i 'Masons on a Mission' group returns from trip to Guatemala
'Masons on a Mission' group returns from trip to Guatemala
BY SADA REED
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 03/15/2009

AUGUSTA -- A group of University of Maine at Augusta staff members and students ventured to Guatemala last month to build stoves as "Masons on a Mission" volunteers. The volunteers, who paid for the trip's costs, were featured in a story published Feb. 1.

After building 24 stoves during their February vacation, the volunteers are back on U.S. soil -- tired but appreciative.

"It went great," said Kathleen King, of Hallowell, administrative assistant in the UMA president's office. "Their living is so different than others."

Twenty volunteers made the trip, including local residents: King; Mary Jo Blazek, professor of human services at UMA; Norma Bisulca, of Oxford, professor of mathematics at UMA; her husband, Paul Bisulca, and their 11-year-old granddaughter, Makayla; and Patrick Cheek, a graduate student in the human development program.

The group built cook stoves for indigenous villagers, replacing open fire pits used in poorly ventilated, adobe homes. Such open fires pose serious health risks, as cooking over open flames can cause lung, vision and back problems for the people using the stoves most often, who are usually women. Each of the stoves volunteers installed cost about $150, though each recipient was required to cover 10 percent of the costs -- a price that was still steep for the families receiving stoves.

Each day the volunteers were divided into groups of three to five people, with each group being paired with a mason. Masons were the unofficial leaders of the group, while non-masons did jobs like shaking sand or cutting bricks. None of the groups had power tools.

Cheek said though he noticed many of the tourist-friendly parts of Guatemala were relatively affluent, the level of poverty overall was incomparable to anything Americans experience.

"The living conditions would be considered squalid, even inhumane, by our standards," Cheek said. "Families fortunate enough to have electricity deal with live electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. Some dwellings have dirt floors, and there's just smoke billowing everywhere. We wouldn't expect homeless people to live in these conditions in the United States.

"After visiting some of the poorer villages, my most profound realization is that Americans live like kings. The space I occupy in my dorm would be occupied by an entire family in Guatemala."

The groups went to several small towns, spending the first three days of stove building in Tzununa and the final two days in San Juan. Work began around 9 a.m. and the groups returned to San Marcos between 1 and 4 p.m. each afternoon, depending upon how long it took to build the allotted number of stoves that day.

While they worked, group members couldn't help but notice what was different about their surroundings.

"They were so hard-working," King said of the natives. "I watched two young men -- they had to be in their teens -- carrying bags of dirt and gravel on their backs all afternoon without complaint. We'd see kids carrying cinder blocks to their homes. They work happily; you see the kids coming home for lunch from school in their indigenous clothing, pressed and clean, then seeing them working very hard in the afternoon to support their family."

As chair of the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission, Paul Bisulca went to the towns not just as a volunteer, but as a bearer of gifts from Maine's indigenous people. Brenda Commander, tribal chief of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, provided photos of her and her two grandchildren in native attire, along with birch bark rattles, sweet grass and small baskets of birch bark or ash.

"The photos and rattles were presented to the woman of the house with the explanation that I was an Indian from the United States and one of our chiefs, a woman, wanted to send gifts to each of the homes in which I was working," he said. "It was a message of Indian solidarity; of Indian people helping Indian people. I also wanted to convey to them that women can be chiefs too and maybe enhance their own self image."

For more information on Masons on a Mission, go to midcoast.com/masonsonamission.

Sada Reed -- 621-5732

sreed@centralmaine.com

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