Once I had a dream

I came to Nueva Mercedes a year ago. I was supposed to leave yesterday – rain and closed roads made me stay at least 2 more days – Polochic life J.

At the beginning of October 2014 coming here I felt like everything is a big question mark. Will the scorpion bite me? Will snake do? What are local people like? Do they like volunteers? Will they cooperate with me? Is it a safe place? What is Li Ch’utam actually doing in the village? Why are mosquitoes around me all the time? I still don’t know the answers for some of these questions but for sure I have experienced a lot during the past year. Killing a scorpion with machete, frying pan, spray to kill scorpions, flip flop, I finally reached a point when I was too lazy and I was sleeping with a scorpion over my head. No water – buy some to drink, use the river for other purposes, save it, no electricity – used electronic devices only in emergency and apart from that - no problem, you can always find a way to deal with it, creativity and positive thinking – that’s what living in Polochic needs. I learned that local people are amazing people, they need a lot of time to understand and trust “gringos” (in q’eqchi means foreigner), but they also open their houses and hearts for us if we let them do it. 

I learned from local people what does it mean to be human again, to help someone without any profit, just because she/he needs that, sharing the little they have with someone who has less, saying “good morning” or “good afternoon” even if I don’t know the person, smiling to people in the pick up, talking to people on the way, cry on the funeral and be happy on the wedding. Here I could count on people, I supported them and they supported me. I learned asking for help, and many times people were doing for me more than I asked for. Especially when it comes to nature I could not imagine being alone here.

Life here is actually big struggle with the nature – no electricity, no water, dirty water, scorpions, snakes, rats, tarantulas, bats, ants, dust, humid heat, heavy rain and bridges under water, almost every day you get at least one of those and you have to deal with it. Carrying things all the time – computers to school, food from Teleman, gas, bad Internet connection. Even though the house has very good conditions still there are many issues to deal with. Half of life here is actually surviving – fighting with nature or preparing food J.

However I feel like I learned a lot about myself here: what are my barriers, what is it that I can stand and what is too difficult for me. You know that feeling when you are in the mountains, so exhausted, that you feel like you cannot do even one more step? But you also know that you have to so you walk 4 more hours. After that you feel so happy that next day you walk even more. I was struggling with many things here, but every battle won made me stronger and willing to fight more. J

The other half of time (at least at the beginning) is work done “European style” – you plan things and you get frustrated because you cannot make it even if you work very hard – people don’t come to the meetings or are 1,5 hours late, teachers don’t come to school, so you cannot just talk to them when you need it, if you tell people to do something for tomorrow you may have it in a week if you’re lucky. Obsession of planning and ticking tasks can be forgotten here. Then there is “I know what they need” syndrome. You come here and you just know how to organize everything, who should do what and how. So you tell people and they say yes to everything (looking at you like at an alien, that you actually are for them). And they never do. You are surprised, very surprised. So you think what went wrong and make a new plan. WRONG!

January 2014. Li Ch’utam organized computer literacy course for secondary school students and it was supposed to be done in Nueva Mercedes school. The only condition was that students had to pay half of electricity bill. Investigation: parents pay every month for electricity of the school even though it should be paid by the government, checked what is needed so that parents don’t pay it. Planned meeting with parents committee 2 times – never showed up. Finally reaching them and giving them information about how to do it with help offered – never came for help. October 2014 – parents are still paying for school electricity.

February 2014. Parents of secondary students asked us to help in organizing transportation for their kids to the other village where they were studying. We put a lot of effort to talk to parents from few villages, the driver, and finally we have organized transportation that was on a specific time, safe, only for the students, and we managed to lower the price. Everyone seemed to be happy because of that. The transportation worked for one week and after that the driver or the kids were not coming. At the end of February students were using again normal transportation, many times waiting for a long time and paying the normal price.

December 2014. Scholarship programme started. 12 young people started secondary school in January 2014, 6 of them receiving scholarships (in 2013 only two young people started secondary school). This month they finish the school year, 10 of them.

I was sooooo happy when we started scholarship programme, so as these young people who applied and received them were. I felt like dreams come true, not only for European girl coming for volunteering to Guatemalan village, but like dreams coming true is a universal right J.

Beginning of April 2014. One of the students receiving scholarship did not come for a week to receive her money. Her mother told me that she is getting married and she will stop studying and that’s girl’s decision (her mom wanted her to study). She was 15. She is one of the brightest girls in the village. Because of lack of money she could not start studying for the past 2 years.

