TheBanyanTree: First Week at the Project in Guatemala

[apmartin at canada.com]

Reminiscing on my First Week

It was Friday, the last day of my first week at the
Camino Seguro Project (Safe Passage), and I sat crammed
between two Guatemalan men on the chicken bus heading
from Guatemala City to Antigua.  Although exhausted, I
also felt a sort of high-on-life energy coursing
through me.    

My home visit on Monday revealed the horrors of the
slums next to the Guatemala City dump.  Empathy for the
innocent children who lived there filled me, children
who had seen the worst of life in their few short
years.  Many of these children’s parents were
prostitutes, alcoholics or drug addicts.  The children
were victims of every type of abuse.  Violence was the
norm.
 
After the home visit, Camino Seguro’s volunteer
coordinator, Monique asked me to assist in the
kindergarten class at the Project for the rest of the
week.  She introduced me to the teacher, Heidi, a
pretty young Mayan woman who wore traditional clothing.
 Heidi did not know English but she welcomed me with a
warm smile.  

In Guatemala all children attend school for only half a
day, no matter their age.  Those who graduate only have
half as much education as those from other more
developed countries. Most children, however, only
attend school for three or four years until they can
read and write.  After that, they must help support the
family.

The children accepted into Camino Seguro commit to
attending school.  The Project pays their school
enrollment fees, purchases their school uniforms,
shoes, backpack and school supplies.  The other half
day these children attend the Project where teachers
reinforce learning.  They teach the children basic life
skills such as personal hygiene and responsibility.

There were 25 children aged five to seven in the
morning class.  Initially, I sat on a child-sized chair
and helped eight children make turtles from green
construction paper.  When they spoke with me, I
understood very little so I communicated by patting
their heads, rubbing their backs and admiring their
work.  “Bien,” I said many times.  “Mi Gusta.”  (Good. 
I like it.)  When I praised them, their eyes lit up and
they smiled.  It touched me that a few words of
encouragement meant so much.

Some of the children wore filthy clothes and a few
stank of urine.  Many scratched their heads frequently.
 I have always had a strong aversion to head lice.  I
knew if I cuddled the children, I would get head lice,
too.  Yet, I had come to Guatemala to give these
children unconditional love.  As I pondered my dilemma,
a little girl ran over to me, wrapped her arms around
my legs and smiled up at me.  I picked her up and
hugged her tightly.  My eyes filled with tears.

At 11:45, it was lunch time. Heidi had the boys and
girls line up before leading them out of the classroom,
past a nicely-landscaped courtyard to the salon, a
roofed, open-air room with wooden tables and benches
for several hundred.  The children passed the cocina
(kitchen) where they picked up a plate of rice, beans
and tortillas.  Heidi took a basket filled with plastic
glasses of rice milk and a handful of cutlery and
followed the class to their table.  Before passing the
children their spoons, she recited a prayer thanking
God for the food.  The children folded their hands and
prayed aloud with her. 

Some children, I noticed, were desperately hungry. 
When they finished their own food, they devoured the
leftovers from someone else’s plate.  At the end of the
meal, Heidi handed a chewable vitamin to each child. 
Several children refused them.  When I said, “Si
ustedes quieren crecer grande, deben comer sus
vitamines. (If you want to grow big, you need to eat
your vitamins),” the children who declined them called
Heidi back, accepted a vitamin and chewed it with
gusto.  

When the children finished their meal, Heidi ushered
them to the front door where she dismissed them.  An
hour later, the next group of students arrived.  They
were fed lunch before starting classes.  Each day the
Project feeds some 350 children.  For some of them, it
is their only meal of the day.
	
Wednesday morning, Monique assigned seven German
volunteers along with Andrew and me to make up 265 food
hampers. The Project requires one caregiver for each
child to meet with the child’s teacher and social
worker once a month.  After the meeting, they receive a
voucher for a food hamper.  If more than one child in a
family attends the Project, the family receives food
hampers for each attendee.

Monique led us to another building, two blocks from
Camino Seguro, where boxes and sacks filled one of the
rooms. A collection of dry goods sat next to one wall. 
She pointed to it.  

