The first chicken bus honked at four AM.

The second one blasted its horn at 4:20 a.m., or maybe 4:30. It didn’t matter. I was awake well before dawn, like every day in San Andreas Osuna, Guatemala. I wondered why I didn’t hear the other thirty people sleeping at the Finca — surely one of the twenty-three Guatemalan Army personnel and seven Engineers Without Borders staff heard the blast horns designed to wake all possible passengers in a twenty mile radius. I weighed what to do in the darkness before breakfast at six and chose to shuffle off to the shared toilet ahead of any others. 

I joined this team a fortnight ago but will depart in a few days. The Army and EWB personnel will stay another two weeks—the time expected to finish the two bridges crossing the Cenizas River. While design details were adjusted, rebar bent and wired, and food prepared to satisfy the hundreds of calories burned, I shot photos, interviewed participants, and worked up outlines for stories. Between the experience and the observation, I planned to write for the next two months. My Wisconsin winter would be warmed as I described the lovely Guatemalan culture, the exotic life of an on-site project engineer, and the lasting, positive effects bridges had upon communities. 

At dinner the previous night, the EWB team sat beneath a single bare bulb, its wires lacking all official approval. The general question on the table was accommodations — would we give the ones at the finca one, two, three or four stars? The conversation resulted from the lead engineer’s phone call to a colleague from EWB Nicaragua, scheduled to arrive in a few days. He told her we had a shower, at which we all yelled our objections. At some sites a makeshift shower can be arranged, but here we had a pila and nothing more.  

Taking a "pila bath”—scooping and pouring water with the small bowl on one’s body—is like a sponge bath.  There’s nothing shower or bath-like about the experience. 

And yet, after the discussion about how we lacked a shower, my EWB colleagues gave a four to our overall experience. Here, we had a makeshift kitchen with a refrigerator (last site used ice in a cooler), electricity for charging (last site used a noisy generator for four hours each night), a covered area under which we placed our tents/cots/sleeping bags/backpacks (we were under the skies). Flushing toilet and sun to dry daily washed clothes were the same.

We lived next to the police station, in a small village of Spanish-speaking people (though I bumped into four with whom I had a conversation in English). It offered many small shops for supplies and refreshments including beer, pop, chips, and ice cream treats, especially my favorite, choco bananas.

My colleagues were two other native English speakers and five native Spanish speakers, each with varying abilities of speaking another language. Most importantly, we all got along remarkably well. Many inside jokes ran the length of our time together.  Every morning, the team watched me do yoga, wisecracking through their coffee at my practice. Only when the cook placed a perfectly-cooked, different-every-morning breakfast on the table, did they stop.   

I understood how relative our one, two, three, or four star rankings were. Some would rate our situation superb; others would be appalled. 

The bridge construction team was on site by seven a.m. I went with them in the morning, when the light was best for photographs. By ten, the volcano spewed enough into the air that it was no longer clear. I asked for a ride from one of the many pickup trucks or cars that headed from the river to the village. More often than not, when I offered to pay money for the ride, the driver refused, saying, “No, thank you. You came to build a bridge that will help my family and community."

By nine at night as each of us used the toilet a last time or finished a pila bath, someone unscrewed the bare light bulb over the table. The area became dark, save the headlamps of those still scurrying about. I found myself looking forward to my sleeping bag on my cot in my tent. All the objects I needed for a two-week stay were there, including a packet of wet wipes, which seemed to calm the bug bites on my legs. The temperature dropped to 15 degrees Celsius—good sleeping weather. I inserted my wax earplugs, hoping to sleep well through the night to hear the morning’s wake up call from the chicken busses and enjoy a new day. 

-J.O Haselhoef

J.O. Haselhoef, a social artist who writes and travels, spent the last twenty years developing communities in multi-cultural environments. As a holder of a Masters in Fine Arts, Visual Art, with an emphasis on a conceptual art practice, she is involved with marginalized groups, among them dementia patients, high school students in alternative educational settings, and farmers experiencing economic hardship in the mountains of Haiti