May 7: Learning Through Open Windows

We arrived in Guatemala Saturday night and found our ride waiting at the airport for us. It was a pretty exciting sight to see the DWC sign our driver held up and realize that our adventure was finally about to begin ! We checked into our hotel and managed to get a few hours of sleep before our early morning departure to climb Volcano Acetenango. It was a bit more of an undertaking than we had anticipated… in total we spent 11 hours on the volcano and definitely had a very good team building experience.

Monday morning we put on our new DWC shirts and headed out to San Miguel Dueñas to meet Teresa and see her amazing work with Open Windows. We toured Open Windows and had a chance to walk around the town with Teresa and see where we would be working for the next two weeks. In the afternoon we returned to Open Windows and went to the library where the children read to us. It was a really great way to interact with them although we didn’t necessarily understand everything –many hand gestures were used!

Tuesday morning the shuttle picked us up right on time after another incredible breakfast (complete with yummy Guatemalan coffee of course!) at Fernando’s Café. We arrived at Open Windows and got ready for our 10 minute walk to the work site. Our job is to build a room in a family’s home out of cinder blocks. None of the eight of us have any sort of experience with building but we all learned everything from our Guatemalan locals to get the project underway.

Cutting wire, putting holes in the cinder blocks, mixing cement, and twisting metal and creating re bar supports were some of the many new things we are learning. Each of us has our own expertise after day one and actually had a lot of fun!

Danielle Anderson
DWC Student Team Leader
May 2013, Guatemala