Our Mayan assistants know plants which are not in textbooks on Mayan agriculture. Our Q’eqchi’ Mayan assistants are writing articles which have information missing from peer-reviewed journals by university professors in USA and Europe.
In remote mountain villages, the kids there are capable of all this, but often the school is a 4-hour hike back-and-forth (not only no school bus, not 4WD pickup available either).
Here is A written with avocados.
Here is Z written with zapotes.
Our goal is to have ABC books and also animated videos (so people can watch them on their mobile phones). We will use local plants to form each letter of all the ABCs.
We have initiated a series of programs to help education of children in remote areas.
In addition to A, B, C…W, X, Y, Z we will also of course spell out entire words.
Once funding is available, we will also indicate which vitamins, minerals, and other healthy proteins are in each natural food.
This way we can help parents (and grandparents) learn about vitamins, minerals, and food values, in addition to learning how to read.
We can also do these educational concepts in the local Mayan languages, such as Q’eqchi’, Pokomchi, Kaqchiquel and of course we would want to do all the languages of Guatemala.
We welcome contacts with companies, foundations, and individuals who would like to help us: FrontDesk “at” FLAAR dot ORG
Driving the back road between Senahu to Tucuru you find lots of orchids. All of Alta Verapaz is moist and most is hills and mountains and rivers. So lots of eco-systems for orchids.
Although we tend to associate orchids with trees, actually there are terrestrial orchids also in Guatemala (precisely along the sides of roads in Alta Verapaz and many areas of the Highlands to the west.
Driving a road (instead of a highway) from Purulha towards Salama (Baja Verapaz) you find lots of orchids in the humid areas (Salama itself is dry, so lots of cacti).
We found orchids in trees, and we thank Alejandro Sagone for knowing their botanical names.
But there were also orchids growing in the ground (there are also terrestrial bromeliads in Guatemala two of which are edible).
Anywhere and everywhere along most highways in Guatemala you can find a rainbow of colors of wild flowers. In Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz (if in the cloud forest areas) many of these roadside flowers are ORCHIDS. Yes, WILD orchids by the thousands for kilometer after kilometer.
Many of these roads require 4WD vehicles (and not SUV; they are not high enough to survive the rocks which will shred their axels and anything else low on the chassis).
Lots of birders use digiscopes to photograph birds that even an 800mm camera lens can barely capture. We have experience with 200mm, 300mm, and 400mm lenses, and will be testing a 600mm prime lens in August.
This conference is made to present the importance of nutrition among Guatemalan children, especially in rural areas, and the health benefits that this can have in the Mayan society.
But for photographing plants, not many people suggest a digiscope. But while doing a research project on listing all the heliconia species native to Guatemala, we quickly found out that even a 400mm telephoto lens was not enough.
So we are considering testing and evaluating a SWAROVSKI OPTIK digiscoping system.
There are many species of amaranth native to Guatemala and we hope to have all of them growing in our Mayan ethnobotanical garden by the end of the year.
So I did research on how many heliconia are native to Guatemala. Each source listed slightly different species (though all three sources listed about six common ones). If you add all the sources together there are between 12 and 15 species.
I then sent out our Q’eqchi’ Mayan ethnobotany team to search for all the species of heliconia in Alta Verapaz between Senahu, Cahabon, and towards Lanquin. They found about eight to ten species, though some were in gardens (so we don’t yet know where they are native).
My goal is to have a minimum of 12 species in our research garden, all in a row, so we can photograph them at high resolution when they flower. We will then make a list of where they can be found in the wild in Guatemala.
Amaranth is a fast-growing grain-like seed used by the Aztec and Maya. Amaranth is to Mesoamerica what quinoa was to the Inca and their neighbors in Peru.
There are many species of amaranth native to Guatemala and we hope to have all of them growing in our Mayan ethnobotanical garden by the end of the year.
Several non-profit Mayan institutes are raising, processing, and selling Amarantho. We wish to encourage that. I am even nudging my family back in the Missouri Ozark Mountains to plant amaranth on our family farm there, since these seeds are among the most notable superfoods of the world.
All blooming same day in the ethnobotanical research garden surrounding the office of FLAAR.
We also have the national flower of Mexico in our ethnobotanical garden, Dahlia, but it bloomed in past month.
National flowers of Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala are three different species of orchid. That of Guatemala (Monja Blanca) is endangered so it is not appropriate to take it off a tree to bring to your garden.
Our team of FLAAR is assisted by several Q’eqchi’ Mayan-speaking people in Alta Verapaz and Peten. These “plant scouts” go out in their areas to help us find plants which are on our “would really like to find and photograph list.”
About 7 months ago we found cacao pods for sale by a Q’eqchi’ grandmother in Senahu, Alta Verapaz. These cacao pods had a curved end to them. Unfortunately we do not have her contact info nor do we know where she harvested these atypical pods. So we have asked our plant scouts to see if they can find trees with “curved, pointed” cacao pods.
While six of us from FLAAR Reports were doing research on advanced digital imaging in Shanghai, one of our plant scouts said he found a tree filled with curved cacao pods. This is a large tall tree, but not a Theobroma bicolor (so not pataxte, balamte). This is clearly Theobroma cacao, and we hope specialists in cacao DNA can figure out why these pods have a curved end.
Mayan cacao chocolate curved point pod. Peten, Guatemala
We have also found Theobroma angustifolium in the Costa Sur, but most people suggest this came from Costa Rica by the Spaniards, very quickly after the conquest of Guatemala and Mexico. The curved-ended cacao is absolutely not Theobroma angustifolium.
