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WORLAND – The Worland Rotary Club in conjunction with several other Wyoming Rotary Clubs across the state and the Huehuetenango (pronounced Way Way Tenango) Rotary Club in Guatemala have provided seven poor villages in the mountains above Huehuetenango with 334 latrines which will benefit 2,776 people.

“There is so much that we take for granted here. Your kids are complaining because they don’t have the newest iPhone or they don’t have a car when they turn 16, these guys live in houses with no electricity, no running water and no bathrooms,” Worland Rotary Club secretary Marty Hinkel stated.

Hinkel and Evanston Rotary Club member Julia Murray visited the villages in January after the latrines were built in 2016 as the final step in the grant process which provided the funding for the latrines with the help of the Rotary International. Hinkel stated that Rotary District 5440 raised $40,000 for the project and the International matched the amount 1.5 times.

“When we look at global grants, a global grant is a grant where we partner with the Rotary Club in another country and together the two clubs work together on helping people. The project that I went over for was the latrine project,” Hinkel explained. “The big thing with Rotary grants is that they have to be sustainable. The country where we go and put them in, it doesn’t do any good to put in a water system or a latrine system if when it breaks down they don’t have the funds to fix it. So each of the villages that we went to, they had to show us their financial records so that we could see that yes they had a bank account and yes they were putting money into it so if the system needed repair they would be able to repair it and move forward, because it does us no good to build it and then two years later it just sits there because no one is using it. That’s the big part of Rotary, it’s not a hand out, it’s a hand up to help them to get to where they need but they have to be able to sustain it and learn how to fix it and work on it,” she added.

Huehuetenango Rotary member Ernesto Villatoro worked with the people of the villages to make sure that they have the ability to build, maintain and repair the latrines. Hinkel stated that he spent three days a week for about six months working with the villagers to install the latrines and teaching them how to work, repair and maintain them. “They are pretty simple, there are no working parts on them,” Hinkel said. “A lot of people have asked why don’t we just take a group of people over there and help build them. They are a very proud people, they can work, they just don’t have the resources to build, to pay for the supplies. We provide the money and Ernesto teaches them and shows them how to do whatever they need to do and then they build them. They don’t want a hand out, they just need a hand up,” she added.

Hinkel and Murray arrived in Guatemala City about midnight on Thursday, Jan. 26, where Villatoro and his daughter Caroline, who was the translator, met them. They spent the night in the city and headed to Huehuetenango in the morning. The trip from Guatemala City to Huehuetenango was about seven hours. Upon arriving in Huehuetenango, they met the Huehuetenango Rotary Club members during a reception at one of the members’ hotel.

Hinkel said that early the next morning they headed up the mountain to visit the villages, inspect the latrines, make sure that the villagers understood their role in keeping the latrines clean, the proper hygiene of them and to make sure that the villages were saving money in a separate account for maintenance and repair.

Unable to visit all seven villages during the two days that they were visiting the villages one entire village walked an hour to meet them and thank them for the latrines. “They got up in the morning and walked for one hour to come to where we were going to be so that they could thank us for the latrines. The president of that village that walked, he had me in tears. Thank God we had sunglasses on so that they couldn’t tell. He said that their village was having a hard time; they were struggling with dysentery problems. They went to the Guatemalan government to ask for help and the government said, ‘sorry we can’t help you.’ They asked other villages around if there was anyone that could help, but all of them were in the same boat, they are all so poor that they couldn’t help. He said ‘I went to bed and I prayed to God for someone to help us and then a month later Ernesto came to say that there are some people from the united States that would do a grant if they could sustain it, that we weren’t just giving it to them that they had to show that they could use it and respect it.’ Here was this big man who was talking and started crying,” Hinkel said with tears in her eyes. “Another gal said ‘our kids when they have to go to the bathroom, they have to go out and poop in rocks and trees and bushes because there is nowhere for them to go so that contaminates the ground water.’ Just by giving them the latrines and showing them how to care for them, what a difference that made for them. To think that someone would walk for one hour to come and thank us for giving them an outhouse that’s not as fancy as some of the outhouses we see up on the mountain. It makes you really grateful for living in the US, for what we have,” she added.

Each village that they visited had a small reception for them, with a ribbon cutting to commemorate the event. “Each village we went to, everyone in the village was there to see us to greet us. They had pine needles down everywhere we walked so that we wouldn’t have to walk on the dirt, kind of like a thing for royalty. They put us on this pedestal, like we were like high royalty, which was very moving. We would talk to them a little bit, they would show us their financial records and then we would go out and have a ribbon cutting for the latrines,” Hinkel said.

Along with completing the final step of the grant process, both Hinkel and Murray came to Huehuetenango with $200 from their individual Rotary Clubs. That $400 converted to $2,500 in Guatemalan money and was used to by school supplies and soccer balls for the villages’ schools. “They have school but they don’t have any paper or pencils. They have a chalkboard at the school so they do their writing on the chalkboard. We gave them some colored pencils, a globe, pencils, pencil sharpeners, paper and four soccer balls. Two soccer balls for the girls and two soccer balls for the boys at each school,” Hinkel said. “Ernesto really emphasized two for the girls and two for the boys because a lot of times the girls don’t get to play and be involved so he had to make sure they separated them,” she added.

The combined forces of Rotary Clubs have a few more projects in the works. Hinkel said that in 2017 they hope to be able to help the villagers put stoves in their homes. “They cook and heat their homes with open fires, so you could smell when the kids come and hug you, you can smell the smoke on them, so they have a lot of problem with emphysema. Ernesto is working on a design for a cinderblock stove that can be vented to the outside, that they can use for cooking and heating and he can probably get them built and designed for under $100. Our club and the other 5440 clubs will be working on raising money to help get them get them, to help their air quality with the kids with the emphysema and coughs,” she said.

Before the latrine project they had helped three villages with water and will be returning in 2018 to help the other four with water. Right now, a lot of their water comes from the rain that runs off the roof. The rain water runs off the roof and falls into an open pit lined with black tarp. The open pit allows animals and birds access to the water which in turn contaminates the water. The water project consists of building shelters where the water runs off into black antimicrobial tanks.