Sajomte - Secondary School

Eventually I'll get to all the different projects that we did in Guatemala but I didn't want to squish them all together so I'll just give them their individual glory. The school project in Sajomte was the biggest of the 4 building projects and definitely got the most attention since it will be the first secondary school in the region. Right now the villages only have elementary schools and only teach through 6th grade so if the kids keep going to school, they have to travel at least an hour or two to get to a school that teaches beyond 6th grade. So, the villagers' solution: build a secondary school. It was such a great experience to work side by side with the people. I'm pretty sure they spent more time laughing at us than anything else since most of us couldn't even speak passable Spanish let alone Q'eqchi', which is the native Mayan dialect that they speak in the Polochic region. One of these days maybe I'll do a post on the little Q'eqchi' that I know since it is pretty cool. It took all my brain power (which I'll admit isn't much) to even memorize counting 1-5. I know... sad. The kids kept trying to teach me up to 10 but I apparently wasn't on my mental game that week.

So, back to the school project. The villagers in Sajomte spent 3 weeks before we got there carving away the hillside to have a flat area to build the school. Yes, with shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows, they literally moved the side of the hill by hand. So, when we showed up the first day, they had the foundation lines marked out and we worked side by side with the locals digging the trenches for the foundation. Because we finished digging the trenches by lunch and were supposed to be doing that all day, we started quarrying rock out of the side of the mountain to put in the foundation. I climbed about 20 feet up the side of the mountain next to the road and used what mini-muscles I had to dislodge boulders out of the mountain and roll them down to the villagers at the bottom so they could either take them back as is or break them up to carry back to the work site. Later that day we took one of our transportation cattle trucks further up the mountain road to a place that had lots of rocks along the road to get more for the foundation. The local kids would help us where ever we went. Up there along the road the kids came out of the house that was close and started helping us, of course with their cheezy big grins on their faces. I was touched when I looked at one of the little boys about 5 years old that was helping and noticed that he only had a stump for one of his arms. It had been amputated just below the elbow. But, he was so excited to be out there helping us haul rocks!

So, over the rest of the week, the building project continued with putting larger rocks in the bottom, putting in the rebar towers (which we had to make too), adding more rock, adding cement, putting in cinder blocks (which were a bear to move... they totally ripped up my gloves so I feel bad for the locals since they don't have gloves to wear working), adding more cement.... and that's about as far as we got on the school. We built up the foundation to the level where they will put in the floor. It was a little discouraging when I looked back and saw that was all we had done on that project in a week, but that was all they had planned on us doing. The villagers finish the projects. We are there to get them started and give them the motivation to do development projects. Let's face it, they can dig trenches, haul rock, mix cement, and bend rebar better than any one of us volunteers. But, that wasn't the point. It was more about working together for a common goal. The last day as we were finishing up working with cement, the local building foreman in Sajomte, Valerio, started gathering up the extra cement. He went to a corner of what will be the school yard and used the extra cement to create a big heart and all of us who worked on the project that day signed our names in it. To top it off, the locals (adults and kids) had the volunteers sing "I am a Child of God" in English and then they sang it back in Q'eqchi'. I loved working on the school. It was probably my favorite project of the week, which is why I kept going back.