As I was thinking about what to write for my first posting with RWI, my thoughts went all over the map. Having lived in Guatemala for close to three years, I am not at a lack for words…so much so that I found it hard to disentangle myself from Guatemala. How there is now, and always will be, a part of my heart that is Guatemala. It would be impossible to live or visit Guatemala and not be touched by the culture, the people, the landscape, the challenges and frustrations… and the beauty.
For the majority of the time that I resided in Guatemala, I lived in a rural and indigenous town in the Western Highlands of the country. From where the office of Roots and Wings International (Raíces y Alas) is located, you would need to travel approximately 80 – 100 kilometers further, following the direction of the Inter-American highway (north and west). If you travel the way that locals travel (and the way I traveled) you would find yourself in a school bus – exactly the kind that you took to school as a child in the United States.
There are some differences of course; one being that these buses are not transporting just school children. Once school buses are found to be unfit for the use of transporting American children, they can make their way down to places like Guatemala, to be used to transport the population at large. There they are refurbished and painted, often in bright and flashy colors, and used as local and national transportation. Travelers and tourists often call them “chicken buses” but to locals they are simply called “camionetas.”
While these school buses at first would bring memories to me of my childhood, the current reality quickly replaced the memory. Everyone takes these buses. It is the way that people travel from place to place; how teachers get to school, how vendors get their produce to markets, how family visit one another. While occasionally some students will need to ride a camioneta to reach the location of their school, there is not a formalized system of bringing children to school in buses. More often than not, children walk to school – and the distance they will walk depends on how far their village is to the closest school and whether or not their village or town has a school.
The town I lived in had a school and the villages that made up our municipality had smaller schools. The indigenous language of my town (and the surrounding areas) is Mam, unlike that of Nahuala where Raíces y Alas is located, where the population speaks K’iche. There are claimed to be 21 – 24 official languages in Guatemala and in some schools only Spanish is spoken. There are others that incorporate classes in the indigenous language. Most young teachers are coming out of high school and not all can speak the indigenous language of their area – making it harder to incorporate the local language.
Guatemala is a very impressive country for a great deal of reasons, one of which being that a large proportion (some say 50%) of the country is Mayan indigenous, which sets in apart from the rest of Central America. The more equipped schools can be in teaching students, especially in utilizing local language and culture in their teaching methods, the better off all Guatemalans would be. The educational system is full of flaws in Guatemala and I am excited that there is an organization like Roots and Wings International doing their part to help strengthen Guatemalan’s lives and their culture.
