Today started with a buffet style breakfast at Hotel Kakchiquel where it was proven once again that Guatemalan coffee is far superior to a cup of joe in the USA. After breakfast, we met a Mayan Families worker named Natalia who guided us on a walk to the Mayan Families office. The compound was beautiful, consisting of an open air courtyard with surrounding office rooms, as well as an artisan shop and a wood shop. Team Guatewater took a nice picture in front of a mural of a quetzal, which was almost as good as the pictures that Ag Team <3 took (totally non-biased opinion).
Natalia, Pablo (who picked us up from the airport), and a woman named Jackie gave a great overview presentation of Mayan Families, covering their ongoing projects, their goals, and the direction they hope to see the organization go in. Currently, they are working towards solutions that have less of a charity aspect and more of a focus on sustainability without intervention.
Soon we were in the van, traveling up the winding mountainside on the way to Tierra Linda, a small town at the top of a BIG mountain. Mayan Families had established a pre-school nutrition center within this community and was a great place to start gathering information via interviews with 4 indigenous women. After two translations (Mayan dialect -> Spanish -> English), both the water and agriculture groups thought we had a great start on gaining a better understanding of Guatemalan life. While some of us were sitting in on the interviews, the rest of us played with the kids or collected soil and water for data collection.
After cruising back down the mountainside we arrived once again at the Mayan Families Office where 3 teachers from Tierra Linda and 3 teachers from Peña Blanca were waiting to discuss the STEM projects we had designed and brought with us. Both groups were super excited to see what we had come up with and we were just as exited to share it with them! After a demonstration and a superb translation from Maya, the teachers gave us some input on how best to introduce our projects to the kids so that they would benefit the most from the experience. After saying goodbye to the teachers we were given a demonstration on constructing cook stoves which we would be doing the following day. The whole process reminded me of constructing IKEA furniture but with cinder blocks.
We ended the day by walking back to the hotel in the pouring rain – our first experience of Guatemala’s rainy season. After a brief break to dry off and change out our shoes and socks we headed out to enjoy dinner and some live music at a restaurant down the street. Before calling it a day and heading to bed, we all gathered on the second floor lobby and did a run through of the Fuerza y Futbol STEM project where it was finally socially acceptable to behave like children.