Turning Trash into Treasure: How the US-based Non-Profit Long Way Home with its Hero School are Transforming Guatemalan Communities

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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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Resilient Earth Podcast
• 1:25 Meet Matt Panaitz and Long Way Home
• 4:22 How Trash Becomes Building Materials
• 9:35 The Hero School's Educational Model
• 17:04 Students Learning Through Community Projects
• 26:42 Scaling Impact Through Teacher Education
• 39:14 Future Vision and Global Collaboration
• 50:22 Closing and Contact Information

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:10

Welcome to the Resilient Earth Podcast, where we talk with speakers from the United States and around the world about the critical issues facing our planet and the positive actions people are taking, from the tiniest of actions to the grandest of gestures, so that we can continue to thrive and survive for generations to come. I'm Leanne Lindsay, producer and host, along with co-hosts and co-producers Scott and Tree Mercer of Mindenoma, whale and Seal Study, located on the South Mendocino and North Sonoma coasts. The music for this podcast is by Eric Alleman, an international composer, pianist and writer living in the Sea Ranch. Discover more of his music, animations, ballet, stage and film work at ericalamancom. You can find Resilient Earth on Spotify, apple and Amazon Podcasts, iheart Radio, youtube, soundcloud and wherever you find your podcasts. You may have heard about our guest today, matt Panites of Long Way Home in Guatemala, through a PBS documentary about him and the school he built, the Hero School in San Juan Kamalapa, guatemala. This PBS segment is hosted by none other than Law Order's Sam Waterston. Here's a quick clip from that.

Speaker 3: 2:11

Every year, more than 1.6 million people leave home to volunteer around the world. Why? What motivates them? What challenges do they confront? Is it even a good thing that people from one culture presume to bestow something on another? It's a puzzle in which the pieces are always changing shape, because that's what culture is ever evolving. That means that adaptability, creativity and a spirit of entrepreneurialism are critical to the process of linking cultures, sharing resources and doing good.

Speaker 4: 2:57

Here in San Juan Coalmallapa, nestled in a mountain valley 25 miles northwest of Guatemala City, an extraordinary endeavor is underway.

Speaker 5: 3:08

We're in San Juan, coalmolapa, chimaltenango, guatemala, population of about 50,000 people. So in Coalmolapa they have market on Tuesday, friday and Sunday. Here they sell carrots, potatoes, oranges, a little bit of everything, and most of this produce comes from the surrounding villages. There's an understanding that everybody depends on the earth to produce food, to also produce their income. But there isn't a really great answer for where to put all of the trash. There isn't a trash system. People can barely afford the education, they can barely afford basic sanitation services. It's just very difficult for anybody to worry about the trash problem, although it's very important to everybody.

Speaker 4: 3:54

Long Way Home is a nonprofit that takes trash and transforms it into a thing of value, but that is just the beginning of the story.

Speaker 2: 4:21

Longway Home's mission as a registered US 501c3 is to mobilize people to actively participate in democracy and create innovative pathways to economic and environmental justice through green building, employment and education. Matthew Panaitz is the executive director and co-founder of Long Way Home, and it all started when he was a former US Peace Corps volunteer from Texas and he was stationed over two decades ago in San Juan, kamalapa, guatemala. Panaitz's desire to continue helping this impoverished, predominantly Mayan community didn't end with his tour, though. He sold his car back in the USA to raise funds to co-found the nonprofit Long Way Home. That was back in 2004, to help create better employment and education opportunities there. In 2008, their team of educators, builders, volunteers and administrators established the Hero School to ensure multi-generational systemic change. They work hand-in-hand with local communities to create educational infrastructure using recycled materials, particularly used tires that would otherwise pollute the environment. Teaching and learning at Hero School is contextually based, relevant to the local challenges associated with environmental degradation and climate change, and grounded in new and sustainable development goals. The Hero School curriculum integrates traditional Guatemalan education, green building and UNESCO standards for education for sustainable development, or ESD, and is accredited by the Guatemalan Ministry of Education. During these two decades, they have transformed over 25,000 used tires and 100,000 plastic bottles filled with inorganic trash into the 20-building upcycled marvel that is the Hero School campus right there in Guatemala. They see a future where the model pioneered in Guatemala spreads globally, creating a network of communities that prove waste can become wealth and education can break cycles of poverty while healing the planet.

