Communities in the state of Puebla

I’ve started helping out with a different set of projects in the office, doing the georeferencing for the PET projects. PET stands for Programa de Empleo Temporal (or temporary employment program), and is a govt program that provides money for projects, but generally the majority of the $ goes to pay the community for their manual labor and not for supplies or equipment. This year is the first year that they are requiring GPS points for the projects and so I am helping train people how to take the points and then how to import them into a GIS system.

On Wednesday, we visited two communities (Cruz de Leon and Texocuixpan) in the municipality of Ixtacamaxtitlán, on the northern border between Tlaxcala and Puebla. Both communities received money to dig trenches to capture sediment that erodes during the rainy season. The area has been heavily deforested for agriculture, and thus erosion, both by wind and water are large issues.

Texocuixpan

Cruz de Leon

The trenches on one of the hillsides

On Friday we went to the southern part of the state to a town called San Jose Miahuatlan (almost on the border between Oaxaca and Puebla) to check on an agricultural canal project. The community has almost finished this year’s project of a 1km long irrigation canal. After checking on the progress of the project, we were invited back to eat (as we had been in the communities on Wednesday as well) a delicious meal of tamales and mole. At the end of the meal though, the women came out from the kitchen with a bucket of mole and a grocery bag full of tamales for each of us. The tradition in their town is to give mole and tamales to visitors and during weddings or other celebrations. So we headed back to Puebla balancing 3 buckets of mole in the Jeep and of course listening to the continuous updates of the swine flu epidemic.

The giant

The bucket of mole and bag of tamale