Building community in Honduras

What began as a six month internship in Honduras turned into a full-time career and more than two years away from home for Claudia Menendez, BA '04, a Latin American Studies graduate whose passion is community development.

Menendez is a project coordinator with Falls Brook Centre, a non-profit community-based education centre based in Knowlesville, New Brunswick. The organization's international work in facilitating food security and creating sources income for local women initially took Menendez to Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America.

"People have the knowledge and potential to make a difference in their own lives," says Menendez. "I'm there as a facilitator, to remind them of that and to bridge the information gap."

Her education-based project focuses on helping women to develop carbon-neutral technologies to enhance their quality of life. Menendez and her team teach women to build composting systems and kitchen gardens to create soil and grow their own fruits and vegetables as well as building cisterns for collection and clean storage of rainwater for household use.

"The kitchen gardens are providing food and health for families," says Menendez. "On a deeper level the gardens are contributing to a healthy environment and even deeper than that, women begin to realize it is a lucrative economic activity. Once they realize food production contributes to their income they feel good about themselves and realize they can share their knowledge with other women and contribute to a sense of well-being in the community."

Menendez's work is not over. After a short break at home in Canada, she heads south again to continue making an impact in rural Honduras communities.