What if the trash polluting our environment could be transformed into schools, homes, and opportunities? In San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, that's what's happening thanks to Matt Panaitz and Long Way Home. 20 years ago, Matt was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in this predominantly Mayan community nestled in Guatemala's Western Highlands. Rather than returning to ordinary life in the U.S. after his service, Matt sold his car, moved back to Guatemala, and embarked on a remarkable journey. What began as building the town's first grass soccer field evolved into a revolutionary approach to education and sustainability. The Hero School campus now stands as a testament to possibility—20 buildings constructed from over 35,000 discarded tires and 100,000 plastic bottles filled with trash. This approach has earned recognition from UNESCO- aligning Education with Sustainable Development and ripples far beyond the school itself—in one village, students mapped every household, identified needs, and implemented 57 stove projects, with grateful residents throwing rose petals at their feet as they departed. By treating waste as a resource rather than a problem, they've created sustainable infrastructure while addressing poverty through education that empowers students to become heroes in their own communities. Learn more about volunteering,
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to the Resilient Earth Podcast, where
we talk with speakers from theUnited States and around the
world about the critical issuesfacing our planet and the
positive actions people aretaking, from the tiniest of
actions to the grandest ofgestures, so that we can
continue to thrive and survivefor generations to come.
(00:32):
I'm Leanne Lindsay, producerand host, along with co-hosts
and co-producers Scott and TreeMercer of Mindenoma, whale and
Seal Study, located on the SouthMendocino and North Sonoma
coasts.
The music for this podcast isby Eric Alleman, an
(00:55):
international composer, pianistand writer living in the Sea
Ranch.
Discover more of his music,animations, ballet, stage and
film work at ericalamancom.
You can find Resilient Earth onSpotify, apple and Amazon
(01:18):
Podcasts, iheart Radio, youtube,soundcloud and wherever you
find your podcasts.
You may have heard about ourguest today, matt Panites of
(01:54):
Long Way Home in Guatemala,through a PBS documentary about
him and the school he built, theHero School in San Juan
Kamalapa, guatemala.
This PBS segment is hosted bynone other than Law Order's Sam
Waterston.
Here's a quick clip from that.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Every year, more than 1.6 million people leave home
to volunteer around the world.
Why?
What motivates them?
What challenges do theyconfront?
Is it even a good thing thatpeople from one culture presume
to bestow something on another?
(02:32):
It's a puzzle in which thepieces are always changing shape
, because that's what culture isever evolving.
That means that adaptability,creativity and a spirit of
entrepreneurialism are criticalto the process of linking
cultures, sharing resources anddoing good.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Here in San Juan Coalmallapa, nestled in a
mountain valley 25 milesnorthwest of Guatemala City, an
extraordinary endeavor isunderway.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
We're in San Juan, coalmolapa, chimaltenango,
guatemala, population of about50,000 people.
So in Coalmolapa they havemarket on Tuesday, friday and
Sunday.
Here they sell carrots,potatoes, oranges, a little bit
of everything, and most of thisproduce comes from the
surrounding villages.
(03:29):
There's an understanding thateverybody depends on the earth
to produce food, to also producetheir income.
But there isn't a really greatanswer for where to put all of
the trash.
There isn't a trash system.
People can barely afford theeducation, they can barely
afford basic sanitation services.
It's just very difficult foranybody to worry about the trash
(03:51):
problem, although it's veryimportant to everybody.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Long Way Home is a nonprofit that takes trash and
transforms it into a thing ofvalue, but that is just the
beginning of the story.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Longway Home's mission as a registered US 501c3
is to mobilize people toactively participate in
democracy and create innovativepathways to economic and
environmental justice throughgreen building, employment and
education.
Matthew Panaitz is theexecutive director and
co-founder of Long Way Home, andit all started when he was a
(04:41):
former US Peace Corps volunteerfrom Texas and he was stationed
over two decades ago in San Juan, kamalapa, guatemala.
Panaitz's desire to continuehelping this impoverished,
predominantly Mayan communitydidn't end with his tour, though
.
He sold his car back in the USAto raise funds to co-found the
(05:06):
nonprofit Long Way Home.
That was back in 2004, to helpcreate better employment and
education opportunities there.
In 2008, their team ofeducators, builders, volunteers
and administrators establishedthe Hero School to ensure
multi-generational systemicchange.
(05:27):
They work hand-in-hand withlocal communities to create
educational infrastructure usingrecycled materials,
particularly used tires thatwould otherwise pollute the
environment.
Teaching and learning at HeroSchool is contextually based,
relevant to the local challengesassociated with environmental
(05:50):
degradation and climate change,and grounded in new and
sustainable development goals.
The Hero School curriculumintegrates traditional
Guatemalan education, greenbuilding and UNESCO standards
for education for sustainabledevelopment, or ESD, and is
(06:11):
accredited by the GuatemalanMinistry of Education.
During these two decades, theyhave transformed over 25,000
used tires and 100,000 plasticbottles filled with inorganic
trash into the 20-buildingupcycled marvel that is the Hero
School campus right there inGuatemala.
(06:33):
They see a future where themodel pioneered in Guatemala
spreads globally, creating anetwork of communities that
prove waste can become wealthand education can break cycles
of poverty while healing theplanet.
Today we invited a guest co-hostto join us, and that's Zach
(06:56):
Cliver of Blue Green Future andFlukes Whale Tours International
.
He's conducted whale tours andexplorations to Guatemala and is
even married to a Guatemalanwoman.
Zach is a Maine-based marinescientist, naturalist and
educator who has led over600,000 people on whale watching
(07:19):
tours from Bar Harbor andaround the world.
He has been a prior guest ofours on this podcast as well as
on an annual conference we'vehosted and produced the Ocean
Life Symposium.
Now we'll get into ourconversation with Matt,
executive Director of Long WayHome and creator of Hero School,
(07:39):
and you're listening toResilient Earth Radio and
Podcast.
I'm Leanne Lindsey, host andproducer, along with my co-host,
tree Mercer, from MendenomaWhale and Seal Study.
Good morning, tree, goodmorning Leanne and Zach and Matt
.
Yes, and Zach Cliver is a guesthost today from Blue Green
(08:00):
Future, and hello to you, zach,and welcome back.
Speaker 6 (08:04):
Great to be here, nice to see you.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
And we're all talking today with Matt Panaitz, who is
executive director of anorganization in Guatemala called
Long Way Home.
I'm so glad you reached out tous, Matt, and welcome to the
show.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Well, thank you, it's great to be here and thank you
for the invitation.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
And you're welcome, so take it away, matt.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Sure.
So I was in the Peace Corpsfrom 2002 and 2003.
And that introduced me toGuatemala.
I don't think I'd ever evenheard of Guatemala before I did
the Peace Corps.
And then I went there and I wasin a small town in the middle
of nowhere and what I sawcaptured my heart and I decided
(08:54):
shortly thereafter to spendpretty much the rest of my life
doing something about some ofthe not so pleasant parts of
what I saw there.
And that's where Long Way Homewas born, and that has me here
today, 23 years later.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, long Way Home is the name of the organization,
and they take all kinds oftrash and build.
In fact, specifically they'vebuilt classrooms focused on
education.
But there's other applicationsthat they've done and they've
given such an example of how todo this process of recycling,
(09:33):
reuse, which is so important forour environment, especially
when there are many locationsaround our world where people
feel that they just have noother option but to maybe throw
it in the river or the ocean,and this is a way to channel all
of that trash into somethingpositive.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
That's exactly right and that is what we have been
focused on for most of the timethat we've been there.
The whole thing started when,after Peace Corps, I decided to
go back.
Right After Peace Corps I triedto live, you know, a relatively
normal life.
I got a job and settled inschool and, you know, there was
(10:16):
this nagging sense that I wasn'tfinished and so I sold all of
my belongings, raffled my 1973Caprice Classic convertible so
that we would have some money tostart off with, moved back to
Guatemala, and the organizationthat I was working with as a
Peace Corps volunteer.
They said, hey, we've got thispiece of property.
(10:36):
Would you like to develop thispiece of property and do youth
outreach?
So I said, sure, that's perfect.
And so we built a grass soccerfield and a basketball court.
It was the first grass soccerfield in the history of this
town.
So because we built a grasssoccer field and everybody loves
soccer there, I Got to know alot of people because I also
(10:58):
really enjoy playing soccer andwas playing seven days a week,
and so you get to know everybodywhen you're doing that, and it
was a real informal.
So you get to know everybodywhen you're doing that, and it
was a real informal way to getto know everybody.
But we were also living in ahouse that had no electricity,
didn't really have windows ordoors, not really much of a roof
, so we were kind of living insome of the same circumstances
(11:20):
as the people around us.
Right as we built the park andwe got to know everybody and
really got to understand whatwas going on around there, at
one point we decided to startcharging eco bricks to get into
the park, and that was becausewe saw a different organization
at Lake Atitlan who was usingplastic bottles stuffed with
(11:40):
trash, because there is a trashproblem and there really is no
solution for it, because therereally is no budget.
You know, there's not budgetsfor schools and hospitals and
some of the basics, so there'sreally not a budget to deal with
the trash there.
And so we saw this.
We were like, oh cool, well,there's a bunch.
You know we need to chargesomething to get into the park,
(12:02):
like 25 cents but a lot of theneighborhood kids couldn't
afford that.
So we said, hey, how about ifyou give us a trash bottle?
Right, we call them eco bricksor trash bottles.
And so we said, how about ifyou give us a trash bottle.
Then we ended up with like25,000 of them because we're the
only.
You know, it was the first parkin the history of that town and
everybody was using it and allthe schools were using it and
(12:25):
the neighborhood kids, and sothat opened the door to even the
concept.
Then at some point I asked theco-founder and I was like you
know, we want to build a schoolto start dealing with what's
going on in the town on aslightly larger scale, because
the park was great, right, itwas well used, but it wasn't
(12:46):
addressing some of the moreurgent needs in that town.
Like kids were carryingfirewood on their head all day,
instead of going to schoolthey're carrying water.
Their shelters were inadequate,not resilient.
You know, we're surrounded byextreme poverty.
And so this co-founder friendof mine, who I was in the Peace
(13:08):
Corps with him, he said have youever heard of building with
trash?
And I was like not really.
I mean, I've seen a retainingwall, I've seen a couple of
privacy walls, but no, I'd neverconsidered this.
So we got earthship biotechersvolume one out and threw a
couple of tires on the groundand decided to try it out, and
(13:30):
we packed the first couple oftires with dirt and then we
packed a whole house worth oftires with dirt and we saw that
people loved it.
It was resilient, becausethere's earthquakes there as
well, um, so we also saw that wewere pulling the trash in from
the neighborhood.
The neighborhood kids werejoining in on it, the schools
(13:51):
were joining in.