Speaker 2: 6:51

Today we invited a guest co-host to join us, and that's Zach Cliver of Blue Green Future and Flukes Whale Tours International. He's conducted whale tours and explorations to Guatemala and is even married to a Guatemalan woman. Zach is a Maine-based marine scientist, naturalist and educator who has led over 600,000 people on whale watching tours from Bar Harbor and around the world. He has been a prior guest of ours on this podcast as well as on an annual conference we've hosted and produced the Ocean Life Symposium. Now we'll get into our conversation with Matt, executive Director of Long Way Home and creator of Hero School, and you're listening to Resilient Earth Radio and Podcast. I'm Leanne Lindsey, host and producer, along with my co-host, tree Mercer, from Mendenoma Whale and Seal Study. Good morning, tree, good morning Leanne and Zach and Matt. Yes, and Zach Cliver is a guest host today from Blue Green Future, and hello to you, zach, and welcome back.

Speaker 6: 8:04

Great to be here, nice to see you.

Speaker 2: 8:06

And we're all talking today with Matt Panaitz, who is executive director of an organization in Guatemala called Long Way Home. I'm so glad you reached out to us, Matt, and welcome to the show.

Speaker 5: 8:22

Well, thank you, it's great to be here and thank you for the invitation.

Speaker 2: 8:27

And you're welcome, so take it away, matt.

Speaker 5: 8:30

Sure. So I was in the Peace Corps from 2002 and 2003. And that introduced me to Guatemala. I don't think I'd ever even heard of Guatemala before I did the Peace Corps. And then I went there and I was in a small town in the middle of nowhere and what I saw captured my heart and I decided shortly thereafter to spend pretty much the rest of my life doing something about some of the not so pleasant parts of what I saw there. And that's where Long Way Home was born, and that has me here today, 23 years later.

Speaker 2: 9:11

Well, long Way Home is the name of the organization, and they take all kinds of trash and build. In fact, specifically they've built classrooms focused on education. But there's other applications that they've done and they've given such an example of how to do this process of recycling, reuse, which is so important for our environment, especially when there are many locations around our world where people feel that they just have no other option but to maybe throw it in the river or the ocean, and this is a way to channel all of that trash into something positive.

Speaker 5: 9:54

That's exactly right and that is what we have been focused on for most of the time that we've been there. The whole thing started when, after Peace Corps, I decided to go back. Right After Peace Corps I tried to live, you know, a relatively normal life. I got a job and settled in school and, you know, there was this nagging sense that I wasn't finished and so I sold all of my belongings, raffled my 1973 Caprice Classic convertible so that we would have some money to start off with, moved back to Guatemala, and the organization that I was working with as a Peace Corps volunteer. They said, hey, we've got this piece of property. Would you like to develop this piece of property and do youth outreach? So I said, sure, that's perfect. And so we built a grass soccer field and a basketball court. It was the first grass soccer field in the history of this town. So because we built a grass soccer field and everybody loves soccer there, I Got to know a lot of people because I also really enjoy playing soccer and was playing seven days a week, and so you get to know everybody when you're doing that, and it was a real informal. So you get to know everybody when you're doing that, and it was a real informal way to get to know everybody. But we were also living in a house that had no electricity, didn't really have windows or doors, not really much of a roof, so we were kind of living in some of the same circumstances as the people around us.

Speaker 5: 11:22

Right as we built the park and we got to know everybody and really got to understand what was going on around there, at one point we decided to start charging eco bricks to get into the park, and that was because we saw a different organization at Lake Atitlan who was using plastic bottles stuffed with trash, because there is a trash problem and there really is no solution for it, because there really is no budget. You know, there's not budgets for schools and hospitals and some of the basics, so there's really 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 charge something to get into the park, like 25 cents but a lot of the neighborhood kids couldn't afford that. So we said, hey, how about if you give us a trash bottle? Right, we call them eco bricks or trash bottles. And so we said, how about if you give us a trash bottle. Then we ended up with like 25,000 of them because we're the only. You know, it was the first park in the history of that town and everybody was using it and all the schools were using it and the neighborhood kids, and so that opened the door to even the concept.

