Solvang Rotary partners with Linda Vista to build water wells in Guatemalan villages

Our weeklong journey from Feb. 3-11 began in the early hours bound for LAX on a chartered bus complete with mimosas and delicious pastries from Olsen’s Bakery.

Our direct flight on Avianca Airlines to Guatemala City was a little over five hours and our baggage was limited to 22 pounds per person, with a carry on suit case only. In addition, we checked three extra 50-pound bags filled with clothing and dentistry supplies for donation to people and organizations in Guatemala.

We were very organized in our mission approach, dividing into two groups, each in a large van to transport suitcases and supplies.

The dental van transported Dr. Art Kaslow and Dr. Robert Brugnone (who offered dentistry services for two days), their assistants Sherry Thore and Dean Elser, to the small community of Escuintla. They saw 50 patients who received free dental care and treatments. Both dentists commented on the severe decay and lack of dental hygiene for these villagers and vowed to come back as often as possible to render further treatment.

We also had the assistance of Rolando Morales from the Escuintla Rotary Club, who helped to make all of the dentistry a reality for our team. This first van also participated in the final day of well drilling and followed up the next day with their commitments and dental obligations.

The second van consisting of Stu Gildred, Linda Johansen, Kristan and Lauren Morrison, Joe Brown, Allan Jones and Robert Klug, worked on the well-drilling project for two full days at Nueva Concepcion, a very remote village found near the end of a dirt road. Each well cost $6,000 to complete and will provide fresh, clean water to the villagers for 20-plus years.

The Solvang Rotary and all of the participants in this project paid for the first well and Linda Vista Foundation made a matching grant for the second well to be drilled at a later time.

The well crew worked under the direction of Jamie Torres and his well-drilling company and team, ASOCAVIVA. His company works with many Rotary Clubs, foundations, and nonprofit organizations to provide clean water to remote villagers. Jamie is committed to bringing fresh water to all rural villages in Guatemala, and gives so much back to the country he calls home, as well as the people he serves and loves.

He is a very dedicated man of high personal and ethical standards. He provides a teacher for children and women at all drill sites, and the curriculum and materials are provided free of cost. He also provides a beautiful bible for the women at the end of class that fits into a gorgeous little felt bag complete with jewels on the outside that each woman has the opportunity to make in class.

Nueva Concepcion has approximately 1,200 villagers and their water source was completely contaminated with fecal matter.

We drilled for two full days, finally reaching clean water at 300 feet that would be safe for the community to drink. The drilling process is hard work and requires manual labor, digging trenches, washing heavy pipes and lubing them. The process also includes feeding the pipes into a drill that pounds them into the ground. That part is slow, difficult, and very tedious.

At each new level, soil is tested for contamination until a level with healthy drinking water is reached. Each working member of the team wore a hard hat, large rubber boots, and was mostly covered with mud within a few minutes.

There were a lot of sore muscles and a few blisters, but at the end of the second day when the fresh water was finally pumping out, there was joyous chaos combined with tears from the crew, the villagers, and the children who promptly jumped right in the water to play.

Dean Elser, fellow Rotarian and photographer for our trip, was the first big kid in the water followed by many village children. It was a beautiful sight to see them all playing in crystal clear clean water!

At the same time the well was being dug, there were classes offered to the children and women in the village in a very small room that was designated as a classroom. There were close to 30 in each class, with the children meeting in the morning and the ladies in the afternoon.

Classes offered were about oral and personal hygiene, nutrition and some arts and crafts projects. Supplies were given to each participant to follow up with their hygiene at the end of class. Kristan and Lauren Morrison along with Linda Johansen aided in the classroom. A woman named Vivian who is associated with ASOCAVIVA, ran the programs that were offered with our assistance.

We all loved the experience with the children and the women getting lots of smiles and huge hugs for our efforts. The women were especially grateful as there is little opportunity for them to be fussed over — ever. They thoroughly enjoyed their class time and participation.

There were also some kitchen duties to attend to with the beautiful, brave and resilient women in the village who made two meals a day for the entire team. There was a mid-morning and afternoon meal all prepared from scratch by these amazing women. They work so hard and were up at dawn to clean, wash, cook, tend to the garden, livestock and children.

They carried in four live chickens on the second day that they killed, plucked. They threw in the meat with vegetables to make homemade empanadas and a huge pot of soup. Working in the kitchen with these lovely women was a beautiful experience as they had us participate in every way. We did draw the line at killing the chickens with a knife, but we did help to pluck them!

At the end of two days and with the completion of the water well, many dignitaries in the village came together for a blessing ceremony.

