Stoves to breath by When Claudia Ramirez smiles, her big brown eyes mask the violent history they have seen. Born and raised during the protracted civil war that wracked Guatemala for 36 years, she witnessed the disappearance of friends, family, priests and professors. Armed conflict was a fact of everyday life where she grew up -- a region known for its rebel sympathies. She speaks of hiding under her bed as a child, terrified of what the masked men downstairs might do to her family. This smile greeted me and 13 other University students March 2 as we disembarked from a Boeing 737, stepping into a hot and dusty afternoon in Guatemala City.
Ramirez, 31, along with a quiet man known to us only as Walter, drove our group six hours cross-country to our worksite, outside the sprawling valley city Quetzaltenango. Our home for the week was Labor El Refugio. El Refugio is a complex of white tile-roofed buildings sprawled out lazily in the shadow of the volcano Santa Maria. The worksite itself sat on a mountainside 400 feet above, in the village of Tierra Colorada Alta, or the Red Highland. There, overlooking the expanse of Quetzaltenango --- known locally by its Mayan name, Xela --- we were to build stoves in the homes of impoverished indigenous families. According to Ramirez, it was a service aimed at lowering the incidence of childhood pulmonary disease due to unventilated cooking fires.
Students Becky Campione, Kendra Grinnage and I were assigned to the household of a squat older woman named Romelia. She, her husband and their daughter and their grandchildren live in four tin sheds arranged around a small, sandy square.We were to build the family's new stove in one of these sheds, next to an old, malfunctioning stove. Romelia, like many Tierra Coloradans of her generation, speaks Quiche --- a regional Mayan dialect --- and very little Spanish. Her husband speaks no Spanish at all. While we worked, he passed the time muttering to himself and drinking, pausing occasionally to kick the family dog, a puppy named Whiskey. Here, for one day, my coworkers and I experienced life without a proper stove. Romelia kept an indoor fire lit, and, despite impromptu gas masks fashioned from bandanas and old t-shirts, the three of us felt on the verge of asphyxiation constantly.
The second house at which we worked belonged to a stoic woman named Aurelia. Her husband recently left her and their five children for another woman --- a story not uncommon in the mountains around Xela. She lives with her brother Francesco and his children in a complex not much larger than the common room of a dormitory. We worked closely with Aurelia's family members who, like Romelia's daughter and grandchildren, helped us carry bricks, mix mortar and pour rocks.
Thursday morning, as we reluctantly departed Xela, Claudia Ramirez made a final appearance to see us off. She smiled as widely as when we had first met her, but her smile seemed to have lost some of its concealing power. Her past and a kind of wariness showed at the corners of her eyes. As our van pulled away from El Refugio, Ramirez gave a final wave before letting her smile fall. Fixing a determined look on her face, she turned around and walked off. Thursday was just beginning; Xela and its environs were slowly waking up. It was time to get back to work.
-- Compiled by Ian MacDougall, CLAS 2007
Emergency Communities
We arrived at 6030 St. Claude on Saturday afternoon just after lunchtime at the Emergency Communities Goin' Home Café. Emergency Communities (EC) is a grassroots organization that was founded shortly after Hurricane Katrina with the purpose of helping rebuild devastated communities from the inside out. That is, at EC, there is a strong emphasis on empowering individual residents to take ownership of their community rebuilding process. A perfect example of this is seen in the generous workmanship of Darren -- a lifetime resident of the Ninth Ward who spends all hours of the day, in his words, rebuilding local homes to "make things look decent" again. We're pretty sure he never sleeps.
Although none of our group members even approximate Darren's superhero status, while at EC, we helped out with both day-to-day community needs and short-term projects. We worked in the kitchen, cooking three hot meals that feed almost 600 people each day. We served up the meals to the friendly residents, who we enjoyed getting to know throughout the week. Then, of course, after meals it was time to plunge into the task of washing dishes, which occupied more hours than one might imagine. Additionally, the community had many concrete needs to which we could lend a hand. There were houses to be gutted, yard work to be done and various rebuilding projects to be started.
As we armed ourselves with crowbars and moving saws, it was often easy to forget what gutting a house actually means -- these were peoples' homes; these were peoples' lives. As we wheel-barreled the last remnants of what once was a home into the trash heaps on the side of the road, it was humbling to pause and think of a family who once lived here.
Amidst the lingering devastation, an unwavering spirit to revitalize this community remains in people like Darren. As we reflect on our time in the Ninth Ward, which is still heavy with the memory of the day the levee broke, we realize that the rebuilding process has only just begun. Nevertheless, in our short time at EC, we were lucky enough to see the real effects that come from the hard work and love of a community of residents and volunteers working together for a common purpose.