Speaker 5: 12:30

Then at some point I asked the co-founder and I was like you know, we want to build a school to start dealing with what's going on in the town on a slightly larger scale, because the park was great, right, it was well used, but it wasn't addressing some of the more urgent needs in that town. Like kids were carrying firewood on their head all day, instead of going to school they're carrying water. Their shelters were inadequate, not resilient. You know, we're surrounded by extreme poverty. And so this co-founder friend of mine, who I was in the Peace Corps with him, he said have you ever heard of building with trash? And I was like not really. I mean, I've seen a retaining wall, I've seen a couple of privacy walls, but no, I'd never considered this.

Speaker 5: 13:21

So we got earthship biotechers volume one out and threw a couple of tires on the ground and decided to try it out, and we packed the first couple of tires with dirt and then we packed a whole house worth of tires with dirt and we saw that people loved it. It was resilient, because there's earthquakes there as well, um, so we also saw that we were pulling the trash in from the neighborhood. The neighborhood kids were joining in on it, the schools were joining in. So the very first building that we did went really, really well and we saw that we could build an entire school campus using the trash and it's not only trash, there are conventional materials that we use to combine all this. But yeah, we saw that we could use the trash that was on the ground to build the entire school campus.

Speaker 2: 14:14

Interesting that you brought up the Earthship biotexture. They're located in Taos, new Mexico, and I just saw a documentary on them last month or so. But it is amazing the complex that this one fellow built. His name is Michael Reynolds and he teaches down there now. They've got a course coming up in September, so I want to ask Zach, what was your connection with the area down there?

Speaker 6: 14:43

Yeah, my connection is through ecotourism. I hired a naturalist who was born in Guatemala and grew up in the States to come work at the whale watch company for me and trained him, and he had worked as a news reporter for Prinza Libra, the largest newspaper in Central America, in Guatemala Libra, the largest newspaper in Central America, in Guatemala, and they had sent him out on an assignment to the West Coast to go whale watching and photograph the whales with the locals that were just starting whale watching there, and he was so amazed by it that he wanted to bring ecotourism to help improve the sustainability and the livelihoods of the people that were poor on the coast. And so he came to work for us and I eventually went to Guatemala to see everything there. And his wife from Guatemala is a teacher, and my wife is a teacher, and she introduced us and asked us to go on a double date, and so that's how I wound up going to Guatemala 12 times since 2018. And I lived there for six months at the longest period.

Speaker 2: 15:47

Let's talk about the location. So where were you, Zach, and where 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 if you leave Guatemala City and you head towards Lake Atitlan, about halfway you'll hit a town called Zaragoza and then you go up into the mountains and Comalapa is about 25 kilometers from Zaragoza, at 7,000 feet in the mountains, so we're in the Western 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 felt it.

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 lot of 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 watching company out of Newburyport, massachusetts, and actually we met on his whale watch boat way back 28 years ago. And being a teacher, yes, I taught for 35 years.

Speaker 2: 17:30

I taught science, grades 7 through 12, and always interested in the ocean and whales conservation, certainly very concerned about environmental issues, and Scott and Tree and I got to meet each other through a local public radio station and then we decided to figure out a way to continue a conference that they had started called the Ocean Life Symposium, during the first year of the pandemic, because we couldn't hold it in a location, so we figured out a way to put it to YouTube through Zoom, this new tool we learned about and from that we did it several years of the Ocean Life Symposium Zach's been on it a couple of times, so that is our connection here. And then we decided, because of all the work we had been doing with the Ocean Life Symposium, we really wanted to do an environmental show and a podcast separate. You know, not just as a radio show but a podcast that could really reach a lot of countries, and right now Resilient Earth is listened and downloaded in over 66 countries around the world and over 400 cities. People are listening everywhere. We like to talk to people about critical issues that are facing our planet and what some of the positive solutions and actions people are taking to make a difference.

Speaker 2: 18:59

And you fit right in there in what Long Way Home is doing, and that's why I'm so glad you did reach out to us and ask us about being a guest on the show, because this is exactly what we like to talk about, things that are more positive and uplifting, because it can be very heavy and depressive, all the doom and gloom. In fact, it was Ralph Chami, who's with Blue Green Future, with Zach's joined his company. That was his first statement when he joined the Ocean Life Symposium as a guest speaker and he said it's not all doom and gloom, so that's what led us to doing this. And now this is a perfect example of this the Long Way Home organization. So can you tell us, matt, some of the successes and maybe some of the challenges that you have had along the way doing these projects?

