Lovely Latrines

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So I am playing a little bit of catch up here because I spent the last week out in the field with my first work group. Jorge, the teams coordinator, and I left last Sunday on a bus back to Guatemala City. It had been less that one week before that I was taking the same drive in the opposite direction upon my arrival to Guatemala. We met the group at the airport and immediately started to get to know one another on the shuttle ride to the hotel. It was a very diverse, intergenerational, and fun group. We had quite the spectrum of experiences from two 13-year-old boys on their first MTI trip with their fathers, to two college sophomores, to one young man who spent most of the past few years traveling around the world, to a semi-retired couple that has been on 47 separate trips with MTI.

After a good nights sleep we hit the road again on our way back to Coban. I have a feeling that I will be becoming quite familiar with this route. We arrived into Coban and settled into our hotel the Posada de Don Antonio. The next few days we spent working in the community of Chitixl in the municipality of San Juan Chamelco. The drive to the Chitixl takes about an hour and fifteen minutes total, with about first twenty minutes on a paved road and then onto a single lane dirt road up into the rural mountains.

One of the things that greatly attracted me to working with Medical Teams International in Guatemala was their focus on primary or preventative health care. Often when we think of health care we are thinking of tertiary medicine, which consists of the treatment of illness. While this is a very important aspect of health care, the contribution of preventative measures can have a much larger impact. Our project this week was to work alongside the community of Chitixl to construct 66 new latrines throughout the community. While this may not seem like a very glamorous project the impact of a well-constructed latrine can be infinite.

I think of my companero Jorge the eldest of eleven brothers and sisters. He is from a very small community much like Chitixl, except that at the time it didn’t have electricity or running water. He did well in grade school and was able to get a scholarship to attend middle school in the closest town. So at thirteen he left his family and went to live on his own in a small apartment in the nearest town so that he could attend middle school. He worked very hard in school and had a job on the weekends to help support himself. Once again because of his good grades and diligence he went on to find a scholarship to attend a high school and then on to university in the United States. He is an inspiration for many of the young children in his small town and many of his brothers and sisters have followed in his foot steps because they now knew it was possible. Now he and the older of his siblings all help to support the education of the younger siblings. Jorge and his wife have just welcomed their first baby into the world and he has great dreams for his young son. Now if as a young child Jorge had been too sick to go to school because the grass that he was playing in, or the food he was eating, or the field that he was working in were contaminated with bacteria from feces dropped in a hole and covered by a thin layer of topsoil, there is no way that he could have made it to where he is now.

Diarrheal diseases are one of the leading causes of childhood illness in Guatemala and around the world and it is simple sanitation projects such as these that can help to reduce those numbers. Many children are forced to stay home from school because their tiny bodies are trying to fight off the onslaught of infection. Jorge is an extremely respected person, not only in his own community, but also in every community that we visit because he is the inspiration as to what is possible. It is our hope that these sanitation projects will help the children of the community live a healthy childhood so that they can work towards the dreams of their own.

The group worked side by side with members of the community this past week. We had some incredible experiences visiting with the people in their homes and playing with the children. It is always interesting to see how people live in other parts of the world. Even the difference from the city of Coban to the rural area of Chitixl is very drastic. The people were very grateful to have us there and were very entertained watching the gringos try to mix concrete by hand. I also had a wonderful time working the team. I know how much I was affected by my first international volunteer trip and it is really amazing to be able to be a part of that experience for others.

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Photos

Laying the frame
The first step of the latrine process.