Her mom wanted me to talk to her and convince her to continue studying and leaving the idea of marriage at least for some time. So I did. The girl told me that her father makes her life impossible and she is thinking since years about living the house, now when she is studying her life is even more complicated and marriage is a way to escape from the house and start a better life. She told me that she was dreaming about education but what she needs more is a normal house when father is supporting his family and is good for his kids. She wants to create this kind of family but first of all she wants to escape from her father. It’s October now. She got married few months ago. Her husband is twice older than she is. She’s already pregnant. They seem to be happy together. It also seems that she will never have a chance to continue education.

During the past year I found out that our work should not be helping community. Our work should be understanding the community, be with people and whatever we do, do it with the community, not for them.

2014 was a year of many activities:

- cooperation with the teachers in the primary school: support in their activities, with literacy for the first and second grade kids;

- afternoon activities about literacy, Spanish, mathematics, art and sport, computer literacy, but also about expression, questioning, interpreting, creation

- preparation of database of activities connected with Guatemalan curriculum

- excursion to Rio Dulce with 4^th-6^th grade students

- scholarship programme for 7 kids

- encouraging young people to study in the new secondary school (12 started, 10 finished the first year)

- homework support for secondary school students

- support for secondary school in La Constancia with computer literacy course and English classes

- transportation project

- vegetable and cooking projects for women

- computer course for men

- we were participating in many school activities: football championship, Mothers Day, Children Day, Independence Day - helping preparing decoration, practicing poems with kids, dances.

Some of the activities worked, others did not. However there were few big successes: 10 secondary school students will finish their first year this month; we reached around 70 kids with our afternoon activities; we have started dialog with the teachers and at some point they wanted us to support them; people from the village started coming to us to talk to us about what they would like us to do; kids coming for literacy classes take books and read; it seems that they like it; women have ideas for more projects; and sometimes when we talk to people they simply say “thank you”.

Once I had a dream, it was about giving everyone real access to education. I feel that it will still need a bit of work J. But I also feel that a seed of it is already planted in Nueva Mercedes and will grow during the coming years.

Thanks to all of you for giving me the opportunity to spend a year of my life in Nueva Mercedes – I learned and enjoyed it a lot. Thanks to Albert, Anna, Astrid, Dodo, Kinga, Miguel and Nicoline for sharing this experience with me. 

I wish good luck to the current team and remember that I’m close if you need me J.

Nicoline and Michel – welcome new volunteers

A week ago we arrived to Nueva Mercedes.

During the first week we already supported Marta with first grade students from primary school and did computer curse with first grade secondary students.

Check first impressions of Nicoline and Michel.

“We arrived at the volunteer house in Nueva Mercedes after dark on the 2nd of September. Tired after the long trip and met by so many new sounds and smells without really being able to see where I was it was really nice to come to a place that looked and felt like a real home. And so it still does.
Being here only a week there are definitely still a lot of things I have to learn and experience, but I have already come to like the little village in its beautiful surroundings and the residents who are always greeting us with friendly smiles or visiting us in the house - and especially the children who in spite of being impatient and easily distracted as children are, genuinely seem to want to work with us and learn from us.

I am looking forward to really getting started with the work and hopefully, slowly getting to know the community and its pace, traditions and way of thinking, as well as its men, women and children.”

Nicoline

“Guatemala is really a wonderful country with hot climate and wonderful nature but most important the impressing people. They are always smiling and seem to be happy all the time, eitherway you know that they are poor, but that is not the case. They show that you can just feel content with nothing more than your smile on the lips. That is the first deep impression I got here and I am sure it is not the last. 
Now it is just my first week here in Nueva Mercedes and living here feels already like in a small family. That is what I appreciate the most. And work doesn’t feel like work, because you know that what you are doing, you are doing it for the kids, for the people here, so maybe we can help them living their life just a bit easier.”

Michel

Thank you Dodo and Albert

I came back to Mercedes at the end of July. Nature welcomed me in full. The bridge was under water so no transportation was passing between Telemán and Mercedes. I had to cross about 1km of water by foot with a part of the road on boat! There was no water and electricity at home. During the next days I was fighting with ants nest in the fridge and scorpions nest above my bad. But the hardest thing to handle was silence in the house. Dodo left at the beginning of June and Albert at the beginning of July. So there is no noise in the morning, no one is leaving belongings all over the house, no one to thank for delicious food, no one to watch a strange movie with. Apart from the fact that I have to do all the projects by myself, I cannot even discuss how it was, what should/could be done. It was good to have you guys here.

Below few photos of you work that say all that should be said:

BIG THANK YOU for the time spent together and your involvement in the project! 

Lester – story about hope, progress, stubbornness and love :)

I met Lester in October.

