Stove Project San Pedro: Stove day....Everyone helps out!

Monday, January 21, 2008

Stove day....Everyone helps out!

Heinz left at the crack of dawn with another man from the village to head to the coast. Two men in a huge empty truck. Hoping that in about 6 hours and no problems, they would be back from the factory with a truck load of all the ...correct .....and unbroken parts!

By the time they made it back it seemed everyone from the village was there to help, regardless of whether they were a family member getting a stove. They all seem to realize the importance of the project on how maybe in the future they may receive one. There are still about 50 homes in need of stoves.

It could not have gone smoother! Within 2 hours all the parts found their way to each correct home scattered across the mountainside.

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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.