Speaker 5: 19:55

Sure, because there's so many right, especially the challenges, exactly, and so whenever you start building with tires, you don't know what you're doing because there's not a lot to work with.

Speaker 5: 20:09

Although Earthship did invite us to Taos and they did show us around and they did give us some training and talk to us about how to better pack a tire Right, because, like when we started off, we were packing them too much and they were becoming unstable. So the very first building that we built out of tires you know we're talking 500 packed tires we had to tear the entire thing down because we had over packed the tires and it made it unstable as the tires went up and so it made it kind of wiggly. So we had to tear all the tires down and pull all the dirt out of the tires and then basically had to start over, because what we saw at earthship was that you don't have to pack them completely tight all the way. In fact it works better if you leave a little bit of space so that they'll sit down like more comfortably on top of each other and kind of fit into the little nooks and crannies of each tire.

Speaker 5: 21:13

So very interesting one challenge right, right, not really knowing what you're doing, but continuing to try until you get it right. It was introducing something new to us, but it was also to 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 build a school out of these tires. And they kind of laughed us off and thought it was kind of silly, and but then slowly people came because it was a you know, it really is a public demonstration. Plus, we were hiring locals to do all of the work, because when you go work and you know a small rural town in guatemala like you rely on the locals to do everything, because they know everything right, they understand how everything works, who you talk to to get anything done.

Speaker 5: 22:06

And so we hired local builders who had traditionally worked with cinder block type of construction and so they had to make the transition over, because it is quite a transition to go from something so steady and regular such as a cinder block and go okay, well, now we're going to work with a whole lot of nuance and we're going to start building with tires. So you know it was tricky and we all gonna start building with tires. So you know it was tricky and we all had to learn from each other and that is what really got 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 a lot more people using them and we have to buy the tires from people 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 shops called Pinchasos and they're kind of like little mom and pop tire shops and they don't have like a thousand, but they'll have like 10 or 15 that they stack in front and they're gonna get thrown away, you know, not terribly responsibly. So whenever we take our truck and we go by and pick them up, we're doing them a favor, right? So there's a collaboration happening there. And then they start saving them for us over time. And then when that isn't enough because we use 35,000 tires to build our campus and so whenever the 10 or 12 aren't enough, we would take our flatbed and drive it along the inter-American highway.

Speaker 5: 23:44

So, for, you know, 50 or $60 worth of gas you can pick up 500 tires, and 500 tires are the walls for most of our buildings. So dirt and tires. You're talking 50 or $60 to build the walls. Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing what's in this river, because you know we build a lot of stuff out of trash and maybe this could be a source 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 Waterston as host, as Matt Panites and another worker were driving along in that flatbed truck looking for trash, which they found volumes of in this one crevice going down to the river. Now back to our conversation. And how do you get your funding and 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-olds who have come with their families because families will come and stay with us for two weeks. Yeah, sometimes people stay with us for two weeks and sometimes they've stayed with us for seven years, right, they're university students. They're people that are curious about alternative living techniques and sustainability techniques and especially like green builders. There's a lot of green builders around the world, but there's also engineers, architects, school teachers, gardeners, students like every person you could pretty much imagine, from all over the world have been our volunteers.

Speaker 9: 25:58

I was born in Missouri, in the Midwest of the United States, and I went through elementary school there and then I was moved to Las Vegas, nevada, where I went to junior high and half a high school, and I found that the big change in the culture and the way that people interacted with each other it made me think a lot about how I wanted to live my life.

Speaker 1: 26:13

We have volunteers from all over the world. We have individual volunteers and interns as well, and service groups that will come for a week or so at a time as like an alternative break. A lot of people also are just traveling through Guatemala and come here on a visit and then say, 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, shift the direction we're heading into a more safe and sustainable direction.

Speaker 2: 26:41

We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

Speaker 10: 26:45

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Speaker 2: 27:03

Here is a case where the communities lose their fish their food security and they don'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 your podcasts.

Speaker 6: 27:22

Resilient Earth radio podcast is brought to you by Flukes International Whale Tours. We are offering week-long eco-tours to the world's preeminent locations for whales at the very best times of the year. Stay at world-class resorts and go out on the ocean when the weather is beautiful and the seas are calm. Come see whales breaching, feeding and diving deep, and learn from marine mammal experts. Find us at flukewhaletourscom.

