This solar oven doesn't need gas or electricity. It cooks food by concentrating solar energy! We used the solar oven to make a delicious rice, using ingredients dried in the solar dehydrator.

This low tech solution can dry herbs, fruits, and veggies without any electricity. Drying helps produce last longer for families. Plus, farmers get better prices for value added products (like herb mixes and dried fruit) than selling harvests straight out of the ground.

We built a dry composting toilet for the community permaculture center. This is an ecological solution that treats human waste without using water. This means we don't waste clean drinking water to flush toilets. We also we don't contaminate the local river with our wastewater.

To help fight the spread of COVID-19, we dropped off sanitary supplies at the permaculture center (masks, disinfecting alcohol, and soap). As COVID-19 spreads through the community, all of our workshops and educational activities have been put on hold. While we can't hold activities in groups, we've decided to respond to the pandemic by providing emergency food aid to the families in our community most in need.

We built a community chicken coop! The first harvest generated $600 in profit which was reinvested back into the project. The profits were also used to build a small home scale chicken coop for a family in need. This is a great example of how donations to CIELO are used to increase food security and independence for local families.

We planted over 4000 trees in our nursery. These seedlings will grow bigger in the nursery until May, when they will be planted in the ground in our food forest. The varieties include soursop, avocado, citrus, cacao, yuca, passionfruit, morera, and quixtan.

We built a community kitchen! The community kitchen is currently being used for workshops on food processing and nutritional cooking. All workshops are taught by local indigenous leaders & focus on native ingredients, like amaranth. The kitchen will also be used to produce locally made artesanal products in the future.

We fed 64 kids with a 3-week nutritional amaranth program during the COVID crisis. Guatemala continues to be among the countries with the worst malnutrition in the world.

While our mission is to build long term food security, the pandemic merited a quick response with emergency aid. We provided 20 Kaqchikel families with direct support at start of the COVID crisis.