So the very first building thatwe did went really, really well
and we saw that we could buildan entire school campus using
the trash and it's not onlytrash, there are conventional
materials that we use to combineall this.
But yeah, we saw that we coulduse the trash that was on the
ground to build the entireschool campus.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Interesting that you brought up the Earthship
biotexture.
They're located in Taos, newMexico, and I just saw a
documentary on them last monthor so.
But it is amazing the complexthat this one fellow built.
His name is Michael Reynoldsand he teaches down there now.
(14:35):
They've got a course coming upin September, so I want to ask
Zach, what was your connectionwith the area down there?
Speaker 6 (14:43):
Yeah, my connection is through ecotourism.
I hired a naturalist who wasborn in Guatemala and grew up in
the States to come work at thewhale watch company for me and
trained him, and he had workedas a news reporter for Prinza
Libra, the largest newspaper inCentral America, in Guatemala
(15:05):
Libra, the largest newspaper inCentral America, in Guatemala,
and they had sent him out on anassignment to the West Coast to
go whale watching and photographthe whales with the locals that
were just starting whalewatching there, and he was so
amazed by it that he wanted tobring ecotourism to help improve
the sustainability and thelivelihoods of the people that
were poor on the coast.
And so he came to work for usand I eventually went to
(15:27):
Guatemala to see everythingthere.
And his wife from Guatemala isa teacher, and my wife is a
teacher, and she introduced usand asked us to go on a double
date, and so that's how I woundup going to Guatemala 12 times
since 2018.
And I lived there for sixmonths at the longest period.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Let's talk about the location.
So where were you, Zach, andwhere is the town where this
school was built?
And tell us more about that,Matt Sure.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
The location of Comalapa is and Zach's probably
pretty familiar with this but ifyou leave Guatemala City and
you head towards Lake Atitlan,about halfway you'll hit a town
called Zaragoza and then you goup into the mountains and
Comalapa is about 25 kilometersfrom Zaragoza, at 7,000 feet in
(16:21):
the mountains, so we're in theWestern Highlands.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Was that area affected by the volcano eruption
back in June and March?
Speaker 5 (16:30):
Well, we do get the tremors and we get the ash from
the volcano, but that's about it, right, the lava doesn't make
it that far, but yeah, we feltit.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
The ash in the air right.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
We get the ash, for sure, we get the ash in the air,
right.
We get the ash for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
And speaking of whale watching, and that is the
connection that Zach and Teresa,or Tree Mercer, have, because
she and Scott Mercer did a lotof whale watching Tree is a
former teacher from Long Island,and tell them, tree, how long
you've known Zach.
Speaker 7 (17:06):
Oh yeah, scott and Zach go back even further than
us, but at least 25, 30 years,zach, I think we have known you.
Scott ran a whale watchingcompany out of Newburyport,
massachusetts, and actually wemet on his whale watch boat way
back 28 years ago.
And being a teacher, yes, Itaught for 35 years.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
I taught science, grades 7 through 12, and always
interested in the ocean andwhales conservation, certainly
very concerned aboutenvironmental issues, and Scott
and Tree and I got to meet eachother through a local public
radio station and then wedecided to figure out a way to
(17:54):
continue a conference that theyhad started called the Ocean
Life Symposium, during the firstyear of the pandemic, because
we couldn't hold it in alocation, so we figured out a
way to put it to YouTube throughZoom, this new tool we learned
about and from that we did itseveral years of the Ocean Life
Symposium Zach's been on it acouple of times, so that is our
(18:18):
connection here.
And then we decided, because ofall the work we had been doing
with the Ocean Life Symposium,we really wanted to do an
environmental show and a podcastseparate.
You know, not just as a radioshow but a podcast that could
really reach a lot of countries,and right now Resilient Earth
(18:39):
is listened and downloaded inover 66 countries around the
world and over 400 cities.
People are listening everywhere.
We like to talk to people aboutcritical issues that are facing
our planet and what some of thepositive solutions and actions
people are taking to make adifference.
(18:59):
And you fit right in there inwhat Long Way Home is doing, and
that's why I'm so glad you didreach out to us and ask us about
being a guest on the show,because this is exactly what we
like to talk about, things thatare more positive and uplifting,
because it can be very heavyand depressive, all the doom and
gloom.
In fact, it was Ralph Chami,who's with Blue Green Future,
(19:23):
with Zach's joined his company.
That was his first statementwhen he joined the Ocean Life
Symposium as a guest speaker andhe said it's not all doom and
gloom, so that's what led us todoing this.
And now this is a perfectexample of this the Long Way
Home organization.
So can you tell us, matt, someof the successes and maybe some
(19:50):
of the challenges that you havehad along the way doing these
projects?
Speaker 5 (19:55):
Sure, because there's so many right, especially the
challenges, exactly, and sowhenever you start building with
tires, you don't know whatyou're doing because there's not
a lot to work with.
Although Earthship did invite usto Taos and they did show us
around and they did give us sometraining and talk to us about
(20:18):
how to better pack a tire Right,because, like when we started
off, we were packing them toomuch and they were becoming
unstable.
So the very first building thatwe built out of tires you know
we're talking 500 packed tireswe had to tear the entire thing
down because we had over packedthe tires and it made it
(20:41):
unstable as the tires went upand so it made it kind of wiggly
.
So we had to tear all the tiresdown and pull all the dirt out
of the tires and then basicallyhad to start over, because what
we saw at earthship was that youdon't have to pack them
completely tight all the way.
In fact it works better if youleave a little bit of space so
(21:05):
that they'll sit down like morecomfortably on top of each other
and kind of fit into the littlenooks and crannies of each tire
.
So very interesting onechallenge right, right, not
really knowing what you're doing, but continuing to try until
you get it right.
It was introducing somethingnew to us, but it was also to
(21:26):
this entire community, because,as we're going around the town
and picking up everybody's tires, and they were like, what are
you doing?
Why do you want these tires?
We're like we're going to builda school out of these tires.
And they kind of laughed us offand thought it was kind of
silly, and but then slowlypeople came because it was a you
know, it really is a publicdemonstration.
(21:46):
Plus, we were hiring locals todo all of the work, because when
you go work and you know asmall rural town in guatemala
like you rely on the locals todo everything, because they know
everything right, theyunderstand how everything works,
who you talk to to get anythingdone.
And so we hired local builderswho had traditionally worked
(22:09):
with cinder block type ofconstruction and so they had to
make the transition over,because it is quite a transition
to go from something so steadyand regular such as a cinder
block and go okay, well, nowwe're going to work with a whole
lot of nuance and we're goingto start building with tires.
So you know it was tricky andwe all gonna start building with
tires.
So you know it was tricky andwe all had to learn from each
(22:30):
other and that is what reallygot us into the community, and
this is kind of funny.
So whenever we started,everybody gave us their tires.
15 years later now there's alot more people using them and
we have to buy the tires frompeople because they're actually
pretty hard to find these days.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
That was one of Tree's questions was where do
you get the resources?
Where are they located?
Speaker 7 (22:56):
Yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 5 (22:58):
Yeah, and you take a flatbed truck and well, first of
all, there's little shopscalled Pinchasos and they're
kind of like little mom and poptire shops and they don't have
like a thousand, but they'llhave like 10 or 15 that they
stack in front and they're gonnaget thrown away, you know, not
(23:20):
terribly responsibly.
So whenever we take our truckand we go by and pick them up,
we're doing them a favor, right?
So there's a collaborationhappening there.
And then they start saving themfor us over time.
And then when that isn't enoughbecause we use 35,000 tires to
build our campus and so wheneverthe 10 or 12 aren't enough, we
would take our flatbed and driveit along the inter-American
(23:42):
highway.
So, for, you know, 50 or $60worth of gas you can pick up 500
tires, and 500 tires are thewalls for most of our buildings.
So dirt and tires.
You're talking 50 or $60 tobuild the walls.
Well, I'm really lookingforward to seeing what's in this
river, because you know webuild a lot of stuff out of
(24:04):
trash and maybe this could be asource of new materials for us,
like we've been building houses,latrines, we have a lot of
things we can use here.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
And that was just a short clip from that same
documentary, with Sam Waterstonas host, as Matt Panites and
another worker were drivingalong in that flatbed truck
looking for trash, which theyfound volumes of in this one
crevice going down to the river.
Now back to our conversation.
(24:38):
And how do you get your fundingand what kind of volunteers
have you had over the years?
Speaker 5 (24:46):
We've had pretty much every imaginable person, right,
there have been six-year-oldswho have come with their
families because families willcome and stay with us for two
weeks.
Yeah, sometimes people staywith us for two weeks and
sometimes they've stayed with usfor seven years, right, they're
university students.
(25:06):
They're people that are curiousabout alternative living
techniques and sustainabilitytechniques and especially like
green builders.
There's a lot of green buildersaround the world, but there's
also engineers, architects,school teachers, gardeners,
students like every person youcould pretty much imagine, from
(25:30):
all over the world have been ourvolunteers.
Speaker 9 (25:58):
I was born in Missouri, in the Midwest of the
United States, and I wentthrough elementary school there
and then I was moved to LasVegas, nevada, where I went to
junior high and half a highschool, and I found that the big
change in the culture and theway that people interacted with
each other it made me think alot about how I wanted to live
my life.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
We have volunteers from all over the world.
We have individual volunteersand interns as well, and service
groups that will come for aweek or so at a time as like an
alternative break.
A lot of people also are justtraveling through Guatemala and
come here on a visit and thensay, wow, I want to be a part of
that, I want to help out.
Speaker 9 (26:32):
I'm only one person, but I want to take my energy and
try to use it to like, shiftthe direction we're heading into
a more safe and sustainabledirection.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 10 (26:45):
Small fish off the coast of West Africa are being
scooped up in large numbers andground into fish meal that's
then sent all over the planet tofeed other fish, like the farm
salmon you get at your localgrocery store.
It's all part of a globalsupply chain that has some
people crying foul.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Here is a case where the communities lose their fish
their food security and theydon't see any dollars coming in.
Speaker 10 (27:11):
That's coming up on the latest season of the Catch.
Listen wherever you get yourpodcasts.
Speaker 6 (27:22):
Resilient Earth radio podcast is brought to you by
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(27:43):
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Speaker 2 (27:58):
You're listening to Resilient Earth Radio and
Podcast.
I'm Leanne Lindsey, host andproducer at Seastorm Studios,
along with Tree Mercer fromMendenoma Whale and Seal Study,
and a guest host today, zachCliver of Blue Green Future and
Fluke Whale Tours International,who happens to have visited
(28:21):
many times in Guatemala, whereLong Way Home is located, and
we're speaking with the founderand executive director, matt
Panaitz, and now he's going totalk about the funding.
Speaker 5 (28:34):
They're also part of our funding solution, because we
wanted an earned income styleof funding, and so what we did
was we charged $85 a week forthose volunteers to come and
work with us.
