Click here to download a PDF of the current newsletter.
The photos below are also in the print version of the newsletter. 
There are more photos of the workshop HERE.
Below the photos is the complete article by Shawn Lavoie detailing the YIHS Guatemala trip. 

Building Bridges, Not Walls: The YIHS Guatemala Trip
by Shawn Lavoie, YIHS Teacher
“Se hace el puente al andar”--Gloria Anzaldúa

The first 2 paragraphs of this article can be found in the current issue of  the KGAP newsletter above. Start at paragraph 3 to finish the story!

The “Build the Wall” chant has resounded vociferously through our political discourse for several years now and the underlying sentiment, sometimes hidden underneath the partisan debates over the scale and construction material of the border wall, is the notion that the United States ends—culturally, legally, compassionately—at our southern border. The line between Americans and Mexicans or Guatemalans or any other Central or South American people can and should be definitively drawn and enforced. There is US and them and the bigger the fence the better the neighbors.  
 
In stark contrast to this sentiment, for the last 18 years the Youth Initiative High School has been building a bridge, modest as it is, between the US and the people of Guatemala. Every two years we send a group of teenagers and adults from this community to build relationships with people and organizations in communities down there. Our relationship to Guatemala stems from the efforts of Connie Vanderhyden who in the mid-1990s was a human rights accompanier with a group of Guatemalan refugees who were returning to their country after over a decade of living in exile. From this first connection in Chaculá (Nueva Esperanza) came the desire to maintain these relationships, to expand the circle of accompaniers and solidarios, andto invest in building the bridge.
 
For three and a half weeks this February and March I along with the trip co-leader Tim Beck led 12 YIHS students on 10thYIHS delegation to Guatemala. Our trip was powerful and intense from start to finish, and even though we were far from home, the specter of US foreign and domestic policy loomed large. The political tensions around immigration were palpable; We flew two days after the end government shutdown over border wall funding and midway through our trip the New York Times published an article describing the increase in border apprehensions, with 90% of people detained in the last five months coming from Guatemala—half of whom were traveling in families. We were literally walking into communities in the Western highlands that many Guatemalans were walking out of, heading north to the US. 
 
The irony was not lost on us. For a few hundred dollars we could get a passport, visa, and plane tickets and travel throughout Guatemala while hundreds of thousands of people were paying a lot more to risk their lives crossing into our country. Moreover we were being received with generosity and warm welcome, while they were being detained, deported, maligned and scapegoated. 
 
The irony manifested in a dramatic fashion one morning while we were at language school in the rural villages of Nuevo San Jose and Fatima outside of Quetzaltenango. A group of scholarship high school students were meeting in the school's outdoor classroom for a bi-weekly student-led training. The theme this week was immigration and the session was being led by a 17-year old powerhouse of a young woman, who the day before we'd played soccer with. My students and I sat in the back of the classroom and observed as the group of about 20 teens talked about this personally hard-hitting subject. Timid at first, they began to share about how immigration to the US had affected their lives, for the better and worse. They invited us—the students and I—to speak and we stuttered out some “I'm sorries” and sympathetic frustration, but our words only increased the awkward tension in the air. Where to from here?Well, the teen leaders took us all to the small grassy soccer field, broke us into groups with the gringos spread around evenly, and challenged us to create a theatrical scene about immigration. We had 15 minutes. Although  my students were perhaps internally mortified to have to create theater with other teens in Spanish, they didn't show it. Laughs started up right away.

Leaders/directors emerged and the subject we'd just been speaking about started to take dramatic form. The scenes represented the most serious of tragedies related to immigration: dying in the desert, kidnappings, threats, arrests, losing a family member. Watching, we were moved to tears, but we also laughed, infusing a necessary breath into these desperate circumstances. After playing the scenes out, the teen leaders challenged us to change them. Improvising we added new characters, changed the plot, and flipped the outcome. It was brief and ephemeral, as all theater is, but the feeling of bridge-making that morning left an indelible mark. 
 
On two other occasions we collaborated with Guatemalan teens. The first was our service week at the San Lucas Mission on Lake Atitlan when we merged with the 11thgrade of Colegio Waldorf Guatemala, the only Waldorf school in Central America with a high school. The 13 students and three teachers from Colegio were almost as unfamiliar to small-town Guatemalan life as we were, as many of them live quite cloistered in the capital city. These students were clearly not midwestern high schoolers, yet there was so much in common: dress, music, and language. They were a super high-functioning bilingual group that flowed back and forth between English and Spanish with panache. Being with the Colegio students the first week lessened the culture shock, as they provided a bridge for our students into the country. Yet, they also gave us a picture of the tremendous social divisions that exist within Guatemala, between city and rural folks, wealthy and poor, indigenous and non-indigenous.
 
The last group we met with, sadly only for one day, at the end of our trip was about 30 teens and young adults of Jovenes en Defensa de la Vida (JODVID) or Youth in Defense of Life. These environmental and community justice activists lived just outside the capital in a nearby municipality that has recently been fighting a large-scale mining project owned by an American and Canadian company. They led a workshop for us and for some of their newest members who had just joined the group. Mixed with ice-breaker and energizer games they delivered a message of how important it is to stand up for the environment, how closely linked environmental and economic justice are, and how dangerous it is to be an activist in Guatemala. In our break out sessions we shared our background and our shared hopes and concerns for the future. Even though the session was brief, and tacked onto the end of three full weeks, I could see the sparks of connection flying. Their vision for the world they want to live in resonated with so many of our values. And they left us with the question that's been rattling in our minds ever since: ¿Cómo ayudarían desde lejos?How could we help from so far away?
 
A bridge, like a wall, is a metaphor. No wall could ever divide two nations that have hundreds of years of criss-crossing history. Nor can a bridge easily brace the deep wounds and differences that exist between us. Perhaps the problem comes when we get too literal, mistaking a catchy chant for the long-term work of dialogue, collaboration, and reconciliation. So, even though this trip is an earnest attempt at solidarity, it is not a completed bridge. Returning home to the US, feeling the distance, we can tell that there's still so much to be done. Imaginative bridges require consistent maintenance; Walls can be thrown up for a few billion dollars, but but bridges ask us to change our lives.