the casual side of SG

I had a lot of adventures in Guatemala and was challenged and changed in many ways. But my real reason for going was to build stoves. Contrary to popular myth, the Mayans did not vanish – although they abandoned their acropolises when resources grew thin or fighting grew thick. Their descendants live on in modern Guatemala. Despite being the majority population, the indigenous are generally disliked and prejudiced against. The government offers them little to no aid and their children fall into the work trades at very young ages. Parc Central in Antigua is teeming with boys who want to polish your shoes and girls who want to sell you bracelets and other hand-craftings.

The primary belief of GVI, the organization I signed up with for my volunteer project, is that everyone has a right to education. Non-denominational and based out of the UK, they run two schools in Guatemala and dozens around the globe. They provide education through mixed age schooling but more importantly, an opportunity for these children to grow up and better their situation.

The two schools operated in Guatemala are in remote villages; the one I visited was a 45 minute ride from Antigua. These schools are not yet recognized or accredited by the government so children who attend here must also attend government school which is overcrowded and underfocused as an educational experience. Basically, the kids don’t learn much there.

The GVI school was not what I expected. On entering a corrugated metal door, the school is basically one large outdoor space. The center is a dirt floor and I can only imagine the mess of rainy season. Around the perimeter the floors are concrete and have make-shift roofs and brightly colored walls. It is surprisingly cheery and gut-wrenchingly sad at the same time. I had to hold back tears.

In the corner was a wire and mud coop where Elana, the resident of this village who managed the school and fed the volunteer staff, kept her chickens. The neighbors house poured smoke into the school and often choked out the staff; the children were used to it.

I was the only stover that week (we are called stovers and the work we do is called stoving) so one of the staff walked with me to my first house. I was do build two stoves that week with Caesar, the mason who designed/engineered the stoves.

You can’t go anywhere in Guatemala without climbing and this was no exception. A twenty-five minute walk from the school, we labored, in the sun, up a paved hill that was easily a 45° incline. The streets are littered with trash. Poor and uneducated, they don’t know that garbage breeds invisible things that make you ill and I don’t imagine they have pick-up service anyway. They don’t have a lot of things.

We turn off the paved road and start on an up and down, rutted dirt path. Inaccessible to anything but foot or bike, we walk down what I might loosely consider “blocks,” passing tightly packed ramshackle shacks made of what appears to be mud and found objects. We get to the place, pass through the stick fence and it is a total shock. For some reason, I expected them to be poor but tidy. This piece of property is a sloped and grassless dirt yard, with pits and potholes and one large hole that was about two feet deep by two round. There is junk everywhere – wrappers, rotten fruit, discarded shoes, broken toys. Four small and scraggly chickens peck at the dirt.

The house is barely a protective structure. The walls are made of mud and stone and the floors are the same pitted dirt as outside. There are two room, a kitchen and a bedroom. There is no door to the kitchen and no furniture except for a small shelf that any American would have taken to the curb. The pots and dishes are stacked against the exterior wall with a boot intermingled in the pile. The sink is outside.

The bedroom does have a door and from what I can tell, just two beds. This family has three boys, ages 4, 6, and 8 that go to the GVI school and the mother is pregnant with number four. They are not allowed to take birth control.

Families who send their children to GVI earn a stove. The better the attendance of the children, the sooner you earn a stove. Since education is not highly valued, this is the incentive to get kids to school. These families, living in extreme poverty, often cook within the home with open fires. That was the case here. In the center of the kitchen was a pile of wood with a metal grate over top and black greasy char climbing up the walls and across the ceiling. This same gunk is in their lungs. Since mothers do the cooking, they go blind early, die young and have terrible respiratory problems their whole lives. Children also inhale this poisonous smoke and are frequently burned by the fire. But this is not why these people are grateful for their stove; they do not necessarily understand the correlation with their health issues. They are glad because Caesar’s stoves are efficient, using 70% less rain forest wood, thereby costing them less money and labor to collect it.

This family’s house was so small that we had to build their stove outside. Caesar had already prepared the earth flat for the footprint and had started laying the cement block. I was to saw bricks, by hand, and then soak them in water. Since the family had to collect the water from some remote location unknown to me, it was something of a precious resource. We used the same water for all of our work and it grew horrifically filthy by the close of day two. I am a baby about doing the dishes and yet I immersed my arms in buckets of this stuff in order to provide this family a stove.

I spent my two days here sawing, mixing concrete and a mud-based gloop, and packing cement between Caesar’s laid bricks. Midday on day one, mom gave us snacks and lemon-lime soda to drink, with cups from the side of the house. This was more than they could afford but a gesture of their appreciation.

I took great care to make a beautiful stove that would live with this growing family for the next 20 years and Caesar takes great pride and care as well. It is fortunate that I live with a perfectionist home-project architect husband because I worked very well alongside the perfectionist Caesar. Despite the language barrier, we could communicate enough for me to do my work. And quickly too… a stove normally takes 2-1/2 days and I did each of mine in two.

Guatemala experienced two earthquakes in one day while I was there. The first was at 4:45am and I was asleep. When you are not accustomed to them, it takes a moment to figure out what is going on. It feels like the motion is coming from within you. While it woke me up, it was over before I knew it and I half-slept until I needed to rise at 6. The second occurred the same day while I was sitting on the bare ground, sawing bricks. The poor house shook and shifted while our stove-in-progress stood firm. It will likely outlast their only refuge from the beating sun and pouring rain.

In addition to this contemplative thought, the earthquake scared the shit out of me. We were in this tiny fenced in yard, working next to a corrugated metal roof that would easily slide off the house and decapitate or otherwise slice me in two. I spent more than a few minutes figuring out where I would run to should another one hit. The scrappy electrical wires crossing the yard limited my options.

On completion of the stove, Caesar spent 15 minutes explaining proper use and care of their new appliance. He must have also explained that they could not use it for 3 weeks until it cured but I did not find that out until later. That would drive me crazy, but I suspect these folks have more patience than North Americans. They actually have a lot of qualities that people in the US have lost.

I meet these three boys, with nothing to do, their mom away half the day, their dad in the fields. They have one outfit apiece – secondhand clothes with superheros on the shirts. No toys, a tiny sad table to do their homework and little food; certainly none nutritious. They live in extreme poverty. And yet, they were happy. All of them. The mom, looking older than her years, smiled as we worked, content to sit in a chair and watch or walk her boys to school up and down that tragic hill, expectant stomach protruding. Dad, who I met on day two was youthful and grateful, nodding at Caesar and smiling at me. I honestly do not think it was only a happy day because they got a stove. They had shelter, each other and enough. They weren’t in want and therefore they were happy.

Coming home from Guatemala, I was overwhelmed with our misery. We are angry about everything and it’s everyone else’s fault. There is a 6 minute segment on the news bitching about potholes in the city. We are suing and hating each other and are often just not very nice. We have little sense of community or appreciation for what we’ve got. In many ways, it was a harder adjustment coming back than it was going there.

This experience gave me a chance to see how life can be and how we can be within it. A little effort can make a big positive impact on someone’s life and a little more can alter the course of our world. We all could use a little grounding and I hope my experience inspires someone to do something for someone else, no matter how small or big. I have learned how to be the change I want to see in the world and my mission now is to live it, to share it and to pass it on.

Thanks for reading. Hasta luego, mis amigos!

This entry was posted by Rachel on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Community, Doing Good, Guatemala, Office News, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.