We used that money to buy thematerials and to pay the labor
and pay the teachers, and that'spretty much how we've paid for
(28:58):
pretty much everything.
Of course, we've won a fewawards and gotten a few grants
along the way, and we've reallykind of pieced it all together.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, talk about one of those awards from UNESCO, was
it?
Speaker 5 (29:10):
Sure, sure.
And then that like really leadsus into the going from using
tires and everything that welearned along the way, because,
in addition to using tires, wealso use Ubuntu blocks.
Right, and those are like youtake the plastic wrappers and
all the plastic wrappers uh,that won't fit into an eco brick
(29:31):
and you use bailing wire andyou basically make a cinder
block with those.
And so we used bamboo, we usedearth bags, so the campus itself
there's 21 buildings.
Every single building is alittle bit different, because
the idea was to practice andexperiment with infrastructure
(29:52):
that we could also, whilelearning how to do it on our
campus, we could also use in thecommunity, because there are
also people who need houses inthe community, who can't afford
the cinder blocks.
And so, as we were trying outall these different alternative
materials, we were getting outall these different alternative
materials, we were gettingaccustomed to the materials and
learning about the materials.
(30:12):
And then so that leads us intothe education model and that
award, because at some point wedid start, in 2012, we started
bringing students in.
We brought our first 12students in, and they were first
, second and third graders, andwe saw that the teachers, they
were using the state-mandatedcurriculum, and we wanted to
(30:37):
integrate what we'd learnedduring the construction process
into the curriculum, and so thatis called Education for
Sustainable Development, andUNESCO has a 2030 agenda to
comply with the SustainableDevelopment Goals, and Education
for Sustainable Developmentcorresponds with the fourth
(30:59):
development goal, which isquality education.
We've been integrating what welearned in the campus into the
curriculum.
They gave us an award for that.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
And I imagine both you, zach and Tree, you being a
teacher, zach being married to ateacher.
What questions do you have forMatt at this point?
Speaker 7 (31:20):
Well, I was wondering Matt were the students who
would eventually go to thisschool?
Were they involved in theconstruction process?
Speaker 5 (31:31):
We didn't have students doing the heavy labor
right.
That would be like the packingof tires with sledgehammers.
That was us hiring.
You know, at one point we had25 or 30 local builders on our
team 25 or 30 local builders onour team and the local paid
(31:53):
professional builders, alongwith the volunteers.
They did the vast majority ofthe super heavy work right,
because if you're going to lay aan 18 wheeler tire flat and
pound, use a sledgehammer to putdirt in it and pound the dirt.
It takes 30 minutes with asledgehammer to do one of those
tires.
And so what we did was got it tothe point where the students
could be involved, like, forexample, in the finishes, the
(32:15):
finish work.
The students love doing thefinish work because you end up
with a lot of mosaic type workand you end up with a lot of cob
, and so they get to stomparound in the cob and then take
the cob and throw the cobagainst the wall and then shape
it into figures such as snakesor squirrels or deer, and so if
(32:39):
you look at our campus, youdon't see any tires right.
What you see are all thefigures and all the mosaic work
that the students have done.
So, like in like in Home Ec,rather than making a cake
necessarily, they kind of takethe same concepts and they make
cob, and then they take that coband they apply it to the walls
(33:01):
and they turn it into shapes.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
What again is cob when you mention that?
But also I liked the images oftheir handprints on the walls as
well.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
So cob is a mixture of basically sand and dirt and
straw and water, right, anddepending on the consistency
that you're looking for, you adddifferent portions of that and
then you put it on a piece ofplastic and then you stomp it
around and you fold it over andyou turn it into what is
(33:36):
ultimately people use for Adobe.
People make Adobe bricks out ofthis exact same type of
material.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Well, that's very creative.
And, Zach, what question do youhave right now for our?
Speaker 6 (33:52):
guest From the ecotourism perspective,
traveling around all throughGuatemala.
I'm always looking at it throughthat lens and one of the
concerns you know with bringingWestern tourism is always the
plastics and the pollution rightin places and you see that and
you, you know we're not used tothat so much in our parks and
(34:13):
beautiful landscapes and things,but they just.
It's such a challenge in lessdeveloped countries to manage
that plastic and waste.
We've been very fortunate.
We go down to the Pacific Ocean, to a place called Mont Rico.
We go down to the beach on theocean and watch the sun rise and
then go down and watch the sunset over the ocean and I always
(34:36):
go down each morning and nightwith two garbage bags and I just
pick up a bag of garbage, twobags of garbage every time and
bring them back, you know.
But there they often wind uphaving to like burn it.
They try to burn the plastic.
It's frustrating, you know, tosee that all the plastic that's
in these places that are poorand I wondered, my understanding
(34:58):
is there now have developedsome processes by which you
could take plastic and melt itdown and then turn it into tiles
or things that are useful, asyou've described.
Are you doing any of that?
Speaker 5 (35:10):
Yeah, well, we're not doing really any of the um
higher production let's call itright where you could take tires
and turn them into chips anduse them for playgrounds, which
now I'm hearing is maybe notsuch a great idea.
There's also people using tiresto make highways, but not
really because we don't have theproduction facilities to do
(35:33):
something like that.
It requires a slightly moreindustrial approach and we're
pretty manual with everythingthat we do.
You know, we use it as a sourceof inspiration because we're
always looking for new ways togo about doing this and people
are constantly sending me newideas and I love reading about
them, but we use our handsmostly and don't involve a lot
(35:56):
of machines.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
I like the way that ecotourism and what Longway Home
is doing with education ispulling that trash out of the
environment and doing somethingpositive with it.
If it's going to be used in oneway or the other, that's not
harmful.
So, like you said somethingabout the playgrounds, you don't
use the plastic in theplayground.
(36:17):
Is that what you were saying?
Speaker 5 (36:19):
Well, sometimes they'll turn the tires into
little chips and they'll use thechips like mulch or something
like that, and I've seen peopleuse pieces of tires as mulch.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Now have you noticed a real impact in the location
where you are located there inGuatemala?
What impact it has had onneighboring areas as well?
Speaker 5 (36:44):
I mean yes and no.
There is an impact in that ourstudents, like I would say,
whenever we started, nobody hadthe slightest idea what to do
about any of it.
Right, there was no.
There were no.
Like, the best ideas thatanybody had were put trash cans
in the Central Park, fill thetrash cans up and then throw
(37:06):
them in the river.
We tell our students, andespecially the lower income
students, because we charge likea minimum of tuition, a couple
of dollars a month.
Even some of our students can'tafford that.
And so we say, hey, pleasebring an eco brick instead of
tuition, right.
And then so some of ourstudents, instead of bringing
(37:27):
one, they'll bring 25.
Right.
So there are some students thatare rallying their neighbors and
talking to their differentfamily members and going above
and beyond and really takingadvantage of the opportunity to
keep their homes and keep theirneighborhoods and keep the
streets clean.
Yeah, I mean that has been areally amazing impact.
(37:51):
To see them once they have theopportunity and have an idea of
what we could possibly do.
To see them once they have theopportunity and have an idea of
what we could possibly do,because we're still using all of
this rubbish and we're we'rebuilding stoves and water tanks
and homes and classrooms, and sothat is our source of materials
these days is largely throughthe students.
(38:11):
Um, do we wish that everybodyin town would have picked it up
immediately and it wouldeliminate all trash and all the
rivers?
Sure, that is what we wishwould have happened, and that
has not fully happened yet.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
You mentioned Tree, too, the impact on housing,
because housing is always anissue, so it seems like this has
had a positive impact, though,Matt, on housing availability in
the area.
Sure.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
There's a couple of other organizations that are
more focused on housing and morefocused on classrooms, like Hug
it Forward.
They're really good at takingeco bricks and building houses
in classrooms because theplastic is really.
You know, tires are an issue,certainly because they don't
really decompose and there isn'tanywhere to put them, but
(39:02):
plastic also being an issue,they go.
Plastic goes really well intothe plastic bottles and, yes,
there are some organizations outthere that are doing a great
job building homes andclassrooms using plastic trash.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
I want to go back to your classroom and the kids what
grade level that you're talking, that you deal with, and the
curriculum.
Perhaps I'd like to know alittle bit about that.
Speaker 5 (39:29):
And that's one of our most exciting things to talk
about really is we have 178students right, and they are
pre-K through high school, as Imentioned before.
You know, whenever you start,you start with a state mandated
curriculum, and that is thefoundation for what we're doing
(39:52):
now, because if you come up withan entirely original curriculum
, it's difficult to scale it,and so we came up with a
curriculum and lesson plans thatadhere to the state
requirements, like, for example,in the seventh grade, rather
than having a somewhat abstractcurriculum.
(40:12):
Instead of lesson plans, wefocus on building ventilated
stoves for the families.
The number one reason people goto the health clinic is because
they cook over open flamesindoors, right, and then
multiple family members get sick.
Plus, you're using tons offirewood, and firewood's
expensive and not easilyaccessible.
(40:32):
So seventh graders, like inmath class now, they use their
math to work on the design ofthe stove and understanding the
dimensions of the stove.
So in the eighth grade they'redoing water tanks another major
issue in Guatemala.
In the ninth grade, we're doingcompost latrines, because
sanitation is an issue.
(40:52):
In the 10th grade, we doretaining walls and in the 11th
grade we do retaining walls.
And in the 11th grade we builda home, right.
So the home is the combinationof everything that they've
learned from all of the courses,and so by the time they
finished, they have a thoroughunderstanding of the issues in
Guatemala and the solutions, andyou can imagine what that does
(41:15):
for a student's self-esteem,right.
They are going into thecommunity, because this is not
only theoretical.
We go into the community.
We find the families that needour help the most, and if there
is a single mother with fivechildren who collects water and
firewood all day, we build astove, we build a floor, water
tanks, compost latrine,retaining wall and we completely
(41:37):
change the family's life.
And this isn't, you know,people swooping in to fix.
This is all done in a way thatyou know.
We ask permission, we work withthem, we talk to them, and it's
primarily done by the studentsand teachers.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
And it's primarily done by the students and
teachers Practical solutions forsustainable living in a place
that needs these things and theyneed these skills.
These students graduate havingall this talent, this ability to
provide for their communities.
It's really empowering thesecommunities.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
Exactly and, like you know, a brief story would be we
went out to a small village andover the course of a week we
built 57 stoves for one.
It was a village in the middleof nowhere that, you know, does
not receive much support fromthe municipal governments.
They're kind of on their ownway out there.
(42:32):
And we built water tanks andstoves and the students mapped
out the entire town.
They went from house to houseto see which family needs what,
and then they went back to theclassroom.
They figured everything out,set a plan and then we all went
back and everybody was soexcited at the end of it that
(42:54):
the people in the village wereactually throwing rose petals at
the feet of our students asthey got back on the bus, right.