Speaker 2: 27:58

You're listening to Resilient Earth Radio and Podcast. I'm Leanne Lindsey, host and producer at Seastorm Studios, along with Tree Mercer from Mendenoma Whale and Seal Study, and a guest host today, zach Cliver of Blue Green Future and Fluke Whale Tours International, who happens to have visited many times in Guatemala, where Long Way Home is located, and we're speaking with the founder and executive director, matt Panaitz, and now he's going to talk about the funding.

Speaker 5: 28:34

They're also part of our funding solution, because we wanted an earned income style of funding, and so what we did was we charged $85 a week for those volunteers to come and work with us. We used that money to buy the materials and to pay the labor and pay the teachers, and that's pretty much how we've paid for pretty much everything. Of course, we've won a few awards and gotten a few grants along the way, and we've really kind 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 leads us into the going from using tires and everything that we learned along the way, because, in addition to using tires, we also use Ubuntu blocks. Right, and those are like you take the plastic wrappers and all the plastic wrappers uh, that won't fit into an eco brick and you use bailing wire and you basically make a cinder block with those. And so we used bamboo, we used earth bags, so the campus itself there's 21 buildings. Every single building is a little bit different, because the idea was to practice and experiment with infrastructure that we could also, while learning how to do it on our campus, we could also use in the community, because there are also people who need houses in the community, who can't afford the cinder blocks. And so, as we were trying out all these different alternative materials, we were getting out all these different alternative materials, we were getting accustomed to the materials and learning about the materials.

Speaker 5: 30:12

And then so that leads us into the education model and that award, because at some point we did start, in 2012, we started bringing students in. We brought our first 12 students in, and they were first, second and third graders, and we saw that the teachers, they were using the state-mandated curriculum, and we wanted to integrate what we'd learned during the construction process into the curriculum, and so that is called Education for Sustainable Development, and UNESCO has a 2030 agenda to comply with the Sustainable Development Goals, and Education for Sustainable Development corresponds with the fourth development goal, which is quality education. We've been integrating what we learned 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 a teacher. What questions do you have for Matt at this point?

Speaker 7: 31:20

Well, I was wondering Matt were the students who would eventually go to this school? Were they involved in the construction process?

Speaker 5: 31:31

We didn't have students doing the heavy labor right. That would be like the packing of tires with sledgehammers. That was us hiring. You know, at one point we had 25 or 30 local builders on our team 25 or 30 local builders on our team and the local paid professional builders, along with the volunteers. They did the vast majority of the super heavy work right, because if you're going to lay a an 18 wheeler tire flat and pound, use a sledgehammer to put dirt in it and pound the dirt. It takes 30 minutes with a sledgehammer to do one of those tires.

Speaker 5: 32:09

And so what we did was got it to the point where the students could be involved, like, for example, in the finishes, the finish work. The students love doing the finish work because you end up with a lot of mosaic type work and you end up with a lot of cob, and so they get to stomp around in the cob and then take the cob and throw the cob against the wall and then shape it into figures such as snakes or squirrels or deer, and so if you look at our campus, you don't see any tires right. What you see are all the figures 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 take the same concepts and they make cob, and then they take that cob and they apply it to the walls and they turn it into shapes.

Speaker 2: 33:03

What again is cob when you mention that? But also I liked the images of their 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, and depending on the consistency that you're looking for, you add different portions of that and then you put it on a piece of plastic and then you stomp it around and you fold it over and you turn it into what is ultimately people use for Adobe. People make Adobe bricks out of this exact same type of material.

Speaker 2: 33:44

Well, that's very creative. And, Zach, what question do you have right now for our?

Speaker 6: 33:52

guest From the ecotourism perspective, traveling around all through Guatemala.

Speaker 6: 33:58

I'm always looking at it through that lens and one of the concerns you know with bringing Western tourism is always the plastics and the pollution right in places and you see that and you, you know we're not used to that so much in our parks and beautiful landscapes and things, but they just.

Speaker 6: 34:15

It's such a challenge in less developed 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 the ocean and watch the sun rise and then go down and watch the sun set over the ocean and I always go down each morning and night with two garbage bags and I just pick up a bag of garbage, two bags of garbage every time and bring them back, you know. But there they often wind up having to like burn it. They try to burn the plastic. It's frustrating, you know, to see that all the plastic that's in these places that are poor and I wondered, my understanding is there now have developed some processes by which you could take plastic and melt it down and then turn it into tiles or things that are useful, as you'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 it right where you could take tires and turn them into chips and use them for playgrounds, which now I'm hearing is maybe not such a great idea. There's also people using tires to make highways, but not really because we don't have the production facilities to do something like that. It requires a slightly more industrial approach and we're pretty manual with everything that we do. You know, we use it as a source of inspiration because we're always looking for new ways to go about doing this and people are constantly sending me new ideas and I love reading about them, but we use our hands mostly and don't involve a lot of machines.

