Preparations

It takes a huge amount of effort to organize and coordinate a community-based mapping project when most of the communities are distant, isolated, and without a telephone. Representatives from the TMCC visited each community to explain the Maya Mapping Project and to ask the communities to select two people to attend the workshops, usually the alcalde, and another person who would be trained in cartography and household survey methods to be the village researchers.

Indian Law Resource Center offices in Washington, D.C., and Helena, Montana, coordinated communication and organization between all the collaborating groups. Many items for the mapping workshop were purchased in Belize City. Some necessary cartographic supplies had to be purchased in Berkeley.

From these early preparations we learned three important things:

1. Maintaining communication is expensive.
2. Organizing community participation is expensive
3. Supplying a community-based mapping project is expensive.

During May and early June, GeoMap worked with TMCC to prepare a 10-page village survey questionnaires (2100 copies were made in Belize City). GeoMap also prepared 1:25,000 village basemaps from the 1:50,000 topographic series for southern Belize, and prepared materials to teach the essentials of field mapping and purchased materials to teach the essentials of mapmaking.

The TMCC facilitated the selection of village researchers from 36 Maya communities in Toledo and six communities in Stann Creek, and along with seven coordinators, each of whom would be responsible for a region and approximately one-seventh of the total fourty-two communities. (San Pablo, a sixth Maya community in Stann Creek District was settled in 1997)