So there was not a dry eyeanywhere.
Everybody was excited.
And then the students feelvalued, right?
They want to feel like valuedmembers of the community.
Speaker 7 (43:18):
Like valued members of the community and you know
what does it better than reallyyou know, showing your value and
being honored by your communitymembers definitely shining
example of a win-win situationwhere the students are winning,
the community's benefiting, and,having been in the classroom
(43:40):
and taught in the traditionalway, I always felt that what you
just described, that's realeducation, that's a
life-changing experience forthose students and it's setting
the seeds, it's planting theseeds for them to continue
sustainability, conservation,caring about the community Wow,
(44:05):
I just it's a five-star programfor sure.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
And you mentioned the compostable toilets when I was
looking at it online too.
The compostable toilets, when Iwas looking at it online too.
It's a system that doesn't usewater.
Speaker 5 (44:24):
Exactly Because water is very difficult to come by
and it's kind of you know, afteryou've used one of those for a
while, you're like, oh my God,we're blushing water down the
toilet where there arecommunities who don't have water
, and so this eliminates theneed to use water.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
And it is sustainable , it is scalable and it is
doable and it helps theenvironment by also taking out
and reusing and putting thattrash and plastic into work for
the community instead of againstit.
Speaker 5 (44:57):
Exactly, and there is no real ceiling for this either
, because if you visitlwhomegreenorg you can see we
made profiles for every one ofour projects.
Yeah, there's no ceiling forthis.
As Tree was saying, the seed isplanted, we get them started,
and then I'm constantly hearingstories because we don't see
(45:21):
everything that happens.
There are students that are nowdoing this on their own.
They're not telling anybody atschool.
There's like grapevine going.
Oh, you know, heard the otherday that students were building
a ventilated stove for theirneighbor who was a single mom
with multiple children whodidn't have anything, and the
students did it outside of theschool, didn't mention it to
(45:42):
anybody, raised the money ontheir own, figured out how to do
it on their own.
You know they're doing a greatjob.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Where do the teachers come from?
Speaker 5 (45:53):
They're all local right.
So one of the major issues inKoma Lapa is employment, and so
this is also part of our missionis to create dependable
employment, and so the teachersare mostly, you know, between
the ages of 20 and 30 years old,who would otherwise find it
(46:15):
very difficult to secure a job,and we currently have 25
teachers.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Zach was your wife a teacher there in Guatemala.
Speaker 6 (46:26):
Yes, she worked at a lot of different schools in the
city and she also had her ownbusiness working with students
that needed personal help toimprove.
You know that were fallingbehind.
She would work with them one onone quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Is there a way that other teachers in other
locations throughout Guatemalacould connect with each other
and have resources pooledresources?
Speaker 5 (46:54):
This is really the most exciting part of all of
this is that because we'rewriting these lesson plans,
we're going to make these lessonplans available to the public
school teachers at the publicschools, right, and because they
don't have their own lessonplans but would like lesson
plans, it would like resourcesand rubrics and everything that
(47:15):
comes along with that all thematerials they're going to use
our lesson plans and it won't belong before the public schools
are using our pedagogy and we'reall fighting poverty together.
So what I'm picturing isseveral hundred people all at
the same time going into ourtown, into those villages, doing
(47:37):
the projects that I mentioned,and that within a couple of
years we're talking thousandsand thousands of people lifted
out of extreme poverty and itbeing done through the public
schools using the subject matter.
And I'm not, I do not thinkthis is happening somewhere else
.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
What an excellent ripple effect it is having
across.
What is your own education,Matt?
What's your background?
Speaker 5 (48:07):
Sure.
Well, I started off as aparamedic.
Whenever I was in the PeaceCorps and while I was doing my
paramedic work, I was also abuilder.
That combination led me to wantto build the school.
And then, while I was buildingthe school, while we were
building the school, I went toGoddard College.
(48:28):
And because we had to come upwith an education model, we knew
that the state model alonewasn't exactly going to be
adequate for what we wanted toshare and what we wanted to
teach.
And so I went and got anundergraduate degree in
sustainability from Goddard.
(48:48):
And then, immediately afterthat, I was looking for
education models and wasintroduced to John Dewey and
Paolo Freire and all of thosewonderful people, and that's
where we came up with theconcept of Hero School.
And so I got a master's fromGoddard College in education,
and now I am working onintegrating democracy into the
(49:12):
middle school classes throughthe education department at
Antioch University.
I'm a doctoral student at thismoment and we named the school
Hero School because we needheroes.
Right, there are a lot ofpeople living in extreme poverty
and there are not a lot ofschools that I'm familiar with
(49:32):
that are doing this the way thatwe're doing it.
So we're hoping that thestudents will take the heroic
steps and the teachers to fixthe extreme poverty that we're
seeing in this town.
And so we do hero work and Iknow it sounds a little cheesy.
I was like kind of on the fenceas to like, should we call it
(49:53):
hero?
School Is that kind ofridiculous and everybody's
really modest about the wholething because nobody actually
wants to be called a hero.
You know, I would never saythat about myself and the
students and teachers reallykind of don't want to say it,
but as a unit we feel reallycomfortable saying that we're
going to go out there and doheroic work and that's what's
(50:14):
really on the horizon is we'regoing to give all the public
school teachers our lesson plansand then we're going to start
doing this on a much largerscale.
And then, through my doctoralwork, what I'm doing is figuring
out how to democratize thisentire process, because you know
it can get out of hand or likewe need clear, concise
(50:35):
communication, we need somestructure, we need to figure out
how we're going to all workeffectively together to do this.
We want everybody's ideas fromall over the world to come into
this space, so that's what we'refocused on.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
I was thinking too, with our two co-hosts here that
with the background that they'vegot in the ocean and education
and helping our environmentaround the world, I would like
to see how tree the education onthe ocean could be uplifted,
like the one young student wetalked with from Minnesota, ian
(51:17):
Ian.
Best year, ian for Ocean.
You should look that up too,matt, did you?
Speaker 7 (51:22):
ever hear of him.
Matt, he's wonderful and theywrite lesson plans.
They want to spread across thecountry and actually he asked us
the last time he spoke with ushe wants to send these to
countries like Guatemala.
May I put him in contact withyou?
Speaker 5 (51:40):
Please do.
We are everybody's welcome.
Great, we're wanting to standon the shoulders of giants.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
That is great, and Zach, I mean with your
background.
Zach is multi-talented in somany places.
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 6 (51:57):
Oh yeah, I would love to go visit the school and my
best friend in Guatemala is anarchitect and I think we could
bring a big group to come visitand see your work and I'd love
to support it.
We just did a program with agroup in Colombia on the Pacific
Coast that have an annual whalefestival and they have a poor
(52:18):
community that are looking forways to improve education and
build up their community andsustainability and take care of
the resources that they have.
They have this incredibleannual migration where the
whales and sea turtles andeverything come there.
So I could see a lot ofcoordination with that program,
with the work that you're doing.
I think they'd be so impressedby what you're doing and I
(52:40):
wanted to tell you that my momwas a college student in the
1960s and heard JFK's speechabout starting the Peace Corps
and she signed up that day andshe went to Kenya and I'm a
Peace Corps baby, so I reallycelebrate what you're doing.
I'm so inspired and grateful.
Speaker 5 (52:59):
It is an honor.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
I didn't know that side of you, Zach.
There's always some new facet.
But I could see too that maybethere's a way to get the
students involved in showingthem what you do with ecotourism
.
That could be something elsethat could be explored.
Speaker 5 (53:18):
The way I think about this is that we've done 22
years of research right.
This entire process needs to beshared, and so everything that
we've done in Koma Lapa, we wantto share with people.
We want the people on the coast, who have no idea what to do
with their trash, we want to letthem know this is what you can
(53:40):
do.
You can build schools.
You can build theinfrastructure that the family
needs using this trash.
Figure out how to do it.
We'd rather cut that down by 21years and share all the
information.
And it's all ready andavailable.
(54:01):
And our foreman started with usin 2009,.
Right, that means that localKomalopan has been working as
our foreman for 16 years.
He's also traveled to Colombia,to Venezuela, and he also went
to South Africa.
This guy's traveled and helikes to travel and he's willing
to travel the country and showpeople how to do this, and
(54:25):
couldn't be a more pleasantfellow.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
Where can people go to find this information?
Matt.
Speaker 5 (54:30):
If you go to LWHomeorg, that's our website.
Lwhomegreenorg, that's ourwebsite.
Lwhomegreenorg is connected toour website, but because there's
so much information there, wehad to create a whole other
website for it, and I'm alwaysaccepting emails, so, matt, at
(54:50):
lwhomeorg, I don't sleep thatmuch.
I'm completely available allthe time, and so I am ready and
willing to answer questions andfacilitate this entire process.
They can volunteer at ourschool, and they can stay from
anywhere from three days to 21years.
(55:12):
As I mentioned, our model is todo sustainable development.
People have been coming tovolunteer Well since COVID.
We went from having regularlyeight volunteers to one or two,
and so now we're reallydependent on donations to keep
going, and so at lwhomeorg, youcould figure out how to donate
(55:33):
and how to volunteer.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
And I see Mr Scott Mercer has joined the show here
too.
Hello Scott.
Speaker 8 (55:40):
I was just going to encourage Matt and Zach to
exchange information before youguys sign off.
Zach is very well connected inGuatemala, as he attributed to a
couple of times.
He knows a lot of people whoare very active in the area,
both ecologically andeconomically.
Matt, I just want to thank youa lot.
(56:02):
The question I had for you ishow did you ever find us?
I understand you contacted us.
Speaker 5 (56:08):
Yes, my brother, his outreach guy, said I'm going to
help you because we're reallygood in the field right, we
spent all that time living inGuatemala doing the construction
, building the curriculum butwhat I'm not great at is
outreach.
And so my brother's outreachperson said I'm going to help
(56:30):
you.
You need to get out there.
You need people to know who youare, and we're kind of modest,
unfortunately, about what we doand how we go about it.
And he goes you can't be modestanymore.
It's not fair to everybody elsethat would like to know this.
So he's helping me get the wordout.
Speaker 2 (56:46):
What a great question , scott.
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 8 (56:50):
You're sitting right almost next to Mr Connection.
We can use some connections.
Speaker 7 (56:54):
Yeah, almost next to Mr Connection.
We can use some connections.
We will spread your word.
We really will, because it'simportant.
What you're doing is sovaluable and we're very grateful
for your time today.
Speaker 4 (57:04):
At the heart of Longway Home is a remarkable
community school Built by greenbuilding volunteers, staffed by
local teachers.
Speaker 9 (57:18):
it features a unique curriculum designed to empower
students to be creative leaders.
