Sola en Guatemala: Pop Wuj Projects

One of the best elements of my school was that it works closely on community projects, and I feel like my money is making a difference here. One very visible project is the stove project, which assists community members with the materials and building skills and labor to build a new, more efficient wood-burning stove for their house. Since many people still cook over open fires in the middle of a one room, dirt house, with no ventilation, the stoves reduce wood consumption by 50 %, improve ventilation and ease of cooking all around. It's not the school's most important project (that would be their local student scholarship program), but it is an easy one for us foreign students to get involved with, and it has tangible results every week. The task the week I was there was delivering the stove materials to 7 chosen familes (later students would help construct the stoves).

The families are required to be part of the process, since the stoves do cost money to build and must be cured properly before use, etc. so the families must be invested in the outcome, too, and they do pay a small amount. We students were excited to be out on the streets, doing something useful, riding in a big dump truck, gathering supplies from various shops in town, talking and joking in English. I didn't even notice the families at first, since they blended in with all the other Mayan-accented locals, but as we gathered and moved supplies I suddenly noticed them, as they were right there with us, carrying items. There were six women and one young man.

What really got my attention was when I realized they were all dressed up. I know because they all had their nice shoes on. Seeing these families, dressed in their town best, in their good shoes, made me want to cry. These are folks who live in one room dirt-floor shacks, and getting these elemental, wood-burning stoves was such an event of import in their lives that they had all taken the time to look their very best, even though we were all hauling dirt and bricks around. We who have so much take so much more for granted, and those who have very little take every small thing with such gratefulness and gladness. We have camping stoves fancier than these wood burning stoves we were building. But to them it meant so much.

First stop: hardware store. Loading the stove tops into the truck.

The families, including a little boy in his footy-pajamas, getting bags of clay and sand. Note the pretty blue ribbon in the braid of the woman on the right--a traditional look.