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learning curves
AS PART OF A HUMANITARIAN VOLUNTEER GROUP, ROGER TOLL WENT DEEP INTO THE MOUNTAINS OF GUATEMALA, WHERE POVERTY IS ENDEMIC. THERE HE DISCOVERED THE UNTOLD RICHES THAT COME FROM HELPING YOUR FELLOW MAN.
rom Guatemala City, it was an hour’s flight then a winding
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to a remote landing strip, two-hour drive through the lofty Sierra de Santa Cruz mountains to the village of Sepamac, where we’d spend a week “voluntouring” among the Q’eqchi’ Indians.
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learning curves
voluntouring
s journeys go, it wasn’t incredibly long or strenuous, but in connecting us with a culture distant from our own, it was as revelatory as any trek of discovery I’ve taken. For the volunteers on this trip, however, revelation was not the motive. Instead, we were eager to work hard with pick, shovel and hammer to do our small part in relieving the poverty of the Q’eqchi’ people, descendants of ancient Maya who live in the remote central highlands among steep, jungleblanketed mountains, eking out a life from tiny plantations of maize as they have for centuries. The Q’eqchi’ are a dignified, quiet people, one of the largest of 22 distinct groups of Mayan descendants in Guatemala. With family names like Coc, Cucul and Tzí, many have facial features that could have been copied from thousand-year-old Mayan temple paintings. The women wear traditional clothes, the men jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps—evidence of outside influences, and time spent in the fertile lowlands earning much-needed cash by harvesting sugar cane or mandarin oranges. We traveled under the auspices of Choice Humanitarian, a Salt Lake City–based, secular philanthropic organization launched 26 years ago, which also runs projects in Kenya, Nepal, Bolivia and Mexico that welcome paying guests on weeklong “expeditions.” In our case, we were 15—two couples with eight children between them, a high school teacher/amateur archaeologist, and my wife and myself—as well as expedition leaders Steven Handley and For more information on the work Emily Franson. Guateof Choice Humanitarian, visit www.choicehumanitarian.org. mala’s in-country direc-
tor, Javier Rabanales, his wife, Walfred, and their three college-age children rounded out the group. “There are neither economic opportunities nor governmental services in this area of the Sierra, so it is a challenge to survive,” Rabanales told me, explaining why Choice Humanitarian’s focus in Guatemala is in the Q’eqchi’ lands. The problems are primarily related to the area’s remoteness: lack of regular transport, minimal government assistance, no modern health facilities and, of course, no manufacturing or traditional commerce. With a lack of marketable resources, little
of which was led by a villager to someone’s home. A group of local men would already be working, clearing and leveling a piece of land where a small new home would go, usually next to the owner’s weathered, smoky hut, with its dirt floor, permeable roof of fronds, and plywood sleeping-and-sitting platforms. After leveling the land, we would dig postholes and put up a simple frame of narrow tree trunks, we Americans taking advantage of our height to hold beams in place as a carpenter nailed down the corrugated iron roofing. We helped mix cement and push wheelbarrows to a mason who leveled the new
With a lack of marketable resources, little formal education and no electricity, the Q’eqchi’ enjoy few of the advances in technology and healthcare that we take for granted.
