We had an opportunity to meet with USAID in Guatemala City. The meeting was clearly long overdue, given the scope of Tula’s role in Guatemala and the degree of overlap of TulaSalud’s activities with USAID’s programs in the northern highlands. As usual for us in such situations, the first topic of conversation was “just who is the Tula Foundation and what the heck is TulaSalud?”. We’ve been so concentrated over the years on the work on the ground in Alta Verapaz, rather than on raising our profile in the capital city, that organizations like a USAID are typically amazed to find out how much we’ve accomplished.
We discussed Tula’s past and present programs in Guatemala, existing USAID programs, TulaSalud and its roadmap for expansion, and the pending USAID Community Nutrition and Health Care project (CNHC).
We reached the following conclusions:
The Tula Foundation and USAID are effectively co-funders with shared priorities.
TulaSalud is very likely to be called upon to play a role in the CNHC project, particularly in the education and in-service training of auxiliary nurses. USAID encouraged TulaSalud to launch another cycle of the CAEC immediately in expectation of a future shortage of auxiliaries.
There are many areas of potential cooperation between Tula/TulaSalud and USAID independent of the CNHC project.
