Worlds Collide: One man’s journey to Guatemala

A&E Editor Justin Jacobs traveled to Guatemala during Spring Break, volunteering with 10 other… A&E Editor Justin Jacobs traveled to Guatemala during Spring Break, volunteering with 10 other Pitt students to help build a reservoir in an impoverished town. This is Part I of III of his story.

Part I, Worlds Collide

The first thing that struck me was the sound of the place.

Late on the second night of my trip to Paraxaj, a tiny farming village in the mountains of Guatemala, I heard the dogs calling to each other from neighboring hills. The dogs and I were the only things awake for miles, and aside from my breathing, the barking was the only sound shooting through the cold air.

No car horns, no stereos or televisions, no air conditioners buzzing or microwaves humming. The requisite sounds of the United States that lay a constant bed of noise every hour of every day were strikingly absent. Refreshingly absent.

I sat on a bag of concrete that, during the day, I’d lugged on my shoulder from one side of Paraxaj to the other, and scribbled furiously in a journal — with the bed of noise gone, each sound I heard was sharp, an aural bullet shot from the howling dogs one or two hills away.

The realization began to set in — though the United States profoundly affects the rest of the world, the United States is not the rest of the world.

And living here, in Pittsburgh, in the USA, it’s often impossible to comprehend the complex ties and staggering differences we have to the rest of the world until they’re barking in your ears.

****

Initially, the plan was simple — do anything over spring break to keep myself off my parents’ couch watching OnDemand reruns. I contemplated bumming around New York City. I even began to plan a road trip down the coast of California.

But when a service trip to Guatemala floated through my inbox, any other option quickly faded. The description was clear — the trip, organized by American Jewish World Service through Pitt’s own Hillel Jewish University Center, would place a group of students in an impoverished, rural community in Guatemala for the purpose of cultural exchange and volunteered manual labor, working on projects that would boost the living standard in the village.

A trip like this, though, doesn’t come together solely from the planning of Americans with big hearts — these things take work on both ends. And in Guatemala, our organizing group was Opcion, a non-governmental organization that stands for Organización para la Promoción comercial y la Investigación. In other, English words, this means that the group works with small, often uneducated farming communities to connect them with the global market, thereby helping to ensure that the farmers are properly treated and paid.

The farmers, who could walk three hours to the nearest town to sell their products in the nearest town, do not have access to the same education as the townspeople, allowing the more business-savvy buyers to out-math the farmers in the marketplace, thereby damning them further into a cycle of poverty. And those in extreme poverty simply can’t afford to pay better teachers, spawning another generation of Guatemalans to be kept down.

Groups like Opcion, with foreign funding, aim to pull the poor from such vicious cycles — in a global marketplace, the hope exists that fair business may just push them out of poverty and into the modern world.

But only recently did Opcion begin hosting volunteer groups in the communities with which they work, and, as co-founder Oscar de Leon told us through our translator, we would be the first group to ever visit Paraxaj.

At first, the shift in operations didn’t quite make sense.

It’s no secret that the actual work American volunteers do on trips like this is often very little, even insignificant in the greater scheme of the poverty cycle.

But after only a day in Paraxaj, the connection revealed itself. While our assigned projects — helping village workers to build a water reservoir to bring clean water to the school and to lay a cement floor in a building that would become the school’s library — had us working hard, they also pitted us, more importantly, in a cultural exchange with the people of Guatemala.

We spent the workdays talking, the little we could, about our homes, about our families and lives. And for an NGO like Opcion, with a goal of bringing the rural poor into a globalized world, a globalized economy and mindset, to learn with us was a valuable experience culturally just like exporting their products is economically.

But the value in learning was not one way, of course, for as American students learn with indigenous Guatemalans, the hope is that they too will learn about the other side. Both sides return to their lives with knowledge and understanding of something they previously only read about.

Globalization, I came to understand, is not about making the world homogenized, but about bettering each other through working, through learning and talking. Globalization is not just a vocabulary word in your business class. It was changing lives in front of my eyes, including my own.

****

Having arrived in Guatemala City on a redeye from New York City’s JFK Airport via Miami, my group of 11 Pitt students and three group leaders was greeted at the airport by our trip organizer Oscar de Leon.

His smile was wide and genuine, and he led us to a large van straight out of 1973. He motioned that we hop in. Our bags loaded into a pick-up, we kissed Guatemala City, with its ever-present fast food joints and car dealerships, goodbye — it would be the last taste of a Western-style world we’d experience in a week.

Before long, the city sites were a memory and the van began a steady climb up the narrow, winding roads that carved through the mountains. Two hours in and the paved roads were dirt paths, but the climb persisted. Then, with a sharp turn down a steep embankment, the van was suddenly surrounded with children — waving wildly, jumping on the back bumper, chasing us down the dry, dusty path.

The van stopped, doors opened and I heard the familiar crack-pop-crack of fireworks — a custom, I soon found out, to welcome new guests.

