants of El Salto and Juanacatlán. He insisted that the contamination levels were within the requirements of a river in Mexico.
Politics are an interesting phenomenon and, although I believe the statement to be an incredible fallacy, I don’t fault the Secretary. I think any other official would have likely been forced to say the same. It’s bigger than the Secretary of Health; it’s bigger than Mexico. I believe current politics are a result of what a relative few, and fortunate, have demanded from the earth and consequently other human beings. I write to you from a machine that requires the contamination of thousands of gallons of water. I am reminded of my choices evey time I cross the El Salto/Juanacatlán bridge.
Deep in the A2S headquarters, amidst website development and lots of video logging, we have been discussing how to make a video go viral. You post it on youtube, you tag it, you give it a fun catchy name, you bless it with the social media gods, and hope it takes off. Ok, so far so good, until we get to the take off part. Yes, there are experts with many varying ideas for success and I have read quite a few of them – mix luck and a huge network, and you’re getting close. If you have contacts at other blogs you can ask them to embed it and we certainly haven’t exhausted all our resources in that vein yet. We work it on Facebook and Twitter, and do have some success. But it is difficult, preparing to launch the first videos created by our workshop participants and being uncertain how far and wide we can spread them. The workshop participants need to get these videos out to make change and gain support to clean up the river. What can we do?
This week I talk about my experience as a videographer covering IMDEC at a National Dam Conference, and I included a few photos. I also discuss an impromptu tour of the Río Santiago on a day when there was nothing but white foam covering the expanse of the river. You’ll see Flip camera footage by a friend, Rodrigo, who brought me on the tour.
We are really excited to share this short video about the process and participants of our video workshops. Consider this a trailer for the videos they created which we should be posting soon! As always, we look forward to feedback and questions. We plan to publish our video workshop methodology, which is popular education based, once it is more refined.
We wanted to share some photos from our video workshops, the town of Juanacatlán, and the Río Santiago waterfall we often mention. If you click on any photo, it will enlarge and you can easily peruse all of them. To view our whole photo collection, click on this link.
I decided to video blog this week. I discuss my journey with an “environmental vigilante”, named Don Pedro. He took me on a bike tour to his brother’s farm in the hills. Thereafter we climbed a mountain to get footage of the surrounding Juanacatlán municipality. I also talk about my internal struggle in working with a community exposed to intense pollution.
The Río Santiago’s state of contamination is a really complicated issue, with many sides. For this post I took a two pronged approach to begin understanding and explaining the issue. First, there is a simple breakdown of the industrial and municipal contributors. Second, a stirring first person account of the river’s transformation as it “changed from being a river of life to a river of death.” We have received a lot of comments and emails asking for more information about the Río Santiago, and how this situation has gotten so bad. We are exploring this issue in our documentary, and will be running video workshops in Guadalajara to capture another side to this history. In short, there is still a lot for us to discover and learn, but we are happy to share some of what we have gathered thus far.
Directly below, there is a breakdown of the human and industrial pollution in the river. Disclaimer: there is a real lack of scientific studies so this data is outdated (2003). Currently, the first major medical study is being conducted in the area and the data from an extensive house survey focusing on health issues is being compiled. All information for this post is taken from “Mártires del Río Santiago,” a joint publication of IMDEC and Instituto Vida. For a succinct article exploring the pollution and water quality of the river, as well as the health effects, please check our friend Jeff Conant’s article Not a Drop to Drink.
Equipment, Milestones, Relationships | sarah | 
8 March 2010 18:20 | 
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