Sara Schonhardt is a freelance reporter currently writing about and exploring her home state of Ohio after 15 years away. A longtime international reporter, she worked for nearly eight years in Indonesia for outlets such as The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and Voice of America. She was most recently a Jakarta-based staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Schonhardt has always enjoyed writing about social issues and how policies are impacting people. She traveled to Guatemala late last year through a fellowship with the International Reporting Project to document how women were responding to issues related to the environment.
The harsh conditions and increasingly unpredictable weather in the Guatemalan highlands are putting added stress on poor families and pushing up migration in an area where locals estimate nearly half of the 250 households have already seen someone leave.