snippets and tidbits: guatemala

Last week I had the awesome opportunity to go on a humanitarian trip to Guatemala with husband's company, Grandeur Peak Funds { they sent the whole company + spouses on the trip to celebrate hitting a company milestone }. We went with CHOICE Humanitarian, which is an amazing organization based out of Salt Lake. Oh my word, it was so fun and humbling to interact and work with these villagers, who despite living without running water, electricity, etc. were just the happiest people you'd ever see. I have so many pictures so I'll probably do a few posts to get all the good ones up but I thought I'd explain a little about what we did too...

We flew into Guatemala City on Sunday and stayed at a hotel that night before taking a nine hour bus ride out to the K'iche' village of La Reforma. { K'iche' is the Mayan language of Guatemala and is the dominant language in most of the small villages outside the main cities - although the kids all learn Spanish in school in order to have opportunities for further education. } On our trip we built stoves with the villagers. Right now the K'iche' people live in single room wood huts with dirt floors and do their cooking over open fires ... dangerous. These fires fill their homes with smoke, making seeing and breathing nearly impossible. Their homes basically have stalactites of soot hanging from the ceiling and you can imagine that's what it looks like in their lungs too. The women also have bad backs from bending over to cook in the fire all day long, often with babies sung around them. And because of the open fires, kids are always getting burns from falling in. So we dug holes, put in cement and cinder block foundations and build brick stoves that had cement chimneys to carry the smoke out of the house. The stoves are also higher off the ground allowing the cook to stand at them instead of bending over.

So that's why we were there. It was an incredible experience and awesome to see the impact we had on their lives, and the impact they had on ours, allowing us to be in their village serving them. This set of pictures show our bus ride to the village and the crazy little cafe we ate lunch at, the beautiful valley of La Reforma, the cute kids in the village, and us hanging out with them during our down time.