In Guatemala, as I sat on the balcony of the third floor of our hotel, looking down onto the city of Chajul I noticed so much within so little. I could see the mountains and how they met the misty horizon. I easily realized how our hotel was probably the tallest building besides the church and the mayor’s home. I heard so many different sounds built up on top of each other, yet they weren’t hard to identify. I could hear the man trying to sell shoes at a very cheap price “Barratos! Barratos! Zapatos!”, the faint Mexican music coming from the fair, the kids giggling over a single “hola” from one of my peers, the dogs barking across the town, and the people conversing and buying and selling in the market. I could smell the corn, the smoke embedded in my clothing, the animals, the nature, and my recently washed hair that was beginning to fade from a fruity smell to a very smoky one that I had learned to adapt to, during my week in Chajul.

At times, it is hard to face someone else’s reality. Phones, internet, tablets, apps are all fine and dandy here, but living without them and them not being a need was very uplifting. It allowed me to see beyond my palms and experience the world from a different perspective.

Seeing the butcher house for the first time, was quite astonishing. They do it all out in the open, and those cows are all lined up to serve their destiny. I remember seeing a little girl standing next to a man at the door way of the building as things got done. I would have been too afraid and disgusted as a child to even dare get near the dripping blood. Watching the pipe run down the stream into the river was what scared me the most. That is the water they drink, bath, and wash with. Luckily, the water that we were provided with was filtered water and I can only imagine the few families who can even afford to own a filter of their own. They most likely don’t find a need for it, since their bodies have become adjusted and immune to their surroundings. The dogs that stood around waiting for a few scraps was saddening, but was a direct reflection of the malnutrition and hunger within the people.

The sense of culture was seen and felt everywhere. It affected so many aspects, whether it be the clothing, the homes, the gestures, the habits, the politics, and education. The woman wore their traditional wear so proudly (or oppressively, although they claimed it was a proud thing), and seeing the teenage girls, who helped us out in the garden, wear it even then, was a perfect example. The stories we heard about how politics affect the employment or unemployment on those who vote favorably were eye-opening. The buses that went from city to city, were so decoratively adorned. The owners took pride in what was considered their profession. The fact that the children had school days off due to the yearly fair (which happened to be there the week we went to Chajul). Even, the mountains they hike to simply have a religious ritual.  It all is so strong, but is it something that needs to change for the better of the community? Will foreigners be the cause of that change? Will it be a positive outcome?

I tend to complain about a potholes here in the streets of College Station, but realizing that all they do is walk up and down hills and through mountains with sacks full of corn or wood makes me truly appreciate what I have. But, in the end, one man’s burden is another man’s everyday task.

Oh, the tortillas! I think I speak for everyone in our group when I say we ate A LOT of tortillas while in Guatemala. Literally every meal, with an exception of maybe two or three, we were served tortillas. If there was a huge bowl with a towel over the top and tucked in the sides, you knew exactly what was in there—tortillas! Don’t get me wrong, I loved them. I loved them so much that I ate at least eight with each meal. That’s right, at least 24 tortillas a day! Well, this extremely unhealthy habit slowly started to dwindle as I was only eating about four with each meal about midway through our stay in Guatemala. By the 7^th day, two or three was all I could eat. By the 9^th day, I was done! No more tortillas for Jackie.

This brings me to a very interesting thought, though. The people of Chajul eat tortillas every single day, sometimes that’s all they eat in addition to a little chili. Can you imagine? It was absolutely mind blowing to me, and still is, that they live off very little food and the food they do eat has little to no nutritional value at all. Hence as to why malnutrition is very common in Chajul and various other parts of Guatemala.

In addition to the lack of food, the people of Chajul had adobe homes with dirt floors and holes in the roof. Very few families have electricity and hot water was generally unheard of unless boiled in a pot on top of a wood-burning fire. They don’t use a washer and dryer to clean their clothes like we do. Instead, the women go to the river and wash the clothes by hand and then hang them or throw them on top of the roof to dry.

Chajul women washing their clothes in the river.

If you want dry clothes in Chajul, you either hang them on the line or throw them on top of your roof.. Simple as that!

Seeing how the people of Chajul live with my own eyes was incomparable to what I could ever learn in a classroom or read in a textbook. I got to experience first-hand what it’s like to live without things I often take for granted such as hot water, clean clothes, an abundance of food, a vehicle, internet, my education and most importantly, my freedom and access to unlimited opportunities. The opportunities I have in America are endless and I am so very fortunate to be able to go to school and earn an education past the sixth grade unlike those in Chajul.