Speaker 2: 35:57

I like the way that ecotourism and what Longway Home is doing with education is pulling that trash out of the environment and doing something positive with it. If it's going to be used in one way or the other, that's not harmful. So, like you said something about the playgrounds, you don't use the plastic in the playground. Is that what you were saying?

Speaker 5: 36:19

Well, sometimes they'll turn the tires into little chips and they'll use the chips like mulch or something like that, and I've seen people use pieces of tires as mulch.

Speaker 2: 36:33

Now have you noticed a real impact in the location where you are located there in Guatemala? What impact it has had on neighboring areas as well?

Speaker 5: 36:44

I mean yes and no. There is an impact in that our students, like I would say, whenever we started, nobody had the slightest idea what to do about any of it. Right, there was no. There were no. Like, the best ideas that anybody had were put trash cans in the Central Park, fill the trash cans up and then throw them in the river. We tell our students, and especially the lower income students, because we charge like a minimum of tuition, a couple of dollars a month. Even some of our students can't afford that. And so we say, hey, please bring an eco brick instead of tuition, right. And then so some of our students, instead of bringing one, they'll bring 25. Right.

Speaker 5: 37:30

So there are some students that are rallying their neighbors and talking to their different family members and going above and beyond and really taking advantage of the opportunity to keep their homes and keep their neighborhoods and keep the streets clean. Yeah, I mean that has been a really amazing impact. To see them once they have the opportunity and have an idea of what we could possibly do. To see them once they have the opportunity and have an idea of what we could possibly do, because we're still using all of this rubbish and we're we're building stoves and water tanks and homes and classrooms, and so that is our source of materials these days is largely through the students. Um, do we wish that everybody in town would have picked it up immediately and it would eliminate all trash and all the rivers? Sure, that is what we wish would 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 an issue, 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 more focused on classrooms, like Hug it Forward. They're really good at taking eco bricks and building houses in classrooms because the plastic is really. You know, tires are an issue, certainly because they don't really decompose and there isn't anywhere to put them, but plastic also being an issue, they go. Plastic goes really well into the plastic bottles and, yes, there are some organizations out there that are doing a great job building homes and classrooms 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 a little bit about that.

Speaker 5: 39:29

And that's one of our most exciting things to talk about really is we have 178 students right, and they are pre-K through high school, as I mentioned before. You know, whenever you start, you start with a state mandated curriculum, and that is the foundation for what we're doing now, because if you come up with an entirely original curriculum, it's difficult to scale it, and so we came up with a curriculum and lesson plans that adhere to the state requirements, like, for example, in the seventh grade, rather than having a somewhat abstract curriculum. Instead of lesson plans, we focus on building ventilated stoves for the families. The number one reason people go to the health clinic is because they cook over open flames indoors, right, and then multiple family members get sick. Plus, you're using tons of firewood, and firewood's expensive and not easily accessible. So seventh graders, like in math class now, they use their math to work on the design of the stove and understanding the dimensions of the stove. So in the eighth grade they're doing water tanks another major issue in Guatemala.

Speaker 5: 40:48

In the ninth grade, we're doing compost latrines, because sanitation is an issue. In the 10th grade, we do retaining walls and in the 11th grade we do retaining walls. And in the 11th grade we build a home, right. So the home is the combination of everything that they've learned from all of the courses, and so by the time they finished, they have a thorough understanding of the issues in Guatemala and the solutions, and you can imagine what that does for a student's self-esteem, right. They are going into the community, because this is not only theoretical. We go into the community. We find the families that need our help the most, and if there is a single mother with five children who collects water and firewood all day, we build a stove, we build a floor, water tanks, compost latrine, retaining wall and we completely change the family's life. And this isn't, you know, people swooping in to fix. This is all done in a way that you know. We ask permission, we work with them, we talk to them, and it's primarily done by the students and teachers.

