BSBAUD503 Lead a Quality Audit Name of Participant: ID No: How to

3. Examine the forces that led to the calling of the Constitutional

3. Examine the forces that led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in1787, by discussing at least 3 reasons that led national leaders to push for a revision of the Articles of Confederation Government.

***HINT: Taxes, Troops & Trade” would be one of the 3 reasons.

In the summer of 1787, fifty-five delegates, representing 12 states met in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their intent, at the time was simply to revise the

“Articles of Confederation”–not to replace them! The delegates to the

“Philadelphia Convention” had hoped to give the central government enough

strength to meet the demands of their growing nation. Most of these delegates

were well educated and politically experienced members of their

community. Approximately one-third of this delegation was “revolutionary officers”

with a very distinct “National” vision.

The Virginia delegation took the lead in the convention–presenting the

meeting with its first working proposal in the “Virginia Plan.” This plan was

largely the work of 36 year old James Madison, who formulated the basic structure

of this new national government. The “Virginia Plan” proposed a 2-house

legislature, much like today’s Senate and House of Representatives, except that

Madison proposed “proportional representation” (by population) in both

houses of this legislature. James Madison believed that any representation “by

state” rather than “by population” (in either House of Congress) would be

a recognition of the sovereignty of the individual states. And that, he believed,

would hinder the “National” authority of this new legislature. James Madison

argued that since they were creating a government “by the people”–not “by the

states”–then all representation should be “proportional representation”

(representation by population not by states).

Practically stalemated by this sticky issue of representation, defeat and

disaster was avoided by Roger Sherman’s introduction of the “Great

Compromise”/”Connecticut Compromise.” This plan gave to the larger states

exactly what they wanted–representation based on population in the “House of

Representatives.” It also gave to the smaller states what they wanted as well–

equal representation in the “Senate.” Although the voting in the Senate,

remember, is done by individuals, not by states.

It was also James Madison who suggested a separation of the different

branches of the government, and an elaborate set of checks and balances in

order to maintain that separation of powers. You see, Madison believed that a

national government could be constructed in such a way that it could never

become “tyrannical” or fall wholly under the influence of one particular interest

group. In order to do this, Madison argued that it was not only necessary to

distribute powers of government among the 3 branches (Executive, Legislature &

Judicial branches) –- but it was also necessary to make sure that the “source” of

that political power was evenly distributed as well. He believed that if the “source”

of the government’s political power did not originate in the same place, then it

would be very difficult for a common interest to combine the 3 branches of

government in favor of any 1 particular class of electors. That is why

the President is elected by an Electoral College chosen specifically for that one

purpose; the House of Representatives is elected directly by the people;

the Senate was elected by the state legislatures until the 20th century; and

the Judiciary is appointed by the President. This is a built-in system of checks

and balances that won’t allow the chief executive to become a dictator, or a

temporary surge of popular opinion to unseat the president or overturn the

courts. In a system like this, there is very little possibility that a common interest

could forge all 3 of these branches together in favor of their own particular type of

legislation. One of the branches is bound to stop them, because it is not simply the

powers of the government that are so evenly distributed and balanced against one

another—but the “source” of that power is evenly distributed as well. This is the

“genius” of James Madison!

One of the last problems hammered out by the Philadelphia convention was

the question of the apportionment of a state’s population regarding slaves. This

was a question that was bitterly contested by the slave and the free states. The

problem was essentially–what role do slaves play in the population of a state when

you are apportioning their delegates to the House of Representatives. For

example, if you apportioned a state’s representatives by counting all the slaves in

that state’s population, then it tended to encourage slavery because it gave that

state more representatives in Congress. And yet, without counting the slaves at

all, the balance of power would always be tipped in favor of the North in the House

of Representatives. And God forbid –what if the new Western states didn’t come

in as slave states? The South could conceivably lose control over the Senate as

well–simply because the north & West had more of a white population than the

South. And let’s face it; the South would have been crazy to join this new

government; crazy to give the Central government any more power; unless the

South could be sure that it could maintain equal control over the new government–

equal with the powers of the North. The “key” to the South’s agreement at the

“Philadelphia Convention” was the “Three-fifths Compromise.” This was a

formula that said 5 slaves would be counted as the equivalent of 3 whites–when

apportioning the states’ representatives or taxes. And this “Three-fifths

Compromise” was linked to a clause in the Constitution that allowed Congress to

stop the slave trade after 20 years. That way the free states would not be looking

at an indefinite increase in the Slave states’ representation.

The fight over the “ratification” of this Constitution took a lot longer than

the 4 months it took to draft the document. In fact, it took almost a full year to

obtain the consent of the 9 states necessary to put the new government into

effect. The struggle over the ratification took the shape of 2 major divisions–large

versus small states and agricultural versus commercial communities. Many of the

smaller or more vulnerable states–like Delaware, New Jersey., Connecticut and

Georgia–ratified the Constitution almost immediately, because they were able to

see immediate advantages to joining this new union. In other words, you didn’t

necessarily have to be a “small state” to find advantages in a stronger Central

government. Both New Jersey and Connecticut for example, were commercially

dependent upon the ports of New York City. And since the use of New York’s ports

was accompanied by duties–then the Central government’s control over

the regulation of trade meant uniform duties and fair trade regulations for a

change. Georgia, on the other hand, was a much larger state–although militarily

vulnerable on its frontiers. Therefore, Georgia was able to see immediate

advantages to a strengthening of the National government, because Georgia could

now be protected with Federal troops.