A sweet little girl at the library in Chajul. Look at that beautiful smile!

Most importantly, I learned what it means to have unconditional happiness. One image I can’t get out of my head, even if I tried, are all of the happy children of Chajul. No matter how dirty their clothes were or how hungry they may have been, they ALWAYS had a sweet, innocent smile on their faces and NEVER missed an opportunity to say “hola!” to us gringos! I learned so much from those children. No matter the circumstances, they were all so happy and full of life. I think we could all use a little bit of unconditional happiness that these children possess, don’t you think?

One of the many precious children of Chajul.

In all, I learned so much more than I could ever imagine learning in Guatemala for just ten days. I learned that we should never take anything for granted. We should never wish for things we don’t have, but instead be thankful for the thirngs we do have and always count our blessings, because somewhere in this world, there’s someone living without.

As a first generation college student I always considered myself to have motivation and a drive to accomplish my dreams, this trip help me realize I had slowly begun to lose my drive and helped me find it again.

As a child I always said I wanted to be someone important and to help those in my community, and as a senior in high school I would say I wanted to open a low income veterinarian but entering college and taking my first chemistry I realized that was not for me. As we began to talk to some of the staff in LHI I felt like I was like the becarios, but as we began to talk to the children and to the families I realized they had so much more they have overcome and so much more they fight to overcome.

The motivation I see they all have made me admire them some had parents who passed away and had to work several jobs to help his mom. Many have to walk 30 minutes to an hour to get to their source of education. This trip truly opened my eyes it made me see how fortunate I am to live in this country and to be attending this University. I used to think I had it hard since my family is considered low-income but the key word there was income, we have an income most families don’t. We went to many families who didn’t have money to send their children to school being as supplies and materials is what impedes them from going. Another thing that becomes an obstacle is the lack of family support. Many of the parents believe that girls shouldn’t go to school and though it has changed to become that girls should go to school and guys should only work this has caused the education of the youth to be even more valued.

I truly admired all the Agronomist students we met in Chajul they made me see that for them to be where they are took lots of work, motivation, and determination and let me see that the motivation I initially started off with was flying away. Luckily I this trip made me remember the initial reason I came to school to improve the lives of others and to become an example for my sibling just as this generation of youth is trying to do.

Right when I got to the small city of Chajul, Guatemala I instantly thought to myself that I wish I had more time to be there. The reason I thought this was because I knew if I wanted to get a great experience out of the trip, I was going to need a lot more time than a week because of all the obstacles I was going to have to overcome. Now when I mention experience, I am not talking about a tourist aspect of it, seeing the best sites or going to the best clubs, I was looking at trying to get the best information, feel of how things ticked, and get to know the people that actually live there. The native people have a lot of the answers to the questions that anyone may have about a region and they could be answered by what they say, the expressions they give off, and by all the things that they don’t say, which is the hardest to figure out, but could be the most important.

When I was in Chajul, I saw and heard a lot of things. I felt I went there not expecting anything, but when I started to try and talk to some of the people, I quickly noticed that I also did not have the right questions lined up to get the right answers. I was thinking to objectively and trying to attack the problems head on. I also noticed that I did this in the conversations that I was trying to have with some of the people too. I needed more time with some of the families around town to just talk about how and why they did a lot of the things they did and more variety with the geographical locations of the people we were talking to in the city.

I feel there is something that is hard to address and on top of that, hard to fix it. I have heard of stories of other groups that try to help an underdeveloped region, but when they leave, the natives go back to the old ways that they were doing before the group came along. In Chajul, I would sit outside and just think why. The people know that they are malnourished; they know there is more of a variety of foods they could eat and grow, yet they continued to follow the same routines. No matter what anyone can tell someone about what they are doing wrong or how to better themselves, they will psychologically never change because they may feel there is not an immediate need to fix the problems at hand or not understand the other motives. A person would more successfully change if they were to buy-in to the cause and be motivated to want to improve themselves and through the changes they would be making, feel empowered by their hard work to motivate them to continue working hard.

In the end, the trip went well and it was a great first experience of being out of the country.  I learned a lot about other perspectives of life and how to handle certain situations when talking to people and dealing with the language and cultural barriers.

Going on this Guatemala trip, I had no clue what to expect. We had all heard stories from our professors in class about their experiences in Guatemala and Chajul, but it wasn’t until we got to Guatemala that we got a feel for the country and culture for ourselves.

