Cambiando Futuros en Guatemala[1]
Our crew before heading out on our first day of work.
It was the last day of our service project – to build a home for (and with) a Guatemalan family – but I don’t think any of us were ready for it to end. That morning we were working on the final touches – Byron and Manuel, our two Guatemalan crew leaders, our jefes; the student crew of Miles, Josie, Maddie, and Azul; and Ofni, the young father of the family who would soon move into this house. We installed two sliding glass windows and a solid-core wood door, and grouted the beautiful terracotta floor tiles that had been laid the day before.
Meanwhile, Ofni’s mother-in-law was making lunch on the stove we had installed. A pot of rice and finely diced vegetables was simmering on one burner, while tomates, chiles, and sliced cebollas were roasting on another. In short breaks between tasks, I kept an eye on the progress as she blended the roasted vegetables with cilantro, parsley, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds to produce a sauce in which chicken pieces would be stewed. As a midday rainstorm moved in, we covered the tools and hauled a makeshift wood plank table into the house. Serenaded by the gentle staccato patter of rain on the sheet metal roof, the ten of us – our work crew plus Ofni, Maria, and their three-month-old baby Arleth Verenice – sat down to a delicious hot lunch of pepián de pollo, a traditional Guatemalan Mayan dish. We ate and smiled and laughed together, dry and comfortable in the warmth of good company.
Lunch in the new home of Ofni, Maria, and their baby daughter.
For the past ten years, my friend and colleague James Burke, a Spanish teacher at Washington High School, has been leading spring break service trips to Antigua, Guatemala. I’ve always been interested in this project, drawn by both my memories of a week spent in Antigua some forty years ago, and the enthusiastically positive demeanor of the students when they returned. James and I had been discussing the possibility of me joining a trip, but I couldn’t commit because of my wife’s health. In the fall of 2019, a year after she passed away, I was finally ready to do so, only to have the Covid pandemic shut down the trip just as we were getting ready to go.
James and I stayed in touch after I retired from Washington in June 2020, and when he told me this past October that a new trip was being organized, I enthusiastically said, “Count me in!” So, in the early hours of Sunday, March 12, I met three other adults and thirteen students at the Eastern Iowa Airport to fly to Guatemala City. By three in the afternoon, we were being greeted at the Aeropuerto Internacional La Aurora by Alexis, Eddie, and Gregorio, the three full-time staff of ImagininGuatemala (IG), the local NGO we’d be working with. We clambered into a 20-seater charter bus, navigated the Guatemala City traffic, stopped for dinner at Pollo Campero, and then headed on through the city and over steep mountains to Antigua, forty kilometers and two hours away. Antigua has all the charm that Guatemala City lacks. The city of 50,000 is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – cobblestone streets and narrow sidewalks border the brightly painted stucco walls of homes and businesses. We were dropped off next to a basketball court in Colonia Candelaria, on the northeast edge of the city, near the crumbling ruins of a church destroyed in the Santa Marta earthquakes in 1773.[2]
We fanned out to our nearby host families. James, Ceci Cornejo (a young paraeducator recently hired at Washington), and I stayed with Dina Cazali, a warm, generous woman who operates a small pension out of her home. Five private rooms open onto a second-floor walkway overlooking a central room on the first floor, all of which is under roof. The second floor reaches out to form a rooftop balcony filled with potted plants and clotheslines. My two companions are far more bilingual than I, but as we chatted with Dina, I realized she thoughtfully adjusts her speech to the needs of her guests, and I was able to easily follow the conversation.
After an orientation meeting that evening at the IG offices, we returned to our lodgings. On this Third Sunday of Lent, some of the churches were holding processionals. We could hear music in the distance, mostly horns and drums, somehow sounding both festive and mournful. As I walked up the hill, I passed un viejo, hunched over, maybe five feet tall. “Buenas noches,” I offered. He replied in kind, warmly, enthusiastically. Even to the many gringos who intrude upon their city, los Antigüeños son muy amable.
On Monday we were given time to get familiar with the city and its culture. I awoke at dawn to the sound of great-tailed grackles speaking a language different from the one birds speak in Iowa. A tinny church bell was struck, over and over, in no particular pattern, perhaps the repetition making up for the lack of resonance. We spent the morning on a guided walking tour of the city, starting with a hike up nearby Cerro de La Cruz, from whose heights we could admire a vista of the entire city and the ominous Volcán de Agua on its far side, and ending at the beautiful baroque facade of the Iglesia de La Merced, gleaming gold and white in the sun. That afternoon we traveled to nearby San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a Kaqchikel Maya town known for its traditional textiles, where we met the family of IG staffer Eddie and watched his wife demonstrate weaving on a backstrap loom. We bought textile items she and her neighbors had woven and then helped make (and eat) tortillas negras cooked on a portable comal.
View of Antigua and Volcán de Agua from Cerro de la Cruz.
We began our service project on Tuesday. We had been split up into three crews, each one led by two local housebuilders. The goal of each crew was to build a home for a family in need of better housing.[3] We loaded a large water cooler and our lunches into the back of a camioneta, and then clambered aboard, sitting on the sidewalls of its bed, arms wrapped around its rack, and traveled through the city of work. The house site was ten kilometers away on the edge of San Antonio Aguas Calientes. After meeting Ofni, Maria, Arleth, and Maria’s mother and sisters, who lived nearby, we lugged the toolboxes and the first six 50-kilo bags of cement from their porch and got to work.