My interpretation of the visionwhen we first got here was to
help reinforce and bolster thelocal Mayan identity through
education and by giving them theskills that they'll need in the
future to survive as a peopleas a people, and that will do it
(57:40):
with our conversation with MattPanites, founder and executive
director of Long Way Home.
Speaker 2 (57:43):
Many thanks to my co-host, treen Bursar, of
Mendenoma Whale and Seal Studyand our guest host today, zach
Cliver of Blue Green Future andFluke International Whale Tours.
I'm Leanne Lindsay.
Thanks for listening toResilient Earth Radio and
Podcast.
Welcome to the Resilient Earth Podcast, where
we talk with speakers from theUnited States and around the
world about the critical issuesfacing our planet and the
positive actions people aretaking, from the tiniest of
actions to the grandest ofgestures, so that we can
continue to thrive and survivefor generations to come.
(00:32):
I'm Leanne Lindsay, producerand host, along with co-hosts
and co-producers Scott and TreeMercer of Mindenoma, whale and
Seal Study, located on the SouthMendocino and North Sonoma
coasts.
The music for this podcast isby Eric Alleman, an
(00:55):
international composer, pianistand writer living in the Sea
Ranch.
Discover more of his music,animations, ballet, stage and
film work at ericalamancom.
You can find Resilient Earth onSpotify, apple and Amazon
(01:18):
Podcasts, iheart Radio, youtube,soundcloud and wherever you
find your podcasts.
You may have heard about ourguest today, matt Panites of
(01:54):
Long Way Home in Guatemala,through a PBS documentary about
him and the school he built, theHero School in San Juan
Kamalapa, guatemala.
This PBS segment is hosted bynone other than Law Order's Sam
Waterston.
Here's a quick clip from that.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Every year, more than 1.6 million people leave home
to volunteer around the world.
Why?
What motivates them?
What challenges do theyconfront?
Is it even a good thing thatpeople from one culture presume
to bestow something on another?
(02:32):
It's a puzzle in which thepieces are always changing shape
, because that's what culture isever evolving.
That means that adaptability,creativity and a spirit of
entrepreneurialism are criticalto the process of linking
cultures, sharing resources anddoing good.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Here in San Juan Coalmallapa, nestled in a
mountain valley 25 milesnorthwest of Guatemala City, an
extraordinary endeavor isunderway.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
We're in San Juan, coalmolapa, chimaltenango,
guatemala, population of about50,000 people.
So in Coalmolapa they havemarket on Tuesday, friday and
Sunday.
Here they sell carrots,potatoes, oranges, a little bit
of everything, and most of thisproduce comes from the
surrounding villages.
(03:29):
There's an understanding thateverybody depends on the earth
to produce food, to also producetheir income.
But there isn't a really greatanswer for where to put all of
the trash.
There isn't a trash system.
People can barely afford theeducation, they can barely
afford basic sanitation services.
It's just very difficult foranybody to worry about the trash
(03:51):
problem, although it's veryimportant to everybody.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Long Way Home is a nonprofit that takes trash and
transforms it into a thing ofvalue, but that is just the
beginning of the story.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Longway Home's mission as a registered US 501c3
is to mobilize people toactively participate in
democracy and create innovativepathways to economic and
environmental justice throughgreen building, employment and
education.
Matthew Panaitz is theexecutive director and
co-founder of Long Way Home, andit all started when he was a
(04:41):
former US Peace Corps volunteerfrom Texas and he was stationed
over two decades ago in San Juan, kamalapa, guatemala.
Panaitz's desire to continuehelping this impoverished,
predominantly Mayan communitydidn't end with his tour, though
.
He sold his car back in the USAto raise funds to co-found the
(05:06):
nonprofit Long Way Home.
That was back in 2004, to helpcreate better employment and
education opportunities there.
In 2008, their team ofeducators, builders, volunteers
and administrators establishedthe Hero School to ensure
multi-generational systemicchange.
(05:27):
They work hand-in-hand withlocal communities to create
educational infrastructure usingrecycled materials,
particularly used tires thatwould otherwise pollute the
environment.
Teaching and learning at HeroSchool is contextually based,
relevant to the local challengesassociated with environmental
(05:50):
degradation and climate change,and grounded in new and
sustainable development goals.
The Hero School curriculumintegrates traditional
Guatemalan education, greenbuilding and UNESCO standards
for education for sustainabledevelopment, or ESD, and is
(06:11):
accredited by the GuatemalanMinistry of Education.
During these two decades, theyhave transformed over 25,000
used tires and 100,000 plasticbottles filled with inorganic
trash into the 20-buildingupcycled marvel that is the Hero
School campus right there inGuatemala.
(06:33):
They see a future where themodel pioneered in Guatemala
spreads globally, creating anetwork of communities that
prove waste can become wealthand education can break cycles
of poverty while healing theplanet.
Today we invited a guest co-hostto join us, and that's Zach
(06:56):
Cliver of Blue Green Future andFlukes Whale Tours International
.
He's conducted whale tours andexplorations to Guatemala and is
even married to a Guatemalanwoman.
Zach is a Maine-based marinescientist, naturalist and
educator who has led over600,000 people on whale watching
(07:19):
tours from Bar Harbor andaround the world.
He has been a prior guest ofours on this podcast as well as
on an annual conference we'vehosted and produced the Ocean
Life Symposium.
Now we'll get into ourconversation with Matt,
executive Director of Long WayHome and creator of Hero School,
(07:39):
and you're listening toResilient Earth Radio and
Podcast.
I'm Leanne Lindsey, host andproducer, along with my co-host,
tree Mercer, from MendenomaWhale and Seal Study.
Good morning, tree, goodmorning Leanne and Zach and Matt
.
Yes, and Zach Cliver is a guesthost today from Blue Green
(08:00):
Future, and hello to you, zach,and welcome back.
Speaker 6 (08:04):
Great to be here, nice to see you.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
And we're all talking today with Matt Panaitz, who is
executive director of anorganization in Guatemala called
Long Way Home.
I'm so glad you reached out tous, Matt, and welcome to the
show.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Well, thank you, it's great to be here and thank you
for the invitation.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
And you're welcome, so take it away, matt.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Sure.
So I was in the Peace Corpsfrom 2002 and 2003.
And that introduced me toGuatemala.
I don't think I'd ever evenheard of Guatemala before I did
the Peace Corps.
And then I went there and I wasin a small town in the middle
of nowhere and what I sawcaptured my heart and I decided
(08:54):
shortly thereafter to spendpretty much the rest of my life
doing something about some ofthe not so pleasant parts of
what I saw there.
And that's where Long Way Homewas born, and that has me here
today, 23 years later.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, long Way Home is the name of the organization,
and they take all kinds oftrash and build.
In fact, specifically they'vebuilt classrooms focused on
education.
But there's other applicationsthat they've done and they've
given such an example of how todo this process of recycling,
(09:33):
reuse, which is so important forour environment, especially
when there are many locationsaround our world where people
feel that they just have noother option but to maybe throw
it in the river or the ocean,and this is a way to channel all
of that trash into somethingpositive.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
That's exactly right and that is what we have been
focused on for most of the timethat we've been there.
The whole thing started when,after Peace Corps, I decided to
go back.
Right After Peace Corps I triedto live, you know, a relatively
normal life.
I got a job and settled inschool and, you know, there was
(10:16):
this nagging sense that I wasn'tfinished and so I sold all of
my belongings, raffled my 1973Caprice Classic convertible so
that we would have some money tostart off with, moved back to
Guatemala, and the organizationthat I was working with as a
Peace Corps volunteer.
They said, hey, we've got thispiece of property.
(10:36):
Would you like to develop thispiece of property and do youth
outreach?
So I said, sure, that's perfect.
And so we built a grass soccerfield and a basketball court.
It was the first grass soccerfield in the history of this
town.
So because we built a grasssoccer field and everybody loves
soccer there, I Got to know alot of people because I also
(10:58):
really enjoy playing soccer andwas playing seven days a week,
and so you get to know everybodywhen you're doing that, and it
was a real informal.
So you get to know everybodywhen you're doing that, and it
was a real informal way to getto know everybody.
But we were also living in ahouse that had no electricity,
didn't really have windows ordoors, not really much of a roof
, so we were kind of living insome of the same circumstances
(11:20):
as the people around us.
Right as we built the park andwe got to know everybody and
really got to understand whatwas going on around there, at
one point we decided to startcharging eco bricks to get into
the park, and that was becausewe saw a different organization
at Lake Atitlan who was usingplastic bottles stuffed with
(11:40):
trash, because there is a trashproblem and there really is no
solution for it, because therereally is no budget.
You know, there's not budgetsfor schools and hospitals and
some of the basics, so there'sreally not a budget to deal with
the trash there.
And so we saw this.
We were like, oh cool, well,there's a bunch.
You know we need to chargesomething to get into the park,
(12:02):
like 25 cents but a lot of theneighborhood kids couldn't
afford that.
So we said, hey, how about ifyou give us a trash bottle?
Right, we call them eco bricksor trash bottles.
And so we said, how about ifyou give us a trash bottle.
Then we ended up with like25,000 of them because we're the
only.
You know, it was the first parkin the history of that town and
everybody was using it and allthe schools were using it and
(12:25):
the neighborhood kids, and sothat opened the door to even the
concept.
Then at some point I asked theco-founder and I was like you
know, we want to build a schoolto start dealing with what's
going on in the town on aslightly larger scale, because
the park was great, right, itwas well used, but it wasn't
(12:46):
addressing some of the moreurgent needs in that town.
Like kids were carryingfirewood on their head all day,
instead of going to schoolthey're carrying water.
Their shelters were inadequate,not resilient.
You know, we're surrounded byextreme poverty.
And so this co-founder friendof mine, who I was in the Peace
(13:08):
Corps with him, he said have youever heard of building with
trash?
And I was like not really.
I mean, I've seen a retainingwall, I've seen a couple of
privacy walls, but no, I'd neverconsidered this.
So we got earthship biotechersvolume one out and threw a
couple of tires on the groundand decided to try it out, and
(13:30):
we packed the first couple oftires with dirt and then we
packed a whole house worth oftires with dirt and we saw that
people loved it.
It was resilient, becausethere's earthquakes there as
well, um, so we also saw that wewere pulling the trash in from
the neighborhood.
The neighborhood kids werejoining in on it, the schools
(13:51):
were joining in.
So the very first building thatwe did went really, really well
and we saw that we could buildan entire school campus using
the trash and it's not onlytrash, there are conventional
materials that we use to combineall this.
But yeah, we saw that we coulduse the trash that was on the
ground to build the entireschool campus.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Interesting that you brought up the Earthship
biotexture.
They're located in Taos, newMexico, and I just saw a
documentary on them last monthor so.
But it is amazing the complexthat this one fellow built.
His name is Michael Reynoldsand he teaches down there now.
