I sat in my mom’s boxy green Volvo, breathing irregularly, as the old man in a white trench coat explained what I did wrong.
“You didn’t back up in a straight line,” he grunted. “And you didn’t make a full stop at that last stop sign.”
There was a pause.
“Did I pass?” I asked timidly. My fate and what was left of my pride rested in this old man’s next word.
“Yeah,” was the muffled, unenthusiastic response. He then got out of the car.
As soon as he had safely exited, I haphazardly parked the car and ran into the DMV building. The Department of Motor Vehicles was suddenly a much less bleak and intimidating place than it had been just an hour before.
“I didn’t fail!” I shouted too loudly at my dad, who was sitting in one of the uncomfortable sea-green chairs across the room. He gave me a thumbs up, and I gave a little jump; I was stoked. But just as quickly as the relief and excitement had filled me just moments earlier, anxiety and dread pounded in my chest.
I remembered I was leaving the country the next day.
A Dangerous World
I stepped from the plane onto the carpeted floor in the tunnel leading directly into the Guatemala City airport. The walls were bright turquoise, and the airport had a strange garage smell. My dad and I went through customs, then found a man holding a sign that read, Healing Waters. Dean Nelson. Vanessa Nelson. And the names of the five other people with us.
We piled into a shuttle, and the man who held the sign looked into my dad’s eyes and said, “I will drive right behind you in my truck the whole time. I won’t leave you. You don’t need to be worried.”
It was at that moment I started to realize this trip was going to be very interesting. Other than going to Europe when I was 5, I had never been out of the country, and now I was in a strange, and apparently dangerous, place. I wasn’t sure what to think.
My family and a few others had donated enough money to sponsor a clean water system in Guatemala this past year through an organization called Healing Waters International. Now the seven of us were being given the opportunity to see the system open and working, as well as see some of the Guatemalans it affected.
Once we got safely to our hotel, I started asking my dad tons of questions. I asked how dangerous the city was (number one city in the world for kidnapping), how safe the water was (we had to brush our teeth with bottled water and close our mouths when we showered), and what exactly were we going to do there? My dad wasn’t quite sure about the third question, so, I pondered it a while, got in bed and watched the end of a Spanish soap opera, and then went to sleep.
Forty Cents for Five Gallons
The next morning my dad and I got up, ate breakfast with our five friends and piled into the van with our Healing Waters translator/guide named Alfredo at the wheel. He told us we were going to a very poor neighborhood called La Brigada, where the system was installed.
The system was in a relatively small room on the property of a community church. Yet for only four quinzales for every five gallon jug, or about 40 cents, it provided enough clean water for the entire area. Because commercial water (the only other clean water option, because water out of the faucet is contaminated) is 18 quinzales, the local people can only afford one five-gallon jug every two weeks. (For a comparison, it takes five gallons just to flush a toilet in the United States.)
The living conditions in La Brigada shocked me, and I got to see first-hand how the water system I helped fund improved the lives of many extremely poor families.
Around lunch time that day, we headed to a two-room house with too many kids to count. The woman who lived there was one of the people benefiting from Healing Waters’ water. She was charming and funny, even though conversation was through an interpreter, and she provided soup, chicken, and amazing tortillas for the 15 people sitting at the rectangular fold-out table on some dirt outside her house.
It was one of the greatest meals I have ever eaten. I realized there was nothing to be afraid of regardless of how poor she was, or how dirty her house seemed. She was completely honored to have us in her home, but we were the ones who ended up grateful.
The people we encountered in Guatemala showed us how to live with hope; the kindness and generosity they showed us was incredible.
The rest of the day was spent on foot, or in the back of a bumpy blue truck. We seven Californians, with about 10 interpreters and buckets and buckets full of water bottles, went all over the La Brigada neighborhood to spread the news about the inexpensive, clean water that would be available to their community that coming Saturday.
We handed the water bottles out to anyone we saw, and the people looked so happy; but more importantly they would soon get purified water for about a third of the price they had been paying. They were grateful and smiling and saying things in Spanish that meant nothing to me, but what I took from it was that I had made a difference.
Grateful for Clean Water
Now, back at home, my perspective on the world, and my outlook on life has completely changed. I am extremely conscious when I flush a toilet, and I am so much more grateful for showers with clean water than I ever was before.
My family has already started saving money to install another system, and I am so excited when I think about all the other people I can help just by giving them the opportunity to have clean water.
Installing a water system seemed like a daunting task to me originally, but once the money was raised I realized how surprisingly simple it all was; instead of buying clothes or eating out all the time, I could save my money in order to help the rest of the world get clean water. There is so much I have taken for granted in my life, but now I want to keep making a difference, one glass of water at a time.
