Discover the diversity of people – a snapshot with Maritza

June 2021

Maritza (37) has lived in Merida, a city on the Mexican peninsula of Yucatán, since she was born.

A region that is dominated alternately by a dry and a rainy season and where the temperature rarely drops below 30 degrees.

During her elementary school years, she felt a pain in her heart when she saw her classmates wantonly torturing animals or trampling plants or breaking tree branches out of ignorance. So Maritza started to pass on her knowledge about a respectful treatment of nature and its inhabitants to her peers after school.

Her knowledge and commitment grew together with her, and in 1995, when Maritza was 11 years old, she founded HUNAB.

HUNAB has been with you for decades. Please tell me more about your life project.

HUNAB means in translation: Humanity united with nature in harmony for beauty, well-being and divinity. As a child, I chose the name which I derived from Hunab Ku, one of the most important Gods in Mayan culture. For us, this God stands as a symbol that created all living things on earth.

When I was in high school, I was already offering workshops in our usually very small community parks.

At university, I studied science and learned more about setting up a non-profit organisation, its laws, but also how to budget, for example.

I wanted to set up my own very comprehensive education centre for children. I received one hectare of land from the city of Merida, for which I had to pay USD 2,000 in taxes. For me as a young adult, this amount was a lot of money.

I was very lucky with the financing. In 2010, we won the first prize in education in a national competition (Iniciativa Mexico) in which about 70,000 projects were registered, and later we won the Rolex Initiative Awards. In 2013, my dream became reality: Ceiba Pentandra Park opened its doors to all children.

Since our opening, newspapers and local TV stations have been reporting about us continuously. We are omnipresent on social media channels. Meanwhile, 400 schools in 300 communities receive our teaching materials.

How can I imagine the education at Ceiba Pentandra Park?

Children from the age of 5 are welcome to join us. On the weekends, we explain to them, for instance, how to plant properly, how to compost, how to protect insects or how to handle pets. We inform them in a playful way about separating waste, pollution or climate change. Our two-year training is very diverse and covers all environmental topics.

One of our projects, for example, is the "Grandmother Earth" project. We explain to the children that Grandmother Earth shares food, nature, etc. with us. Every child wants Grandmother Earth to be well and healthy.

After this training, our "Little Heroes" receive an accreditation as an environmental advisor. Afterwards, many children decide to go for a more intensive training where each child, depending on their interests, chooses their own focus.

The special thing about our programme is that after the two years training, children can teach children themselves.

We have no upper age limit. Many ex-students are still connected to HUNAB, for example our current engineer also attended our training centre as a child.

As an Emerging Explorer with National Geographic, I was able to visit already a wide variety of ecosystems. On the Great Barrier Reef, I studied the relation between coral bleaching and global warming. I try to communicate the complexity of this knowledge in a way that is suitable for children, whether in the form of experiments or a wide variety of learning games. Our education centre is the only one in Mexico where children receive a well-founded education in environmental topics and have a lot of fun at the same time.

What were the challenges, the setbacks, did you have doubts?

The biggest challenge was that I was a female teenager. Men have more opportunities than women in Mexico. Authorities always looked at my age instead of my experience and the solutions I had developed over the years. It was very difficult to gain credibility. I remember an appointment at the Ministry of Environment. When the person in charge found out that we were teenagers, the appointment was cancelled. Years later, I prepared a concept for an environmental law. When I presented it to the then minister, he rejected my proposal. I was very surprised that exactly the same minister later presented my plan to the public as his idea. Unfortunately, it is not the first time that adults simply "steal" suggestions from children.

As my idea was respected by my parents when I was a kid, I value the thoughts and ideas of the children who come to us every day. I have been frustrated, especially when talking to politicians, but I have never thought of giving up. HUNAB is my life, my passion. My family conveyed values like honesty and discipline to me during my childhood.

My biggest setback was the big fire we had in 2020. A neighbor burnt his rubbish and with the wind and drought, the flames spread over our property. The classrooms at the time were traditionally built as palapas with wooden walls and quickly caught fire. We were lucky: due to the Corona pandemic, we were not allowed to hold any classes. We took the opportunity to replace our burnt palapas with an open and better fireproof construction. We hope to be able to re-open again in October 2021 and step by step completely restore all our buildings.

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Where do you see problems, where opportunities in environmental protection?

In my opinion, many people act out of ignorance. I want to counteract this lack of knowledge. How can we fight climate change if we don't teach our children how to protect nature? Ecosystems know no boundaries! In Yucatán, it is still common to burn rubbish. People are not aware of the harmful pollutants that result from buring trash. Many people believe that it is enough to abandon plastic bottles to save the environment. Still far too many people forget their rubbish on the beaches of Mexico.

The solution to this problem is not to make people believe that a non-profit organization or an initiative cleans the beaches anyway. The goal is to make people aware of the importance of avoiding trash in the first place. It is exactly this rubbish that sooner or later ends up on our own plates.

Fortunately, we are moving in the right direction. Foreign companies are supporting us in our energy transformation. But the bottom line is that we also must learn to save energy, not to constantly exchange our electronic devices for new ones. A lot of education and campaigning is needed to change our lifestyle, become more mindful consumers, and buy less.

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Finally, can you give us an insight into your private life?

I have three younger brothers. One of my brothers (Victor Hugo), also founded a non-profit organization. Cosmos is a humanitarian organization made up of volunteers. They help people who can't afford medicine, for example.

My parents are also involved in HUNAB. My mother has been taking care of organizational issues since she retired. My father contributes his creativity.

He is a musician, writes romantic songs and likes to sing. One of his songs is Americaribeño, an invented word derived from America and the Caribbean.

Apart from my work, I like to draw, especially comics for our HUNAB newspaper. I learn Japanese, occupy myself with "in vitro" plants and our micro-world with its insects.

I like to visit the mangrove forests on the coast, like the Celestún Biosphere Reserve, and photograph the numerous birds that come to our coast to spend the wintertime here.