C-Falls student experiences culture in Guatemala

One Columbia Falls High School student recently got a unique look at Central American culture, spending a week in Guatemala courtesy of the Rotary Interact Club and Maya Pedal.

Laney Conger made the trip along with Interact Club members from Bigfork and Polson high schools (Columbia Falls does not have an Interact Club) in April, getting the chance to learn more about the Guatemalan way of life in the small country that borders Mexico to the north and Honduras and El Salvador to the south. The group was hosted by Maya Pedal, a non-governmental organization which uses old bicycle components to build pedal-powered machines to help the Guatemalan people with everything from energy production to water pumping and food processing.

“It was an amazing experience with a lot of great food,” she said. “All of the fresh-squeezed juices were fantastic and the coffee was amazing. I don’t usually drink just black coffee, but I had it every day while I was there. Their coffee is so good.”

Conger spent the first three nights of her trip at Maya Pedal hostel in the coastal town of San Andrés Itzapa, getting the chance to practice her Spanish, before spending the last half of the trip living with several host families.

“We spoke Spanish with the kids when we first got there, because they speak a little slower and were easier to understand,” Conger said. “Later in the week, we stayed with families where everyone around us only spoke Spanish and we were able to hold our own speaking with them by then.”

While Conger was able to communicate thanks to her high school Spanish classes, she also got the chance to hear another language from a number of the locals, who speak varying dialects of the regional Mayan language.

“It was amazing,” Conger said. “I would be able to completely understand them and then they would go into speaking Mayan when they had something they did not want us to understand. It was like a lot of clicking noises. It was fascinating.”

Conger said the group spent the first three days doing a lot of manual work with Maya Pedal, helping build six water filters from scratch to help a 15-person family battle the lack of fresh water available in the country.

“There is no trash system down there, so there is a lot of trash and sewage that run through the city and into their rivers, which makes the clean water problem even worse,” she said.

Conger said she enjoyed helping build and deliver the water filters to the family, but her favorite part of the trip was meeting the people and families she got to stay with over the final few days.

“It’s crazy how fast you can form a bond with someone when you are shoved into a scenario where nobody knows each other and you don’t speak the same language,” she said.

It was during her time with these families that Conger got to practice her bartering skills at the local market, see Mayan ruins up close and even visit Acatenango and Volcán de Fuego, a pair of 12,000-plus foot volcanoes that last erupted in June of last year.

“We went part of the way up the volcano and got to see some of the damage done last year,” she said. “It was pretty crazy.”

All in all, Conger said the trip was an eye-opening experience that has helped her learn not to take for granted all that she has here in Montana.

“There was extreme poverty and it was very humbling to be able to witness that,” she said. “I learned to appreciate everything that I have while I was there.”