Welcome to Part 2 of Operation "Finish the Blog"! This post will focus on our community engagement aspect of the trip, which was by far the best part! Although seeing our project come to live was surreal, being able to spend time with the community that the project was directly impacting really put a purpose to what we were doing in Guatemala.
Community engagement was tricky for Team Guatemala due to our lack of access to the community. The kids that came to enjoy the garden and our kitchen are children who come from homes of poverty, abuse and general instability. The Garden is a safe space where the kids can seek happiness and joy. Garden of Hope works very hard to ensure that all adults that work with the children are there for the long term so that the kids are not exposed to more loss and suffering. PUC and Garden of Hope were in agreement that PUC students should have limited interaction with the kids in order to avoid a painful goodbye.
But we made it work! With days of sharing between our team and community members over a meal after yoga on the side of a mountain at the beautiful Earth Lodge and attending a sign language workshop at the school for the deaf, LAVOSI, that Garden of Hope partners with together. Both experiences put us out of our comfort zone and brought us together, especially being able to take native English speakers and native Spanish speakers and have them learn a new language together.
Another piece of community engagement was being able to teach a couple of Garden of Hopes classes. The goal was to take engineering principles through fun activities to capture the attention and imagination of the kids we were working with. The first class was with Education for the Children’s 1-3 graders, where we had them work in teams to create the tallest tower out of toothpicks and marshmallows. The second activity was learning about the principle of viscosity where the children were able to make slime out of cornstarch and water and food coloring. The kids were riveted and so excited to take their slime home, going around and explaining the activity to others. The second class was with Antigua Green school’s multilingual middle schoolers. Here we talked about what it meant to be an engineer and a social worker and then built rockets out of balloons, straws and strings. It was great to talk to engaged students, some wanting to develop into engineers.
Another formative experience was trying to communicate with the Guatemalan team members of Garden of Hope, they were gracious, helpful, patient and had a great sense of humor. Having a conversation was always an adventure, but both parties were committed to connection and understanding, which I believe sums up our dynamic throughout this project.
Stay tuned for our last blog post that will be about the conclusion of our project! You won't want to miss it!! But until then, here is a sneak peak...
