The weekend before Halloween we visited Lake Atitlan, what Aldous Huxley called “the most beautiful lake in the world.” We also took an exhilarating day trip to the Mayan ruins of Tikal.
I have started volunteering at an organization called Common Hope, or Familias De Esperanza. This Minnesota-based non-government organization focuses on education to bring people out of poverty by ultimately improving life quality through a variety of projects. School ended for most Guatemalan schools which has left us volunteers with some odd jobs.
Senior Heide Snoek has been volunteering with the accounting office at Common Hope, experiencing the inner workings of such a unique organization.
Personally, I’ve been working in construction. That means building houses on people’s property where previously there was only a home constructed of a dirt floor, bamboo walls and an aluminum roof. The houses aren’t fancy, but a simple concrete and wood house is better than nothing. Literally.
According to the World Bank the purchasing power parity (PPP) for a Guatemalan is $4,740. The PPP for a person from the United States? $47,184. Prensa Libre, the local newspaper in Guatemala, reports that in Guatemala 53.7 percent live in poverty with 41 percent living in extreme poverty. This 41 percent lives on only one to three dollars each day.
This difference is strikingly apparent when I return from a construction site covered in black muck and concrete dust to my comfortable room with a laptop, hard floors and a change of clothes. I have become grateful for running water, food and the opportunity of education now more than ever before.
I don’t bring this up as a guilt trip, but poverty here demands acknowledgement. The hardest things about this real-life education is the imperative need for change. It is impossible to know about both the materialism in the United States and the poverty here without a desire for change.
This Thanksgiving, we have a lot to be thankful for. We’ve survived earthquakes, mudslides, volcanic eruptions and Guatemala city traffic. We are thankful for the opportunity to be studying in Guatemala.
We are also looking forward to a Thanksgiving meal the Sunday after Thanksgiving with United States-style turkey, stuffing and pumpkin and pecan pie. On Thanksgiving we plan to use up Antigua, Guatemala’s WI-FI while Skyping our families back in the states.
This Thanksgiving, be thankful. Really. Our blessing of education and access to resources should not be taken for granted. Maybe we’re the 99 percent back in America, but for the rest of the world we are the one percent.
For more information on Common Hope, visit commonhope.org.
My blog is at dshinabarger.wordpress.com.
