I hope you are having an amazing week. In my work I love being able to connect with so many amazing and ambitious teenagers. Today’s blog post is by a former student of mine, Anna Crowder. Anna is studying at Ursinus College and is double majoring in International Relations and Spanish with a minor in Latin American Studies (YOU GO GIRL!). Recently, Ana and I reconnected and she shared with me her experience volunteering in Guatemala. I am so excited she agreed to share her story with our community. I hope you enjoy her story and are inspired to give your time and energy to empower others. Not only did Anna give value to the community she served, but she gained so much through her experience. Every opportunity to give is also an opportunity to grow and learn. Anna’s message provides a beautiful lesson on the power of connection. Thank you Anna for sharing your experience.
Much Love,
Andrea Zacharias
By Anna Crowder
This summer I had the opportunity to spend two weeks volunteering in the lovely town of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala (called Xela by the locals). It was my first time in a Spanish speaking country, and as a Spanish major it was a very life-changing to experience what goes on in a place so different than my own. Guatemala definitely does not have much in common with New Jersey, where I live, nor probably with most of the United States. I was surprised when there were no traffic lights, when public transportation consisted of renovated painted school buses, when there was an armed guard in front of the bookstore I frequented. The amount of stray dogs was surprising, along with the casual all-too-common sight of pickup trucks filled with people standing up in the back as I walked around the city. Different for me, but normal and nothing to be concerned about for those who live there, who are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, some of which have become very good friends of mine.
For my volunteer project, I went every day for 4-5 hours a day to volunteer with the organization “Aldeas Infantiles SOS Guatemala” (SOS Children’s Villages Guatemala). The location itself consisted of a little gated community of about 100 kids, ranging from around 5 years old to 16 years, living in a total of 13 houses. Each house had a “Tía”, a woman who acted as the head of each house, cooking meals and being an overall motherly figure for the children in her houses. The community also included a library, playground, and basketball court.
Each day that I walked the ten minutes from my host family to the village, I was greeted by the very friendly security guard who recognized me from when I introduced myself on the first day and unlocked the gate to let me in. Once walking through the administrative building and into the village itself, there was always a swarm of children running to me, smiling and asking me what houses I would be visiting with on that day. The core of my project revolved around boosting literacy within the village by providing books and spending time reading with the kids. In order to fund this, I had done a successful fundraiser back home, and due to the favorable exchange rate, was able to purchase a lot of books while in Quetzaltenango to give to them, along with games and sweets. I visited with about three houses per day, where we would read for a time, followed by going outside, playing games, watching movies, anything the kids wanted to do.
The kids were really amazing, and spending time with them was truly a humbling experience. The kids all were getting some degree of schooling, but had never studied English. However, American music is very popular there, so many of the girls would ask me to translate various pop songs and sing them out so they could hear a native speaker pronounce them. They were so interested in learning that I wish I could have stayed longer and arranged some lesson plans. Communicating wasn’t the easiest thing, since I am still a Spanish student and am not terribly used to slang terms, but all the kids were really nice and would talk slower when I couldn’t understand. I learned a lot of Spanish just in the two weeks I was there, and that there are a lot of differences in words between countries, such as when I used what I thought was the word car (coche) but to Guatemalans actually means pig! So the kids got a good laugh when I told them I was a 3-minute ride away “by pig”.
I was always so admiring of how thankful the kids were for the littlest things, such as when a woman came by to give one house I was in a bag of socks. They were so excited they all posed with their gifts like it was Christmas. Another day I went to spend time in a house where it was a little girl’s birthday, and she was so excited to show me her gifts, which consisted of a notebook and some multivitamins. They were always so happy, too, despite the fact that all had ended up there for a variety of unfortunate events. More than anything else, those kids taught me that money does not buy happiness, and anything we as people can do to help others, we should do it, even if the only thing we are spending is our time. I plan to do another fundraiser for the kids closer to Christmastime, and hope to be able to go back and visit them soon. A place is so much more than what you can read about in the news, I would recommend anyone visit Guatemala.
