DukeEngage | Duke Center for Civic Engagement

During my first week in Guatemala, I found out that my host brother, Melvin, got his girlfriend pregnant a few months before, and they had to get married as soon as possible. They planned to move into the second floor of the family's formerly one-story house.

I arrived on a Monday and the wedding was the following Saturday. In order to have the house ready for their wedding, the construction for their new house continued through the night. (Sidenote: I'm on anti-malaria drugs which have humorous side effects, including hallucinations or vivid dreams that tend to manifest during the night.)

On my second night in the house, I must have heard the hammers working above, and I had a crazy dream that the ceiling was collapsing on me. I woke up and ran out of my room.

As soon as stepped outside, I saw my host father walking out of his room in a Speedo. (Not part of the dream.) I'm sure he was embarrassed and certainly did not expect to see me that early in the morning. I was mortified. I also realized that my life in Guatemala for the next two months would be far from normal.

As the family prepared for Melvin's wedding, I learned more of the birth saga, even though I could barely understand Spanish. My host family explained the story to me on multiple occasions, and all I could understand was that his girlfriend was either five months pregnant or was going to have five children.

Even though they live with less than most families in the U.S., the wedding was a grand event. This shotgun wedding was "small" and only had three hundred people because they had to plan it quickly (and because a few family members boycotted the wedding because of the pregnancy). My older host sister had over one thousand people at her wedding. I can't even imagine someone in the U.S. trying to plan a wedding of that size.

Some of the traditional customs surprised me. They could not have the wedding in a church because of the bride's pregnancy. On her wedding day, she wore pink, because she was not allowed to wear pure white. The person performing the wedding even chastised them publicly for their "sexual love" and said they needed to find a new form of "Godly love." Guatemala was nothing like I expected; even the daily customs contrast sharply with American life.

Before I went to Guatemala I made quite a few assumptions about my trip. I never truly understood what it meant to live on less than $2 a day. And I thought that if I was a bit tanner and wore Guatemalan clothing, I could fit right in with my dark hair and Mediterranean olive skin. I could not have been more wrong.

In Guatemala all white foreigners are called "gringos," a term that can be both affectionate and insulting. At 5-foot-7-inches, I am taller than almost everyone in this country, including the men. My hair is too light, and my facial features are too foreign. I've never been in a country where I could not blend in with the local population. I am a total anomaly.

We need hiking boots to walk in the muddle streets, and it would be impossible to roll a suitcase down these roads. The camping backpack is a necessity. My newest homestay family does not even have soap in the bathrooms, and I'm preparing to take my first bucket shower tonight. I know I will not be American-style clean for the next two months.

One of the hardest things for me in this country was figuring out the difference between surviving and adapting. In many cases when my kitchen plates are dirty and I have no way of cleaning anything I own, I think about how I only want to survive this trip. The water is not safe to drink, and I am forever itchy with bites.

But I realized that if I'm living day to day as if I am just trying to survive, I will never have a full experience. People live like this here, and many of them are happier than people I interact with on a daily basis in the U.S. Now that I am no longer only trying to survive, I'm learning to see life like locals. Flies in the kitchen no longer faze me. I have no fashion standards (zip-off pants, manly hiking boots, and rolled-up jeans are all fair game). And the more Guatemalan I become, the more I realize how much I love this place.

Local Guatemalans wash their clothes in a water basin called a pila, and this hand-washing process takes them about eight hours.

Over the weekend, we went to a local entrepreneur who works with bicycle scraps to create new machinery. Maya Petal uses old bicycles to power many different things, including a coffee and corn grinder, a macadamia nut de-sheller (I might have made up that word), a water pump, a power generator (30 minutes on the bike makes 3 hours of electricity), and even a washing machine.

The washing machine works in 30 minutes, which would save my mother eight hours in the pila. They even made a stationary bike for a local Guatemalan girl with MS. I would like to show you all some pictures of the place, but my internet connection here is unbelievably slow.

You can find their website, mayapetal.org,

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All twelve of the DukeEngage students in Guatemala climbed on to a camioneta, a Guatemalan Chicken Bus. Parents who read the Lonely Planet Guide to Guatemala told us that we should never set foot on one of these things, and yet on our first day in the country, we were squished together riding to a small village named Magdalena.

A Chicken Bus is like a reformed school bus that most of us used in elementary school, except that it is decked out with Latin music and people store their live chickens on the shelves above the seats. Locals bring all kinds of stuff onto this bus. In fact, just yesterday one of the DukeEngagers sat next to a man with a machete.

In the U.S., we generally sit at maximum two people per seat, and no one stands in the aisle. Guatemalans have no such concept of personal space-people sit together with at least three people per seat and there is no room in the aisle. It is a great place for pick-pocketing, because people are literally packed like sardines. Imagine how uncomfortable the bus is when everyone is soaking wet from Guatemalan tropical storms.

We each spent our first night with our homestay family, and the next morning we road the Chicken Bus back into work. I live with the Batista family, apparently one of the most prominent village families. My host mother, Doña Raquel is from a family of 10 children and my host father is one of six. And another one of the DukeEngagers met the Batista grandfather, who claims to have 53 grandchildren.

I am the only DukeEngager who did not know Spanish seven days ago, and that first night with my host family, none of whom speak English, was spent with a dictionary and lots of hand signals. I spent most of my time smiling and nodding.

Miscommunication is common. I learned yesterday that for the past week I have been saying "Yo tengo veinte anos," which literally means "I have twenty assholes," instead of the correct "Yo tengo veinte años," which translates to "I am twenty years old."

Our first two weeks in the program are spent studying Spanish in Antigua, Guatemala, living with homestays and preparing for our fieldwork. We are members of Soluciones Comunitarias, a nonprofit company whose mission is to encourage a socially responsible business climate in Guatemala.

The program leaders use the famous Chinese proverb to describe the program: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Traditional "relief" and international aid can be compared to "giving of fish," whereas "teaching someone to fish" is "development" assistance.

Deciding when to use development and went to use relief can be a tough call. For instance, places devastated by Hurricane Katrina needed relief, and many rural environments in Guatemala need development.

Soluciones Comunitarias focuses primarily on development and trains local entrepreneurs to sell products that many people in the U.S. take for granted. The five main products sold by the entrepreneurs are water purifiers, reading glasses, vegetable seed, energy efficient light bulbs and wood stoves. In many villages, people have no access to these products, and the market opportunity is vast.

As Duke Engagers, we have a unique opportunity to be a combined student and consultant. We are learning the cultural differences, making mistakes in Spanish, and riding the Chicken Bus. We are also acquainted with some effective business practices and can provide labor for their projects.

Considering that I have already consumed an entire bottle of Pepto-Bismol in six days, perhaps I can start by introducing some of these products to my village. Food washed in the local water can carry amoebas and stomach-upsetting bacteria.

A water purifier would be a healthy addition to the households in Magdalena.