So, while the smaller and more vulnerable states ratified the new

Constitution rather quickly, the critical struggles over ratification took place in the

larger states–like New York, Massachusetts and Virginia. These states saw no

immediate advantages to joining this new government, and therefore, were still

reluctant to surrender their independence to a new Central authority. And if we

could actually look inside these larger states to see exactly what was going on—we

would see another struggle going on, between the agricultural”(antiFederalists) and the commercial”(Federalists) communities in these larger

states. The agricultural communities had a very “localized” outlook in their

politics. The “anti-Federalists” in these agricultural communities were generally

rural, sparsely educated and their experiences tended to be limited to their own

localized communities. I don’t mean to infer that all “anti-Federalists” were smalltime farmers who couldn’t see beyond their own state lines–although on a large

proportion of them were. Still, there were some “anti-Federalists” who successful

and wealthy agriculturists–like Patrick Henry. He continually opposed the

ratification of the Constitution because he was”ideologically” opposed to a strong

National government. Patrick Henry believed that the “representation” prescribed

by the “Constitution of 1787” was too far removed from its constituents and

therefore the states would eventually be subjected to the tyranny of a strong and

distant government. The “anti-Federalists” simply preferred government at the

state level, because they were convinced that their own state legislatures were

more representative of their interests and more responsive to their needs.

Most anti-Federalists could generally be found about 50 miles inland from

the East coast. In fact, if you drew a line, 50 miles inland, from Maine down to

Georgia–you could pretty accurately separate the “Federalists” from the “antiFederalists.” This “fall line” is basically what separated the “subsistent” (selfsufficient) farmers from the merchants and “commercial” farmers. Beyond that

“fall line” they were not participants in the market economy, and therefore saw

very little to gain and an awful lot to lose, when they handed over their Western

land claims to this new central government.

Acceptance or ratification of the “Constitution of 1787” was achieved in

some states by very narrow margins, and in others, it was achieved only by the

promise of a “Bill of Rights”–the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. On

October 10, 1788, the “Articles of Confederation” government passed into

history, and the United States finally had a responsible and representative

government on a “national” scale. Very few members to this “Philadelphia

Convention” had anticipated the size of the task before them in that summer of

1787. They had met, remember, only to “revise” the Articles of

Confederation. They had no idea at the time that their efforts would result in the

creation of an entirely new Constitution–one that radically transformed the

structure of America’s government when it established such an enormously

powerful Central government.

“Our Constitution is in actual operation,” said Ben Franklin, “and everything

appears to promise that it will last.” “But then again,” he said, “Nothing in this

world is certain but death and taxes.”

And maybe….FINAL EXAMS :)[supanova_question]

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN 6 Running head: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN 1 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN 6

Running head: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN 1

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN 2

Professional Development Plan

The University of Melbourne

Melbourne School of Health Sciences

Department of Nursing

Masters of Nursing Science

Contemporary Nursing

NURS90057

Word Count: 546 (Excluding References)

Continuing professional development is an approach implemented by the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) that focuses on maintaining the capability for practice whilst allowing for development of skills, knowledge and expertise (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia [NMBA], 2016). Throughout this paper clinical handover will be discussed and integrated as a learning need within a personal professional development plan. The NMBA registered nurse standards for practice was used to formulate the learning goal, and relevant contemporary literature established the expected benefits of clinical handover as a requirement in nursing practice. Appendix 1 will outline a development plan that is to be used in conjunction with my experiences of professional placement within an emergency department of a major metropolitan hospital.

Communication in the form of clinical handover has been identified as a fundamental component of registered nursing to provide safe and effective patient care (Johnson & Cowin, 2013). Clinical handover is outlined as the transfer of a sequence of events including the patient, patient information and professional accountability to another professional or person with either a temporary or permanent intention (Gardiner, Marshall & Gillespie, 2015). This skill can be performed in a variety of formats, with verbal communication and written documentation being the most common within the emergency department (Sujan et al., 2014). Clinical handover primarily concerns continuity of patient centered care, patient safety and accountability (Anderson, Malone, Shanahan & Manning, 2015). This skill is essential in preventing adverse events, inappropriate and unnecessary treatments as well as reducing misunderstanding, miscommunication and malpractice amongst multidisciplinary teams (Thomson, Tourangeau, Jeffs & Puts, 2018).

To be able to execute and receive a clinical handover competently, confidently and safely I have identified a range of manageable activities that will assist me in achieving my goal. Appendix one will outline these activities and outcomes in more detail (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2012). The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia has outlined seven standards for registered nurse practices with four of these standards specifically relating to my learning goal of clinical handover in the specific setting of the emergency department (Cashin et al., 2017). Standard one will be demonstrated through using evidence based clinical handover frameworks such as ‘ISOBAR’ or ‘SHARED’ that are supportive to implementing care to my patients. I will demonstrate standard two through communicating with multidisciplinary teams, patients and families whilst incorporating patient advocacy. Through understanding and revising policies and guidelines relevant to the emergency department and working within my scope of practice as a final year nursing student I will implement standard six. Standard seven will be achieved through planning, goal setting and evaluation of my performance in providing clinical handover whilst communicating with appropriate personnel to ensure my patients are receiving the highest standard of care (NMBA, 2016).