(14:35):
They've got a course coming upin September, so I want to ask
Zach, what was your connectionwith the area down there?
Speaker 6 (14:43):
Yeah, my connection is through ecotourism.
I hired a naturalist who wasborn in Guatemala and grew up in
the States to come work at thewhale watch company for me and
trained him, and he had workedas a news reporter for Prinza
Libra, the largest newspaper inCentral America, in Guatemala
(15:05):
Libra, the largest newspaper inCentral America, in Guatemala,
and they had sent him out on anassignment to the West Coast to
go whale watching and photographthe whales with the locals that
were just starting whalewatching there, and he was so
amazed by it that he wanted tobring ecotourism to help improve
the sustainability and thelivelihoods of the people that
were poor on the coast.
And so he came to work for usand I eventually went to
(15:27):
Guatemala to see everythingthere.
And his wife from Guatemala isa teacher, and my wife is a
teacher, and she introduced usand asked us to go on a double
date, and so that's how I woundup going to Guatemala 12 times
since 2018.
And I lived there for sixmonths at the longest period.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Let's talk about the location.
So where were you, Zach, andwhere is the town where this
school was built?
And tell us more about that,Matt Sure.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
The location of Comalapa is and Zach's probably
pretty familiar with this but ifyou leave Guatemala City and
you head towards Lake Atitlan,about halfway you'll hit a town
called Zaragoza and then you goup into the mountains and
Comalapa is about 25 kilometersfrom Zaragoza, at 7,000 feet in
(16:21):
the mountains, so we're in theWestern Highlands.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Was that area affected by the volcano eruption
back in June and March?
Speaker 5 (16:30):
Well, we do get the tremors and we get the ash from
the volcano, but that's about it, right, the lava doesn't make
it that far, but yeah, we feltit.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
The ash in the air right.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
We get the ash, for sure, we get the ash in the air,
right.
We get the ash for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
And speaking of whale watching, and that is the
connection that Zach and Teresa,or Tree Mercer, have, because
she and Scott Mercer did a lotof whale watching Tree is a
former teacher from Long Island,and tell them, tree, how long
you've known Zach.
Speaker 7 (17:06):
Oh yeah, scott and Zach go back even further than
us, but at least 25, 30 years,zach, I think we have known you.
Scott ran a whale watchingcompany out of Newburyport,
massachusetts, and actually wemet on his whale watch boat way
back 28 years ago.
And being a teacher, yes, Itaught for 35 years.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
I taught science, grades 7 through 12, and always
interested in the ocean andwhales conservation, certainly
very concerned aboutenvironmental issues, and Scott
and Tree and I got to meet eachother through a local public
radio station and then wedecided to figure out a way to
(17:54):
continue a conference that theyhad started called the Ocean
Life Symposium, during the firstyear of the pandemic, because
we couldn't hold it in alocation, so we figured out a
way to put it to YouTube throughZoom, this new tool we learned
about and from that we did itseveral years of the Ocean Life
Symposium Zach's been on it acouple of times, so that is our
(18:18):
connection here.
And then we decided, because ofall the work we had been doing
with the Ocean Life Symposium,we really wanted to do an
environmental show and a podcastseparate.
You know, not just as a radioshow but a podcast that could
really reach a lot of countries,and right now Resilient Earth
(18:39):
is listened and downloaded inover 66 countries around the
world and over 400 cities.
People are listening everywhere.
We like to talk to people aboutcritical issues that are facing
our planet and what some of thepositive solutions and actions
people are taking to make adifference.
(18:59):
And you fit right in there inwhat Long Way Home is doing, and
that's why I'm so glad you didreach out to us and ask us about
being a guest on the show,because this is exactly what we
like to talk about, things thatare more positive and uplifting,
because it can be very heavyand depressive, all the doom and
gloom.
In fact, it was Ralph Chami,who's with Blue Green Future,
(19:23):
with Zach's joined his company.
That was his first statementwhen he joined the Ocean Life
Symposium as a guest speaker andhe said it's not all doom and
gloom, so that's what led us todoing this.
And now this is a perfectexample of this the Long Way
Home organization.
So can you tell us, matt, someof the successes and maybe some
(19:50):
of the challenges that you havehad along the way doing these
projects?
Speaker 5 (19:55):
Sure, because there's so many right, especially the
challenges, exactly, and sowhenever you start building with
tires, you don't know whatyou're doing because there's not
a lot to work with.
Although Earthship did invite usto Taos and they did show us
around and they did give us sometraining and talk to us about
(20:18):
how to better pack a tire Right,because, like when we started
off, we were packing them toomuch and they were becoming
unstable.
So the very first building thatwe built out of tires you know
we're talking 500 packed tireswe had to tear the entire thing
down because we had over packedthe tires and it made it
(20:41):
unstable as the tires went upand so it made it kind of wiggly
.
So we had to tear all the tiresdown and pull all the dirt out
of the tires and then basicallyhad to start over, because what
we saw at earthship was that youdon't have to pack them
completely tight all the way.
In fact it works better if youleave a little bit of space so
(21:05):
that they'll sit down like morecomfortably on top of each other
and kind of fit into the littlenooks and crannies of each tire
.
So very interesting onechallenge right, right, not
really knowing what you're doing, but continuing to try until
you get it right.
It was introducing somethingnew to us, but it was also to
(21:26):
this entire community, because,as we're going around the town
and picking up everybody's tires, and they were like, what are
you doing?
Why do you want these tires?
We're like we're going to builda school out of these tires.
And they kind of laughed us offand thought it was kind of
silly, and but then slowlypeople came because it was a you
know, it really is a publicdemonstration.
(21:46):
Plus, we were hiring locals todo all of the work, because when
you go work and you know asmall rural town in guatemala
like you rely on the locals todo everything, because they know
everything right, theyunderstand how everything works,
who you talk to to get anythingdone.
And so we hired local builderswho had traditionally worked
(22:09):
with cinder block type ofconstruction and so they had to
make the transition over,because it is quite a transition
to go from something so steadyand regular such as a cinder
block and go okay, well, nowwe're going to work with a whole
lot of nuance and we're goingto start building with tires.
So you know it was tricky andwe all gonna start building with
tires.
So you know it was tricky andwe all had to learn from each
(22:30):
other and that is what reallygot us into the community, and
this is kind of funny.
So whenever we started,everybody gave us their tires.
15 years later now there's alot more people using them and
we have to buy the tires frompeople because they're actually
pretty hard to find these days.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
That was one of Tree's questions was where do
you get the resources?
Where are they located?
Speaker 7 (22:56):
Yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 5 (22:58):
Yeah, and you take a flatbed truck and well, first of
all, there's little shopscalled Pinchasos and they're
kind of like little mom and poptire shops and they don't have
like a thousand, but they'llhave like 10 or 15 that they
stack in front and they're gonnaget thrown away, you know, not
(23:20):
terribly responsibly.
So whenever we take our truckand we go by and pick them up,
we're doing them a favor, right?
So there's a collaborationhappening there.
And then they start saving themfor us over time.
And then when that isn't enoughbecause we use 35,000 tires to
build our campus and so wheneverthe 10 or 12 aren't enough, we
would take our flatbed and driveit along the inter-American
(23:42):
highway.
So, for, you know, 50 or $60worth of gas you can pick up 500
tires, and 500 tires are thewalls for most of our buildings.
So dirt and tires.
You're talking 50 or $60 tobuild the walls.
Well, I'm really lookingforward to seeing what's in this
river, because you know webuild a lot of stuff out of
(24:04):
trash and maybe this could be asource of new materials for us,
like we've been building houses,latrines, we have a lot of
things we can use here.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
And that was just a short clip from that same
documentary, with Sam Waterstonas host, as Matt Panites and
another worker were drivingalong in that flatbed truck
looking for trash, which theyfound volumes of in this one
crevice going down to the river.
Now back to our conversation.
(24:38):
And how do you get your fundingand what kind of volunteers
have you had over the years?
Speaker 5 (24:46):
We've had pretty much every imaginable person, right,
there have been six-year-oldswho have come with their
families because families willcome and stay with us for two
weeks.
Yeah, sometimes people staywith us for two weeks and
sometimes they've stayed with usfor seven years, right, they're
university students.
(25:06):
They're people that are curiousabout alternative living
techniques and sustainabilitytechniques and especially like
green builders.
There's a lot of green buildersaround the world, but there's
also engineers, architects,school teachers, gardeners,
students like every person youcould pretty much imagine, from
(25:30):
all over the world have been ourvolunteers.
Speaker 9 (25:58):
I was born in Missouri, in the Midwest of the
United States, and I wentthrough elementary school there
and then I was moved to LasVegas, nevada, where I went to
junior high and half a highschool, and I found that the big
change in the culture and theway that people interacted with
each other it made me think alot about how I wanted to live
my life.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
We have volunteers from all over the world.
We have individual volunteersand interns as well, and service
groups that will come for aweek or so at a time as like an
alternative break.
A lot of people also are justtraveling through Guatemala and
come here on a visit and thensay, wow, I want to be a part of
that, I want to help out.
Speaker 9 (26:32):
I'm only one person, but I want to take my energy and
try to use it to like, shiftthe direction we're heading into
a more safe and sustainabledirection.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 10 (26:45):
Small fish off the coast of West Africa are being
scooped up in large numbers andground into fish meal that's
then sent all over the planet tofeed other fish, like the farm
salmon you get at your localgrocery store.
It's all part of a globalsupply chain that has some
people crying foul.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Here is a case where the communities lose their fish
their food security and theydon't see any dollars coming in.
Speaker 10 (27:11):
That's coming up on the latest season of the Catch.
Listen wherever you get yourpodcasts.
Speaker 6 (27:22):
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Speaker 2 (27:58):
You're listening to Resilient Earth Radio and
Podcast.
I'm Leanne Lindsey, host andproducer at Seastorm Studios,
along with Tree Mercer fromMendenoma Whale and Seal Study,
and a guest host today, zachCliver of Blue Green Future and
Fluke Whale Tours International,who happens to have visited
(28:21):
many times in Guatemala, whereLong Way Home is located, and
we're speaking with the founderand executive director, matt
Panaitz, and now he's going totalk about the funding.
Speaker 5 (28:34):
They're also part of our funding solution, because we
wanted an earned income styleof funding, and so what we did
was we charged $85 a week forthose volunteers to come and
work with us.
We used that money to buy thematerials and to pay the labor
and pay the teachers, and that'spretty much how we've paid for
(28:58):
pretty much everything.
Of course, we've won a fewawards and gotten a few grants
along the way, and we've reallykind of pieced it all together.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, talk about one of those awards from UNESCO, was
it?
Speaker 5 (29:10):
Sure, sure.
And then that like really leadsus into the going from using
tires and everything that welearned along the way, because,
in addition to using tires, wealso use Ubuntu blocks.
