Stove Project San Pedro: The project gets going!

Saturday, January 12, 2008

The project gets going!

Keep watch for daily updates! After more than a month in Antigua and many,many,many hours of studying Spanish...
We are finally at the lake and things are very busy, and certainly a different world. Heinz and Jutta arrived 3 days before me and they already have been going full speed ahead. So much to do! Helped by a leader of the village, they set out to visit and choose the 30+ families most in need to receive the stoves. The next few days we will be finishing this process in the remote area of the mountain. The photos just posted are of a few of the actual families and their homes.

School registration starts Monday so this also means we will need to make sure all the sponsored children are signed up to return this year to school and we will need to complete the process of buying shoes, school supplies for each child. Getting the school ready for another year is no easy task.

This next week will be busy, but we are luck this week to have the help of Brittany and Hector. The first delivery of stove parts are due to arrive on the 15th. They need to be divided and delivered to each site in different areas of the mountain side. Also, the 15th is the start of the school year. The 16th and 17th every family receiving a stove will be involved in a training session for installation and use. I will do my best to keep you everyone informed of our daily trials and tribulations!

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A bit about the village,lake,people,culture and the area

At the southern edge of the broad highland belt that runs through Guatemala, captured in a mountain basin commanded by three towering volcanoes, lies Lake Atitlán. A score of Indian settlements, dwarfed by the mountain backdrop, lie scattered around the twisting shores of the 1ake which measures twelve miles long and half as wide. Like the million and a half Indians that make up half of Guatemala's present population, the residents of the Lake Atitlán basin speak dialects of the Maya-Quiche linguistic stock, akin to the language once spoken by the builders of the fabled Maya Empire of lowland Guatemala and Yucatan. The women weave on backstrap looms, the men cultivate corn on mountain slopes and valley plots, and the people of different villages exchange goods in open markets.
The villages surrounding the lake differ from one another in size, specialized crops, and level of wealth. Each has its characteristic costume, its peculiar dialect, and its distinctive customs, despite centuries of cross contact. Each community has repatterned its twin heritage of original Indian and introduced Spanish traditions into a way of life as distinctive from the others as are the personalities of different individuals. Every village may be said to have its own culture. Reliant on spoken rather than written tradition, yet increasingly subject to city ways, these peasant communities combine primitive and civilized features.
San Pedro la Laguna, has a cluster of some five hundred adobe houses compactly grouped in blocks around a central square. With a population of 2400, the village is third largest of the lake settlements and occupies a terrace more than a hundred feet above the water at the base of an inactive volcano whose steep sides form part of the agricultural hinterland. Situated about 5,000 feet above sea level, the village enjoys a temperate climate, the annual cycle consisting of a wet and dry season of about equal duration.
No roads connect San Pedro with other villages. The people travel on foot and occasionally on horseback along narrow paths winding around precipitous hillsides.