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My month and a half in Guatemala so far has been otherworldly. Sometimes I feel like I'm so far from the life
I live in the United States. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning; it is still dark but already the neighbors' music
is playing, the roosters are screeching, cows are being driven past the volunteer porch and trucks are starting
to rumble on the road.
On a Sunday a Long Way Home volunteer or intern might walk to the market to buy food for the volunteer house.
The dusty road to town is filled with potholes; tuktuks whistle and rattle past. Dogs of every shape and color
imaginable run about, following their owners bicycles or laying on the concrete outside of the hundreds of tiny
tiendas that line the streets. Women carry children on their backs and sometimes huge bundles on their heads; teenage
girls rock their traje while teetering on stilettos. Men carry azadones as they walk to the fields; a small boy
walks up a hill bent double under the bundle of wood on his back. A grazing, starving horse with huge sores on
its back and a halter with a bright blue tassel on its forehead grazes near a home where a small boy standing on
the roof with a homemade barrilete (kite) is silhouetted against the bright sky. Everyone smiles a "buenos dias"
or "buenos tardes" to those they pass on the road, even if that person is a gringa.
The market is overflowing and overwhelming; pungent smells and second-hand clothing and every type of food imaginable.
Vendedoras Cristina, a tiny bright-eyed 50-year-old, and Reina, a beautiful teenager, smile warmly, displaying gold
teeth and golder hearts as they serve up delicious frijoles, eggs, and made-on-the-spot tortillas for less than
a U.S. dollar.
Every workday holds a new, sometimes unexpected task. I might help build a recycling bin, or garden, or take a
chicken bus to Antigua to pick up medicine for Parque Chimiyá's dogs, or teach an English class to Comalapan
children, or help with a concrete pour at the school we're building. The only constant is that I'm always
learning something new, and that if there is a particular project I am interested in I am encouraged to pursue it.
Volunteers and interns at Long Way Home work with amazing people. Sometimes I am taken aback by the dedication,
humor, and passion Mateo, Adam and Liz bring to the table every day. Whether I'm learning how to drive in a
nail, cut lamina, mulch a garden, write a newsletter or expand my mind to fathom a new and potentially frightening
idea about the world, the staff of Long Way Home are right there, encouraging, challenging, sometimes pushing me
to better myself and the world through development work.
Long Way Home has amazing, close connections and friendships with the community. Every day Parque Chimiyá is
filled with school groups and families enjoying the gardens and the soccer field and basketball courts. Every
evening throngs of Guatemalans show up after work for raucous games of soccer; Mateo often joins them. The
generosity of the people here is extraordinary; homes are opened and meals offered by families who have very
little worldly possessions. I've gossiped and eaten lunch with the family of Glindy, an 18-year-old secretary
who dreams of bettering Comalapa when she is elected mayor. Fidelia, the wise dueña of a neighborhood tienda,
teaches volunteers to make tortillas and her six-year-old granddaughter Sara regularly comes over and bakes
cookies with us in the "Peace Corps oven" in the volunteer house. Sometimes we are woken up by the cheery
"buenas dias" of Carmelita, who has come to sell still-warm milk by the glass.
Life here is new, breathtaking, challenging, sometimes frustrating or scary but always, always beautiful. For
anyone who wants to learn about the world and their responsibility to it, I recommend coming to Parque Chimiyá
and working with Long Way Home. This place and these people are incredible and amazing things are happening
everyday - who wouldn't want to be a part of it?
 I discovered Long Way Home through the very formal process of applying for an international internship with IE3 Global as an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon. At the time I had little to no idea of the range of opportunities for doing good, rewarding work in Guatemala that would be afforded to me as a Long Way Home intern because of the basic informalities involved in performing development work in a third world country. I was soon to discover the world of possibilities that lay in waiting for myself and other Long Way Home volunteers in San Juan Comalapa.
During my three month internship in Comalapa there were the regular, predictable days consisting of morning lesson planning, teaching a Latin American history class at a local school, food shopping in the market, working in the Parque Chimiyá garden in the afternoon, coaching local girls in a game of pick-up basketball and ending with an evening development work discussion over dinner.
Yet, there were also the days when the distinct character of Guatemala as a developing country surprised you with what that day's work brought you. The days when a group of Guatemalans show up to invite you to their sustainable agricultural project in a neighboring town and feed you delicious, fresh fruits you have never heard of, nor recognize. The days planting trees at a reforestation site when a small indigenous man twice my age, with twice as many tools and saplings on his back, moves twice as fast as me up and down the hillside planting trees.
Or there was the rainy day when a local woman showed up at Parque Chimiyá on foot with a baby on her back and a young boy circling her legs, all drenched. She wanted to inquire about having a wood stove built at her house by us. Mateo happened to be busy at the time and asked me to drop what I was doing so that we could get an assessment of the woman's need and reason for coming to us with this request. In general, when deciding to do a project with an individual or group, Long Way Home requires that there be sufficient need and an appropriate amount of participation or investment by the benefitting person or party.