Byron and Manual gave us instructions in Spanish. Thankfully we had studied our housebuilder vocabulary. Hammer is martillo, nails are clavos, pintura is paint, and the four-by-eight fiberboard sheets are láminas. When Byron said, “Quarenta bloques!” we knew how many cinder blocks to carry from a nearby stack to the 12-by-16-foot trench that was the footprint of the main room. Meanwhile, some of us wheelbarrowed sand to a packed dirt area between the outdoor sink and shower and the chicken coop, under the shade of a carob tree. After shoveling the sand and cement until it was well blended, water was added, and then more shoveling and mixing until it was the proper consistency for mortar. The walls went up, seven courses in front, eight courses in the back, with the second and last courses laid upside down so the cinder blocks could be filled with rebar and mortar for greater stability, and large bolts could be inserted in the wet mortar of the top course. Ofni worked alongside us, always a smile on his face. “David!” he would call out to me, just for fun. Maria, carrying sleeping Arleth in a sling tied over her shoulder, brought us a mid-morning snack – a bowl of freshly sliced pineapple.
On the ride back to Antigua that afternoon, I looked around at our student crew and thought about how much I was enjoying getting to know them, seeing parts of them they usually don’t share with their classroom teachers. Miles and Josie were excitedly comparing their lists of top ten breakup songs. Maddie and Azul called out to dogs lounging beside the road, to dogs assembled on a street corner by the mercado, seemingly living in their own worlds. As we rumbled through the streets of Antigua, we felt exhausted but happy, and somehow changed. We had proved ourselves in the crucible of a hard day’s labor. We smiled and shook our heads at the U.S. tourists wandering around in short pants and skimpy tops, oblivious to or in glaring opposition to the culture of the Guatemalan people.
Our second workday was just as challenging. I noticed that Ofni had carefully tied up some of the low branches of the carob tree. Our heads had been bumping into the large green bean pods as we worked on Tuesday. As we prepared to begin our work, I stopped to look up at the surrounding mountains, where carefully tended campos clung to even the steepest slopes, and directly overhead, where the pale wisp of a crescent moon was dissolving in the morning sun. We cut all the four-by-fours and two-by-fours that would frame the house, and drilled holes for the bottom plates of those walls. We prepared to pour the floor, again mixing the cement by hand – trece carretas de arena spread out ten inches thick, seis sacos de cemento poured over that, and for a top layer, siete carretas de piedrin.[4] We sifted and mixed the dry ingredients by shoveling them into a peak, como un volcán, then shoveling the entire volcano five feet away, then shoveling it back to its original location. We leveled out its peak and created a depression in the middle, adding water, mas agua, mas agua, como un lago, then formed an irrigation ditch around the lake, letting the water soak in until it was ready to be mixed into concrete.
Our mid-morning snack was a bowlful of sliced papaya. Ah, the taste of a fresh, tree-ripened papaya – the fruit all but melted in our mouths. And there was enough left for a dessert to go with our lunch of sandwiches and chips. Byron was ready to get to it after lunch. Maddie, Josie, Azul, and I formed a bucket brigade from the wet concrete into the house, while Manuel and Miles rapidly filled our three-gallon buckets with wet concrete. As soon as we supplied Byron, he emptied each bucket and troweled the concrete to a smooth level surface. When the interior room was done, we poured a six-by-twelve-foot slab adjoining the house for the outdoor kitchen. We were able to knock off at three o’clock, just as a light rain began to fall.
At the end of day two, with Maria’s mother and nephew Mateo in this photo.
On our third day the workload began to ease up. We framed the rest of the house, nailing the wall studs and top plate and rafter beams, adding frames for the windows and door. We tacked down the sturdy fiberboard láminas we had painted a bright turquoise color, cutting out space for the windows. Ofni brought us 16-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola, which we decided to store in the water cooler so they’d be ice-cold at lunchtime. Maria’s mother made us a lunch of spaghetti with vegetables, a kind of pasta primavera. And for an afternoon snack, Maria brought us a Guatemalan treat, rellenitos de plátano – mashed plantains stuffed with sweet frijoles, deep-fried and rolled in sugar. We worked until five o’clock, laying the twelve-by-twelve-inch floor tiles and installing the high-efficiency wood-burning Chispa cookstove.[5]
Friday was our last day at the house. After that wonderful lunch with the family, we wired the house for electricity, putting in three overhead lights and three outlets, and installed a plaque beside the door that announced the owners of the home and our role in constructing it. We gathered inside the house for a formal handing over of the keys. Byron gave a little speech, and Ofni expressed his heartfelt thanks, with bilingual Azul translating so we’d know all that was said. She didn’t need to translate the part when he told us we were now their lifelong friends, and were welcome in their home any time we wanted to visit. When we gave the house keys to Ofni, Maria, and Arleth, there were few dry eyes.[6] I was moved by the gratitude of the family, but also impressed by the students, who are struggling to shape their identity in a world fraught with social media, who at a tender age weathered a pandemic, with its social distancing and sheltering in place. They were fully in the moment. They understood the part they had played in this extraordinary kindness, this most human of acts.
That morning as we were loading up the camionetas, a man who lived next door was standing in his doorway watching us. He said something to the drivers I didn’t catch. Azul smiled as she turned to me, translating, “He said, ‘Take good care of those gems.’”
Footnotes:
[1] Cambiando Futuros (Changing Futures) is a slogan used by ImagininGuatemala, the charitable organization we worked with. I encourage you to visit their website and click on “how you can help.”
[2] After those earthquakes, the capital of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala was moved to present-day Guatemala City. The city that was eventually rebuilt became Antigua (as in Old Guatemala).
[3] Ours would be houses #181-183 built by the ImagininGuatemala NGO.
[4] Our concrete formula was 13 wheelbarrows of sand, 6 bags of cement, and 7 wheelbarrows of gravel.
[5] See this website for more information: Chispa Stoves / Clean Cooking Alliance.