Honduras: communitites learn hazard mapping for resilience

Twenty eight community leaders from Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras - primarily grassroots women - together with a large number of local residents gathered in Guadalupe to prepare a community map of this small hurricane prone coastal town in Honduras. This community hazard mapping exercise was part of a four-day, four-country learning exchange, sponsored by GROOTS International’s Community Resilience Program and hosted by Comite de Emergencia Garifuna. The exchange was organized in response to demands from Latin American grassroots women who heard about community mapping in Jamaica at a regional planning meeting in Guatemala in March 2007 and asked to learn community mapping from the Jamaicans in order to understand how to reduce the impact of disaster in their communities. For several years, Construction Resource and Development Center in Jamaica has been training grassroots women to map their communities; and to use mapping as an organizing, learning and advocacy tool. Holding the exchange in Honduras with the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna as the host organization allowed visiting participants from disaster-prone areas from Jamaica, Guatemala and Nicaragua to see for themselves the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Mitch and community-led rebuilding efforts over the last ten years.