Mexico / Compañeros En Salud

	Community health workers brainstorm.
	Community members learn about their legal and health care rights at a EAPSEC meeting.
	A group of women who have completed a workshop series to their priorities for change in the community.
	An EASPEC Community Health Worker and his son on the way to visit a patient survey a hillside that once housed a village. Landslides are a very real threat for people living on the region's mountains.

The residents of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, including millions of indigenous Maya, have long struggled with poverty, political violence, and dismal health conditions. Chiapas is burdened with extremely high rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, and tuberculosis when compared to other states in Mexico. Our work aims to provide a more reliable, community-based alternative by training and employing local community health promoters, called promotores.

Compañeros En Salud, PIH's sister organization in Mexico, believes that "a life of dignity" is a human right. This includes a strong public health system that responds to the most pressing health needs of the population, and access to high quality health care.

Beginning in 1989, PIH collaborated with the local nonprofit El Equipo de Apoyo en Salud y Educación Comunitaria (The Team for the Support of Community Health and Education) to improve medical infrastructure in the region and to recruit and train hundreds of promotores. Over the past two decades, EAPSEC has partnered with dozens of indigenous and rural communities throughout Chiapas to develop local health capacity. Recent work has focused on a network of communities in the area of Huitiupan in the highlands and in the area of Amatan. in 2011, PIH decided to begin its own nonprofit in Mexico, a step towards expanding the scope of the organization's work in that region.

With support from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, CES is deepening a long-standing partnership with a network of promotores living in more than 20 isolated farming communities in the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Chiapas. Faced with treacherous roads and a lack of communications infrastructure, local families are frequently unable to afford transportation to government or private health care facilities, let alone the cost of the consults and medicine. With physician support, Community Health Promoters provide unprecedented access to treatment as well as prevention information in their own communities at almost no cost. They are also able to provide crucial follow-up for diseases such as diabetes, epilepsy, and tuberculosis.