May 19th, 2014
Today
we left our hotel at 7:45 am to go to the mission and set up breakfast for
everyone. The local cooks at the mission
had already prepared oatmeal, rolls, black beans, and locally picked bananas.
After breakfast a part of the group was on dish duty and then we all met in
front of the church at 9am for our tour of all the missions San Lucas
projects. First we got a tour of the
Colegio Privado Mixto founded by Father Greg.
This is the local school foe elementary and middle school students. This original school, founded by the mission,
taught about 90 students. Currently
there are over 600 local children enrolled of both ladino and Mayan descent. Also, we had a tour at the Montessori school
for children; the school prepares 4, 5, and 6 year old students for elementary
school. This ‘preschool’ has been proven
to greatly increase students’ ability to focus and perform better in
school. Next our group and the other 2
groups that are working with the mission this week loaded up into the back of a
pick-up truck and a van to drive to the women’s center which was recently
opened in 2011. This center teaches
women trades such as cooking, sewing, and weaving so that they can have an
income for themselves. It also is a
place where they have childcare available, and can gather to clean their
clothes in clean water. All the
volunteers then loaded back into the 2 vehicles and went to the clinic that the
mission had spent many years fundraising for and are still making additions
too. We toured the facility and Katie,
the head coordinator, gave us background on the capabilities of the
hospital. This included seeing the
emergency room, surgical room, dental office, pediatrics, and maternal
health. The tour next took us to the
reforestation area which focuses on keeping Guatemala “the land of the
trees”. For decades local members of the
community have worked to educate the community on the importance of respecting
mother nature and replanting trees to replace the numerous trees that are cut
down for firewood, to make room for farming, etc. Our next stop was to visit Father Greg’s
grave in the local cemetery. This
cemetery varies greatly from American cemeteries in its brightly covered tombs,
and above ground graves. After taking a
moment to pay our respects, the tour took us to the coffee processing
facilities. Here, Katie told the groups
the entire process through which coffee goes through from harvesting to
packaging to be sold as ground beans.
After having lunch, the three mission groups were split into
different areas of San Lucas to work at for the day. Our group had the pleasure of working at the
reforestation area. Here, we followed
orders by the reforestation coordinator, Toribio. He had us package fertile soil into bags
which were to be used for continuing growth of the local vegetation. By splitting our group into twelve dirt
packagers and two dirt collectors, it made our job much more efficient. The packagers had small tubes made of plastic
to funnel dirt into small bags until they were filled to the brim. The collectors walked around picking up the
full bags and lining them up along an area.
Over the span of an hour and a half, this process went on. After this, the next half hour was spent
making an assembly line out of the entirety of our group to hand off bags of
dirt to one another to the nursery where they will be seeded. On our walk back towards the mission, we took
a detour through a local market to stop at a Paneria where we all had a cookie,
a sweet roll, and a crescent roll type of bread product.
After going back to the hotel to clean up from working in
the mounds of dirt, we went back to the Mission for dinner. Following dinner, we went souvenir shopping
at a nearby vendor close to the church.
We accidentally spent too much time perusing Jorge’s collection of
handmade knickknacks; he is a true artisan.
As a result of this, we arrived late to the riveting movie about coffee
bean processing which was interesting but a bit redundant with what we had learned in class earlier this semester.
Buenas Noches from Guatemala
Megan and Adam
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