-- Compiled by Micaela Connery
Repairing a "place of peace"
Our first glimpse of Buenos Aires was characterized by smog and chaos, and our orientation at our worksite left us with a hard road ahead. Our task in the city was to help the people of Villa 15, one of many poor, forgotten villages on the outskirts of "the Paris of South America," by improving their community center through many repairs, a lot of painting and a bit of building.
The community center, Centro Conviven, had a long list of needs, and we found very quickly that the people who looked to Centro Conviven as the bright spot of their village were as ready to jump into action as we were. Valmir, the energetic Brazilian ex-missionary who manages the center, and Adrian, a native of Villa 15 who is endlessly dedicated to the people of his community, worked alongside us as our guides and newfound friends from half a world away. Carmen, Adrian's mother, worked herself to the bone on various tasks around the center and made us meals each afternoon. Each day at Centro Conviven we grew closer to our goals of leaving the people of Villa 15 something tangibly helpful and connecting with the community along the way.
What we accomplished by the end of our time there blew our initial estimations of our own capabilities out of the water. We had stripped, repaired and painted previously mold-ridden sections of the center, painted vast walls for the first time, helped repair a leaky roof that was causing extensive water damage, installed dozens of shelves for books and supplies and spent our last afternoon playing with children from the village and meeting the faces our work was meant to make smile. On the last day at the center, Adrian read us a meticulously prepared note, thanking us for our work. Carmen, who had been a statue of strength and seriousness, burst into tears as she thanked us for coming to help Centro Conviven, their "refuge and place of peace." We thanked them for their warm welcome and told them we would never forget them.
Our time at Centro Conviven was unforgettable, and its story is only one chapter in the larger tale of the trip. After being held captive for several days by the beauty and culture of Buenos Aires, we moved on to Federal, a town in the rural northeast, where we worked ourselves physically harder than ever, doing repairs for a small kindergarten. We drew our trip to a close with an excursion to the border of Brazil and Argentina, where we were so mesmerized by the awe-inspiring waterfalls of Iguazú that we didn't want to go home.
From the intense beauty and culture of Argentina and its people to the profound joy of making a new and great family of friends -- a group of near strangers only weeks earlier -- the trip offered us the richest of experiences. We will always remember the times we had during ASB Argentina, and together and as individuals, we will look forward to the next adventure.
-- Compiled by PJ Podesta, CLAS 2007
Cautiously counting cacti
"Ouch! Where are the tweezers? I've got a Teddy Bear in my leg! And while you're getting that out, can I use the sunscreen?"
We learned very quickly that a Teddy Bear was not a cuddly stuffed animal but a painful type of cholla cactus with barbed spines that typically requires the help of pliers to remove safely. The ASB group became fearless as we toiled under the broiling sun and grew accustomed to run-ins with these and other cacti along the trails where we worked.
ASB Saguaro spent a week volunteering with the National Park Service in Saguaro National Park, outside of Tucson, Ariz. We spent the first half of the week helping a resource management crew take a Saguaro Cacti census and remove a patch of the invasive buffelgrass. We bushwhacked off-trail to randomly-selected 200 by 200 meter plots both days that we were counting and measuring Saguaro cacti for the census. The cacti ranged in size from a tiny six centimeters to a towering six meters tall with, usually, four to eight arms.
The Park Service began the Saguaro census in the early twentieth century and has been monitoring the same plots every ten years to measure the health of the cacti in the park. Wednesday morning, after a two-hour hike, half of which was off-trail bushwhacking, we arrived at a hillside covered in buffelgrass and spent the day pulling up the remote patch of grass.
Despite the hours of hard work, we enjoyed a long lunch break playing in the cold mountain stream that ran through the area.
During the second half of the week, we worked with a trail crew to maintain the neglected trail to Rincon Peak, one of the tallest mountains in the park at 8,486 feet. We used sharp saws and loppers to cut brush and prickly pears, another type of cacti that we all had run-ins with, and then hauled the cuttings off the trail to clear a "six by 10 corridor," or a six feet wide by 10 feet tall open passage.
Throughout the entire trip we camped near an old, defunct ranger station located in a secluded area of the park that was 30 minutes down a dirt road. We had a small "kitchen" comprised of a propane stove, two coolers, 12 five-gallon jugs of water and an old but working refrigerator. We ate breakfast and supper together, and we packed lunches to take out on the trail. In the little bit of free time we had, we were able to see the Chiricahuas, ancient mountains that have eroded to form massive rock pillars. We also went horseback riding in a dry wash, a seasonal riverbed. We all agreed that it was an unforgettable and worthwhile way to spend our Spring Break.
- Compiled by ASB Saguaro Group 2007
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