Wiring the American Dream
Texas Electric Cooperatives
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South Texas lineworkers bring electricity to rural?Guatemala
Justin Garcia wondered what he had gotten himself into in November as he maneuvered the steep terrain of?Guatemala?to bring electricity—all the infrastructure—to a village where residents cooked by wood fires and navigated nighttime by candlelight.
“The job seemed impossible and daunting,” said Garcia, a Magic Valley EC lineworker who volunteered for the Central American mission. “But all this hard work is worth it after seeing a little girl in a red dress carrying a huge bag of bread on her head passing us with ease while waving and smiling at us.”
Garcia was one of 20 lineworkers from 10 Texas co-ops who spent two weeks in Matasanos, a rural village in?Guatemala, as part of NRECA International. The program has delivered electricity for more than 60 years to remote places that had none—exactly what co-ops did in rural Texas 85 years ago.
NRECA International has helped establish more than 250 electric utilities and electric cooperatives in 48 countries.
Texas co-ops began planning for this mission years ago before the pandemic sidelined the efforts. But when the opportunity arose again, general managers in Group 7 rallied the workers and resources—some $267,000 in fundraising, spearheaded by Victoria EC’s Blaine Warzecha, one of five co-op general managers who assisted the crews in?Guatemala—and the project was a go.
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The work orders show that the lineworkers trudged through miles of mountainous tropical forest, installing dozens of power poles, lines and four transformers. Sixty homes—with dirt floors and walls—were wired with four lights, two switches and two outlets each. A church, health clinic and school there now have electricity, too.
What the work orders won’t show are the smiles and tears that emerged as the co-op crews and some 240 villagers bonded.“
Each morning, and this really amazed me, the guys would go by a local department store, gather up as many toys, clothes, cookies and candy as they could for the kids and take them up to the mountain,” said Avan Irani, CEO at Nueces EC. “As soon as the trucks rolled in, the kids would jump in the back of the trucks.“
There clearly were some emotional moments towards the end of the trip. There was joy and celebration when the lights came on, but the true tears came when the guys realized they will not be going back up to the mountain and see the kids they had become so attached to over the course of the project.”
Jim Coleman, general manager at Jackson Electric Cooperative in Edna, has participated in several international projects in his career. It’s always humbling.“
It is really hard to describe to someone born in America the conditions in which people in other parts of the world live,” he says. “I believe we take the American dream on the road and transplant it to other countries.”
Cooperatives that sent two lineworkers each to?Guatemala: