An article in the Dallas Morning News carried an Associated Press story about a remote Mayan village in the Ixil Triangle, a mountainous region in northwest Guatemala. Chacalté is not an easy place to get to; I know, I’ve taken the scenic route. Actually, the scenic route is the only route you can take.

The story concerned the exposure and the aftermath of a tragedy—a massacre of the villagers in 1983. This atrocity was attributed to the rebel forces, unlike most of the killings of the indigenous Mayans during a 25-year-long civil war.

I’ve traveled to the region, which straddles the Cordillera de los Cuchumateñas, many times during the 90s. We stayed for a week at a time in the remote highlands. Our home base was San Gaspar Chajul, an Ixil (pronounced Ee-sheel’) village that’s a thirteen hour bus ride from Guatemala City. The village of Chacalté is another two hours from Chajul and completely off any map of the region.

Even though we traveled under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and with a group of men from a Dallas church, our primary mission was not evangelical. The reason for our brief visit was to build homes for widows. A generation of warfare produced a sea of orphans and widows. On two of our trips to the region we also put together medical and dental clinics. The homes and clinics are humble and modest by most standards, but not to the people in the villages, and not to the widows who received a new home.

We were able to build six homes the last week we spent in Guatemala (our work time in Chajul was actually limited to three and a half days because of the travel time involved). The dental clinic was also open and very busy since a dentist had traveled with us.

On my first trip, the one that got the dental clinic set up and running, I was in charge of making it all work. I built the cabinets here in the States, negotiated with the airlines to ship the parts to Guatemala for free, assembled and installed the millwork on site and then assisted the dentist as his attendant since I was one of the few in our group who could speak Spanish—actually, I had a 12 year old assistant who translated my poor Spanish into the local language. My next trip I did the same kind of thing to get the medical clinic up and running. 

On my last journey to the region I had my first real opportunity to be in on the actual construction of the homes. It was great to be able to work on putting a home together.

One of the houses that we built that week was in the remote village of Chacalté which required us to ride in the back of a cattle truck for an hour from our base in Chajul. After stopping in the middle of the road in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, we hiked, carrying our tools, over a mountain ridge. The top of the ridge we had to cross was between 7,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level.

It was gloriously beautiful. A minor drawback during the first part of May is that it’s the end of the dry season. All the farmers and field workers are getting ready for the rains that begin near the end of May. It’s typical to burn off all the chaff and leftover corn stalks and generally just churn up a lot of dust. Every pore and crevice gets filled with fine dust—there’s just no escaping it.

At one point on our walk from the road to the village we had a view from a saddle ridge of several different valleys and could see the sun reflecting off the metal roofs of distant villages, sparkling like terrestrial stars through the smoky, dusty haze. We reached Chacalté, breathless, in about an hour.

We also carried most of the supplies and material we needed to put the house together. It was easier for the locals to carry twice as much as we could, they were simply used to the oxygen levels. For me, carrying an 100 extra pounds or so at 8,000 ft was one of the hardest things I'd ever done. 

It took about three hours for the group of twelve men to put together the house. The wood was from a local hand-powered saw mill. Thirteen posts went into a smoothed dirt platform prepared for us. The planks for the siding were so newly sawn they squirted water at us as we hammered them into the posts to make the walls.

One of the more compelling parts of our time in the mountains of Guatemala is the actual dedication of the homes for the widows. After we have all the homes built, we return to the site and meet the widow and if there are any children or relatives, we meet and greet them as well. The team that built the home then goes inside with the widow for the dedication ceremony.

Standing next to the widow is a translator from the Ixil language to Spanish and there is also a translator from Spanish to English. We learn a little of her life and how her husband died, whether through sickness or the violence and the images from what is said and the imaginings from what is left unsaid are sometimes overwhelming. One of the builders is then asked to say to the widow something about our motivation; it usually follows along the lines of …”we are not here because of how good or important we think we are, but because we wish to demonstrate we are all connected through this gift to you.”

One of our group then offers some locally purchased house-warming presents; a large basket, some laundry soap (used in the streams on large flat rocks), candles, salt, sugar, coffee, matches, some protein mix and a rubber ball or two for the children. Invariably, the widow then proclaims that although she has nothing to give, the Lord will remember what we have done. As we file out, she holds both hands of each of us in turn and offers Ta’ntiox (ta-ahn’ tay oosh’—thank you) and either Chen’ne (Shin’ nay—good morning) or Tioch’lash (Chock-ah losh—good afternoon).

In a trip that has many wonderful moments, this is perhaps the best; how humbling it is to suddenly realize how fortunate we are and how many gifts we have and how we use them juxtaposed to a widow’s heartfelt joy and gratitude.

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There was no lack of children who volunteered to help. It was another wonderful benefit. The picture above shows the cabinets I made in Dallas and put together on site.

And yes, I was thinner and better looking in the 90s, not that long ago really. Below shows my group of helpers in one of the clinics.