ST. GEORGE – “It really didn’t matter what we decided to do in Central America after Hurricane Mitch devastated millions of acres of farmland, as well as homes and schools in 1998. But it matters a great deal that we continue to show up year after year!” said Dr. Dan Strobell, a longtime member of St. George Rotary Club, and the founder of his club’s Guatemala stoves project. He is also a specialist in Ancient Maya History through Utah Tech’s community education program.
In the second year of this international project, the Strobell family and friends discovered many village children were not attending the school his group of enthusiastic Americans had built the year before. When they questioned the reason, they were told the routine task of preparing meals in the homes of many of the country’s 6.5 million indigenous people often requires children to spend their days gathering firewood or carrying water from great distances. Aside from losing out on an education, kids and their families are daily at serious risk for life-threatening burns or lung damage and a variety of other health complaints which include chronic headaches, burning eyes and difficulty breathing due to harmful particulates from unvented open fires inside their homes.
During the week of June 1-8, 2024, forty-seven St. George Rotarians and friends of Rotary, including some of their children and grandchildren and an interested fellow Rotarian from Ohio, traveled the 4200-mile roundtrip at their own expense to build or fund – at about $200 each – 125 of 3400+ stoves created in the 15-year history of this Rotary project.
In addition to the stoves, this year’s trip to Guatemala included the distribution of school supplies, wooden toys donated by the Happy Factory in Cedar City, shoes, handmade knit caps, soccer balls, prenatal and multi-vitamins and hundreds of pounds of beans which were distributed to village families.
As part of their annual trip, travelers from the Beehive State return for a follow-up visit to villages they served in the previous year. There they find villagers overjoyed with improved health for themselves as well as their children through the gift of a vented stove, requiring only a few twigs a day to provide meals, as needed, for an entire family. The villagers also report the reduction in wood needed for cooking and warming their homes allows their children to return to the classroom.
Although villagers don’t know anything about Utah or Rotary, they are convinced these strangers from another part of the world continue to bless their lives in numerous ways.
To make a tax-deductible donation to next year’s life-saving Guatemala stoves project, Venmo to @StGeorgeUTRotary.
The date for the 2025 trip is tentatively scheduled for the first week in June and will likely be limited to 35 participants. For more information about Guatemala stoves or about Rotary, call 435-669-8020.