During the Thanksgiving season, the majority of the United States gives thanks for the harvest and work hard to put food on the tables of their families.

Teresa Gaspar, pictured here with two of her eight children, has been participating in Puente's Eco-Amaranth program for the past year. One of Teresa's main concerns is her family's nutrition- which is not surprising considering her 3-year-old daughter is below normal weight for her age and suffers from problems of concentration and development. She says that she joined the program because "amaranth is very good for your health and I wanted to learn how to produce it so that I can better feed all of my children." 

Amaranth is a grain, native to Meso-America, which like the local foods first harvested by the early Pilgrims, has the potential to prevent children like Teresa’s from going hungry. 

Teresa hopes that once she has produced enough amaranth to feed her family she can sell the excess and raise some money. Amaranth currently fetches 19 pesos (approx $1.50) per kilo. When asked how she would use the extra income she answered, "to buy extra fruit and vegetables that can be added to the amaranth, tortillas and beans that we already eat, and make my children grow strong."

Over seventy-five participants helped to make Santa Catarina Tayata's first ever Amaranth Day a success.  Amaranth Day represents the culmination of over a year's worth of Puente's activities in Tayata, a community located in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca state, and the center of one of four micro-regions selected for Puente initiatives.

Residents from Santa Catarina Tayata and six neighbouring communities began arriving before 10:00 am to take part in the workshops and discussions scheduled for the day.   Led by Puente's Consumption Promotor Bárbara Gómez Reyes and Amaranth Agronomists Uriel Baeza Nahed and Manuel Gómez Reyes, community members spent part of the morning brainstorming some of the many benefits of growing and consuming amaranth.  Each group took turns presenting its work to the audience at large.  Later, participants heard from local members of the Production and Healthy Family groups in Tayata, who shared photos and advice about their experiences cultivating, harvesting and preparing amaranth.

Showing off photos of the program to other communities

Sadot Ramirez Paz, a producer from Santa Catarina Tayata, enthusiastically noted that amaranth cultivation has gone "from good to better" over the past year.He told the audience how applying a organic fertilizer to parcels of amaranth plants had improved yield, and he thanked Uriel Baeza for his commitment to the project.  Asked about his work with Puente's production efforts in San Pedro Ñumi, Ponciano Cruz Chavez, 26, said that they have been going "really well," and added that he was glad to "receive more information about amaranth" through the day's activities.

Lucila Osorio, a 52 year old resident of Cuauhtemoc Tayata, attended Amaranth Day in order to share her experiences as part of the community's Eco-amaranth and Healthy Families teams, and "to learn more about the benefits of amaranth consumption."  She noted that since her community began working with Puente, "amaranth has gotten the attention of lots of people" in Tayata.   One of those people, fourteen-year-old Laura García Santos, expressed her interest in "learning to make things out of amaranth," and could be seen paying close attention to how alegrías (amaranth bars) could be confected out of amaranth seed, cinnamon and brown sugar.

The highlight of the afternoon came when a caravan of pick-ups took participants ten minutes down a winding road, along a river flanked by sabinos, to the site of Tayata's amaranth crop.  Local producers looked on proudly as Puente's agronomists described amaranth's growth cycle and fielded questions about its cultivation.  One onlooker, Neftalí Hernández Rosas traveled from San Martín Huamalulpan to see first-hand what amaranth was about.  Impressed by the morning's workshops and the crop before his eyes, he mentioned a desire to bring the plant to his own community.  "Before today, I had never actually seen the amaranth plant, only the seeds.  I would like to plant it myself."  He asked whether Puente could start a production project in his community, a petition which Puente will take into consideration.

The afternoon's activities drew to a close with a meal of chicken, rice and beans topped with liberal servings of amaranth cereal and accompanied by amaranth horchata.  A dozen lucky participants answered trivia in exchange for bags full of amaranth products.

On the whole, the Puente staff and local community saw Tayata's first Amaranth Day as a resounding success.  Alberto Gatica, one of the local producers, concluded that the event "lifts our spirits, and will motivate a lot of people to get involved."

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