A Long Way Home is Right

So I´ve been thinking about ¨volunteer opportunities¨recently, which are thick like moscas to a porch luce here in Guatemala. You can live in a gringo commune and build a kitchen from tires or stay at a coffee farm and show women how to use Microsoft Excel. You can teach english to kids, or translate at a collective weaving shop. There´s plenty of talk about ¨helping the street children¨as well, a term which a friend of mine wondered about. Sort of like saying you were going to help the hobos....the term PC doesn´t translate here.

Anyway, I came back this morning from checking out the first mentioned on the list--the gringo commune neatly labeled ¨A Long Way Home.¨ The short story is that this dude spent his two year peace corps stint in San Juan Comolapa, a beautiful mountain town about an hour north of Antigua. They wanted a park for the kids, but didn´t have the money, so this dude went back to his college town (Ashland, Oregon) and made some money and recruited some good old boys like himself, and came down and built a soccar field. and a basketball court. and a gringo commune-house. and then a nice little house for him and his girlfriend with a fence around it.

his house remains the only one with hot water for showers, but that´s a minor detail.

I think what Americans, and probably Europeans and definitely Canadians don´t quite admit to themselves is that ¨volunteer opportunities¨in developing countries might be better categorized as ¨eco tourism.¨ At least in my experience here in Guatemala in the places I have seen so far, where money is contributed for room and board and the eager, fresh faced volunteer is arranged into some form of work, and definitely given some compromising living conditions, and generally begins to feel like they´re getting a ¨real¨look into the country.

Enter in day two at Long Way Home, where an alternative school is being built in a corn field. I was supposed to leave that morning, but the night before we celebrated someone´s birthday, and el jefe Matteo was seeing his girlfriend off for the final time, so there was partying all around and the good people of the community showed up on the back of a pickup truck and a gaggle of women in beautiful embroidery opened up pots of stewed meat, rice, mayo salad and tortillas and served the men first. The local tienda, owned by the gregarious and nosy Fidelia, must make a fortune selling litres of Gallo by the caseload solely to the volunteers.

But anyway, the next day. the commune (seven people in all, all below the age of thirty) was slathered in sun screen. The good old boys, three other Oregonians in their mid-twenties with differeing degrees of poor spanish, drank coffee and smoked pot. Someone gave me a pack of saltine crackers for later. And then we packed the truck with tools (which everyone was incredibly uptight about. apparantly you are supposed to buy your own, so no one wanted to share. The commune-idea, i would soon realize, was not really desired by most) and we were off.

I suppose at the school site, it´s fair to say we all had a ¨real¨day in the life of a Guatemalan, becuase there were thirty or so Guatemalan volunteers that came out to help. Short, sturdy men, they looked at us girls with the shovels and wondered. Some local police came by and examined the plastic handle on the pick axe I was using. They commented on how light it was and then looked at me quizically. Like I was sort of alien. Then one of them said something to the equivelent of: ¨The more you use this thing the better figure you´ll have.¨ He used his hands to make an hour-glass shape.

Matteo showed up on his Honda Motorcycle. He was wearing a black t-shirt emblazoned with ¨I got dumped¨, which I suppose was the truth. We were all working on a trench five feet deep and unyieldingly long, and I asked him about excavators. Like, didn´t Comolapa have any? Matteo said something about Che Guevera, who liked to work with the people. He also said something like, if the excavator came, you wouldn´t have any work to do. And he also said that the excavator was against socialist ideals. (All this from a Texan alcoholic with a propensity for lewd comments towards women. It might also be interesting to note that he, the Che lover, stopped digging almost three hours before any of us did. Said he felt accomplished and went home. Got back and he was drinking Jack and Coke in his back yard).

Lunch time was a high lite. The women arrived in a tuk tuk, one of those little, covered motorcyle get-ups with the same food as the night before.

The school, predicted to be finished in four years, is supposed to offer mechanics, crafts and other workshop type classes. It´s basically Long Way Home´s sole project to date, and besides the tree nursery and the tire kitchen, digging is the only project one can contribute to. One return volunteer, a smoke jumper from Oregon who braided his hair and wore a john deer hat, said he was over it. That he used to come down to hang out with Matteo, but now it was like he was at work. Volunteers must log 40 hours a week, and do some weekends. And he added, ¨if this school doesn´t work out, Matteo is going to have a sick sick house.¨

The part about no shower comes in here too. Because as we were all filthy by the end of the day, the sun set and the cold came in, and the only shower was a cold one. We all went to bed with Guatemalan dirt stuck to us like a second skin.