Tarahumara Foundation, Chihauhua
His brother’s illness and subsequent death were catalytic events, prompting Rodrigo and his wife, Maria, and many of their friends to follow Jose onto the same road of devotion and service to the Tarahumaras, a proud people but among the world’s most desperately poor.
The Llagunos brought a contemporary, non-paternalistic vision to their mission, carefully aligning themselves with the fierce sense of independent self-reliance of a people best known to the outside world for their beautiful woven baskets, blankets and legendary status as runners with the endurance to run for days on end.
“The Tarahumara want to stay the same as who they are,” said Carlos Vallejo, who has lived and worked among them as a kind of social worker for many years. “They screen pretty carefully from outside their culture before they adopt new practices. But they were wise to choose from the (Llagunos’) program because these people want to keep them well and help them grow. And they know it.”
Over the past 13 years the Llaguno-founded Tarahumara Foundation has reached across Mexico and the world at large to galvanize support for improved education, child nutrition and healthcare among the Tarahumara in the northern state of Chihuahua. Among their major financial supporters has been Amway Mexico.
“We knew they were a great foundation, which is why we started working with them,” said Nancy Cortez of Amway Mexico, which, like the Foundation, has offices in Monterrey. “Then, three years ago, when Amway’s One by One Campaign for Children began, we increased our involvement. The people have so many needs – but the Foundation’s efforts are focused on the same areas as One by One, so it was a great combination.”
Amway was among those honored in a traditional 24-hour dance and other ceremonies in October 2005 marking the 10-year anniversary of an innovative Tarahumara Foundation-backed program for delivery of free, fortified, powdered milk for children under five. Raising funds through Amway-sponsored events for Independent Business Owners (IBOs), Amway Mexico has contributed $112,000 USD in cash and in-kind donations to the Tarahumara Foundation’s activities over the past three years, according to Ms. Cortez.
The milk program, which began with 17 recipients per month, now serves 3,000 children in and around some 400 tiny, isolated communities in the rugged valleys and rocky hillsides region near the city of Creel (pop. 4,000) about 150 miles southwest of Chihuahua City, the state capital.
Academic researchers and nurses at the main hospital in the area say the milk has had a clear and positive impact on the nutritional status of Tarahumara children, though malnutrition is still common. Just as important as the milk itself, however, are the health assessments made by the members of a volunteer team of some 100 native “health promoters” who deliver the milk to the families, who live on scattered, one- to two-acre subsistence plots often miles away from their fellow tribal members.
“Communities in the middle of the Sierras are not in circles, they’re dispersed,” Teresa Ochoa-Rivera, a nutritionist from Iberoamerica University in Mexico City who has studied intervention efforts among the Tarahumara for the past several years. “There is no transportation to speak of, so it’s the way of the people to walk.”
Indeed, the Tarahumara call themselves Raramuri, which has been translated from their language to mean “runners,” or “those who walk well.” Their running prowess, with 36- and even 72-hour runs up and down the canyons of their homeland, is legendary.
Once the milk-toting promoters reach their destination farms – all-day walks are not uncommon – they take time to do other tasks for which they are trained with Foundation support, including weighing and measuring babies and other young children, giving vaccination shots and counseling about diet and other health-related information.
“They know exactly what to do,” said Maria Carranco de Llaguno, Rodrigo’s wife, of the health promoters. “They have the authority – but more important, the parents’ trust – to send a weak child to the hospital and they don’t need a referral. But the real emphasis is on prevention, on responding to things like diarrhea, fever and hygiene issues.”
“The milk is really a good excuse to enable us to do a lot more,” Mr. Llaguno adds with a twinkle in his eye. “The Tarahumara already know about their native plants, but with this outreach we can teach them to grow things like carrots, cucumbers and lettuce. Milk opens the door.”
Over the years that “open door” has allowed the delivery of expanded educational opportunities as well as improved health care for the community.
In 2004, for example, the Tarahumara and their supporters celebrated the opening of a $1 million school complex in Creel. Tribal members come from afar on foot or crammed into the beds of battered pickups to attend workshops in agronomy, ecology and health education, ranging from post-primary to post-secondary levels. The school’s self-help ethos is reflected in the fact that it includes a large kitchen and dormitories for up to 40 men and 40 women that enable the offering of short, intense courses lasting three or four days aimed at inculcating “best practices” for sustainable, small-scale agriculture in an arid, hardscrabble region where the specter of starvation is never far off. Funds raised by Amway Mexico provided computers for the school’s computer lab, along with school supplies and cleaning products.
The Foundation also supports some 15 village schools in the region surrounding Creel, emphasizing lesson plans designed with parents’ consultation to be rooted in the children’s rural, agricultural lives instead of the Euro-centrism of decades past, according to Rodrigo Llaguno. The goal, he said, is to improve on the Tarahumaras’ historically distressing dropout rate. In the past, he said, most children didn’t advance beyond third or fourth grade, in part because school seemed so irrelevant to their lives.
“It’s not giving them everything we might like,” he said. “But the theory is that we have to do more to help them sustain themselves, be more productive with their land. It’s a difficult balance.”
Llaguno says he’s encouraged by progress on many fronts since the Foundation was established. Nonetheless, the challenge remains enormous in the face of the Tarahumaras’ remoteness, their stark poverty, the deforestation of the region, the ever-present threat of drought. He’s deeply grateful, he said, for the willingness of corporate partners like Amway not only to send money, but to take steps to engage employees and IBOs with the cause. That, he said, will ensure that the effort rests on a strong, lasting foundation.
He summed up his thinking about the long-term goal this way:
“We’ve found there’s a very close relationship between education and nutrition. The traditional way of thinking is that the better-fed the children are, the more likely they’ll stay in school. Now, however, research is going another way – when the mother finishes primary or secondary school, the children are better fed. So if we can do more to keep them in school, we can shoot at the problem from both sides.”
