When Ana Elizabeth Pop Jor was growing up outside Chisec in rural, northern Guatemala, violence was never far away. The oldest daughter in a family of 11 children, Ana still remembers the day that the low ceilings of their small home saved her mother’s life. “My father lunged at my mom with a machete and …
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The Guatemala City office of AJWS grantee Bufete para Pueblas Indígenas (BPI), or the Indigenous Law Firm, may look like most law offices: stacks of client files, a large conference table, bustling energy and coffee and tea perpetually brewing. But at BPI, there is more than meets the eye. “At other law firms, you’re not …
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Burma’s humanitarian crisis has reached staggering levels of suffering — with millions of people fleeing their homes and resettling across the border in Bangladesh or in camps within the country, while a civil war between the Burmese military and resistance armed militant groups rages. But a movement of passionate activists continues to operate under the …
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For decades, Aon Changnam has dreamt of the open waters of his childhood. Aon was born into a community of Urak Laroi people, traditionally nomadic people that have populated Thai and Malaysian islands for countless generations. He grew up swimming and exploring, enjoying freshly seafood, and hiking through the dense forests of Koh Lanta, his …
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Isabel Chen Ical and her husband, Agustín Chocooj, live with their two children and members of their extended family on a lush, fertile plot of land in Cerro Alto village, in rural Guatemala. They are members of the Q’eqchi Indigenous community — one of Guatemala’s 24 distinct ethnic groups. There’s one family member she speaks …
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In Haiti, the struggles of the capital, Port-au-Prince, radiate outwards. Though the city is the epicenter of the country’s compounding problems — a collapsed government that has given way to the take-over of violent street gangs, following multiple natural disasters — the fallout stretches well into Haiti’s more remote regions, where people lack any form …
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For nearly two decades, AJWS grantee the Association of Communities for the Development, Defense of Land and Natural Resources (ACODET), has successfully fought off government plans to build a hydroelectric dam in Ixcán, Guatemala, that would force 19,000 Indigenous villagers to lose their homes. ACODET is a grassroots coalition of 36 Indigenous farming villages that …
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