Not A Vacation

Growing up, it was always preached to me that you should search out opportunities for community service. You should want to do it because it is helping others, and that is a desire that you should have. I volunteered year after year in little tasks around town and while it was nice to help others, that’s all it was; helping others. Going on this service trip to Guatemala really changed my perspective on service and the value of it.

While on the trip, it was often discussed that this is not a vacation. It doesn’t feel like one, and it wasn’t intended to. Almost every day in country, we did construction work for eight hours a day. Construction work is particularly tedious and difficult in Guatemala due to the lack of technology and resources in general. Every little task required multiple steps of man power before it could be even close to complete. For example, making concrete and pouring it into the foundation trenches was a huge undertaking and required a lot of work from every person on the team. We first had to carry cement bags up a hill to the work site, 90ibs a piece. Then people were on the street side shoveling water, cement, and gravel into a concrete mixer. Once the small concrete mixer was finished, there were more people to shovel the concrete into buckets which were hoisted up to the worksite using a homemade pully system. Once the person at the top of the pully could reach the bucket, they pulled it to the ledge, unhooked the handle, and passed it to the assembly line. We made a line of people to pass buckets down in order to reach the desired location for each bucket of cement. It took multiple days and many muscle aches to do very little work.

Due to this, it felt more like a work assignment than a vacation, but I would not change that. Through helping this service project, I was able to really step into the shoes of the locals of Panajachel. I was able to work alongside and create relationships with men, women, and children who were born in that community. I was not a tourist, I got to live the life of a local for the short two weeks. Without this service, I would not really understand the lives of the locals. I would be blinded by the smoke of resort culture that often smothers the true culture of tropical destinations, such as Guatemala. It wasn’t a fairy tale dream vacation, but much more than that. In this case, service was invaluable as a lesson on perspective.