The proposed outcome of implementing and subsequently achieving my learning need will primarily be to demonstrate competence in performing and receiving clinical handover with positive outcomes and improved confidence. Furthermore, I will advance my role in inclusive and closed loop communication, ultimately improving patient safety. I would expect to develop skills and techniques in relation to advocating for my patients and their families. Finally, I would expect to increase confidence whilst working within a multidisciplinary team in aspects such as communication, escalation of care, summarisation of relevant information and establishing professional relationships.

To conclude, understanding and implementing effective clinical handover is distinguishably a positive activity to adequately maintain patient centered care. Through outlining its requirement and importance in registered nursing using NMBA standards for practice I have been able to identify it as a learning goal. Within the literature it is evident that effective communication, patient safety and patient advocacy is achievable when a precise and timely clinical handover is implemented using a structured framework and planned approach which is ultimately relevant to my participation as a final year nursing student (Pang, 2017).

References

Anderson, J., Malone, L., Shanahan, K., & Manning, J. (2015). Nursing bedside clinical handover–an integrated review of issues and tools. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 24(5-6), 662-671.

Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. (2012). Safety and quality improvement guide standard 6: clinical handover.

Cashin, A., Heartfield, M., Bryce, J., Devey, L., Buckley, T., Cox, D., … & Fisher, M. (2017). Standards for practice for registered nurses in Australia. Collegian, 24(3), 255-266.

Gardiner, T. M., Marshall, A. P., & Gillespie, B. M. (2015). Clinical handover of the critically ill postoperative patient: an integrative review. Australian Critical Care, 28(4), 226-234.

Johnson, M., & Cowin, L. S. (2013). Nurses discuss bedside handover and using written handove sheets. Journal of nursing management, 21(1), 121-129

Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia. (2016). Registered nurse standards for practice. Melbourne, Vic.: Author. https://www.nursingmidwiferyboard.gov.au/codes-guidelines statements/professional-standards/registered-nurse-standards-for-practice.aspx

Pang, W. I. (2017). Promoting integrity of shift report by applying ISBAR principles among nursing students in clinical placement. In SHS Web of Conferences (Vol. 37, p. 01019). EDP Sciences.

Sujan, M., Spurgeon, P., Inada-Kim, M., Rudd, M., Fitton, L., Horniblow, S., Cross, S., Chessum, P., & Cooke, M. W. (2014). Clinical handover within the emergency care pathway and the potential risks of clinical handover failure (ECHO): primary research.

Thomson, H., Tourangeau, A., Jeffs, L., & Puts, M. (2018). Factors affecting quality of nurse shift handover in the emergency department. Journal of advanced nursing, 74(4), 876-

Appendix 1: Professional Development Plan

Standard

Standard 1 – Thinks critically and analyses nursing practice

Standard 2 – Engages in therapeutic and professional relationships

Standard 6 – Provides safe, appropriate and responsive quality nursing care

Standard 7 – Evaluates outcomes to inform nursing practice

Criteria for Demonstration

1.1 accesses, analyses, and uses the best available evidence, that includes research findings, for safe, quality practice

1.2 develops practice through reflection on experiences, knowledge, actions, feelings and beliefs to identify how these shape practice

2.2 communicates effectively, and is respectful of a person’s dignity, culture, values, beliefs and rights

2.5 advocates on behalf of people in a manner that respects the person’s autonomy and legal capacity

2.8 participates in and/or leads collaborative practice

6.2 practices within their scope of practice

6.5 practices in accordance with relevant policies, guidelines, standards, regulations and legislation

7.1 evaluates and monitors progress towards the expected goals and outcomes

7.2 revises the plan based on the evaluation

7.3 determines, documents and communicates further priorities, goals and outcomes with the relevant persons.

Specific Learning Goal

Action Plan

Evaluation of Learning Goal & Activities

To demonstrate competence in performing and receiving clinical handover, safely and confidently by implementing and evaluating learning goal activities between September 3rd and October 12th 2018.

Research current literature on structured clinical handover frameworks/tools

Compare and apply structured clinical handover frameworks & apply to practice

Read relevant guidelines on implementing handover

Identify my responsibilities during handover

Identify barriers and facilitators influencing my handover technique

Practice providing handover to peers & colleagues prior to communicating with the information receiver

Participate in simulation scenarios during clinical labs & placement

Provide supervised clinical handovers

Seek feedback on all clinical handover attempts

Reflect on each handover attempt

Identify a range of peer reviewed articles outlining clinical handover tools prior to August 27th 2018

Compare ISOBAR and SHARED handover tools before September 3rd 2018

Read Safety and Quality Improvement Guide document on Standard 6: clinical handover before September 3rd 2018

Attend all clinical labs by September 3rd 2018 and receive feedback from clinical scenarios in a non clinical environment

Attempt 5 clinical handovers by September 14th 2018 and self reflect on the performances

Correctly implement my nominated clinical handover process/tool with each attempt by October 12th 2018

Implement closed loop communication to assess the receivers level of understanding from September 3rd to October 12th 2018

Asses the time taken to successfully identify and communicate relevant patient information by October 12th 2018

Keep a reflective log of each clinical handover attempt to assess for positive progression from September 3rd to October 12th 2018

Summarise main points of provided feedback for each handover attempt by October 12th 2018

NURS90057

NURS90057[supanova_question]

Karla V. Arguello Group Communication Skills Resumé [email protected] EDUCATION University of Alaska

Writing Assignment Help Karla V. Arguello

Group Communication Skills Resumé

[email protected]

EDUCATION

University of Alaska Anchorage exp. 2022

Bachelor of Science in Psychology

Minor in Outdoor Leadership

PUBPLIC SPEAKING SKILLS

Group Roles

Basic understanding of different roles within groups, including the leader expediter, information seeker, gate keeper, and recorder

Ability to effectively engage in groups as an information seeker

Group Decision-Making

Basic understanding of the Nominal Group Process for decision-making in groups

Ability to apply the Nominal Group Process to effectively make a decision within a group

Group Problem-Solving

Basic understanding of the Procedural Model of Problem-Solving (P-MOPS)

Ability to employ the Procedural Model of Problem-Solving to effectively solve a problem within a group

COMMUNICATION COURSES

University of Alaska Anchorage

Fundamentals of Oral Communication (COMM A111) Spring 2020

Addendum

What does it mean to have the “basic understanding of different roles within groups”?