A Matter of Choice
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formal education and no electricity, the Q’eqchi’ enjoy few of the advances in technology and healthcare that we take for granted. “People can grow things, but without good roads it is hard to get them to market,” Rabanales said. The villagers let us stay in the two-room schoolhouse, built last year by a Choice Humanitarian expedition, and we had lights there, thanks to the luxury of a portable generator. In the evening, the children and adults in the village would join us on the school’s narrow terrace and we’d discuss the day’s events and share our diverse backgrounds. One of the youths in our group, an Eagle Scout, had prepared a talk on basic hygiene and the danger of germs—translated, in a hopscotch fashion, from English to Spanish to Q’eqchi’—complete with a microscope through which the children were fascinated to see examples of germs squiggling on glass plates. At times, the evening evolved into games like musical chairs, accompanied by the squeals of village children, or into hilarious rounds of singing “head, shoulders, knees and toes” in all three of our languages. Those of us who were taking a voluntouring vacation, “versus just lolling on a beach,” as Redmond, Washington, resident Rodger Ricks put it to me, had similar motives: to be closer to a people and a culture, beyond the touristic surface of a foreign land, and to serve others, if only for a few short days. The parents of the two families also had their children in mind. “We wanted them to see that not everyone lives in affluence,” Ricks told me, “and that it doesn’t take riches to be happy. Vacations can be self-indulgent. When you serve others, you feel good about yourself.” Every morning, we divided into three working groups, each
floor. We worked shoulder to shoulder with village teams, all far more experienced in basic construction techniques than we were, with our soft, office hands that fascinated our hardcalloused co-workers. Aided by Spanish that some of us had picked up in schools and travels, and some of them had during seasonal work in the lowlands, communication was not difficult. Beyond our basic words, the more immediate language was made up of smiles, warmth and goodwill, and pointing at objects, and experimenting with words in Q’eqchi’ and English that produced moments of merriment. Working together, we created simple bonds, and when the next day we would run into a co-worker on the steep trails that connected far-flung plots of land, the smile of recognition was cordial and friendly. “The village needs to own the project and to drive it,” Handley told me when I asked about how Choice works. “Most aid is a temporary bandage, not long-term development. Our goal is to end poverty by getting a village to work together for its collective good, with natural leaders rising up to guide the way.” Rather than prioritizing what projects need doing and giving the villagers orders, Choice, true to its name, lets the villagers decide which projects are most vital to them. “This puts them at the center, motivates them, makes them proud as partners in all we do,” Handley said. The project of home improvements is a tool that allows villagers to learn how to work together, Handley explained. “This project in particular helps families [bond], since they need first to decide which 35 families out of 110 are most in need of help. Then they have to work on each other’s homes, which
makes it pretty intimate.” In Guatemala, projects have also included construction of schools, health clinics and community water systems, plus adult literacy programs, women’s savings programs and leadership training. A village “graduates” when it exhibits successful, continuing self-development. “The end of poverty comes not from building projects, but from building communities,” Rabanales told me. “We try to inspire villagers to be more creative and innovative, to think differently about their future, and in the process break down the mind-set of poverty that believes nothing has changed for centuries, nor can change in the future. The endgame is to become self-sustainable and not need our help any more.” On the morning of our fifth day, we packed up and flew back to Guatemala City for a two-day visit to the nearby colonial city of Antigua, where we had our farewell dinner before the group split up. It was New Year’s Eve, and already the sound of firecrackers echoed around town as we walked to dinner. At the end of the meal, Franson asked us each what we found most enlightening about our experience. “I have a better idea now of how the 72 percent of the world that lives in poverty survives,” one boy said. Another was impressed by “the dignity and grace of these people.” A college girl said she hadn’t realized how fast she could fall in love with the children in the village. “I have left part of my heart with them,” she said. A parent who works as a corporate attorney said he was “stunned by the sheer beauty of the mountains and the dense green jungle. This is a country I now deeply care about.” Rodger Ricks said that working side by side with the villagers “allowed us to touch each other as people and to appreciate their humanity. It expanded our vision of the world, and maybe it expanded theirs as well.” Delta offers daily I couldn’t have agreed more. There is little nonstop service to/ we could accomplish on a measurable level in from Atlanta and three days, so I realized early on that our expeGuatemala City, and rience was not really about the results of the nonstop service to/ work we were doing. Yes, they were important from Los Angeles and Guatemala City for the villagers, something they would conthree times per tinue working on long after we had gone, but week. For more inour job—more for us than them—was to reach formation, visit across a divide in time and culture, and allow delta.com. the excuse of working together to let us see that despite our vastly different ways of living we were all, simply, humans. Ultimately, it was coming together, as Ricks said, that allowed us, through our smiles and laughter, and with our shovels and hammers, to touch each other for a few days. Today, work continues with the Q’eqchi’ of the highlands despite the terrible loss of Choice Humanitarian’s country directors, Javier and Walfred Rabanales, in an accident on a return journey to Sepamac several months later. Never have I met such focused, generous and openhearted people; they were entirely devoted to bettering the opportunities and existence of the Q’eqchi’ Indians. Contributing editor Roger Toll travels far and wide for Sky from his home office near Salt Lake City.
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