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Printer-Friendly ModeStudents help build homes in Guyana
March 20, 2006 —
For most, spending the majority of a week digging foundations in blistering South American heat would sound more like a prison sentence than a vacation. But for a group of SVSU students who traveled to the tiny South American country of Guyana over spring break, spending all day caked in dirt and sweat doing hard labor made for a trip worth taking.
As part of the Alternative Breaks program, 12 students traveled to Guyana to work alongside Habitat for Humanity, breaking ground on four homes in West Demerara in a community named Tuschen. With no power tools or machinery, the students used only shovels, pick-axes, and old-fashioned hard work to dig the three-foot-deep foundations.
The students spent most of their time excavating, suffering through blisters and sunburn while digging through the soil. And while many students on spring break spend their time on the beach drinking cold beer, the group was hard pressed just to find drinking water.
"Here, we can just stick the cup under the faucet," said Alternative Breaks Coordinator and Guyana Co-Site Leader Carly Toyzan. "We couldn't do that there."
Aside from providing homes to the families in need, the program was also designed to provide students with the skills and experiences needed to be active leaders in their own communities.
"Here, it's easy for students to be blind to the problems we have, even in the Saginaw area," Toyzan said. "But when you're driving through the city of Georgetown, there's no way to avoid these problems."
Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, experiences horrific flooding each year according to Toyzan and does not have the resources available to cope. It goes without saying, then, that if a country's own capital city experiences severe hardships, that the remainder of the nation has it even worse.
"You learn to appreciate things that we have here that we never think about," Toyzan said. "It really opens your eyes to the social problems that exist everywhere."
One such problem is poverty. According to Toyzan, the average annual income in Guyana is around $2,400, meaning most Guyanese have few of the luxuries Americans take for granted.
The group experienced such poverty first hand during a walk through Tuschen when they saw half-naked children bathing in ditches and families living in shacks. Several of the group members, Toyzan said, even mentioned how the scene reminded them of footage often seen during Save the Children commercials.
"When it's on TV, it's just a commercial," she said. "But you're actually seeing these kids running around and playing in the dirty water and running around without clothes on. It was too real."
Despite some of the hardships they witnessed, the group was able to enjoy some of the down time they had while on the trip. They mountain biked and took a boat ride through the rainforest, visited a zoo, and traveled to nearby Parika to visit the town's markets.
It was during the group's trip to Parika where Toyzan said she experienced one of her most unique moments on the trip, when she drank straight from a coconut after watching a local man split it in half with a machete.
After leaving Guyana, the group experienced rough travel, getting stranded in Chicago after their flight was grounded because of high winds. The group spent the night at a hotel before deciding to rent vans and make the drive home. They finally arrived back on campus late Tuesday night.
Despite the negative traveling experience at the end of the trip, Toyzan said the students were still thrilled with the time they spent in Guyana and what they were able to learn.
"You see these people you help and they're so thankful for these simple things," she says. "It made the trip well worth it."