He is around 7-9 years old. He was speaking almost no Spanish and because of his behavior I had the impression that he barely understands any of my words as he was basically not following my words. He wasn’t close with others kids. They were hitting him or he was hitting them. I was working with him individually during literacy classes during summer. He was coming but couldn’t read, we were working with vowels at the beginning as consonants were too difficult for him. Sometimes he was looking at me guessing the letters “a”, “e”, “i”, when the letter was “u”. 

I noticed that it’s difficult for him to concentrate and he was getting bored quickly saying “no quiero”. I didn’t know why.. There was a theory that he’s a bit retarded. This theory was easy to be proven as he was following absolutely no rules, sometimes he was just standing up and leaving or punching other kids or jumping with punching “karate style”, shouting etc. I decided to give him patience and appreciation of any results. 

The second one was a simple “bien” or “muy bien” and after a day of hard work I was always telling him what a great job he did that day. I saw this twinkle in his eyes, he was proud. Some days he was the only one in the class, while others were playing outside. What I like the most in this kid is that he doesn’t care about what others do or think. 

He says and does what he thinks, answers questions, is not afraid to speak, even if sometimes he is talking about a totally different issue. He wants to come and learn and he simply does it. And when he doesn’t want it anymore he communicates it and leaves. Coming back to the story, already in October and November he was progressing incredibly from day to day, learned all the vowels, some consonants, simple words, started speaking some Spanish so that we could communicate. In January Lester started first grade, with Marta, in my opinion the best teacher in local school, who speaks only Spanish with kids. It’s June, Lester comes to our classes almost every day. He speaks, asks questions, answers in Spanish, follows instructions. He knows almost all the letters and during literacy classes is the first to take a book and read. He masses up some letters but has this incredible motivation to start again and again. He wants to read and puts a lot of effort to achieve it every time there is something to read.

Once during literacy classes children were drawing objects from the story I was reading. Lester that day draw 4 pictures of his own story and told us the story in Spanish. It was about a girl and a boy who were in love. She was kidnapped by a bad man with helicopter and saved by the soldiers of her man. I was so happy both for listening to his creative story and his new vocabulary ;).

Now Lester is coming for our classes saying “yo quiero” to whatever we do. Sometimes I take a piece of paper and want to do easier things with him, as most of the kids are from 2^nd of 3^rd grade, going back to practice letters that are difficult for him, but he wants to read books so stubbornly that I let him doing mistakes and try.

It’s not only about reading. Last time he came for math classes when we were doing roman numbers with 3^rd and 4^th grade kids. It was obviously not on his level as he knows counting till 20 since 2 months.. But he loved it, got it very quickly and was doing it sometimes better than 4^th grade students! I was soooooo proud of him!

His behavior changed. He’s less violent, sometimes gets sad or does his “karate” but is not punching others without reason.

From my point of view this kid made a huge progress, in Spanish, reading, writing, math, understanding, expressing, communication, behavior. For sure there were many different conditions that helped him achieve this. I’m sure Marta as his teacher and Li Ch’utam’s activities are important once, with the most important his own motivation. Being a volunteer in Li Ch’utam many times I ask myself why am I here, am I actually doing something good here, can I influence people here in a positive way, leave something in them that will serve them in the future?

Two days ago during our classes kids were to draw and write names of the objects that can be found at home. There were around 10 children in the class, from 1^st to 6^th grade. Most of the kids had 8-12 objects. Lester had the biggest number - 20. Some of them with the names terribly written. But watching him repeating the word “tijeras” 30 times to be able to catch the letters was simply beautiful! After that he helped me organize Li Ch’utam materials and clean the floor.

A child alone cannot develop, but if you give him a chance to do it, he will, and Lester is a prove for it. I love this kid! And even if he is the only one whom I’ve influenced a bit during my stay here – it was worth! 

Update after 3 months

During the last 3 months many things happened in the village and in Li Ch’utam.

Anna got selected for a different project and left at the beginning of March so there are just 3 of us here in the village: Albert, Dodo and me. In March the weather changed and the heat makes us working slower than before. Adding health problems of some team members the work slowed down much below European standards J. However all the projects planned for 2014 started and we are in the constant evaluation process.

Primary school

School utilities arrived at the beginning of April (almost 3 months from the beginning of classes) and school classes start looking friendlier. Our cooperation with teachers is getting better. Each of us is supporting its teacher/s at least once a week – I do literacy classes, including interpretation of pictures and getting familiar with the book and introducing music to sports classes with first grade students, Albert is helping with 7 second grade kids who still cannot read and Dodo is supporting reading classes of 3^rd and 6^th grade.

We continue after school activities, focusing mainly on literature, trying different methods or teaching how to read but also how to understand the text and interpret. 

