Becca Haydu with Projects for Peace
Haydu’s project — Centro Cultural RealizArte — is an arts and cultural center in a rural Mayan community whose mission is to promote and value indigenous culture through arts and literacy education. According to Haydu, the summer went impressively well. She and others involved in the project were able to secure a space to hold workshops and had a lot of interest and help from people in the community. There was strong, consistent participation with people of many different ages and backgrounds, which is largely what the project’s aim was — to strengthen the community and connect and empower people through the arts and education.
Haydu understands that peace has a complex definition, but in this project she explored the idea of peace at the personal level.
“To create change and foster peace in the rest of the world, we must first find peace with ourselves,” she said. Haydu wanted this project to create a space where people could engage with the artistic process, thrive, and connect with themselves and others in the shared human experience.
Centro Cultural RealizeArte students in Mayan culture workshop playing traditional games and building a Mayan house with teachers Gener Chan and William Gonzalez.
On a different level, Haydu found the project yielded many of personal lessons in non-profit management and community engagement. While she didn’t encounter many challenges, she did find some difficulties in financially securing the center and dealing with other monetary difficulties. All in all, though, Haydu was able to get the needed funds and secure a space.
The project was valuable for the community, but also solidified Haydu’s desire to pursue the arts and confirmed her faith in the healing and community building powers of art. If human ecology is about changing lives and changing the world, Haydu’s experience is surely a testament to the importance of such study.
More information on Centro Cultural RealiZarte can be found here.
