Stove Project San Pedro: Bella Vista School

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Bella Vista School

5 years ago while traveling and studying Spanish in Guatemala Jutta, by chance was invited to go with the director to drop off very basic supplies to the school in "el campo". This is the area way up in the mountain where the majority of the village are coffee pickers and the poorest of the poor.

As it was, the school had basically nothing. No teacher, books, paper, desks or even a proper building. During this short visit Jutta learned a bit about the importance of the existence of a school for the community and how it was being shut down due to lack of government funding. The amount needed that year was somewhere around $500. When she returned to Canada she could not get this school out of her mind. She started,very grass roots, collecting money and getting kids sponsored for $12 a month. 5 years later, with lots of work and thought. There is now a nice little fenced in building, bathrooms, desks, 3 teachers, basic supplies and about 70+ children getting a chance at an education, they may not ever have the chance to receive. All accomplished little by little over 5 years by Heinz, Jutta and people who have supported them in their project. A few dollars here and there can make a huge difference in this village's life.

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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.