TFS Member Alf Sharp in Guatemala

I was invited to help build a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the moun­tains of Guatemala. I took along my good friend and shop assis­tant, Tom. We’re both well over six feet tall, and the diminu­tive natives of the area called us ​“los dos gigantes (the two giants)”. After a week there, I flew my wife down for the remain­ing two weeks of our tenure. We were working in the moun­tain town of Huehuete­nago, a harrow­ing three hour bus ride from the capital, Guatemala City. Once on the tortur­ous moun­tain road our bus was behind a slow-moving concrete truck. On one side of the road was a verti­cal cliff going up, and on the other a straight drop for several hundred feet. The bus driver pulled out to pass on one of the many blind curves. As we drew along­side the truck, around the curve from the oppo­site direc­tion barreled a gaso­line truck. I prepared to die. Somehow all three commer­cial sized vehi­cles managed to pass one another along this normally two lane road without touch­ing. I guess it’s not without reason that many of the brightly painted buses in Central America include the phrase, in large letters, ​“Dios con Nosotros (God be with us)”.

Safely in Huehue­te­nango, we got down to work. We were staying with a Witness family who lived about three miles from the work site. Among a congre­ga­tion of about 120 people, there were only two auto­mo­biles. The brother who owned one of them would normally pick us up in the morning to take us to the project. In the US, his car, which we dubbed ​“el carro”, would have long been rele­gated to the junk yard. It smoked like a loco­mo­tive. He kept a couple of extra sets of spark plugs, cleaned and gapped, on his dash­board, to be exchanged as the previ­ous set became hope­lessly fouled during each day’s driving around. He’d turn off the engine to save gas at every conceiv­able oppor­tu­nity, and the engine had so little compres­sion that he could bump start it with the clutch coming off any of the numer­ous speed bumps around town.

In the evening we’d gener­ally walk back to our lodg­ings which was very pleas­ant. Lunch and dinner was served on site – great simple regional food that tasted quite exotic to us — so it would usually be rather late – 8:30 or 9:00 – because the custom was to take a 2 – 2 ½ hour siesta in the middle of the day, a most civi­lized custom. We’d lie in the grass on a little mound under­neath a purple-flow­er­ing jacaranda tree and take a little nap. The younger, more ener­getic broth­ers would pick up a soccer game down the hill. I joined them once, but once was enough.

Because of mois­ture and termite issues, build­ings in Central America are almost univer­sally made of masonry. Doors and windows and inte­rior trim are the province of wood­work­ers, hence our pres­ence. We were working with green mahogany straight from the forest. Kiln drying is expen­sive and rarely used for local purposes. Signif­i­cant cracks in the wood­work is a common feature of Central Amer­i­can build­ings, we found. But mahogany moves much less than other woods, so the problem wasn’t insurmountable.

Modern wood­work­ing machines were barely employed in this remote corner of a third world country. The lumber came to the work­site in the form of logs, and was rendered into planks by a version of pit sawing. The log was lifted onto a scaf­fold­ing about seven feet in the air. One brother would climb atop the log, the other would work below, the two of them wield­ing a long two-man saw. They would launch into the log early in the morning, and by evening they would have sawn three to five boards up to 15” wide and 12’ long. The quality of work was about what you’d expect – a thick­ness differ­ence of maybe ½” from end to end, and promi­nent saw marks throughout.

Once inside, a board would be cross-cut into two or three pieces, and several broth­ers with jointer planes that had seen better days would begin address­ing the planks. The planes were set to take a thin shaving, and they passed the planes along the boards as if they were playing shuffle board – almost pitch­ing the planes forward. Very little, if any, wood was taken in a pass, but the motion was very rhyth­mic and the planers were exert­ing little effort with each pass, so they didn’t tire out quickly, which was a good thing because they did this all day long every day. They would stop peri­od­i­cally to wipe the soles of their planes with gaso­line, which they said made the planes slide more smoothly. In this way, a single brother might finish two planks in a day, and they were supply­ing us with boards that were reason­ably flat and true.

We had brought a skill saw and a router with us, and we used the skill saw to make a rudi­men­tary table saw. We began ripping stock for the stiles and rails and muntins for the windows and doors. We sawed tenons and chopped mortises by hand. Amazing how quick and how good you can get at those processes when you do them all day long. It helps you under­stand better how an 18^th century cabi­net­maker with an appren­tice or two could turn out work about as fast as we do today. We used the router to apply a nice little molding to all the inter­nal edges. The double entrance doors were quite elab­o­rate with 36 small fielded panels in each door. We fash­ioned an angled fence to enable us to use the skill-saw/ta­ble­saw to raise the fields on the little panels. By the end of our three weeks we had made eight double-case­ment type window frames and three doors. Cracks were already showing up in some of the wood.

On one weekend break we took a trip up the huge moun­tain that loomed over town. Capil­la­nia, as it was known, rose to over 15,500 feet. There was a large rocky plain on the top of the moun­tain, and several remote little commu­ni­ties existed up there. The road up the moun­tain was unpaved and tortur­ous, but busses and large trucks still shared the road with us. We rode in the back of a pick-up truck, a ubiq­ui­tous prac­tice in the region. As we approached the top of the moun­tain, the terrain became as alien as another planet. The promi­nent plant up there was a type of century plant, but in this envi­ron­ment they grew immense. The central stalk would be about a foot in diam­e­ter, and thirty feet tall. The rest of the spiky leaves rose to a height of six or seven feet. The diam­e­ter of the entire plant might be ten feet. The air was dry and rather cold, even though we were pretty close to the equator. I got a touch of alti­tude sick­ness — vague nausea and lightheadedness.

We visited inside a couple of meager dwellings – wattle and daub construc­tion with thatch roofs and dirt floors. The ceil­ings were prob­a­bly not six feet off the ground and I had to stoop. It was hard to imagine how they subsisted up there at all. The ground was just entirely gravel. I did see some corn plants and some stunted fruit trees. I think they kept goats as well. Commu­ni­ca­tion was diffi­cult because these folks spoke an ancient Indian language that included pops and clicks and whis­tles. Their Spanish was about as limited as my own, but we got along just fine.

Despite their atten­u­ated exis­tence, these were happy and contented people, as were almost every­one we met at the bottom of the moun­tain as well. It was on this and another similar trip that I decided every spoiled and enti­tled Amer­i­can teenager needed to be trans­ported to a third-world loca­tion and made to live among the people for a few weeks. It’s mighty hard to take for granted all the luxu­ries and labor saving devices we have after expe­ri­enc­ing life at this level. And real­iz­ing that joy in living can just as easily be found in what we’d call deprived circum­stances will really make one reassess one’s priorities.