In talking with that woman and visiting her home that rainy day I found out that her alcoholic husband had basically abandoned the family, leaving her to sustain her two boys by taking odd jobs like washing clothes and relying on a meager corn patch for some sustenance. As we talked in her sparse weaving room she served me a little sweat bread and instant coffee heated up over coals of an open fire located outside the shelter underneath some sheets of corrugated aluminum. She cooked all the family meals there, kneeling and squatting, breathing in acrid smoke all the while like all too many women in the developing world. I easily determined she was in need, next came the discussion about what she could do or provide in the stove-building process. As I mentioned, with nearly all the development projects that Long Way Home undertakes in conjunction with Guatemalan organizations or individuals we ask the locals to provide as much materials, physical labor or logistical assistance as appropriate and possible in any given situation. In this case, the mother said she would be able to procure the block and cement required for the stove as long as we donated the expensive part; the metal stove top.
Over the next few weeks Mateo continued the process of soliciting a Guatemala City Rotary Club for a donation of a quantity of metal stove tops. All the while the woman continued to stop by Parque Chimiyá from time to time to inquire about and remind us of her request and our deal. She eventually secured the materials we agreed upon and readied the stove site area. Simultaneously, my designated internship time came to a close with Long Way Home and I departed for a long awaited vacation and travel period in Southern Mexico. My obligatory and formal period of work in Comalapa came to an end and that easily could have been it for my work and continued connection with the people of Guatemala. With all due respect, for many volunteers and interns who pass through Comalapa and work for Long Way Home once their designated work period Is over, their self-satisfaction secured and with a few unique Guatemalan experiences in hand, that is it, they walk away from development work. And that's fine for some, that's all they are looking for and Long Way Home still benefits.
However, what I feel is the advantage of the grassroots, open nature of the Long Way Home organization is the opportunity for sustained, meaningful work both in Guatemala, as well as back in your home country.
For example, in this case I kept in contact with Mateo about returning after my travels for another few weeks of volunteer work. The wheels kept turning during my travel absence and when I returned to Comalapa a few weeks later the stove tops had been secured and delivered to Parque Chimiyá. In fact, the day after my return Long Way Home's resident mason, Adam Howland, was planning on beginning construction of the mother's long awaited wood stove. Thus I was able to start the project process and see it through to the end despite my brief departure from Comalapa. I was able to show the woman Long Way Home's sustained, genuine care for her situation by placing the literal and figurative first and last blocks of her family's new, efficient wood stove.
Furthermore, since returning to the United States from my time in Central America I have continued my support of Long Way Home's mission by fundraising, volunteer recruitment and promoting the organization in my home community. In addition, I recently made a return visit to Comalapa in October of 2009 to participate in and witness the realization of Long Way Home's principal goal; the construction of an earth built vocational school. Yet there are many more avenues for continued, stateside support of the organization upon completion of your on-site work in Comalapa including grant writing, project coordination and community presentations. If you are like me and believe that doing development work in the third world requires a sustained, long-term, on-the-ground approach, Long Way Home is the development organization for you.
Arriving at the tail end of the annual reforestation project, I was only present to partake in the final week of the fun day-long bag filling sessions. Once every bag was full of the equal part mulch, dirt and sand mixture, we began planting thetrees. A carefully placed white pine seedling was given a home in each bag until some 8,000 baby trees were readied for planting. Together with the local schools, we combined this effort to teach experientially about the environment with learning about the growth process of trees. We always had plenty of excited helping hands to aid our reforestation efforts. Watching the kids gleefully dig into the dirt made the lessons worthwhile.
In addition to our hands-on work with the kids, the second part of our lesson on the environment was to explain the negative effects of littering, and to promote participation in our trash filled plastic bottle project. As can easily be seen from the littered banks of Comalapa's rivers and water sources, pollution has not been taken seriously. By offering free entrance to the park to any kid who brings in a trash filled plastic bottle, we provided a win-win situation for all. Not only do we get bottles to use for our construction projects, we also help eliminate waste and make the kids conscious of the amount of daily waste they produce.
As we started reaching out to local schools, more and more requests came to teach English to the 4th through 6th graders. Teaching each grade an hour a week, we began with basic colors and animals and ended with sentence structure, common phrases, and present and past tense. Greeted as "una gringa" on my first day at school, I felt that even more important than basic English, I was exposing these kids to another culture, disproving wild and unfounded theories about Americans and showing them how much we all really have in common. Along with teaching, during my second month our main goal was to streamline the administrative work. I wrote up internship descriptions, drafted service group budget plans, reformatted the volunteer manual, designed letterhead and researched potential grant giving organizations.
During my third month, we began a project to build Adam and Liz a house out of tires. After leveling out the land, and creating grooves to lay the first tire level for the bedroom, Adam went around the community to round up old tires. Leveling the tire foundation took some patience, but after the initial layer of tires was pounded full of gravel, we began to get the hang of it and fell into a steady rhythm. Because the trade school, which we now have the land for, is going to be constructed out of tires and other recycled material, Adam and Liz's house has been a preview of future building projects to come!
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