Linemen to take electricity to Guatemala

Arkansans to light up 4 remote communities

A woman in a village near El Paraiso, Guatemala, irons clothes after her having her home wired for electricity last year. Workers from the Arkansas Electric Cooperatives are planning to help extend electric service to about 80 homes in four villages.
A woman in a village near El Paraiso, Guatemala, irons clothes after her having her home wired for electricity last year. Workers from the Arkansas Electric Cooperatives are planning to help extend electric service to about 80 homes in four villages.

About a dozen linemen from electric cooperatives in Arkansas will travel to the mountains of northwestern Guatemala in October to help provide electricity to two rural villages.

Another dozen will return in late March to establish electricity in two other rural villages. All four villages are in the state of Huehuetenango, Guatemala.

The trips are part of an effort by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association International Foundation, which is working in Latin America, Africa and Asia to provide access to electricity in remote rural villages.

The Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. was approached by the foundation to help out, said Duane Highley, chief executive officer of Arkansas Electric, which includes 17 electric distribution cooperatives that serve about a third of the state’s population in about two-thirds of the land mass.

The villages are about a three-hour drive from the Pan American Highway, using a four-wheel-drive vehicle on steep, mountainous roads, said Doug Evans, who went with Highley and others on a scouting mission to the Central American country, just south of Mexico, in July. Evans is safety manager for the state’s cooperatives.

“The people are extremely poor,” Highley said of those who live in the four villages where the Electric Cooperative employees will go during the next several months. “They don’t have electricity. They cultivate coffee all day.”

Women in the area carry bundles of wood - bigger than the women - to their houses to use in their wood stoves for cooking and also for ironing, Highley said.

“Every house we would go by - we would call them shacks - women were in there doing the laundry,” Highley said. “Down there, it takes women at least 20 hours a week to do laundry. They do it all by hand. They’re proud people. They dress nicely.”

The women heat their metal irons on the stove to press the clothes, Highley said. The irons have to be placed on the stove repeatedly to keep them hot enough to iron, Highley said.

In one village that received electricity last year, the homes had televisions, microwave ovens and even cellphones, Highley said.

“But the woman of the house dragged us aside because she wanted to show us her new steam iron,” Highley said. “You wouldn’t think that was a big deal. But for her, the difference it made in her life was dramatic.”

There are some relatively nice homes in the mountains, but also some that were built with mud bricks, Evans said.

Some of the elderly women have lung conditions because of inhaling the wood smoke inside their small homes for much of their lives, Evans said. Some women are almost blind from the smoke in their eyes for years, he said.

“So it will be wonderful for them to cook on electric burners and turn on a light to be able to see,” Evans said.

They will also have a way to refrigerate their food, Highley said.

Most of the linemen going on the trip wanted to go so badly they were willing to pay their own way, Evans said. But the cooperatives are covering the costs, including airfare, and will pay them for 40 hours of work a week, although most days they’ll work 12 hours or more, Evans said.

The cooperative’s linemen will build power lines and do inside wiring in the houses, Evans said.

“It will be very simple,” Evan said. “We’ll probably install a switch, a light and a plug-in. I want to see some people flip a switch and have lights come on before we leave.”

The two villages where electricity will be added in October are San Pablo and Buena Vista.

“They were just elated when we told them,” Evans said.

It was the rainy season when the group visited Guatemala in July. One the way to visit one village, the road was washed out and they couldn’t get up the mountain to the village, Highley said.

The villagers walked down the mountain to say how much they wanted electricity in their homes, Highley said.

“They brought their pastor down with them,” Highley said. “It was a major deal.”

The people in the villages will help with much of the work. About 12 or 14 men will carry the 35-foot power poles up the mountains on their shoulders to the spots where they’ll be put in the ground, Evans said. There are about 12 or 13 poles that will be installed for each village.

“Those poles probably weigh 300 to 350 pounds,” Evans said. “And they’ll do the same thing with the transformers. Some of those weigh 250 to 300 pounds.”

The Arkansans will teach the villagers how to attach the wires to the poles, how to sag the wires, how to hang the transformers and how to connect transformers to get the proper voltage to the homes, Evans said.

They’ll also teach them to climb the poles by using special spikes attached to their legs so they can make necessary repairs in the future, Evans said. There is a lineman who lives in that area, Evans said.

The villagers where electricity won’t be installed until March - La Haciendita and Canton los Flores - were visibly disappointed they won’t get electricity this fall, Evans said.

“They were under the misunderstanding that they were going to be electrified in 2013, also,” Evans said. “There had been a landslide that blocked the road [to those villages]. With the road being blocked, we’ll have to come in from a different direction to get to them [in March].”

In all four villages, the Arkansans expect to provide electricity for about 80 houses, Highley said. The villages will buy electricity from Mexico, which has a surplus, Highley said.

On Friday, Evans and others packed shipping containers in Little Rock to load onto barges to be shipped to Guatemala. It will take about a month and a half for the shipment to reach Guatemala, Evans said, where it will be loaded onto trucks to be taken to the villages. Evans spent more than $3,000 at a local hardware store on supplies, such as tools, wiring, and even sleeping bags and pillows.

“There is just tremendous satisfaction doing this,” Evans said. “When we were talking to the villagers, their faces would light up when we told them about putting in electricity. Most of them have never been anywhere that has electricity. I can’t imagine doing a better thing than volunteering to go down there and do this.”

Business, Pages 69 on 09/01/2013

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