During spring break, students in the short-term study abroad courses, ECG 200 "Faces of Guatemala and Justice" and ECG 300 "Working for Justice in Guatemala," travel to Guatemala to learn about and work alongside the people there. This is my account of the trip.
Day 3
While we have multiple cars, a large house, and closets full of clothes, most indigenous Mayan people live a life of hard labor. In the morning we learned how to build a cooking stove. Extremely poor people might live in a one-room home with walls made from reeds and with a dirt floor. The cooking fire might be a wood fire in the middle of the room. Imagine smoke filling the room all day and night, causing chronic lung problems. Imagine a toddler tripping and falling into the fire. Imagine having to climb the mountains every few days to forage for firewood.
A Mayan home near San Lucas
Today we assisted in laying a concrete floor for a house and building a wood-efficient, safe cooking stove. Our jobs involved learning to mix concrete, cut cinder blocks with a machete, and build a stove.
In the afternoon we learned some of the daily-living skills of Mayan men and women. We learned to wash clothes by hand in a communal sink; build a fire, grind corn, and make tortillas; carry baskets of clothes on our heads; and carry 100 pounds of wood on our backs.
We developed an understanding of the diverse skills and culture of the Mayan people of San Lucas. We appreciate more now how hard these people work, how talented they are, but how they struggle to earn enough to care for their families. We finished the day with a discussion about the ways we can help US citizens understand better that we are all brothers and sisters but that some of us have been fortunate to have been born with more advantages. What must we do to make the world a more just and fair place for all?