Health Programs

In 2006, Proyecto Itzaes in collaboration with the Palo Alto Rotary, Club Rotario Nuevas Generaciones Mérida, and Rotary International began a project in six Yucatán villages focused on preventing Type II Diabetes.

The diabetes project has provided technology resources (computers, printers, scanners, digital cameras and recorders and other teaching materials) to enable the middle school students of the community to complete a village wide health education project. Students are:

• Interviewing village elders about the food that they ate in their childhood and how those foods were produced
• Scanning and archiving old photos of milpas and family gardens
• Banking seeds from traditional food sources
• Interviewing each other to determine the most common foods eaten by middle school students today and where those foods come from
• Using the internet and other research resources to compare and contrast the nutritional values of their own current diet with that of their elders
• Writing recommendations for their communities about healthy nutrition and diets that help prevent Type II Diabetes