by Muriel and Terry Henderson and Christie R. House

Well Construction/Simple well construction to provide water for the community. Image by: Adam Neal Source: Advance GYTTE Staff/Teaches clean food preparation procedures Image by: Adam Neal Source: Advance

Over the past 30 years, the GYTTE program has trained and equipped tens of thousands of people to take care of their own needs and also serve others. In 2007, approximately 15,000 people were empowered to move from subsistence living to lives of dignity through training events, learning experiences, and community activities.

A social outreach project of the Methodist Church of Mexico, GYTTE was founded in 1977 to combat hunger and poverty in the rural sector. Since its founding, GYTTE has been directed by Global Ministries' missionaries Muriel and Terry Henderson, originally from the Desert Southwest Conference. The program's purpose is to strengthen the capabilities of marginalized people and communities to meet their own basic needs and assist them to determine and sustain a just and integrated development process. GYTTE uses people-centered, participatory approaches to help create conditions in which real change can take place.

In 1990, GYTTE purchased land in the small community of Tlancualpican to open a training center that was named the "Tree of Life." In time, the mission program grew into an integrated, community-based development project that focused on five aspects of development: community, agricultural, health, livestock, and church and faith. A lively volunteer program called A.W.A.R.E. (Alternate Work-study And Reality Experience) also developed, exposing US groups to the communities of rural South Central Mexico.

Pueblo Partners is a program designed to empower the rural people of Mexico to improve the conditions of daily life within their own cultures, communities and families. This partnership focuses on three areas: community-building, agricultural resources, and livestock.

Adam Neal visited GYTTE in March/2008. He writes:
GYTTE teaches women how to make paper out of potato skins and solar ovens out of cardboard boxes. In order to set an example for the neighboring villages, they have built all of the buildings on their 30-acre campus out of straw, adobe, bamboo, and other products of the land. Terry and Muriel live in an extraordinary straw-bale house with a bamboo roof which has been documented in multiple books. The dorm rooms and offices have also been built by resources that utilize the available resources of the land, from the homemade iron bars on the windows, to solar power water heaters.
They have trained numerous village persons to be self-sustainable with the main resource they have--their own labor. Bamboo, rocks, straw, and mud are available to almost everybody. These simple things have been used to dramatically change the lives of the people living in Cualcalpican and throughout Mexico.

"GIVE YE THEM TO EAT" is an Advance Project of The United Methodist Church. Project name and code number: "Give Ye Them To Eat"Advance #07629A.
For more information, contact GYTTE. Visit the website at www.gytte.org or send an e-mail to GYTTEphm@aol.com .

Christie R. House, is the editor of New World Outlook. Terry and Muriel Henderson have served as Global Ministries missionaries in Mexico for 35 years.

New World Outlook, March/April 2008.

"GYTTE Project in Jeopardy." Please click here for an important update.

	See Also... Topic: Advance |  Geographic Region: Mexico |  Source: New World Outlook
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Date posted: May 27, 2008