Why I’m Bringing You to Guatemala This Spring

A beautiful trip and a chance to help others are not opposites. This spring, I’m bringing a group to Guatemala to experience both.

When I was a teenager, I went through a very sad time. I felt very discouraged and was frequently sad and irritable. One day, I sat down next to my Dad’s “home office,” which was a well-loved brown velveteen couch, and laid out my discouragement. Wise as always, he said, “Julie, if you want to feel better, stop looking at yourself and try to go out and help others.” This philosophy changed my life.

This is why I’m so passionate about this week’s feature. The Boatique Hotel and Marina was started by a couple I greatly respect. Sheldon was an oil executive who was relocated all over the world. Pamela was a firebrand herself: an organizer, a connector of people, and someone unafraid to start her own cottage business.

They left all this behind to start a hotel with more than a cushy stay in mind. Instead they set out to change the community around them in their adopted country of Guatemala.

What started as a couple building a special resort, which catered to the sailing community and reached out to the people around them through their charity, quickly morphed into more and more organized endeavors for teaching life skills to young women who aged out of the orphanage system. They now open this opportunity to travelers. I have partnered with them to bring others who want to do more than just “vacation” with people they love. They want to make a difference.

The ProgramThe Young Women’s Program

In Guatemala, there is nothing waiting for a girl who ages out of the orphanage at eighteen. She leaves the facility and that is the whole arrangement. No job, no place to live, no one teaching her how to pay rent or open a bank account or what to do when the money runs out.

Pamela and Sheldon’s Boatique Project changes that. Young women come to them at eighteen and stay for six months. They get a room, they get three meals a day cooked from fresh local ingredients. They get a job—either at the hotel or somewhere in the community.

And they pay rent. She pays for her room and food from the wages she earns. She opens a bank account. They help her write a resume and build a savings plan. In six months, she learns what it costs to keep a roof over her head and what it feels like to save for something of her own.

Their first young woman arrived three years ago at eighteen. She is twenty-one now and has saved a down payment for land.

The WeekWhat Your Week Looks Like

You get seven nights and six full days. Every meal is included. You have a private coach with a dedicated driver for the entire week. The river gorge with walls three hundred feet high, the Spanish fort from the sixteen hundreds, the waterfalls—that is all part of it.

Half your week is pure travel. You deserve a beautiful trip.

The other half is the work.

If you can sing, paint, cook, or dance, you teach those skills to the young women in the program. A skill someone can earn a living from is worth far more than anything in a suitcase. If you can frame a wall, wire a room, hang a door, or tile a floor, there is a house being built. Your group finishes, paints, carries, learns. You see what actual house-building looks like in Guatemala and you talk to the people doing it every day.

We are funding one house. About US$5,000. Walls, roof, kitchen, refrigerator, and a stocked pantry so when the family moves in that first night there is food to eat. The house is funded the day your group commits. It is not a fundraising goal. It happens, period. You are free to fail at construction and still have built the thing.

The DetailsThe Trip Details and Pricing

This pricing changes with your group size because the coach and the house build are fixed costs. Four people pay differently than thirty people. This is not a product built for couples—it is built for extended families, for companies, for congregations, for friend groups who have talked about doing something that matters.

Guatemala City is less than three hours from Houston. And Guatemala does not observe daylight saving time, so from mid-March to early November it runs on exactly the same clock as Alberta. A grandparent and a seven-year-old can do this trip together with no jet lag and no time confusion.

The PointWhy This Matters

We are raising a generation of young people who are more sealed off from the rest of the world than any generation before us. In affluent settings, the pressure to excel now sits among the top four risk factors for adolescent mental health, alongside exposure to poverty, trauma, and discrimination.

A week where your child teaches a young Guatemalan woman to cook, or helps her build the frame of her family’s new house, breaks that seal. It does not cure anything. But it changes what that young person thinks they are capable of. It changes what they know about the world.

My father understood something crucial when I was fourteen and discouraged. Sometimes you need to know that you can help. That you matter. That the world is bigger than your own struggles.

This trip gives that to your family.

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