Right, and those are like youtake the plastic wrappers and
all the plastic wrappers uh,that won't fit into an eco brick
(29:31):
and you use bailing wire andyou basically make a cinder
block with those.
And so we used bamboo, we usedearth bags, so the campus itself
there's 21 buildings.
Every single building is alittle bit different, because
the idea was to practice andexperiment with infrastructure
(29:52):
that we could also, whilelearning how to do it on our
campus, we could also use in thecommunity, because there are
also people who need houses inthe community, who can't afford
the cinder blocks.
And so, as we were trying outall these different alternative
materials, we were getting outall these different alternative
materials, we were gettingaccustomed to the materials and
learning about the materials.
(30:12):
And then so that leads us intothe education model and that
award, because at some point wedid start, in 2012, we started
bringing students in.
We brought our first 12students in, and they were first
, second and third graders, andwe saw that the teachers, they
were using the state-mandatedcurriculum, and we wanted to
(30:37):
integrate what we'd learnedduring the construction process
into the curriculum, and so thatis called Education for
Sustainable Development, andUNESCO has a 2030 agenda to
comply with the SustainableDevelopment Goals, and Education
for Sustainable Developmentcorresponds with the fourth
(30:59):
development goal, which isquality education.
We've been integrating what welearned in the campus into the
curriculum.
They gave us an award for that.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
And I imagine both you, zach and Tree, you being a
teacher, zach being married to ateacher.
What questions do you have forMatt at this point?
Speaker 7 (31:20):
Well, I was wondering Matt were the students who
would eventually go to thisschool?
Were they involved in theconstruction process?
Speaker 5 (31:31):
We didn't have students doing the heavy labor
right.
That would be like the packingof tires with sledgehammers.
That was us hiring.
You know, at one point we had25 or 30 local builders on our
team 25 or 30 local builders onour team and the local paid
(31:53):
professional builders, alongwith the volunteers.
They did the vast majority ofthe super heavy work right,
because if you're going to lay aan 18 wheeler tire flat and
pound, use a sledgehammer to putdirt in it and pound the dirt.
It takes 30 minutes with asledgehammer to do one of those
tires.
And so what we did was got it tothe point where the students
could be involved, like, forexample, in the finishes, the
(32:15):
finish work.
The students love doing thefinish work because you end up
with a lot of mosaic type workand you end up with a lot of cob
, and so they get to stomparound in the cob and then take
the cob and throw the cobagainst the wall and then shape
it into figures such as snakesor squirrels or deer, and so if
(32:39):
you look at our campus, youdon't see any tires right.
What you see are all thefigures and all the mosaic work
that the students have done.
So, like in like in Home Ec,rather than making a cake
necessarily, they kind of takethe same concepts and they make
cob, and then they take that coband they apply it to the walls
(33:01):
and they turn it into shapes.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
What again is cob when you mention that?
But also I liked the images oftheir handprints on the walls as
well.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
So cob is a mixture of basically sand and dirt and
straw and water, right, anddepending on the consistency
that you're looking for, you adddifferent portions of that and
then you put it on a piece ofplastic and then you stomp it
around and you fold it over andyou turn it into what is
(33:36):
ultimately people use for Adobe.
People make Adobe bricks out ofthis exact same type of
material.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Well, that's very creative.
And, Zach, what question do youhave right now for our?
Speaker 6 (33:52):
guest From the ecotourism perspective,
traveling around all throughGuatemala.
I'm always looking at it throughthat lens and one of the
concerns you know with bringingWestern tourism is always the
plastics and the pollution rightin places and you see that and
you, you know we're not used tothat so much in our parks and
(34:13):
beautiful landscapes and things,but they just.
It's such a challenge in lessdeveloped countries to manage
that plastic and waste.
We've been very fortunate.
We go down to the Pacific Ocean, to a place called Mont Rico.
We go down to the beach on theocean and watch the sun rise and
then go down and watch the sunset over the ocean and I always
(34:36):
go down each morning and nightwith two garbage bags and I just
pick up a bag of garbage, twobags of garbage every time and
bring them back, you know.
But there they often wind uphaving to like burn it.
They try to burn the plastic.
It's frustrating, you know, tosee that all the plastic that's
in these places that are poorand I wondered, my understanding
(34:58):
is there now have developedsome processes by which you
could take plastic and melt itdown and then turn it into tiles
or things that are useful, asyou've described.
Are you doing any of that?
Speaker 5 (35:10):
Yeah, well, we're not doing really any of the um
higher production let's call itright where you could take tires
and turn them into chips anduse them for playgrounds, which
now I'm hearing is maybe notsuch a great idea.
There's also people using tiresto make highways, but not
really because we don't have theproduction facilities to do
(35:33):
something like that.
It requires a slightly moreindustrial approach and we're
pretty manual with everythingthat we do.
You know, we use it as a sourceof inspiration because we're
always looking for new ways togo about doing this and people
are constantly sending me newideas and I love reading about
them, but we use our handsmostly and don't involve a lot
(35:56):
of machines.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
I like the way that ecotourism and what Longway Home
is doing with education ispulling that trash out of the
environment and doing somethingpositive with it.
If it's going to be used in oneway or the other, that's not
harmful.
So, like you said somethingabout the playgrounds, you don't
use the plastic in theplayground.
(36:17):
Is that what you were saying?
Speaker 5 (36:19):
Well, sometimes they'll turn the tires into
little chips and they'll use thechips like mulch or something
like that, and I've seen peopleuse pieces of tires as mulch.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Now have you noticed a real impact in the location
where you are located there inGuatemala?
What impact it has had onneighboring areas as well?
Speaker 5 (36:44):
I mean yes and no.
There is an impact in that ourstudents, like I would say,
whenever we started, nobody hadthe slightest idea what to do
about any of it.
Right, there was no.
There were no.
Like, the best ideas thatanybody had were put trash cans
in the Central Park, fill thetrash cans up and then throw
(37:06):
them in the river.
We tell our students, andespecially the lower income
students, because we charge likea minimum of tuition, a couple
of dollars a month.
Even some of our students can'tafford that.
And so we say, hey, pleasebring an eco brick instead of
tuition, right.
And then so some of ourstudents, instead of bringing
(37:27):
one, they'll bring 25.
Right.
So there are some students thatare rallying their neighbors and
talking to their differentfamily members and going above
and beyond and really takingadvantage of the opportunity to
keep their homes and keep theirneighborhoods and keep the
streets clean.
Yeah, I mean that has been areally amazing impact.
(37:51):
To see them once they have theopportunity and have an idea of
what we could possibly do.
To see them once they have theopportunity and have an idea of
what we could possibly do,because we're still using all of
this rubbish and we're we'rebuilding stoves and water tanks
and homes and classrooms, and sothat is our source of materials
these days is largely throughthe students.
(38:11):
Um, do we wish that everybodyin town would have picked it up
immediately and it wouldeliminate all trash and all the
rivers?
Sure, that is what we wishwould have happened, and that
has not fully happened yet.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
You mentioned Tree, too, the impact on housing,
because housing is always anissue, so it seems like this has
had a positive impact, though,Matt, on housing availability in
the area.
Sure.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
There's a couple of other organizations that are
more focused on housing and morefocused on classrooms, like Hug
it Forward.
They're really good at takingeco bricks and building houses
in classrooms because theplastic is really.
You know, tires are an issue,certainly because they don't
really decompose and there isn'tanywhere to put them, but
(39:02):
plastic also being an issue,they go.
Plastic goes really well intothe plastic bottles and, yes,
there are some organizations outthere that are doing a great
job building homes andclassrooms using plastic trash.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
I want to go back to your classroom and the kids what
grade level that you're talking, that you deal with, and the
curriculum.
Perhaps I'd like to know alittle bit about that.
Speaker 5 (39:29):
And that's one of our most exciting things to talk
about really is we have 178students right, and they are
pre-K through high school, as Imentioned before.
You know, whenever you start,you start with a state mandated
curriculum, and that is thefoundation for what we're doing
(39:52):
now, because if you come up withan entirely original curriculum
, it's difficult to scale it,and so we came up with a
curriculum and lesson plans thatadhere to the state
requirements, like, for example,in the seventh grade, rather
than having a somewhat abstractcurriculum.
(40:12):
Instead of lesson plans, wefocus on building ventilated
stoves for the families.
The number one reason people goto the health clinic is because
they cook over open flamesindoors, right, and then
multiple family members get sick.
Plus, you're using tons offirewood, and firewood's
expensive and not easilyaccessible.
(40:32):
So seventh graders, like inmath class now, they use their
math to work on the design ofthe stove and understanding the
dimensions of the stove.
So in the eighth grade they'redoing water tanks another major
issue in Guatemala.
In the ninth grade, we're doingcompost latrines, because
sanitation is an issue.
(40:52):
In the 10th grade, we doretaining walls and in the 11th
grade we do retaining walls.
And in the 11th grade we builda home, right.
So the home is the combinationof everything that they've
learned from all of the courses,and so by the time they
finished, they have a thoroughunderstanding of the issues in
Guatemala and the solutions, andyou can imagine what that does
(41:15):
for a student's self-esteem,right.
They are going into thecommunity, because this is not
only theoretical.
We go into the community.
We find the families that needour help the most, and if there
is a single mother with fivechildren who collects water and
firewood all day, we build astove, we build a floor, water
tanks, compost latrine,retaining wall and we completely
(41:37):
change the family's life.
And this isn't, you know,people swooping in to fix.
This is all done in a way thatyou know.
We ask permission, we work withthem, we talk to them, and it's
primarily done by the studentsand teachers.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
And it's primarily done by the students and
teachers Practical solutions forsustainable living in a place
that needs these things and theyneed these skills.
These students graduate havingall this talent, this ability to
provide for their communities.
It's really empowering thesecommunities.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
Exactly and, like you know, a brief story would be we
went out to a small village andover the course of a week we
built 57 stoves for one.
It was a village in the middleof nowhere that, you know, does
not receive much support fromthe municipal governments.
They're kind of on their ownway out there.
(42:32):
And we built water tanks andstoves and the students mapped
out the entire town.
They went from house to houseto see which family needs what,
and then they went back to theclassroom.
They figured everything out,set a plan and then we all went
back and everybody was soexcited at the end of it that
(42:54):
the people in the village wereactually throwing rose petals at
the feet of our students asthey got back on the bus, right.
So there was not a dry eyeanywhere.
Everybody was excited.
And then the students feelvalued, right?
They want to feel like valuedmembers of the community.
Speaker 7 (43:18):
Like valued members of the community and you know
what does it better than reallyyou know, showing your value and
being honored by your communitymembers definitely shining
example of a win-win situationwhere the students are winning,
the community's benefiting, and,having been in the classroom
(43:40):
and taught in the traditionalway, I always felt that what you
just described, that's realeducation, that's a
life-changing experience forthose students and it's setting
the seeds, it's planting theseeds for them to continue
sustainability, conservation,caring about the community Wow,
(44:05):
I just it's a five-star programfor sure.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
And you mentioned the compostable toilets when I was
looking at it online too.
The compostable toilets, when Iwas looking at it online too.
It's a system that doesn't usewater.
Speaker 5 (44:24):
Exactly Because water is very difficult to come by
and it's kind of you know, afteryou've used one of those for a
while, you're like, oh my God,we're blushing water down the
toilet where there arecommunities who don't have water
, and so this eliminates theneed to use water.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
And it is sustainable , it is scalable and it is
doable and it helps theenvironment by also taking out
and reusing and putting thattrash and plastic into work for
the community instead of againstit.
Speaker 5 (44:57):
Exactly, and there is no real ceiling for this either
, because if you visitlwhomegreenorg you can see we
made profiles for every one ofour projects.
Yeah, there's no ceiling forthis.
As Tree was saying, the seed isplanted, we get them started,
and then I'm constantly hearingstories because we don't see
(45:21):
everything that happens.
There are students that are nowdoing this on their own.
They're not telling anybody atschool.
There's like grapevine going.
Oh, you know, heard the otherday that students were building
a ventilated stove for theirneighbor who was a single mom
with multiple children whodidn't have anything, and the
students did it outside of theschool, didn't mention it to
(45:42):
anybody, raised the money ontheir own, figured out how to do
it on their own.
You know they're doing a greatjob.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Where do the teachers come from?
Speaker 5 (45:53):
They're all local right.
So one of the major issues inKoma Lapa is employment, and so
this is also part of our missionis to create dependable
employment, and so the teachersare mostly, you know, between
the ages of 20 and 30 years old,who would otherwise find it
(46:15):
very difficult to secure a job,and we currently have 25
teachers.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Zach was your wife a teacher there in Guatemala.
Speaker 6 (46:26):
Yes, she worked at a lot of different schools in the
city and she also had her ownbusiness working with students
that needed personal help toimprove.
You know that were fallingbehind.
She would work with them one onone quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Is there a way that other teachers in other
locations throughout Guatemalacould connect with each other
and have resources pooledresources?
Speaker 5 (46:54):
This is really the most exciting part of all of
this is that because we'rewriting these lesson plans,
we're going to make these lessonplans available to the public
school teachers at the publicschools, right, and because they
don't have their own lessonplans but would like lesson
plans, it would like resourcesand rubrics and everything that
(47:15):
comes along with that all thematerials they're going to use
our lesson plans and it won't belong before the public schools
are using our pedagogy and we'reall fighting poverty together.
So what I'm picturing isseveral hundred people all at
the same time going into ourtown, into those villages, doing
(47:37):
the projects that I mentioned,and that within a couple of
years we're talking thousandsand thousands of people lifted
out of extreme poverty and itbeing done through the public
schools using the subject matter.
And I'm not, I do not thinkthis is happening somewhere else
.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
What an excellent ripple effect it is having
across.
What is your own education,Matt?
What's your background?
Speaker 5 (48:07):
Sure.
Well, I started off as aparamedic.
Whenever I was in the PeaceCorps and while I was doing my
paramedic work, I was also abuilder.
That combination led me to wantto build the school.
And then, while I was buildingthe school, while we were
building the school, I went toGoddard College.
(48:28):
And because we had to come upwith an education model, we knew
that the state model alonewasn't exactly going to be
adequate for what we wanted toshare and what we wanted to
teach.
And so I went and got anundergraduate degree in
sustainability from Goddard.
(48:48):
And then, immediately afterthat, I was looking for
education models and wasintroduced to John Dewey and
Paolo Freire and all of thosewonderful people, and that's
where we came up with theconcept of Hero School.
And so I got a master's fromGoddard College in education,
and now I am working onintegrating democracy into the
(49:12):
middle school classes throughthe education department at
Antioch University.
I'm a doctoral student at thismoment and we named the school
Hero School because we needheroes.
Right, there are a lot ofpeople living in extreme poverty
and there are not a lot ofschools that I'm familiar with
(49:32):
that are doing this the way thatwe're doing it.
So we're hoping that thestudents will take the heroic
steps and the teachers to fixthe extreme poverty that we're
seeing in this town.
And so we do hero work and Iknow it sounds a little cheesy.
I was like kind of on the fenceas to like, should we call it
(49:53):
hero?
School Is that kind ofridiculous and everybody's
really modest about the wholething because nobody actually
wants to be called a hero.
You know, I would never saythat about myself and the
students and teachers reallykind of don't want to say it,
but as a unit we feel reallycomfortable saying that we're
going to go out there and doheroic work and that's what's
(50:14):
really on the horizon is we'regoing to give all the public
school teachers our lesson plansand then we're going to start
doing this on a much largerscale.
And then, through my doctoralwork, what I'm doing is figuring
out how to democratize thisentire process, because you know
it can get out of hand or likewe need clear, concise
(50:35):
communication, we need somestructure, we need to figure out
how we're going to all workeffectively together to do this.
We want everybody's ideas fromall over the world to come into
this space, so that's what we'refocused on.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
I was thinking too, with our two co-hosts here that
with the background that they'vegot in the ocean and education
and helping our environmentaround the world, I would like
to see how tree the education onthe ocean could be uplifted,
like the one young student wetalked with from Minnesota, ian
(51:17):
Ian.
Best year, ian for Ocean.
You should look that up too,matt, did you?
Speaker 7 (51:22):
ever hear of him.
Matt, he's wonderful and theywrite lesson plans.
They want to spread across thecountry and actually he asked us
the last time he spoke with ushe wants to send these to
countries like Guatemala.
May I put him in contact withyou?
Speaker 5 (51:40):
Please do.
We are everybody's welcome.
Great, we're wanting to standon the shoulders of giants.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
That is great, and Zach, I mean with your
background.
Zach is multi-talented in somany places.
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 6 (51:57):
Oh yeah, I would love to go visit the school and my
best friend in Guatemala is anarchitect and I think we could
bring a big group to come visitand see your work and I'd love
to support it.
We just did a program with agroup in Colombia on the Pacific
Coast that have an annual whalefestival and they have a poor
(52:18):
community that are looking forways to improve education and
build up their community andsustainability and take care of
the resources that they have.
They have this incredibleannual migration where the
whales and sea turtles andeverything come there.
So I could see a lot ofcoordination with that program,
with the work that you're doing.
I think they'd be so impressedby what you're doing and I
(52:40):
wanted to tell you that my momwas a college student in the
1960s and heard JFK's speechabout starting the Peace Corps
and she signed up that day andshe went to Kenya and I'm a
Peace Corps baby, so I reallycelebrate what you're doing.
I'm so inspired and grateful.
Speaker 5 (52:59):
It is an honor.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
I didn't know that side of you, Zach.
There's always some new facet.
But I could see too that maybethere's a way to get the
students involved in showingthem what you do with ecotourism
.
That could be something elsethat could be explored.
Speaker 5 (53:18):
The way I think about this is that we've done 22
years of research right.
This entire process needs to beshared, and so everything that
we've done in Koma Lapa, we wantto share with people.
We want the people on the coast, who have no idea what to do
with their trash, we want to letthem know this is what you can
(53:40):
do.
You can build schools.
You can build theinfrastructure that the family
needs using this trash.
Figure out how to do it.
We'd rather cut that down by 21years and share all the
information.
And it's all ready andavailable.
(54:01):
And our foreman started with usin 2009,.
Right, that means that localKomalopan has been working as
our foreman for 16 years.
He's also traveled to Colombia,to Venezuela, and he also went
to South Africa.
This guy's traveled and helikes to travel and he's willing
to travel the country and showpeople how to do this, and
(54:25):
couldn't be a more pleasantfellow.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
Where can people go to find this information?
Matt.
Speaker 5 (54:30):
If you go to LWHomeorg, that's our website.
Lwhomegreenorg, that's ourwebsite.
Lwhomegreenorg is connected toour website, but because there's
so much information there, wehad to create a whole other
website for it, and I'm alwaysaccepting emails, so, matt, at
(54:50):
lwhomeorg, I don't sleep thatmuch.
I'm completely available allthe time, and so I am ready and
willing to answer questions andfacilitate this entire process.
They can volunteer at ourschool, and they can stay from
anywhere from three days to 21years.
(55:12):
As I mentioned, our model is todo sustainable development.
People have been coming tovolunteer Well since COVID.
We went from having regularlyeight volunteers to one or two,
and so now we're reallydependent on donations to keep
going, and so at lwhomeorg, youcould figure out how to donate
(55:33):
and how to volunteer.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
And I see Mr Scott Mercer has joined the show here
too.
Hello Scott.
Speaker 8 (55:40):
I was just going to encourage Matt and Zach to
exchange information before youguys sign off.
Zach is very well connected inGuatemala, as he attributed to a
couple of times.
He knows a lot of people whoare very active in the area,
both ecologically andeconomically.
Matt, I just want to thank youa lot.
(56:02):
The question I had for you ishow did you ever find us?
I understand you contacted us.
Speaker 5 (56:08):
Yes, my brother, his outreach guy, said I'm going to
help you because we're reallygood in the field right, we
spent all that time living inGuatemala doing the construction
, building the curriculum butwhat I'm not great at is
outreach.
And so my brother's outreachperson said I'm going to help
(56:30):
you.
You need to get out there.
You need people to know who youare, and we're kind of modest,
unfortunately, about what we doand how we go about it.
And he goes you can't be modestanymore.
It's not fair to everybody elsethat would like to know this.
So he's helping me get the wordout.
Speaker 2 (56:46):
What a great question , scott.
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 8 (56:50):
You're sitting right almost next to Mr Connection.
We can use some connections.
Speaker 7 (56:54):
Yeah, almost next to Mr Connection.
We can use some connections.
We will spread your word.
We really will, because it'simportant.
What you're doing is sovaluable and we're very grateful
for your time today.
Speaker 4 (57:04):
At the heart of Longway Home is a remarkable
community school Built by greenbuilding volunteers, staffed by
local teachers.
Speaker 9 (57:18):
it features a unique curriculum designed to empower
students to be creative leaders.
My interpretation of the visionwhen we first got here was to
help reinforce and bolster thelocal Mayan identity through
education and by giving them theskills that they'll need in the
future to survive as a peopleas a people, and that will do it
(57:40):
with our conversation with MattPanites, founder and executive
director of Long Way Home.
Speaker 2 (57:43):
Many thanks to my co-host, treen Bursar, of
Mendenoma Whale and Seal Studyand our guest host today, zach
Cliver of Blue Green Future andFluke International Whale Tours.
I'm Leanne Lindsay.
Thanks for listening toResilient Earth Radio and
Podcast.
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