Two Italian Cooperation emergency intervention projects were introduced in Guatemala that are aimed at improving the living conditions of hundreds of families and at protecting the Dipartimento di Sololà ecosystem: they are the Chukmuk Community Centre and the Integrated Ecological System for solid urban waste management in Santiago.
The community centre consists of an outpatient clinic with facilities for both traditional Mayan and Western medicine, rooms for women, children and traditional communities, and a space for the volunteers of CONRED, which is the equivalent of the Italian Civil Defence Department. The project was financed with 353,000 dollars and carried out by the Italian NGO CISP in one of the country’s most natural disaster-prone regions—which still bears the scars of 2005’s hurricane Stan—and its beneficiaries are 883 families.
The second project is a solid urban waste sorting plant in Santiago di Atitlan, the first in Guatemala and located in an area particularly vulnerable to the problem following the recent contamination of beautiful Lake Atitlan by toxic algae that have changed it colour to a fiery red.
The President of the Republic Alvaro Colom also participated in the ceremony for the opening of the two centres.
The Integrated Ecological System also includes approximately 6,000 square metres of land for refuse, waste collection equipment (including 3 trucks), training programmes for workers and for educating children in local schools, and information campaigns for inhabitants of the lake area and tourists. The cost of the operation was 258,000 dollars.