Speaker 2: 41:54

And it's primarily done by the students and teachers Practical solutions for sustainable living in a place that needs these things and they need these skills. These students graduate having all this talent, this ability to provide for their communities. It's really empowering these communities.

Speaker 5: 42:12

Exactly and, like you know, a brief story would be we went out to a small village and over the course of a week we built 57 stoves for one. It was a village in the middle of nowhere that, you know, does not receive much support from the municipal governments. They're kind of on their own way out there. And we built water tanks and stoves and the students mapped out the entire town. They went from house to house to see which family needs what, and then they went back to the classroom. They figured everything out, set a plan and then we all went back and everybody was so excited at the end of it that the people in the village were actually throwing rose petals at the feet of our students as they got back on the bus, right. So there was not a dry eye anywhere. Everybody was excited. And then the students feel valued, right? They want to feel like valued members of the community.

Speaker 7: 43:18

Like valued members of the community and you know what does it better than really you know, showing your value and being honored by your community members definitely shining example of a win-win situation where the students are winning, the community's benefiting, and, having been in the classroom and taught in the traditional way, I always felt that what you just described, that's real education, that's a life-changing experience for those students and it's setting the seeds, it's planting the seeds for them to continue sustainability, conservation, caring about the community Wow, I just it's a five-star program for sure.

Speaker 2: 44:10

And you mentioned the compostable toilets when I was looking at it online too. The compostable toilets, when I was looking at it online too. It's a system that doesn't use water.

Speaker 5: 44:24

Exactly Because water is very difficult to come by and it's kind of you know, after you've used one of those for a while, you're like, oh my God, we're blushing water down the toilet where there are communities who don't have water, and so this eliminates the need to use water.

Speaker 2: 44:37

And it is sustainable, it is scalable and it is doable and it helps the environment by also taking out and reusing and putting that trash and plastic into work for the community instead of against it.

Speaker 5: 44:57

Exactly, and there is no real ceiling for this either, because if you visit lwhomegreenorg you can see we made profiles for every one of our projects. Yeah, there's no ceiling for this. As Tree was saying, the seed is planted, we get them started, and then I'm constantly hearing stories because we don't see everything that happens. There are students that are now doing this on their own. They're not telling anybody at school. There's like grapevine going. Oh, you know, heard the other day that students were building a ventilated stove for their neighbor who was a single mom with multiple children who didn't have anything, and the students did it outside of the school, didn't mention it to anybody, raised the money on their own, figured out how to do it on their own. You know they're doing a great job.

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 in Koma Lapa is employment, and so this is also part of our mission is to create dependable employment, and so the teachers are mostly, you know, between the ages of 20 and 30 years old, who would otherwise find it 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 own business working with students that needed personal help to improve. You know that were falling behind. She would work with them one on one quite a lot.

Speaker 2: 46:43

Is there a way that other teachers in other locations throughout Guatemala could connect with each other and have resources pooled resources?

Speaker 5: 46:54

This is really the most exciting part of all of this is that because we're writing these lesson plans, we're going to make these lesson plans available to the public school teachers at the public schools, right, and because they don't have their own lesson plans but would like lesson plans, it would like resources and rubrics and everything that comes along with that all the materials they're going to use our lesson plans and it won't be long before the public schools are using our pedagogy and we're all fighting poverty together. So what I'm picturing is several hundred people all at the same time going into our town, into those villages, doing the projects that I mentioned, and that within a couple of years we're talking thousands and thousands of people lifted out of extreme poverty and it being done through the public schools using the subject matter. And I'm not, I do not think this 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 a paramedic. Whenever I was in the Peace Corps and while I was doing my paramedic work, I was also a builder. That combination led me to want to build the school. And then, while I was building the school, while we were building the school, I went to Goddard College. And because we had to come up with an education model, we knew that the state model alone wasn't exactly going to be adequate for what we wanted to share and what we wanted to teach. And so I went and got an undergraduate degree in sustainability from Goddard. And then, immediately after that, I was looking for education models and was introduced to John Dewey and Paolo Freire and all of those wonderful people, and that's where we came up with the concept of Hero School. And so I got a master's from Goddard College in education, and now I am working on integrating democracy into the middle school classes through the education department at Antioch University.