To complete the addendum for this assignment, turn each skill listed in the resume into a question like this example. Then, explain each skill using course content and terms. https://onlyassignmenthelp.com/index.php/2021/11/28/yahoo-inc-strategic-planning/ [supanova_question]

Supply Chain Question

Homework Assignment
How does the infrastructure benefit or harm the supply chain? Select a particular mode and explain how the new infrastructure bill will improve the industry. Ensure to use material that you have learned up to this point in the class. Use an MLA format and produce a minimum of 3 pages plus a cited page.

done
Seen
few seconds ago[supanova_question]

#3 Discussion Topic – use Canvas Discussions – U.S. Border Crisis 12

#3 Discussion Topic – use Canvas Discussions – U.S. Border Crisis

12

12 unread replies.

12

12 replies.

Discussion Topic # 3

Please read through the following material and also watch the following video and then post a 350 word commentary of your views and thoughts and reflections on the Discussion Board – follow this with at least one additional post(s) of about 75-100 words that is a response to other students postings. Use the link on the left menu bar on your Home Page to link to the Discussions.

Please be sure to make an effort to discuss what you personally think and avoid any form of ‘copy and paste’ model. It is your own opinions, reflections and commentary that you should provide for the forum to be effective and interesting.

Please be sure that you:

do not ‘copy and paste’ information in the posts

feel free to discuss your own personal views and reflections on the topic

try to minimize or avoid generalized comments – such as – “this is really a huge problem and the government should do something about it.”

feel free to include personal anecdotal information – things that you have personally experienced are great to include

feel free to include information that you have learned in other classes and/or in your own personal reading – please give a reference/link if relevant

please be sensitive to others viewpoints – especially if you don’t share their opinion on a particular issue

upload your 250-300 post on the discussion forum first before you respond and make your second post

make as many response posts as you wish.

How Climate Change if Fueling the US Border Crisis.

In the Western Highlands of Guatemala the question is no longer whether someone will leave but when.

Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at ‘The New Yorker’ magazine with photography by Mauricio Lima, April 2019, from the ‘New Yorker’ magazine.

In the center of Climentoro, in the western highlands of Guatemala, a dozen large white houses rise above the village’s traditional wooden huts like giant monuments. The structures are made of concrete and fashioned with archways, colonnaded porches, and elaborate moldings. “Most of them are empty,” Feliciano Pérez, a local farmer, told me. Their owners, who live in the U.S., had sent money home to build American-inspired houses for when they returned, but they never did. Pérez gestured to a three-story house topped with a faux-brick chimney. “No one lives there,” he said. The family of twelve had migrated a few years ago, leaving the vacant construction behind. “Vecinos fantasmas,” Pérez called them—ghost neighbors.

Pérez, who is thirty-five, is short and lean, with dark, weathered skin and metal caps on his front teeth. He wore a baseball cap mottled in camouflage and emblazoned with the words “Proud Marine Dad.” “It was about six years ago that things started to change,” he said. Climentoro had always been poor. Residents depended on the few crops that could survive at an elevation of more than nine thousand feet, harvesting maize to feed their families and selling potatoes for a small profit. But, Pérez said, the changing climate was wiping out the region’s crops. “In the higher part of town, there have been more frosts than there used to be, and they kill an entire harvest in one fell swoop,” he said. “In the lower part of Climentoro, there’s been much less rain and new sorts of pests.” He added, “Farmers have been abandoning their land.”

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

In February, citing a “national-security crisis on our southern border,” Donald Trump declared a state of emergency, a measure that even members of Congress from his own party rejected. Three months earlier, with much less fanfare, thirteen federal agencies issued a landmark report about the damage wrought by climate change. In a sixteen-hundred-page analysis, government scientists described wildfires in California, the collapse of infrastructure in the South, crop shortages in the Midwest, and catastrophic flooding. The President publicly dismissed the findings. “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it,” he said. There was a deeper layer of denial in this, since overlooking these effects meant turning a blind eye to one of the major forces driving migration to the border. “There are always a lot of reasons why people migrate,” Yarsinio Palacios, an expert on forestry in Guatemala, told me. “Maybe a family member is sick. Maybe they are trying to make up for losses from the previous year. But in every situation, it has something to do with climate change.”

Outside the small village of Chicua, in the western highlands, in an area affected by extreme-weather events, Ilda Gonzales looks after her daughter.

The western highlands, which extend from Antigua to the Mexican border, cover roughly twenty per cent of Guatemala and contain a large share of the country’s three hundred microclimates, ranging from dank, tropical locales near the Pacific Coast to the arid, alpine reaches of the department of Huehuetenango. The population in the highlands is mostly indigenous, and people’s livelihoods are almost exclusively agrarian. The malnutrition rate, which hovers around sixty-five per cent, is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. In 2014, a group of agronomists and scientists, working on an initiative called Climate, Nature, and Communities of Guatemala, produced a report that cautioned lawmakers about the region’s susceptibility to a new threat. The highlands region, they wrote, “was the most vulnerable area in the country to climate change.”

