Story & Photos by Kathryn Boyd-Batstone
After a full day of travel, my family and I stepped off the plane into the dark and quiet airport of Guatemala City. Tourist signs lined the walkway to the baggage claim, displaying beautiful views of waterfalls and colorful towns with slogans like, “Deluvio de color,” meaning “flood of color.” When we walked through the airport doors, a shower of lights flooded the city. Guatemala’s soccer team had just won against Columbia and the city echoed with cars honking. The streets were full of cars, bumper to bumper with people yelling enthusiastically and waving Guatemalan team shirts out their windows.  Everything was just a blur of red and white car lights illuminating this industrialized city as we drove to Antigua.
It was my third trip to Guatemala over the past eight years. My dad, a professor at California State University at Long Beach, another American professor, and three Guatemalans work with teachers in rural areas to help them with their teaching techniques. I accompanied them this time to document their work.
The next morning we woke early and piled into a van to start our eight-hour trek to Nebaj in the province of Quiché. Through the many hours of driving, bright turquoise and red houses flashed by. People peacefully stood at doorways to these colorful houses, pensively staring out at the world passing by. As we drove further and further away from the tourist areas, dirty pieces of trash littering the street walkways replaced the traditional Guatemalan colors.  Brightly painted busses roared around us in clouds of black diesel smoke. The colonial style houses of Antigua gave way to countryside filled with political endorsement billboards, displaying different parties’ colors and images. The driver explained that the second out of three elections for every political position had just occurred days before we arrived. Since Guatemala became democratic, they have gone full throttle, creating over ten political parties, filling every billboard with politicians’ faces, and painting houses, road barriers, and trees with political endorsements. The bright colors advertised in the airport terminal seemed like a joke, because despite the fact that we left the city behind, trash continued to litter the side of the road.
Eight hours later we arrived at our destination. It started to rain and we rushed inside the hotel only to be met with darkness. “No hay electricidad ahora, desde ayer, pero creemos que va a regresar a las siete.” (“There is no electricity right now and there hasn’t been since yesterday, but we think it will return at seven.”)Well, I was definitely in for an adventure.
The electricity eventually came back on and the next morning we headed off to the school. The schoolrooms were small with no windows and a blue tarp that served as the roof and which cast a blue light over everything, but the students, studying to be teachers, were still eager to learn. After meeting with the students in the morning, we had some down time before a meeting with the teachers in the afternoon. My mom and I decided to go on a hike out to the catarata (waterfall). One of the other hikers asked the guide why there was so much trash on the trail and he described how, although there was a trash pickup system, the cost was prohibitive for many families. Families weren’t going to spend their meager earnings on someone hauling their trash to a landfill when they could just dump it on the outskirts of town. Most of the trash I saw however was from American food products like Cheetos and Gatorade. These products were sold here here despite the fact that Guatemalans, especially in rural towns like Nebaj, don’t have the means to dispose of their products properly.  I looked at my water bottle to check for a recycling symbol and found nothing.  Even worse, all the water bottles were made in Guatemala, meaning the water bottle company, by not recycling, was digging its own tomb in a way.
Although locally made water bottles use fewer fossil fuels in transportation, a big contributor to global warming, they get thrown off on the side of the road or side of the mountain. On the way back to Antigua, we saw just that. A truck loaded with trash, creeping to the edge of the cliff, tipping the trunk over and watching the trash slide down the mountain. A chemical called phthalate, now banned in the United States and Europe, is used to create the slippery, smooth texture of water bottles, which when used repeatedly or weathered, leaches out of the plastic. Phthalate disrupts the endocrine, or hormonal, system in both humans and animals, causing birth defects. When the phthalate leaches into the ground, instead of being recycled, it can seep into ground water used by animals and humans. What seems like just a simple act of discarding trash can actually have disastrous long-term effects.
The catarata was beautiful. Lush green vegetation surrounded it and no trash spoiled the scene. Huge yellow and red butterflies larger than the size of my fist fluttered around accented by the green corn fields. When we started to approach the town again, the butterflies congregated around the trash, attracted by its color. I didn’t know how to feel because I know Guatemala is still developing and it is hard to concentrate on environmental issues when people are fighting to make it through the day, but someone had to care, right? I remembered my dad mentioning that one of the teachers taught biology with an emphasis on environmental science, so I decided I would talk to him at the workshop.
Gerardo Cedillo took an angle to the environment that I hadn’t considered. He talked about the respect his ancestors, the Mayans, felt towards nature and how Guatemalans have somehow drifted away from that view. The Mayans knew how to balance taking from nature with giving back. This way of life was somehow lost through the generations once wealth became a defining aspect of life and success.  He said that now the rich take and use most of the natural resources while the poor suffer the consequences. Their own Guatemalan companies cut down large areas of trees for their own purpose, causing flooding from deforestation, a big problem in Nebaj. Solid waste is also creating problems in Nebaj as it accumulates making “landfills” on the outskirts of town. “Con solo el uso de los tres Rs, reciclar, reducer, y reutilizer, podemos mejorar.” (“With just the use of the three Rs, recycle, reduce, and reuse, we can improve.”)
He proposed that Guatemala should use the three Rs to go on an economic venture of selling products made from recovered waste to create a self sustaining program with revenue and a better environment. He had his students imagine new ways to use trash they found laying in the streets. They designed posters in four different indigenous languages to show at an exposition with neighboring towns. This little act was a step in educating students and parents about humans’ actions and their effect on the environment. “No es el mismo Nebaj, no es el mismo Guatemala por el mal uso de los recursos.” (“Nebaj is not the same, Guatemala is not the same, because of the misuse of resources.”) He acknowledged that this is not only in Nebaj, not only in Guatemala, but a problem the whole world must face and fix. He took this local issue and globalized it. Nature can live without humans, but we humans cannot live without nature.
His knowledge of how the Earth works and human’s effect on it gives me hope that the human race can counter global environmental issues. He is a teacher of students who will soon become teachers themselves. While not all of them will share his passion for environmental issues, they will graduate with a respect towards the Earth and some with a motivation to combat these environmental issues. He is starting a movement with his students in this small town. This is a global issue affecting everyone, no matter the population or the country’s GDP.

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