Heroes of the Swamp In March 2013, the Leadership Learning Community was hired by the MAR Leadership Program (MAR-L) to evaluate their program. The evaluation team conducted site visits to spend time with fellows and the people who work with them daily to learn firsthand about the challenges, achievements and impact of their conservation projects. Name of Fellow: Mariela Ochoa City, Country: Guanaja, Bay Islands, Honduras MAR -L Cohort Year: 2012 Project: Mangrove restoration on the Island of Guanaja Key wins: Planted 50,000 red mangrove seeds and 50,000 black and white mangrove seeds over the last year. Involved 245 volunteers in an environmental education program and mangrove planting and maintenance. Secured funding for 2013 from New England Biolabs Foundation ($7,420) and Fly Fish Guanaja ($2,500). In 2014, BICA will be contributing a boat designated solely for mangrove nursery transportation purposes. Page | 1 The story of mangroves is a story of place. The roots of mangroves are wild and strong; they grow into the earth and bring essential nutrients where they grow. Mangroves weave together a story of life and sustainability. The mangrove ecosystem is a place for fish to reproduce, and mangroves ground the earth’s soil so that it grows stronger, is protected from natural disasters, and releases oxygen into the atmosphere. The roots also lay the foundations of sustainability and relationships for family and community. MAR-L Fellow, Mariela Ochoa (2012), through her work of repopulating the red, black and white mangroves on the island of Guanaja has brought together a diverse group of community members. This is a story about community, sustainability, and relationships. I. Chapter 1: The Story of Place “Guanaja” means the island of the Caribbean pine trees. Guanaja is one of the Honduran Bay Islands of striking and diverse geographical beauty, covered in the deep green Caribbean pine trees endemic to the region. When viewed against the turquoise blue water of the Caribbean Sea, it becomes clear why many call this island paradise. The three main towns on the island are Bonacca, Mangrove Bight, and Savannah Bight. The majority of the population of Guanaja, approximately 10,000 people, lives in Bonacca, which is actually on a cay off the main island. Bonacca has been called the Venice of the Caribbean because of the bridges and canals that connect the community. Passing the island, we can see young kids laughing and jumping into the water from the boat dock. Guanaja was devastated in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 hurricane that pounded the island’s coast for three days. Strong winds destroyed one-third of the islands, including homes and hotels, and many were without power for months. Most of the residents of Guanaja have rebuilt their homes; however, many still talk about life pre- and post-Hurricane Mitch, given how much it changed the island. The mangrove population, which used to be thriving, was wiped out entirely. It is estimated today that 95% of the mangroves have not recovered. The skeletons of the mangroves, now black and white, still remain rising high above the water. Among the devastation, small green leaves can be seen poking out of the water; the mangroves are growing back thanks to the heroic efforts of a growing group of dedicated volunteers who have become stewards of the swamp. Page | 2 II. Chapter 2: The Story of Mariela MAR-L Fellow Mariela Ochoa, a 32-year-old intelligent, tenacious, and jovial woman, is a central character in this story. Mariela’s ability to impeccably plan our site visit demonstrates how proud she is of her work and of the volunteers. She organized boats for travel around the island, presentations, and interviews with community stakeholders and fishermen, as well as traditional meals such as the delicious tapado, or fish coconut soup, and lobster and lionfish ceviche, scheduled for us over the two days that we were visiting Guanaja. Mariela moved to Guanaja two years ago for a job with the National Marine Park of the Bay Islands, leaving most of her family and support network back in La Cieba. Though Mariela has many family members who migrated to New York, including her mother, she has found her second family in Guanaja and among the MAR-L fellows. Since moving to Guanaja she has been working to replenish the mangrove population of the island. When asked what sparked her passion for the mangrove “Mariela is dynamic—she leads plants of Honduras, Mariela shares her story about growing up in a small town in La Cieba in the Garifuna and many follow. Mariela is a culture. She knew little about the environment or grand teacher. Mariela is conservation. It was not until she began her university teaching us; we have learned and studies in Tourism and Ecology that she was randomly the fishermen are