In the years before the report was published, three hurricanes had caused damage that cost more than the previous four decades’ worth of public and private investment in the national economy. Extreme-weather events were just the most obvious climate-related calamities. There were increasingly wide fluctuations in temperature—unexpected surges in heat followed by morning frosts—and unpredictable rainfall. Almost half a year’s worth of precipitation might fall in a single week, which would flood the soil and destroy crops. Grain and vegetable harvests that once produced enough food to feed a family for close to a year now lasted less than five months. “Inattention to these issues,” the report’s authors wrote, can drive “more migration to the United States” and “put at grave risk the already deteriorating viability of the country.”

Guatemalan migration to the U.S., which had been steady since the late nineteen-seventies, has spiked in recent years. In 2018, fifty thousand families were apprehended at the border—twice as many as the year before. Within the first five months of the current fiscal year, sixty-six thousand families were arrested. The number of unaccompanied children has also increased: American authorities recorded twenty-two thousand children from Guatemala last year, more than those from El Salvador and Honduras combined. Much of this migration has come from the western highlands, which receives not only some of the highest rates of remittances per capita but also the greatest number of deportees. Of the ninety-four thousand immigrants deported to Guatemala from the U.S. and Mexico last year, about half came from this region.

In a tiny hamlet called Nuevo Belén, Federico Matías, a potato farmer, has lost thousands of quetzales on each harvest. His neighbor prepares the land for the coming crop.

One evening in early February, a thrum of activity in Climentoro brought the area’s shifting demographics into view. The streets filled with residents running their final errands before dark. Children milled around a small wooden shack selling candy, and women, wrapped in embroidered dresses and carrying pots of water to their houses, stepped past wandering flocks of chickens and sheep. Almost everyone appeared to be either older than forty-five or younger than sixteen, and there was a conspicuous absence of young men. “They’re gone,” Pérez told me. More than half of the residents had migrated, he said, most of them to the U.S.

Pérez stayed in Climentoro to work on a project known as a “seed bank.” In a small shed, in a corner of the town, shelves of large containers lined the walls; inside each was a particular type of maize seed—black, yellow, red, white—from successive years going back more than a decade. The idea, Pérez told me, was to create a repository of extra seeds so that farmers wouldn’t go hungry when their crops were destroyed by an unexpected frost, a rain storm, or a new strain of fungus. The reserve supply helped limit the number of residents forced to migrate to feed their families, but it was an imperfect stopgap. Pérez recalled how, on a recent afternoon, a neighbor had approached him to ask for work. “You don’t have to pay me,” the man said. “Just give me breakfast and lunch.” A few weeks later, the neighbor and his family were gone. They left for the U.S., and Pérez hasn’t heard from them since.

On a bright morning in February, Palacios, who works for a local environmental group known as asocuch, drove me in his truck up a rocky, twisting road to the village of Quilinco, about ten miles from Climentoro. A few small houses were tucked away on the side of a mountain, which was interspersed with thick patches of foliage and undulating strips of soil. Esvin Rocael López, who is thirty-four years old and oversees Quilinco’s seed bank, was helping to shuck maize and rake the corn into metal pails. His burliness was accentuated by a snugly fitting Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. Typically, maize is planted in April, prior to a period of extended rain; last year, however, both May and June were dry. “No one knows whether to plant their crops or not,” López told me. “When do you do it? If the rains don’t come at a predictable time, how do you know? These crops are for survival. If there aren’t crops, people leave.”

In recent years, U.S. immigration policy in Central America has largely relied on the idea that, in order to control the flow of immigrants heading north, the government should make it as painful as possible to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s always been about deterrence,” a former official at the Department of Homeland Security told me. “Unless you send a message, people will keep coming.” The Trump Administration began separating families at the border, in 2017, with the expectation that tougher enforcement would scare off other families from making the trip. When it didn’t, and the numbers continued to rise

(Links to an external site.)

, the President attempted to ban asylum altogether and has since forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases languish in American immigration courts. On Friday, Trump announced that he was cutting all aid

(Links to an external site.)

to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, because the three countries “haven’t done a thing for us.”

Agustín Par, seventy-five, is in charge of a greenhouse of tree saplings outside the city of Totonicapán.

Scientists describe Totonicapán as the western highlands department most vulnerable to drought, as the dry corridor expands.

Even approaches that have accounted for the root causes of regional mass migration have underestimated the impact of climate change. The Obama Administration pledged roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars to the northern triangle of Central America, an aid package known as the Alliance for Prosperity, which aimed to address mounting poverty, political corruption, and cycles of crime and violence. Little of that money dealt with issues of environmental sustainability, however, even though half of the Guatemalan workforce is in the agricultural sector. Sebastian Charchalac, an agronomist and environmental consultant who headed the Climate, Nature, and Communities project in the western highlands until 2017, told me, “It’s like the State Department is looking at the fire, but not the kindling.”