Speaker 5: 49:17

I'm a doctoral student at this moment and we named the school Hero School because we need heroes. Right, there are a lot of people living in extreme poverty and there are not a lot of schools that I'm familiar with that are doing this the way that we're doing it. So we're hoping that the students will take the heroic steps and the teachers to fix the extreme poverty that we're seeing in this town. And so we do hero work and I know it sounds a little cheesy. I was like kind of on the fence as to like, should we call it hero?

Speaker 5: 49:53

School Is that kind of ridiculous and everybody's really modest about the whole thing because nobody actually wants to be called a hero. You know, I would never say that about myself and the students and teachers really kind of don't want to say it, but as a unit we feel really comfortable saying that we're going to go out there and do heroic work and that's what's really on the horizon is we're going to give all the public school teachers our lesson plans and then we're going to start doing this on a much larger scale. And then, through my doctoral work, what I'm doing is figuring out how to democratize this entire process, because you know it can get out of hand or like we need clear, concise communication, we need some structure, we need to figure out how we're going to all work effectively together to do this. We want everybody's ideas from all over the world to come into this space, so that's what we're focused on.

Speaker 2: 50:52

I was thinking too, with our two co-hosts here that with the background that they've got in the ocean and education and helping our environment around the world, I would like to see how tree the education on the ocean could be uplifted, like the one young student we talked with from Minnesota, ian 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 they write lesson plans. They want to spread across the country and actually he asked us the last time he spoke with us he wants to send these to countries like Guatemala. May I put him in contact with you?

Speaker 5: 51:40

Please do. We are everybody's welcome. Great, we're wanting to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Speaker 2: 51:48

That is great, and Zach, I mean with your background. Zach is multi-talented in so many 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 an architect and I think we could bring a big group to come visit and see your work and I'd love to support it. We just did a program with a group in Colombia on the Pacific Coast that have an annual whale festival and they have a poor community that are looking for ways to improve education and build up their community and sustainability and take care of the resources that they have. They have this incredible annual migration where the whales and sea turtles and everything come there. So I could see a lot of coordination with that program, with the work that you're doing. I think they'd be so impressed by what you're doing and I wanted to tell you that my mom was a college student in the 1960s and heard JFK's speech about starting the Peace Corps and she signed up that day and she went to Kenya and I'm a Peace Corps baby, so I really celebrate 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 maybe there's a way to get the students involved in showing them what you do with ecotourism. That could be something else that 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 be shared, and so everything that we've done in Koma Lapa, we want to share with people. We want the people on the coast, who have no idea what to do with their trash, we want to let them know this is what you can do. You can build schools. You can build the infrastructure that the family needs using this trash. Figure out how to do it. We'd rather cut that down by 21 years and share all the information. And it's all ready and available. And our foreman started with us in 2009,. Right, that means that local Komalopan 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 he likes to travel and he's willing to travel the country and show people how to do this, and couldn't be a more pleasant fellow.

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 our website. Lwhomegreenorg is connected to our website, but because there's so much information there, we had to create a whole other website for it, and I'm always accepting emails, so, matt, at lwhomeorg, I don't sleep that much. I'm completely available all the time, and so I am ready and willing to answer questions and facilitate this entire process. They can volunteer at our school, and they can stay from anywhere from three days to 21 years. As I mentioned, our model is to do sustainable development. People have been coming to volunteer Well since COVID. We went from having regularly eight volunteers to one or two, and so now we're really dependent on donations to keep going, and so at lwhomeorg, you could figure out how to donate 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 you guys sign off. Zach is very well connected in Guatemala, as he attributed to a couple of times. He knows a lot of people who are very active in the area, both ecologically and economically. Matt, I just want to thank you a lot. The question I had for you is how 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 really good in the field right, we spent all that time living in Guatemala doing the construction, building the curriculum but what I'm not great at is outreach. And so my brother's outreach person said I'm going to help you. You need to get out there. You need people to know who you are, and we're kind of modest, unfortunately, about what we do and how we go about it. And he goes you can't be modest anymore. It's not fair to everybody else that would like to know this. So he's helping me get the word out.

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's important. What you're doing is so valuable 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 green building 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 vision when we first got here was to help reinforce and bolster the local Mayan identity through education and by giving them the skills that they'll need in the future to survive as a people as a people, and that will do it with our conversation with Matt Panites, 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 Study and our guest host today, zach Cliver of Blue Green Future and Fluke International Whale Tours. I'm Leanne Lindsay. Thanks for listening to Resilient Earth Radio and Podcast.