The watersite was blessed as were all of us for our hard work and efforts to financially bring this well to their village. There were lots of prayers, many different blessings, huge hugs, and lots of kisses and tears as we said goodbye to these humble, impoverished indigenous Guatemalan’s who are so resilient. They live so meagerly, but are happy and content with the little that they have. We all came to love Guatemala and the beautiful people there, and are committed to going back many times to work on additional projects, including this fall.

In between our work days, the entire team visited many nonprofit organizations that benefit from working with the Linda Vista Foundation. The outreach of the Stuart Gildred family and their commitment to helping others around the world, and here in our Valley was astounding. We had no idea the magnitude of impact they have made in impoverished communities in Mexico and Central and South America.

We were able to connect with the following organizations and understand the dire need in Guatemala, and the Solvang Rotary is committed to partnering with the Linda Vista Foundation to further help. Partnering makes our money stretch farther, and with the Solvang Rotary, we have a vital work force in place.

One nonprofit organization called Amigos De Santa Cruz has a mission to improve the lives of the indigenous people of Santa Cruz and surrounding villages through support for education and sustainable economic empowerment. Their vision is for families in their communities to have access to sustainable sources of income, where schools provide quality education to all children, and where women, men and youth have an active voice in decisions that impact their communities. We also visited The Maia Impact School, which is the first female indigenous-led secondary school in Central America.

The Maia Impact School offers a holistic education focused equally on academics, culture and identity, socioemotional development and family engagement. The school was beautiful and the girls brilliant and amazing in their educational achievements. The school is developing a network of public, private and nongovernmental organization partners with whom to collaborate in order to share best practices, co-design innovation, and to lead sustainable local development.

ASOCAVIVA is a faith-based organization built on Christian principles who the Rotary will partner with to build our well. Their main goal is to provide safe drinking water to remote areas in Guatemala and to share the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Founded in 2019 this organization drills water wells and tries to improve the lifestyle and health of the communities they visit. They teach classes in health, personal and oral hygiene as well as nutrition, and encourage villagers to have a relationship with God and care for one another and their community.

Another organization visited, Cooperative for Education, believes that all children will be given the opportunity for education regardless of poverty level they are born into. They believe that poverty robs the children of opportunity and that education empowers them and opens doors which can change the destiny of Guatemala.

Suenos is the word for “dreams” in Spanish and this organization works with indigenous children whose families have moved from the rural areas of Guatemala to Antigua in hopes of a better economic opportunity. These children are kept from school and work as street vendors with their parents. Suenos is working to educate these children with at least a primary education to give them some economic stability and to help stop the cycle of child labor.

Lastly, we visited Faith in Practice which is a nonprofit Christian organization that seeks to improve the physical, spiritual and economic conditions of the poor in Guatemala through integrated surgical, medical, and dental mission trips and health- related educational programs. All of these organizations have many opportunities with which the Solvang Rotary can partner to help better the living and educational standards of the people of Guatemala.

Another amazing opportunity presented itself when a local Guatemalan Rotary Club was celebrating its 25th anniversary for a literacy reading program that was started by a fellow Rotarian in a local school.

There was a huge presentation complete with Guatemalan pop artist and Grammy Award-winning Gaby Moreno as a speaker, as well as the first female International Rotarian President Jennifer Jones.

Our entire entourage was invited to attend the Rotary International Gala that same evening in the converted old historic convent in Antigua called the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo. It has reigned as the best hotel in Guatemala since it opened in 1989. It functions like a museum with overnight guests and many of the surviving buildings are from the 1600s. It was an incredible evening and the Solvang Rotary was able to be photographed with our first-ever female Rotary International president, which was an honor. We all told her about our project in Guatemala and she gave us her full support and congratulations.

Lastly, en route to our humble Guatemalan hotel that we were based in for two nights while we worked on the water drilling project, we stopped overnight for an incredible visit at Lake Atitlan in the Sierra Madre Mountain Range. This gorgeous blue lake in Central America sits on a massive volcanic crater and is around 1,115 feet deep, making it the deepest lake in Central America. It is flanked by three volcanoes, Atitlan, Toliman and San Pedro. The views were absolutely breathtaking and many small villages surround the lake many accessible by water taxi only.

After parking our vans in a dirt field, we were helped to our water taxi that took us to our accommodations for the one night. It was an incredible stay and time to bond with our Rotary group before all the work began.

The highlight of this Lake Atitlan visit was that the Linda Vista Foundation purchased property to build a primary school that will be for both boys and girls.

We walked the property and could all envision a school that would educate the children of this very rural and impoverished area. All children deserve the opportunity to get an education to better themselves and to grow up healthy with clean drinking water, free of fecal matter and bacteria.

The Solvang Rotary and Linda Vista Foundation are partnering to make sure is becomes a reality.