The day after Palacios and I visited Quilinco, I headed farther north with an agronomist named Silvia Monterroso, who worked for an organization in Huehuetenango called FundaEco. Monterroso has lived in the area for more than twenty years and had close relationships with a number of families along the road to the city of Todos Santos. En route, we passed a cemetery with a series of gravestones and sepulchres painted ornately with American flags, an indication that the deceased had died as immigrants in the U.S. “It’s a symbol of thanks,” Monterroso told me. “The family of the person who died is thanking those who left, because if they hadn’t left for the U.S. and sent money home, the family would have nothing.”

In the distance, about ten thousand feet above sea level, was a belt of craggy peaks. At these heights, the impact of a changing climate was especially dire: increasing aridity was exacerbating an already limited water supply. By the side of a road near the hamlet of La Capellania, groups of women carted piles of laundry, in wheelbarrows and in baskets balanced on their heads, to small drainage ditches where they washed their families’ clothes with bars of soap, scrubbing the articles clean on flattened stones. They had set out with flashlights before dawn, wearing hats and jackets to withstand the freezing temperatures; the earlier the women arrived, the less likely it was that the water would be full of suds from prior use.

In Paraje León, a village of three hundred people, in a remote corner of Totonicapán, a woman stands outside her house, situated in front of a reforested mountain.

In another hamlet, Agua Alegre, fresh water for cooking and drinking was only available from a small communal tap. Some sixty families lived in the houses nearby, and long lines formed as the women filled plastic jugs to carry away. Five years ago, when local authorities started rationing the supply, residents were told that they could draw water at any time they wanted, but only on certain days of the week during the summer; three years ago, the schedule was limited to specific hours on consecutive days. Now water is only available on Wednesdays and Saturdays, between the hours of three in the afternoon and five in the morning. A middle-aged widow called Doña Gloria told me that she made about fifty trips to the tap on each of the days that water was available. Another resident, Ilda Ramirez, told me, “This isn’t even the worst time of year. The worst months for water are March, April, and May,” which were still weeks away.

The only crop that could grow reliably at these altitudes was potatoes. I visited the houses of four farmers; all of them were losing money. Changing weather patterns were forcing them to purchase fertilizers, extra compost, and pesticides. The growing season had also contracted, meaning most harvests were selling at the same time, driving down the price. One potato farmer, a seventy-five-year-old with two children in the U.S., had given up on trying to grow anything. “La papa no da papa,” he said, making a pun on the word for potato, which is slang for money. The son of another farmer had left for the U.S. three months earlier, taking his nine-year-old daughter with him. “How else was he going to get across the border?” the father said. Their neighbor had also emigrated, but he’d opted to make the trip without his children and was now detained in Texas. “The ticket is travelling with a kid,” he added. “They try to cross the border with their children because they know they’ll get released when they seek asylum.”

Federico Matías, a potato farmer in a tiny hamlet called Nuevo Belén, wore the traditional dress of the area: pink striped pants, a stiff purple scarf, and a straw sun hat. He was Mam, an indigenous group of some six hundred thousand people, and learned Spanish working alongside Mexican day laborers in the U.S. He had migrated three times as a younger man, back when it was easier to travel across the border. Now, at forty-nine, he lived in the mountains with his wife, his father, and his nineteen-year-old daughter. Water and firewood were so scarce that the family only bathed once a week, in an outdoor structure made of stone. Matías, who has been losing thousands of quetzales on each potato harvest, reeled off a litany of mounting expenses. “Thankfully, I have my family members in the United States,” he said. “They give us money to eat.” His four other children, all of them between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, live in California. Late last year, his nineteen-year-old daughter left for the U.S. to join them, but was arrested and later deported. She told her father, “I got scared that when I came back you guys wouldn’t be here.”

Residents of Paraje León, Irma Jiménez and her husband depended on maize as their main source of food and sold other vegetables at markets. “We kept losing crops,” Jiménez said. “There wasn’t money, and so we started to have to cut down trees.”

Paraje León, a village of three hundred people, in a remote corner of the highlands department of Totonicapán, is on the edge of an expanding swath of Central America that’s known as the dry corridor. The area begins in Panama and snakes north through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and parts of southern Mexico. Home to some ten million people, it is defined by its susceptibility to droughts, tropical storms, landslides, and flash floods; more than half of the residents in the region are subsistence farmers, and at least two million of them have gone hungry in the last decade because of extreme weather. The south of Guatemala has suffered spectacularly in recent years, forcing the federal government, last December, to offer food stamps to families who lost more than half of their land to a prolonged drought in the towns along the Honduran border. As climate change has worsened, the dry corridor has extended into the western part of the country—scientists describe Totonicapán as the most vulnerable department in the western highlands—and efforts have been made to anticipate and mitigate further damage.

One afternoon in November, 2015, a delegation from the Asociación de Cooperación para el Desarrollo Rural de Occidente (C.D.R.O.) visited the home of the mayor of Paraje León, an affable seventy-one-year-old named Domingo de León. Through a national initiative financed by the U.S. government, the C.D.R.O. had received a contract to launch a pilot project designed to help villages respond to climate change. The total grant amounted to a hundred and ninety thousand dollars over a three-year period, enough for trained agronomists to show the community how to diversify their crops, conserve water, and reforest some of the surrounding areas. Annual droughts that used to last about four weeks were beginning to drag on for months in Paraje León, where most of the residents made their money cutting down trees to sell as firewood. “We wanted them to try growing plants instead,” Antonia Xuruc, who directed the project, told me. “We had to be careful not to make it seem like we were going in to try to change their life style.”