Unfortunately books are in terrible condition. I even wrote a story about a broken book who was crying so that they understand that they should take care of books but it seems it didn’t help. And it’s not just about Li Ch’utam books, schools books are even worse threaten. And another thing is that these 40-60 books we use all the time kids know by heart, would be great to have some new once.. With Spanish and mathematics we try to use games and practice the knowledge kids got during morning classes. Once a week kids learn using computers and Friday is always art and sport day.

Secondary school

Computer classes are going very well. We already did 8 hours of computer course for 4 groups, all together 36 students. They are familiar with history of information technology, can use the basics of computers and are learning typing. Next course in the coming week.

We continue with homework help for our students and English classes for La Constancia students.

We have noticed that secondary school students come to our house to do homework or to learn English or for whatever they need but they are not involved in Li Ch’utam’s activities. Hopefully within few weeks we can finally organize an event for them to connect our work with the community and its needs.

Adults activities

In March we have started vegetable garden project for women from the village. There are 15 women involved in the project. Our master of harvesting is Edwin, our local fourth volunteer J, agriculture engineer working on the plantation in Mercedes. On the first meeting of the project we have explained how to grow vegetables: how to prepare land, how to plant, how to take care of the plants and how to harvest them. During the second meeting we already had seeds and there was planting presentation. After that each family had to plant their seeds. 

After few weeks we visited each garden with all participants giving advices on how to improve the crops. 

All the participant are very much involved and are taking care of their vegetables, sometimes they are coming to our house asking for more seeds. And are already eating their first vegetables!!!

Between volunteers we have already been discussing that we still miss men from the village in our activities and that makes it more difficult for us to understand the community. Few men who are our friends here wanted us to organize computer course for them. I hope that with 4 volunteers on board we can come back to this idea.

Current situation and 2014 plans

2014 started with planning of the projects we want to run this year. There are few we start now and others we plan to start within next weeks of months.

Primary school: classes at school started 12 days after the date when they should have been started. The government did not sent utilities for kids on time, actually they did not send it yet and no one knows when this happens. There was a meeting, teachers with parents to buy the most needed utilities to start school classes. Some parents bought them and send kids to school, others didn’t (because of lack of money on the second half of January). So on the 4^th of February (the school should start on the 16^th of January) there are half of students at classes and teachers say they cannot actually start teaching the material from the grade as other kids might have problems later. So they are repeating the material from last year or just let kids go at 10 (instead of 12:30), some days teachers just don’t come. One of the teachers changed the place of work on Monday and now he will be working in Telemán. That means that there are 5 teachers for 6 grades + pre-primary school so third and sixth grade have the same teacher and 4^th and 5^th grade have the same teacher. Apart from the teachers not coming to school, these kids will have it even more difficult. That’s the primary education situation in the village and in Guatemala..

The main objective of Li Ch’utam is to support education, especially primary education in Nueva Mercedes so we already had a meeting with teachers to discuss how can we support them. Each of us will be working with one-two teachers, supporting them with preparation of their school activities if the require it, being present at some hours/days if needed and preparing and running after school activities according to kids needs, teachers activities and Guatemalan curriculum. So far now we managed to talk to each teacher and they only tell us that they cannot actually start teaching and don’t know the needs of each kid as they have less than a half of students subscribed.. Anyway we know more or less what material they will give in the next weeks and according to that we prepare our afternoon classes that will start this Thursday. Tomorrow Li Ch’utam meets with all the parents to present our plans, especially concerning primary education, afternoon activities at school but also talk about other projects.

Cooperation with secondary school in La Constancia: as I wrote before, this year there is a new secondary school in La Constancia, around 3km from Mercedes. Finally there are 12 young people attending this school from La Ceiba and Nueva Mercedes, 5 girls and 7 boys! 6 of them receives scholarships from Li Ch’utam. The teachers there are very motivated and students are satisfied with classes, explication and all the activities done at school. The teachers are also willing to cooperate with us, using the unique competencies of Li Ch’utam – technology and foreign volunteers. That’s why we will do computer literacy and typing course and we will be supporting the teacher preparing and assisting during English classes for all students from the first grade. English classes started today. Great job Anna!

Li Ch’utam also supports the secondary school students in homework preparation twice a week. They can come if they need any materials or explanation.

Apart from the scholarships Li Ch’utam decided to organize the transportation for secondary school students. Finally there are 38 students from Nueva Mercedes, La Ceiba, Los Recuerdos, Semahu y La Constancia que van a las escuelas en La Constancia y Telemán. Every day at 12:30 pick-up takes them to school and picks them up at 18:30 starting from Telemán.

Adults education: This month we are going to start first of the workshops for adults, mainly women, about growing vegetables. We count  on their presence and active participation in the project!