learning about assigned to explore the mangrove ecosystem. As she learned more about the mangroves, she was taken with the ways they should involve their beauty and impressed by what she learned about themselves in the protection of their growing conditions and environmental importance. resources.” Eager to share what she learned, Mariela organized a field trip for her classmates to see the mangroves. Needless to say, Mariela aced her class. Mangroves are essential because they provide nurseries for spawning lobster and crab, and they are important renewable resource for community building because mangrove wood, being durable and water resistant, is good for building homes. In Guanaja the mangroves are a particularly important part of the ecosystem because they help prevent the island’s erosion from ocean waves. Mariela’s MAR-L project focusing on mangrove restoration was a perfect coupling of her passion for mangroves and working with the community, including fishermen. Mariela’s project focused on repopulating the mangrove forest in the southern part of Guanaja, which was hardest hit during Hurricane Mitch. Her project donor was Scott Peterson of Fly Fish Guanaja, and over a dinner at his hotel on our first night in Guanaja, the mangrove volunteers discussed how this project has been a labor of love. As Mariela explains, “There weren’t even enough seeds to collect to be able to replant the trees along the coast. When we started our project we had to go to other Bay Islands to get seeds to plant here on Guanaja.” Then began the process of trial and error. They moved their garden way from the beach where seeds were being devoured by blue crabs. As they moved their mangrove gardens inland, they were faced with the everyday labor- intensive challenge of transporting the salt water required by the plants to their inland home. Page | 3 Through ingenuity and hard work, Mariela, together with school children and community volunteers, perfected their approach and now have the most successful garden to date, producing 100,000 mangroves last year: 50,000 red and 50,000 black and white. The MAR-L hopes of replication have taken seed with Mariela. She has received funding to create a manual of mangrove restoration, with Guanaja as a case study. Mariela sees this as an opportunity to help others learn from and adopt the process used in Guanaja. She hopes that her work with the mangroves will be replicated not only elsewhere in Honduras but also in the MAR region. III. Chapter 3: The Story of the Project Mariela would be the first to acknowledge that the new mangrove sprouts are the work of a community. Her passion for the mangroves and her spirit are contagious. The volunteers see themselves as one big family. You need only follow the laughter and you will find Mariela right in the center, the heart of the family. As they jostle each other and kid around, you might think that the work is easy, but it is not. The work of planting and tending the mangroves is grueling and takes a community of support. As one volunteer, Cristina, recalled, “Sometimes we don’t have a boat to get us to water the gardens, sometimes we don’t have gas in the boat; the plants are very delicate so you really have to be dedicated and committed to tending the garden every day without fault. And when we finally plant the mangroves, we have to enter the swamps under the hot sun, we’ve lost shoes in the mud, we’ve gotten stuck, we’ve found ourselves neck deep in mud!” Cristina and her daughter began volunteering with the mangrove restoration project as part of their high school social service requirement. A 5-foot-tall powerhouse who is a quiet but mighty community association leader in Guanaja, Cristina decided to go back to school with her daughter Laura, and they graduated at the same time. Folks in the room laughingly commented, “Cristina calls Mariela to wake her up, she feeds her as they work in the mangrove garden, and she organizes all the logistics! She is a mom to all of us, not just Laura!” Cristina has been a main contributor to the mangrove project and has also involved her other children and her husband. The collaboration and bond among the volunteers is palpable; they laughed, sang, and ate together as they told the story of the mangroves. The growing community of mangrove gardeners and guardians now includes high school students, volunteers, and even government officials. Page | 4 Mariela’s humility opened the door to people from the community. She says, “Communities have a lot of knowledge; sometimes in conservation we think about “Communities have a lot of methodology and how to apply it to the field, but for me it knowledge; sometimes in has been fundamental to engage the community, to do it conservation we think about with them.” She has a strong commitment to building local leadership.