The Community Development Team or Stoves Team

The stoves team finished pouring the concrete floors, white washing the walls and began the stove installation on Wednesday. The concrete is mixed by pouring the water, sand and rock in large buckets with an electric mixer and carried in buckets into the house and poured on the floor or, the preference of the Guatemalans, the rock, water and sand is piled on to the floor and mixed that way. The mix is then spread by masons from the community who are exchanging work for having their own homes being “remodeled”. One homeowner completed the floor of the other room in his home by himself before the team came back to put in the stove.

After you have mixed concrete for three day putting in stoves seems easy. Of course, the home owner has to get all the parts to his home. That means that sand gravel and cement for the floor and concrete blocks along with parts for the stove have to be hauled up the hill one back-load at a time. You read it right: one back load at a time. Many of these families live well away from the nearest road where the parts and supplies for the stove and floors can be conveniently dropped off.

Part of what goes on with the team is that they interact with the family. This interaction may be more important than the home transformation and is why HELPS has gone through the process of doing these home makeovers. It doesn’t seem logical to have accountants, college graduates, successful real estate executives and lawyers work in rural. Certainly you could organize the people in each community to do this work and install stoves, but part of the transforming process takes place in the hearts and minds of the people that come to work and the people that live in the homes that are being remodeled. Perhaps the most important transformation takes place in the lives of our interpreters. Each year we have interpreters from schools in Guatemala City. These young people are from upper class families and have never been to this part of their own country and seen the circumstances in which most of their countrymen live. Last year our group of interpreters was so struck by their experience that they made raising money for stoves their senior class project. John Brougher found out the last night of our trip this year that they had exceeded their goal and raised nearly $5000.00.

One family that John Brougher’s team worked with this year had five boys between the ages of three to thirteen. John’s team fell in love with this family and spent as much time as they could with them. Whenever John would take a break the youngest boy would crawl into John’s lap and sit quietly just soaking it in.