De León, who wears a cowboy hat and boots, with a cell phone dangling from a lanyard around his neck, was suspicious at first. During elections, campaigning politicians make the rounds in rural parts of the country, disbursing money and promises in exchange for loyalty at the ballot box. Residents were also wary of outside groups trying to strip the town of its timber. “I don’t want us to be taken advantage of,” de León said. When the residents of Paraje León decided to hold a general assembly to vote on the proposal, the result was a deadlock, but a group of about twenty people eventually agreed to move forward. “When the program started, the names we took down were all men,” Loyda Socop, another staffer at the C.D.R.O., said. “But it turned out that it was mostly women who were behind it. They were the ones who wanted to give this a try.”

The practice of cutting trees to sell for firewood, which was growing increasingly common in the area, has steadily deforested the region around Totonicapán.

A worker burns the land as preparation for the next onion harvest, near the city of Quetzaltenango. With less tree cover, the effects of oscillating temperatures have worsened, making it more difficult for farmers to recoup losses.

At the time, Irma Jiménez, then a thirty-one-year-old mother of three, was trying to persuade her husband not to leave for the U.S. Like many families in the western highlands, Jiménez and her husband depended on maize as their main source of food and sold other vegetables at markets in the surrounding villages. “We kept losing crops,” Jiménez said. “There wasn’t money, and so we started to have to cut down trees.” The practice, which was growing increasingly common in the area, has steadily deforested the mountainside around Paraje León. With less tree cover, the effects of oscillating temperatures have worsened, making it even more difficult for local farmers to recoup the losses in their harvests. “My husband told me he had to go north, that it was the only way,” Jiménez told me. “But I said to him, ‘Don’t go. There’s money here. We just have to figure out how to earn it.’ ”

Jiménez has dark hair, an angular, youthful face, and ramrod posture. Her house, on a sloping plot of land, consists of a cluster of rooms with dirt floors and doorless entryways. The area’s soil is intermittently rocky, with broad patches of thick vegetation and coniferous trees. The agronomists with the C.D.R.O. showed Jiménez how to arrange her crops to take advantage of alternating stretches of sun and shade. Tree cover helped modulate temperature and absorb rainfall, and certain plants could protect the harvest from morning frosts. The C.D.R.O. also provided plastic receptacles to capture rain water and condensation, as well as seeds for additional crops. Rising humidity in the region meant, among other things, that Jiménez could plant coffee and citrus at higher altitudes. Charchalac, who oversaw the Climate, Nature, and Communities program in the highlands, told me that, three years earlier, it would have been impossible to find these types of crops in a place like Paraje León. “The coffee and citrus are a clear sign of climate change,” he said. “At the same time, it can be an opportunity. By planting so many diverse things, you can create your own microclimates.”

At the end of the first year, Jiménez and her family had grown enough maize to last them most of the following year, saving them hundreds of quetzales in purchases each month. The C.D.R.O. also set up a device in Totonicapán that measured wind speed, barometric pressure, humidity, and a host of other indicators that could help predict weather events that imperilled crops. In the span of a single month, Jiménez received a pair of text messages from the service, one warning about a coming frost and another alerting her to a stretch of unseasonable heat and humidity. “I planned accordingly,” she told me. “It saved my crops. I warned my neighbors, too, but some of them who weren’t involved in the program or didn’t believe me didn’t make their own preparations, and they lost an entire year’s worth of food.”

Women collect water in the town of Agua Alegre, in the arid, alpine reaches of the department of Huehuetenango.

Within three years, Jiménez and her husband no longer needed to cut firewood to cover their expenses. They sold tomatoes, vegetables, and beans to buyers at nearby markets and also some of their fruit—apples, peaches, citruses—to residents in Paraje León. Others, including de León, the mayor, were experimenting with their plots as well. A forestry expert at the C.D.R.O. helped a group of volunteers create a nursery for tree saplings, and a local board formed to monitor their progress. Before long, they were planting in denuded stretches of the mountainside.

Jiménez’s brother-in-law worked in a restaurant in Mississippi, and the remittances that he sent home were an irrefutable testament to the benefits of leaving Paraje León. Still, for the first time, she and her husband could make an argument for staying. Jiménez managed to convince her sister, who lived in a neighboring village, not to migrate. Her father-in-law had tried, and failed, to reach the United States several years before, and he’d since been saddled with a massive debt. When he broached the idea of selling his land to repay the bank, Jiménez’s husband told him that the land was too valuable to give up. “The more success we had,” Socop, of the C.D.R.O., told me, “the less attractive it was becoming for people to leave town.”

In July, 2017, the Trump Administration ended funding for the Climate, Nature, and Communities program that covered the project in Paraje León. Although the President had been explicit in questioning the scientific consensus on climate change, there were no official announcements or press conferences; the funding simply petered out. “The reasoning wasn’t an official thing,” one N.G.O. director, who preferred to remain anonymous, told me. “Those who were associated with the U.S. Embassy had a way of communicating it. It was something that came up informally, that the climate-change work would no longer be a thing.” Advocates began noticing subtle changes in the language adopted by U.S.A.I.D. In grant proposals and project descriptions, “climate change” was replaced with phrases such as “resilience to environmental impacts.”

Sebastian Charchalac talks to villagers in a field in Paraje León. Trained agronomists, through grants, have been instructing rural communities in diversifying crops, conserving water, and reforesting some of the surrounding areas.

