Update 1 - Fall 2009

Chuwi Tinamit accepts our Premio!

The following is a brief account of my involvement with the Long Way Home organization since my departure from Guatemala in April of 2008.

As many of you will recall I interned in San Juan Comalapa with Long Way Home(LWH) between June and September of 2007. Upon completion of my internship I traveled extensively throughout Central America and southern Mexico while making regular stops back in Comalapa for reality checks.  In total, I returned three times between October 2007 and April 2008, contributing over a months’ worth of volunteer work hours and seeing to the completion of a couple projects initiated during my internship. (See my LWH volunteer statement and other blog archives on this site to read further about past projects.)

When I left Comalapa and returned home to Seattle that spring I had big ideas about the work I could and would do for the organization from the vantage point of the affluent United States of America.  Fundraisers, grant proposals, project presentations and more were thrown about as potential U.S. outlets for my desire to maintain my working relationship with Guatemala and LWH.  However, I was careful not to promise too much to Mateo, LWH executive director, and kept in mind that I was returning to a life of total uncertainty in Seattle as an unemployed, recent college graduate entering the job at the beginning of the Great Recession.  That being said, I still do believe that I have underachieved in my stateside endeavors on behalf of LWH, at least relative to what is generally possible. However, despite my limited efforts to help the organization from home, the organization has made great strides and achieved great successes within Guatemala in the year and a half that I’ve been away.

I’ll start by briefly summarizing my work for LWH since April 2008:

For the most part I have been charged with foundation and grant research with the related role of unofficial “Northwest” representative for Long Way Home.  Meaning that in the past year and a half I have written, spoken to or met with representatives from philanthropic or academic organizations ranging from the Seattle International Foundation to the University of Washington.  In fact, my one success in this time has been formalizing a project collaboration agreement with the Engineers Without Borders at Seattle University(EWBSU).

In February of 2009, after months of religiously contacting Engineers Without Borders groups in both Washington and Oregon, I finally received an invitation from a Seattle University engineering professor to give a talk to a group of his students about Long Way Home’s appropriate technology projects in and around Comalapa.  Professor Phillip Thompson, as one of the directors of Seattle University’s Engineers Without Borders chapter, also asked me to meet with him personally to discuss a specific development project for which LWH could use the support of EWBSU, either financially, materially or technically.  Mateo already had a project in mind and “shovel-ready”, so he sent me the appropriate materials to present the Cojol Juyu water project.  Cojol Juyu is a small, isolated aldea or village populated primarily by indigenous Kaqchikel Maya in the surrounding highland hills of Comalapa.  As a result of which its basic infrastructure remains essentially non-existent.  The town currently relies on an inconsistent water connection that comes from a neighboring village, thus on a good day Cojol Juyu receives just a few precious hours of running water to serve the village needs for cooking and cleaning. The little water it does receive is not fit for drinking, yet many do.

Unattended to by the municipal authorities, the town recently purchased the rights to a series of springs positioned perfectly, up-land from the town and its residents.  Therefore, all that is required of EWBSU to help complete this project is to provide some basic surveying and technical assistance, along with some amount of the materials required, a usual feature of EWB project arrangements.  Professor Thompson agreed to take on the project on behalf of EWBSU and after my presentation we identified an eager, student liason who would go on a preliminary visit to Comalapa and the Cojol Juyu project site during her upcoming summer break. 

Unfortunately, since presenting LWH’s work at Seattle University last February not much has advanced in terms of the Cojol Juyu water project, therefore nothing has changed for the people of that aldea in terms of their water supply.  The Seattle University engineering student did travel to Guatemala and completed some necessary prep-work for the completion of the water system.  However, in May of this year the national headquarters of Engineers Without Borders instituted a moratorium on new EWB projects for the individual chapters across the country, including EWBSU, due to financial uncertainties in the organization caused by the bad economy.  In conjunction with EWBSU we are now trying to work around that moratorium, going ahead with the student visit and preparing all the needed technical work on EWBSU’s end, right up to the point of construction.  Of course, we will have to wait out the uncertain economic climate in order to receive the critical financial assistance from EWB and in the mean time Cojol Juyu continues to receive the same trickle.

The second, more minor achievement of my work, this time in conjunction with LWH partners all over the world, was an online fundraising contest sponsored by GlobalGiving (http://www.globalgiving.com/).  The organizations that qualified in this contest received official registration of a development project on the GlobalGiving website, which is an international, charitable networking site encouraging and facilitating one-to-one direct philanthropic giving across the globe.  In order for LWH to qualify our innovative school-building project the organization had to fulfill GlobalGiving’s “Open Challenge” fundraising requirements of garnering more than 100 individual donations totaling more than $3000 in just a two months of online giving.  We were utterly successful in meeting these requirements, raising over $7000 in the allotted time, while proving LWH’s grassroots bonafides to GlobalGiving.  Therefore, you can now find and give directly to the school-building on the GlobalGiving website (http://www.globalgiving.com/projects/build-a-school-from-recycled-materials-for-50-maya/).

Thanks very much to those friends and family members of mine who responded to my email, Facebook or face-to-face solicitations.  Because of your generosity you can all point to a specific tire in the school-building wall which you helped to place there.

Lastly, the great achievement of Long Way Home in the past year and a half, not surprisingly, had absolutely nothing to do with me and everything to do with the hard work and inspiration Long Way Home has put into its school-building project.  This past August LWH won second prize in an aid and development capital contest held by the primary, home-grown, corporate power in Guatemala, the fast-food giant Pollo Campero. In awarding LWH and our local, partner organization Chuwi Tinamit the $50,000 2^nd place prize, Pollo Campero’s Juan Bautista Gutierrez Foundation essentially recognized our school as the second most important development project currently under construction in Guatemala. (http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2009/agosto/20/336228.html)

In addition to giving LWH the monetary means to complete the initial phase of construction for the school and employing a crew of ten local Guatemalans for more than a year, the Pollo Campero prize gives our project and the organization a heightened legitimacy and prominence within the global development community.  It gives us a new-found credibility to go to established organizations who we want to work with and say, “Look, we’re grassroots by any definition of the word, yet we’ve been recognized by both GlobalGiving and Pollo Campero, a local Guatemalan company, pay attention to our work and get on board now!”

This recognition, more than the actual prize money, may be just the catalyst Long Way Home needs to sustain and grow our efforts towards the ultimate goal for this project; to design, build and institute a high-level, sustainably-built and maintained, academic and vocational institution in cooperation with locals and accessible to the whole community.