In Xela, $50 changes lives.

Hola de Guatemala,

A stove is the simplest of things. In my home, it is a metal box with knobs that I turn to cook meals or heat water. Or it stands idle. I lean against it and chat with a friend or stack some mail on it or leave a plant on its shelf to soften its sharp contours. I give it as little thought as my refrigerator, or my table, or my countertop. To buy it new, it would cost about $450.

In Guatemala´s villages, a stove is a fire pit at floor level in the center of a one-room home. Babies crawling on the floor reach for pots heating up over the fire and lose their fingers, burn their arms, wind up crippled and scarred for life. The burning wood gives off a dense sooty smoke, and since there is no chimney and the single room is closed up to keep out the cold mountain air, the family breathes the fumes of the fire all day long. It is no surprise, then, that respiratory illnesses are the second leading cause of death among children among the villages of the Mayan highlands around Xela where I´m staying for a week.

Today, we started to build a new kind of stove from scratch. It is built with cinder blocks and cement, vents the smoke through a chimney, stands about four feet off the floor and has an entirely enclosed box for the fire. No more burns, scars, ruined lungs and lives. It costs $50.

That is one glimpse into the differences of lives on this planet. Now, of course, if we travelled deeper into the Central American mountains, or to rural Africa, or to perhaps even some of the worst hollows of Appalachia, we might find even more contrasts and inequalities. But when you actually experience it, when you travel from California to Guatemala in only six hours by airplane and then another five by bus and find yourself in a world where children suffer and die for lack of a $50 stove, when you think of the bad dinners in pretentious gourmet restaurants in San Francisco that have cost you twice that, you realize that there is a point at which the world makes no sense.

It might take hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to replace all the fire pits in the countryside in Guatemala, but poco y poco. In the past 14 years, la Escuela Pop Wuj, the Spanish language school in Xela which developed and pioneered this project, has built 5,000 of these new, cinder-block stoves. That means there are 5,000 families who are living more safely than before. What is that, perhaps 20,000 people? And as these people have children, will these benefits ripple out to perhaps 40,000 people and more?

These new stoves are a real sign of hope in the midst of very dark history in Guatemala. This history is incredibly complex, starting with the Spanish conquest, the conflicts within Guatemalan society, the impact of global economic demands, the spread of a plantation economy and racism against the indigenous Mayans who have lived here for at least 8,000 years. And the problem that the stoves solve is only a fraction of the problems that haunt this country. The other problems are less visible, at least to me, after only a week here. As you know, this is my first visit to Guatemala and I´m actually here for personal reasons, but the larger problems are ones ones I know mainly from books, not from direct experience, as I now know about the new stoves.

Before I came, I knew of the trauma that this country has suffered, but an idea is only a mental reality. It takes being here - walking the streets, breathing the car exhaust, drinking the bad coffee (since all the best coffee is exported to American and European consumers), spending time with some special people – to absorb the reality at the molecular level, in my body, as an experience deeper than words.

For those who haven´t been here, Xela – more formally known as Queztaltenango – is the second largest city, far up in a plateau in the western highlands. As you ride the bus from Guatemala City, careening along winding mountain roads and piercing one layer of clouds after another, you feel as if you are ascending into another more ethereal world, far distant from the traffic jams and clatter of the capital city. We are at 7,000 feet; the atmosphere is dry, the air insubstantial, the sun harsher and more brilliant. I´m winded after climbing even small hills. At night, I toss and turn, as if the air lacks the oxygen I need to stay asleep.

Or is it that my sleep is haunted by the reverberations of what has happened here, the earth still throbbing with la violencia and la influencia? Is it that some of my book knowledge is mixed with a new indirect knowledge I now feel when I walk along sidewalks wide enough for only one person, full of cracks and uncovered holes, or see the grimy buildings no taller than one ladder´s height, exposed electrical wires hanging almost within reach, stray dogs that come out at night and sniff through piles of garbage spilling out of trash containers at the edges of deserted parks?

Or is it seeing the decaying facades of once magnificient commercial and governmental buildings constructed some 70 to 80 years ago in the style of imitation Roman classicism with fluted columns, Corinthian capitals, flowing steps and patios opening into interior courtyards? And then in the midst of all this, the dignity and friendliness of the people carrying on, perhaps like Romans living in the shadow of the empire 500 years after the fall and sack of Rome?

But this is not Rome, only a provinicial capital that seemed to have a burst of prosperity some time between the World Wars, between 1918 and 1929, perhaps the result of new wealth from the coffee plantations and the rising demand for coffee, perhaps the beginning of the economic squeeze that drove the indigenous Mayans off their land onto the plantations, perhaps an acceleration of a process that began with the conquistadores. This is only a guess; my history of Central America is weak. Yet this is what it feels like, a city where time stopped nearly 70 years ago or so, then began to disintegrate faster and faster until the freefall of the past 40 years of la violencia and la influencia.

There are many books on la violencia, the policies of a succession of military dictators who massacred 200,00 and displaced 1 million, mainly indigenous Mayans from the mountaineous regions to suppress a peasant rebellion against social inequities, some perhaps symbolized in that simple comparison of stoves, others much more deeply rooted and complex. There are fewer books specifically on la influencia, which in Spanish sounds like the influenza, the flu, the virus that sustained and fed la violencia. It is la influencia de los Estatods Unidos, of the United States, or most basically, of ourselves. After all, we are a democracy. We are, in the end, responsible for what our government does.

I do not ask people for their individual stories. It is something I need to wait to be told, if anyone cares to relive their trauma. But I can infer it in the tone of voice, the corners of conversations. I hear that nearly everyone has lost family members, escaped death squads – encouraged and trained in the U.S. – or lived in hiding. And the chaos drained the society of its institutions, resources and skills to cope with disasters like Hurricane Stan, rural poverty and centuries old racism against the Mayans, whom one person from the Guatemalan elite was quoted as calling ¨shriveled oranges.´´

In the midst of this, you can imagine how I feel about going back to the United States and spending the next three months in a federal prison for protesting the U.S. policies that produced this catastrophe for the people here.

In a word: relieved.

If trespassing at Fort Benning to protest la Escuela de las Americas made sense when I was in Georgia, it makes ten times more sense now that I´m here. My time in prison won´t change a damn thing anymore than fasting for lunch on a Friday will change world hunger. But I hope that while I´m in prison, the few people who know me will remember those who have suffered la violencia y la influencia here in Xela, in Guatemala, in Central America, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam. Remembering is the least we can do.

Well, maybe not the least. We can also dig into our wallets and find $50 for a new stove and give a new family and its children a chance for healthier lives.

Contact this foundation formed by former Pop Wuj students to donate:
Stove Project
Foundation Todos Juntos
295 Quarry Rd.
Trinidad, CA 95070

Thanks!