The residents of Paraje León, meanwhile, knew little about the new Presidential Administration in the U.S. but noticed changes in the community. Jiménez told me that the text-message alerts about weather patterns ceased. (“I started to just look at the sky and clouds to predict if there would be a bad frost,” she said.) A representative from the C.D.R.O. continued to visit the village, but less frequently, and the seed supply diminished. Even so, the people of Paraje León had been fortunate to a degree: their village was one of only a few that had the chance to join the regional initiative before the funding disappeared.

“The little bit of money we got here made a huge impact,” Charchalac told me, during my first visit to Paraje León. We were touring a greenhouse built by Marcos de León, the mayor’s son. There were patches of tomatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables; flowers and vines coiled around wooden stakes pitched along the perimeter. School had just let out for the day, and groups of children bobbed along the road outside, heading home to have lunch and then help their families in the fields. Their teachers, who are driven into town each day from the nearest city, roughly an hour away, were piling into a truck to begin the trip back.

Charchalac had not been to the village for almost two years, and his excitement at seeing everyone was mixed with a bitter sense of what could have been. “We had big plans,” he said. “We were going to do what we did in Paraje León to ten other communities in the department.” Last year, the Guatemalan government officially added five municipalities of Totonicapán to the list of locales classified as being part of the dry corridor, which makes them eligible for emergency-relief funding. One of them, called Santa María Chiquimula, includes Paraje León.

Graves painted with the U.S. flag, in the cemetery of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, indicate that the deceased died as immigrants in the U.S. The families paint the flags as a symbol of thanks for money that their loved ones sent home from the U.S.

In most of the western highlands, the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when. “Extreme poverty may be the primary reason people leave,” Edwin Castellanos, a climate scientist at the Universidad del Valle, told me. “But climate change is intensifying all the existing factors.” Extended periods of heat and dryness, known as canículas, have increased in four of the last seven years, across the country. Yet even measurements of annual rainfall, which is projected to decline over the next fifty years, obscure the effects of its growing irregularity on agriculture. Farming, Castellanos has said, is “a trial-and-error exercise for the modification of the conditions of sowing and harvesting times in the face of a variable environment.” Climate change is outpacing the ability of growers to adapt. Based on models of shifting weather patterns in the region, Castellanos told me, “what was supposed to be happening fifty years from now is our present reality.”

San Juan Ixcoy is a small city of twenty thousand people, tucked away in a valley of the Cuchumatán mountains, some sixty-five miles from the Mexican border. It is a lively place, with a bustling downtown full of small shops and semi-paved roads lined with trees; ramshackle houses fan out from a central plaza, designed in the Spanish Colonial style. On a warm afternoon last month, I visited a local school, a single-story building with a pitched roof that had served as a military garrison during the country’s civil war. One of the teachers, Rafael Rafael, who was twenty-five, voluble, and wearing a white polo shirt, told me that many of his students had recently left for the U.S. “In a class of twenty-five students, at least five drop out every term to migrate with their families,” Rafael said. “I don’t like it, but it’s hard to blame them.”

Across the country, the dropout rate nearly doubled last year. Each semester, Rafael expected to have about two months of classes before he started to lose students. At another school where he worked, in nearby San Pedro Soloma, matriculation declined by a hundred students every year since 2015, from five hundred and thirty to a hundred and eighty. “All of this is because of immigration,” he told me.

In Paraje León, a mother walks home with her baby at dusk. This remote corner of the highlands department of Totonicapán is on the edge of an expanding swath of Central America’s dry corridor.

As we spoke, a group of students, still wearing their school uniforms, were playing soccer on a grassy pitch next to the schoolhouse. Across the street, a few men were using rakes to churn the soil in preparation for harvest time. “Those who are still here take turns working on the properties,” Rafael told me, motioning toward the men. “We’re entering maize-and-bean season. But there aren’t enough people here to work the fields.” Rafael’s own brother had left for the U.S. two months earlier, taking his eight-year-old out of school so that they could travel together. “I’m not going to migrate” Rafael said. “For the moment, I have a stable job, at least for as long as there are enough students around for classes.”

A little over a month later, I received a phone call from him. It was nearly midnight on a Sunday, and I was at home, in New York. He told me that he had something to share, though his voice caught as he began. “I’m going to be leaving soon, too,” he said. He sounded dejected and was reluctant to elaborate. He still had his job at the school, he said, but his salary couldn’t cover his family’s living expenses. His wife and their six-month-old baby, he added, would remain behind. “There are things you can do there”—in the U.S.—“that you just can’t do here,” he said. I asked him what he had in mind, but he demurred, mumbling something vague about work. He mentioned his brother, whose trip to the U.S. had shown Rafael that there was more he could do for his family if he were in the U.S. He didn’t seem fully convinced. Then, a note of certitude crept into his voice, and his words quickened. “I’ll call you when I make it there.”

The following video from PBS features another region within the ‘dry corridor’ of Central America, in Honduras.

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Play media comment.

Here are a few images from our visit to Guatemala a few years ago:

Two of my great friends and colleagues discuss the itinerary as we begin our journey.

OK the local music is not to everyone’s taste – !! – ha ha

Though some of us appreciate the local scene.

Some of our hosts in Guatemala – he is a landscape gardener as well as a Maya Priest (see below – who thankfully successfully treated me for an illness during our stay) and she makes the beautiful garments that you see in the picture.

Local transportation often features highly attractive former US school buses.

Picturesque St. George overlooks Lake Atitlan – our base for a few days.

That’s me sharing a lovely moment with some schoolchildren and a well earned time for an evening cocktail with my wife.

Evening stroll in Antigua, the old capital of Guatemala.[supanova_question]