by Jaspar Loes

Victor had been sick for a week. Several of us who were helping at his school decided to follow Marta, his sister, home and offer some all-purpose medicine to their mother. It was my first time in the mountain foothills of Buena Vista where 800 or so indigenous Indians live. The town spreads over the side of a mountain above Guatemala City and is accessed by two roads: one to the houses arriba (up) and one to the houses abajo (down). The school and bright yellow church sit on a third road that connects the other two horizontally.

Marta and Victor live abajo, and as we begin our descent, I stop for a moment to take in the panoramic view of Guatemala City from which Buena Vista gains its name.

Children come out of their houses to stand by the side of the road and watch the five gringas. The sun is hot, the going slow. I look into the dusty faces of the staring children and wonder how we look to them: five American girls painstakingly inching their way down a trail that the children run up and down several times a day.

My knees bend with careful precision for stability. The diagonal ridges of the concrete form a V in the middle of the road to offer a bit of traction. Amazingly, we all make it down without mishap.

Marta turns onto a wide dirt path a bit more level than the road but still tilting downward. The air is alive with the smell of the earth. Houses line the street, some built near the road and others sitting at higher levels along narrow paths that climb steeply through the trees. Plotted fields of flowers lay amid the wild foliage, fenced in by the barbed wire so common in Guatemala.

Marta darts between a few short trees and past two small concrete buildings. We duck under lines of drying clothes, and follow her through a doorless opening into a small square room. A large bed sits in the middle of the room. Covers are stretched tightly across one tiny little boy lying in the middle of it: Victor.

We explain the reason for our visit to their mother, a stout woman standing in the corner next to a large pile of flowers she is getting ready for market. Victor has a fever, she tells us, and una gripe (a bad cough).

I look around the spare room, surprised at how pleasant and clean it is. The floor looks freshly swept, the walls washed, and the blankets crisp and clean. Suddenly, as I stand in Victor's home, I get a different perspective on poverty. I realize that for people in the town of Buena Vista, this is the standard of living. And I see how unnecessary many of the things I consider to be essentials really are.

We bow our heads and pray together in a small clean room in the middle of a small poor town, lifting a little boy's health up to a God who loves the whole world. We offer some children's Tylenol to his mother, telling her to give him one tablet every four hours. "Gracias Senorita, gracias Senorita," she thanks us profusely.

I feel a deep peace as we leave the house. Walking past the hanging clothes and the blackened stone of the kitchen building, I realize that this town with its brightly colored houses, its desert jungle foliage, and its dust-covered children playing in its dust-covered streets is a beautiful town. And its strong and resourceful people are a beautiful people, indeed.

Jaspar Loes '02, from Scottsdale, Ariz., was one of 21 students who spent spring semester 2000 on the annual Bethel-sponsored trip to Guatemala. Students divide their time between language school at Centro Linguistico Maya and missions work with Students International, a missions organization based in Antigua, serving in areas such as education, social work, appropriate technology, economics, and medical care.