After nearly 24 hours of traveling, we’d arrived in Paraxaj, a village too small to merit a dot on a map, but a place that would tear down and reshape my ideas of poverty, of family, of war, of violence and of just what it means to be a United States citizen in a truly globalized world.

Part II, Night and Day

Considering that Guatemala is near the equator, the frigidness of nights and mornings in Paraxaj caught me by surprise. It didn’t help that I’d forgotten a sleeping bag — even when I resorted to wearing all three of my pairs of pants to bed, I still woke up shivering in fetal position.

Still, it was hard to complain come Wednesday, when we were invited into the houses of villagers to meet their families, to absorb their way of life. Pitt freshman Racheli Schoenburg, our Opcion translator Marlene and I trekked just up a hill from the schoolhouse that we called home for the week to one family’s house — a family of one proud papa, one silent mama and 10 energetic kids.

All on a plot of land the size of a large classroom, head-of-the-family Pedro had built a dirt-floor kitchen out of mud bricks and a sheet metal roof, as well as a two room living quarter. The larger room was for his oldest boys and oldest girls, the other, which was big enough only for a bed, housed he and his wife, and the couple’s six youngest children.

Pedro took us from the dusty land between his kitchen and bedroom to sit on the bed of his youngest sons — Willy and Byron, both pre-adolescents. A plank of wood covered in a blanket, a beat-up radio where the absent pillow would’ve been. Three pairs of pants were more than the boys owned, and the nights were cold. The entire collection of the boys’ clothing sat on the floor, smaller than my laundry pile after three days. A picture of the pope hung on the wall.

“Tu gusta la musica?” I asked Byron in my embarrassingly inaccurate Spanish.

“Si, si,” he nodded, holding back a giggle at the sheer notion that there was a white man — more than likely the first he’d ever talked to — sitting in his room.

I scanned the small room. The radio was the only item inside that wasn’t an absolute necessity. He switched it on as Racheli and Marlene spoke to Pedro about the new house he planned to build for his oldest boys once they’d become men.

“Tu gusta la rock and roll?” I asked.

Byron smiled and shook his finger.

Through Marlene, I asked Miguel if I could bring some rock and roll to Byron.

“Si, si.”

I returned with an iPod within minutes and watched Byron, the entire family of 12 gathered around him eagerly, seemingly enjoy the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though he was a bit bored by Neil Young.

Pedro stopped me, still smiling.

“Cuánto dinero?” he asked, pointing to the screen.

Immediately I felt like I’d been socked in the stomach. My Spanish was poor, but I understood perfectly. And I had no idea how to respond. With Pedro’s salary averaging just a few dollars a day, leaving no room to save, the iPod cost more money than Pedro would ever possess at one time in his entire life.

I stuttered, paused.

“Un poco,” I lied. “Gracias, Pedro. Su familia es bonita.”

Filled with shame, I excused myself and walked back to the schoolhouse.

****

Though we 11 students worked through the days both helping the villagers build a water reservoir to provide clean water for the school and laying a cement floor in what was to become the school’s first ever library, it was hard to convince ourselves that the little impact we could have would ever make a difference. Sure, a floor is good. But where will the books come from, and what children will make it far enough in school to read them?

In fact, as we arguably made the projects go quicker, we often felt as if we were taking precious paid hours away from the workers.

But poverty is not simply monetary, and it is not purely circumstantial.

And through our cultural exchange of ideas, of language and of laughter that increased each day, I went to bed hoping that the people of Paraxaj were gaining as much understanding as I was.

****

The word poverty sounds dirty. It sounds lonely and dark. We picture an African child surrounded by flies, crying on some late-night please-donate-now commercial. And sure, that is poverty.

But the word’s endless complexity is something many spend their lives wading through. Is a man in poverty if he lives comfortably, but lacks the support to survive a major downturn in his income? Is he in poverty if he makes below a certain dollar amount a day? Is he in poverty if his only healthcare is luck?

In Paraxaj, poverty creeps through the mountains like a ghost. It is rarely spoken of, rarely referenced. But it is found in the village’s school, where 53 kids sit in each cramped class with one teacher, only to be pulled out by third grade in order to work in the fields with papa or in the kitchen with mama. It is found under the hardened feet of women who carry their family’s laundry an hour to the nearest water source, and who cannot afford shoes. It’s found in the sweat-stained shirts of the 150 village boys who played soccer with us after school wearing the same clothing from the day before and the day before that.

And it is found in either of the two family-owned stores in Paraxaj. Most often run by a teenage daughter in the family, the stores look like the prize window at an arcade — shelves full of tiny, individually packaged goods. Single-serving Tylenol. Travel size shampoo. One egg for sale at a time.

And the buyers? Usually children of three or four, waddling into the store, unable to reach the counter. Too young to go to school, too young for work in the fields — they’re the only available family member.