“Take a good look at what goes into each hamper,” she
said.  “The Project buys the exact amount of food
needed so it’s really important to be accurate.  We’ve
had some volunteers add extra items to hampers, and
then run out before all the hampers were completed.”

She handed packages of small bags to us.

“Before you get started on making the hampers, you need
to make up 265 bags of rice and 265 bags of black
beans, three cups in each bag.” 

Once we bagged the rice and beans, we formed an
assembly line.  My job was to open two black garbage
bags, insert one into the other, insert three one-pound
packages of sugar and pass it on   Several hours later,
hampers containing sugar, spaghetti, oatmeal, soap,
salt, rice, beans, soup bouillon and cooking oil were
double-checked and ready for pick-up on Friday.  Most
of us had sore backs from the stooping and bending.   

Thursday morning, on our walk through Zone 3 to the
Project, we saw three prostitutes in a violent fight on
the street.  One woman in black knee-high boots with
high heels grabbed another woman by the hair, flung her
on the pavement and proceeded to kick her savagely.  A
second woman pulled up the downed woman’s blouse and
exposed her breasts.  Most of the volunteers kept
walking as if this was commonplace.  Some of us
stopped, but common sense prevailed.  This wasn’t our
battle.  To help the downed woman meant putting our
lives at risk.  As many as 33 people each day were
murdered in Guatemala City, most of them in Zone 3. 
Our purpose in Guatemala was to help the children
living in this environment, not to get killed.  Still,
it felt odd not to help.

Guatemala celebrates Children’s Day on October 1st. 
Camino Seguro celebrated it one day early because
Friday was parent/teacher/hamper day.  Balloons, crepe
paper streamers and art work decorated the salon.  The
children finger painted, made puzzles, origami and drew
pictures with markers.  The teachers put on a comical
play, and there was much laughter.  Later, there was a
dance contest for the children.  If the wind hadn’t
sent whiffs of rotting garbage our way, it would have
been easy to forget what awaited the children outside
the locked Project doors.  

At the end of the day, en route to the bus, I saw a
rail-thin girl of eleven or twelve wearing high heels
and a tight skirt.  The makeup and woman’s clothing
made her look ridiculous, like a child playing dress
up, but I felt certain she was a child prostitute.  I
hoped the work I was doing would help prevent the
children at Camino Seguro from turning to prostitution
in order to survive.

Friday challenged me further.  I smiled as I recalled
the day’s events.  First thing in the morning, Monique
assigned each volunteer a job.  The same day the
Project dispersed hampers, it offered the children
optional lice treatment and haircuts.  There was an
epidemic of head lice and they were impossible to get
rid of.  As soon as the children returned home, they
picked them up again.  Still, a treatment offered a
brief respite.

Monique assigned Andrew and another male volunteer to
wash and rinse hair.  She asked several women including
me to comb out the children’s hair with a lice comb
after the treatment.  
 
After a short assembly that included recognizing the
volunteers, the children’s caregiver (be it mother,
father, aunt, uncle or grandparent) and child(ren) met
with the teacher and social worker.  While they waited,
the children who wanted to could visit us at the far
corner of the salon for a hair wash with lice shampoo
and a haircut.

When combing, I was careful not to pull the children’s
hair.  None of them cried. The task, nevertheless, was
distasteful to me, especially when the lice and nits
were visible on the comb.  As I combed head after head
of thick black hair, to my surprise, a sense of pride
filled me.  I had stepped past my comfort zone to help
the children.  That was all that really mattered.

The chicken bus screeched to a stop and jolted me from
my reverie.  Outside, I saw a MacDonald’s.  Next to the
entrance, a uniformed guard held a shotgun.  A pickup
truck filled with some twenty-five people standing in
the box clinging to a single metal overhead bar whizzed
past.  The pollution wafting in through the open bus
windows suffocated me.  It always seemed worse at the
end of the day.  In an attempt to avoid it, I breathed
shallowly through my mouth.

The week had been intense, I mused, but it had also
been incredibly interesting.  There were many things I
didn’t like about Guatemala:  the crime, the pollution,
the poverty.  Yet, it was a place I believed I could
truly make a difference and that, to me, felt deeply
satisfying.