The culture shock was quite real once we got to Chajul. Experiencing how most of these families live by being invited to lunch at their homes was an eye-opener. Many of the homes that we went to had dirt flooring, and only one or two beds for an entire family to sleep on, all in the same room. There wasn’t any indoor plumbing in most of the houses, which made me think that sanitation practices were probably not a number one priority. Many of the meals that they ate were just comprised of corn tortillas and salsa. We talked to a couple people that said that when times were hard, they would have to go to the mountains to pick herbs for their meal that day. I can’t imagine that a diet like that has the proper amount of nutrients needed by the human body for healthy living.

Another shocking experience was that the stoves that most people used to cook are just a couple of cinder blocks and some fire wood. The walls of the houses were all dyed black from the amount of smoke that passes through them daily. I can imagine that the people’s lungs must look like the walls from inhaling that much smoke throughout their lives.

This is box bul (bush bol) which is a famous dish in the Ixil region of Guatemala. Its made of corn masa and leaves with a soup type liquid. Most families eat it three times weekly.

A shocking observation that I had was the amount of pollution that goes into the water sources there. People often do all of their laundry in the river, which causes soap chemicals to pollute their water. The river was filled with trash thrown into it. The slaughter house in town has a pipe going down into the river that all of the blood from the animals would run into after slaughter. The water from this river is the same water that people get in their pipes and use to cook, drink and clean with.

Some mothers doing laundry in the river.

The slaughter house where the pipe leads into the river. All of the stray dogs in the neighborhood sit around at slaughter time in hopes of getting some scraps to eat.

Even though living conditions are not the best and food access is very limited, people in Chajul have an amazing sense of community and family. It amazed me to see how many people that we talked to say that if they had the opportunity to get a job outside of the village, they wouldn’t take it so they can be close to their home and family. It’s such a strange concept to me, because in America we all leave home at the age of 18, and usually don’t go back.

This experience made me think about how much we take for granted in our lives. I value things like clean water, protein-filled diets and every other luxury that we have a whole lot more now.

Georgia Arrindell

There are no pets in Guatemala, but there are thousands of dogs. Far from domesticated, these skeletal dogs roamed the streets of Chajul looking for scraps of food. Admittedly, I cringed at the sight of every sickly, homeless dog I saw. I pitied the puppies whose rib cages were easily visible from meters away and whose fur was dirty and marked with scratches and scars. Albeit a little flee-infested, they were often quite adorable: I cannot count the number of times I wanted to reach out and pet the dogs or pick them up and take them home with me.

And yet every time I found myself pitying the lives of these animals, I subsequently thought of the even larger number of men, women, and children in Guatemala who suffered from the same problems. These people do not have the luxury of worrying about the needs of a dog when they are merely trying to ensure the basic needs of their families are met. For every mangy mutt I passed by on the streets of Chajul, there was at least one family likewise suffering from hunger. While I had known that hunger and malnutrition were endemic in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, I did not have a grasp on what this truly meant until I saw the plight of the Ixil people of Chajul.

Hunger and malnutrition are not always physically visible in humans. There was one thing, however, that made the malnourishment of the people of Chajul particularly evident: their height. At 5’4″, I’m not very tall, yet in Guatemala there were several occasions in which I was the tallest person in the room. The phenomenon of “stunting” is extremely noticeable in the more rural, mountainous regions of Guatemala, where people’s diets consist of very little protein or essential vitamins and other nutrients. Over the span of their life, these people simply do not attain the nutrients necessary to grow at a normal rate and are much shorter as a result.

Never have I been so exposed to hunger in the way that I was in Chajul. As is often said of development, you never can truly understand the problems facing our world today until you see and experience them for yourself.

Seeing hunger through my own eyes is an experience I will not easily forget; it has helped me to better understand the crucial importance of doing everything in our power to find sustainable solutions for world hunger. I encourage everyone to travel and see things for yourself so that you can have a better understanding of the world around you.

There are so many things that we take for granted as Americans. We wash our clothes in a washer, dry them in a dryer, rinse our mouth with tap water, eat food in variety, and take warm showers. There is nothing like experiencing this simple lifestyle to make you realize what you’ve really got. Although we did stay in Hotel San Gaspar, one of the nicer places in the town of Chajul, we nonetheless had to deal with all of these issues. We did as much as we could to immerse ourselves in the lifestyle of a Chajulense; we learned how to make tortillas, attempted some Ixil, weaved pieces of cloth, ate lunch with families, and walked the steep path to the hill of San Andres.