As men’s incomes vary daily from zero (for a man without his own land, the availability of work at neighboring farms varies by day) to around $5, the families in Paraxaj cannot afford to buy goods of food for more than a few days at a time. This is the anti-Costco, the anti-Wal-Mart. This is hand to mouth, with hands tired and mouths hungry.

Part III, Making Peace

By the end of my week in Guatemala, I felt like I was truly grasping the rural lifestyle. The day began when the roosters crowed — which was often before 4 a.m. — and ended with just enough time to make the trek back home before dark.

But one thing I hadn’t absorbed was the actual work that these farmers did, the machine-less farming that many would do until the day they died. A group leader and translator, AJWS’s Lom Friedman, arranged for Julian, one of Paraxaj’s leading figures, to take us to his fields on our last morning in Guatemala.

Only two students were up at 5:30 a.m., and Robin Scheimer, Lom and I met Julian outside the schoolhouse as the sun came up. He was a small man with a soft, forgiving face, round cheeks and large eyes.

We walked along the main dirt road that outlined Paraxaj’s upper border until our schoolhouse was out of sight. We walked and saw 13-year-old boys similarly headed to the fields, old women with baskets balanced on their heads. Morning rush hour in Paraxaj comes early.

After a mile, Julian turned onto a tiny trail and we followed him up a brief hill and then down, down an entire mountainside sometimes so steep we had to hold on to tree roots to keep from falling, down so far that when we finally reached his fields, the spot where we’d begun our descent was the horizon.

Julian smiled and led us towards the wide, expansive opening in the woods — his fields, his livelihood. His daughters were already at work watering the crops.

****

The main exports of Paraxaj are zucchini and snow peas, an interesting combination considering that neither is remotely a part of the Guatemalan diet. Rather, the two crops are almost solely grown in the area because they are major exports, vegetables that can’t be grown just anywhere. Paraxaj, which means ‘humid’ in the indigenous Kaqchikel language, is called so because under the dry topsoil is fertile, moist ground, ready to grow.

We asked Julian what type of zucchini he grew.

“Green Commander,” he said, pronouncing the English with a heavy accent.

“Is that a translation,” asked Lom.

“No,” he said. “Green Commander en Espanol.”

The seeds, we learned, were imported from the United States — on each pack, Julian had sounded out, the seeds were labeled Green Commander. Julian, like nearly every farmer in Paraxaj, was so encompassed by the United States market that he didn’t even know the name of his product — only that it allowed him to feed his 11 children.

Though I’d come to farm, to kneel in the dirt and learn the craft, the four of us stood in the middle of Julian’s field and spoke, through Lom, about the United States, about the recession.

Here, our recession may mean that we don’t buy a new pair of jeans, that we skip the family vacation or that we pass on picking up some snow peas for dinner. But to poor farmers like Julian or Pedro, our recession could mean missing a day’s pay because the peas aren’t selling, it could mean that there’s no money to buy Willy or Byron medicine in the next town. It could mean death.

We asked Julian what responsibility the United States had towards a poorer country like Guatemala.

“Compre mis verduras.” Not sending money, not donating clothing, but, “Buy my vegetables.”

A drop in the pond of my country, which felt so far away, rippled to the mountains of Guatemala, rippled through the entire world. At once America felt like a giant shadow.

****

On the hike back Julian gave us a guided tour of his country’s secret holocaust. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because we don’t learn about the estimated 2 million indigenous Guatemalans slaughtered by the Spanish-descendent run Guatemalan army in the 1980’s—the Guatemalans decapitated and thrown into mass graves, rooted out of hiding in the mountains, rounded up in villages like Paraxaj and raped, murdered. The Guatemalan’s massacred for their different culture and heritage by an army receiving arms and funds from the United States. Thank you, history class.

As we hiked up the mountain, Julian would pause and point to a patch of land.

“There,” he would say. “A family used to live. My neighbors. The army came in and threw a grenade into their house.”

For us, these sites were plots of earth, imagined violence. For Julian, we were walking through a graveyard of friends.

“How does it make you feel,” he said. “To know that your parents’ tax dollars paid for my friends to die?”

But there was no accusation, no anger. He really wanted to know how we felt. He wanted to see that we were human too, that we, the white man, the man that funded the army that beheaded his brother, were not machines but people.

“And now,” he continued, “You pay money to come and rebuild our lives. For a long time, we thought everyone in the United States wanted us to die.”

We continued to climb up the mountain but I clung to his words. Maybe the work we’d done on the reservoir or on the library floor was negligible. Maybe it was putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. But for many of the people in Paraxaj, the fact that we were there helping at all had changed their entire conception of Americans, of an entire people.

The specter of America, of the global impact and impression of America, billowed greater than ever.

Our actions, it seemed to me at once, are not our own. Our actions, by merit of being born into a wealthy nation, carry some effect through the entire world. And whether we believe it is our responsibility or not, our lives reverberate around the globe.