There was no day that was the same; we were always doing at least one new thing every day. We may have worked on a raised garden for three days, but every day was a new opportunity to interact with different people in Chajul. Whether they were older people by the market or little kids in the library, they each had an interesting story to tell, after you broke their shy barrier of course. Although all their stories were interesting and exciting to listen to, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to walk in their shoes. Every day I walked in the street, to the market, or up the hills I tried to immerse myself in the environment and take it all in.

It took me a couple days to finally realize how hard it must be to walk in some of these people’s shoes. These people weren’t here for ten days enjoying the scenery; they live here and are here to stay. On Tuesday we had a day of relaxation before we started working on the raised garden. This was the day I put all the pieces together and realized how hard some of these people have to work just to LIVE. Some of us stopped in Nebaj to make a trek up and over a hill to the neighboring town of Acul where we would visit a beautiful cheese farm.

Bottom in Nebaj

As we began our hike and climbed higher and got more exhausted, I noticed people walking the same trails and some even working atop the steep slopes on parts of land. This was the moment when it hit me; these people make this exhausting journey more than once a week just to work or get to work. Whether it’s to get to Nebaj, Acul, or just to their horribly placed given plot of land atop the hill, it was unforgiving on the legs.

I started to put pieces together as to why a lot of these people are so malnourished, boys start helping their fathers at around the age of 8 and use up all the little nutrients that they do get climbing atop these hills and working on their land. Then there is the process of having to carry your entire finished crop back down the hilltop. This is hard work that I couldn’t have imagined doing at this age besides having to mow the lawn.

We like to live our comfortable lives on our couches, behind our televisions and computers, oblivious to the fact that other people just like us have to work a hundred times harder to earn a hundred times less. It really helps to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and realize that you’ve got it pretty good. Don’t pass up the opportunities that you’ve been given and remember that we all have to work with what we’ve got.

Everything in life has a start, a culture, and a source of pride. When visiting Chajul, or even Guatemala for that matter, I had no idea what to expect. I went into the trip expecting the worst, such as a community so smokey that I wouldn’t be able to breath, children walking around as malnourished as the ones in the aid to Africa commercials, and half eaten cats and dogs running around in the streets. In reality, though some of those statements were true, what I observed on my trip was something that no one could have even begun to describe to me.

In Chajul there is a source of pride, a passion for their culture that we no longer get to enjoy in the states. From the traditional dresses, weavings, and extreme source of family unity, I was in awe of their entire way of life and how it seemed to start from infancy. Women coming back from their daily trip to the grinder would carry their traditionally dressed infants in a blanket on their backs while carrying maize on their heads. Men would head to the fields early in the morning with their machetes on their belts, hoes over their shoulders, and their sons by their sides. Although everyone had their duties to preform, they always had their children by their sides. This is what stood out to me the most on our trip to Guatemala. Everything I heard before I left prepared me for the worst, which in turn helped me to accept the bad and be blown away by the culture that I didn’t expect.

I am so blessed to have been accepted for this experience. Sure, every culture has their problems, Chajul may even have more than others, but I just wanted to take this small amount of time to focus one the side of Chajul that people rarely get to hear about.

Thanks & Gig ’em

– Brittany Jesson

“From the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. And from the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.”

I’ve been at Texas A&M University for three years and I never truly understood the meaning of this phrase. Although I have many friends here in College Station, they were all bonds that were formed over time.

Study abroad experiences are unique. You are thrown in a new environment with a group of people that you may not know very well or may have just met. With no cell phones or Internet to steal away your attention, you are forced to interact and get to know these new people.

Our newly formed bonds were immediately tested. Early on in our trip, a friendly game of soccer broke out with a few of the local children in Chajul. A full-force kick launched the ball into the air, which landed on a nearby resident’s roof. The impact knocked multiple clay shingles off and they shattered on impact. An upset homeowner quickly came out.

Being a student who couldn’t speak Spanish, I was at a loss for words. That was when my newly formed Aggie Family stepped in. Not just professors, but fellow students were there to help me out in a possibly bad situation. Frowns quickly changed to smiles and anger quickly changed happiness.

The incident quickly became the talk of the village. Interested children rapidly surrounded us, and we spent the rest of the afternoon interacting with them.