Dec 30, 2011 5 min read

If all goes according to plan, my wife and I will be sound asleep when that bedazzled ball drops in Times Square and the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1.

Even though New Year’s Eve is my wife’s favorite holiday, we’ll be passing on passing into 2012 with family and friends because this year logistics trump letting loose.

You see, my wife and another leader will be taking 22 Waynesburg University students to Guatemala during the first week of 2012 — and their flight leaves at 6 a.m. on Jan. 1, meaning they’ve got to get to the airport around 4 a.m. (Seriously, airlines, who even schedules a flight at that ungodly hour on New Year’s Day??)

So when the ball drops, my wife and I will (hopefully) be sound asleep. We had briefly discussed staying up straight through the night into the morning, but then remembered she’d be taking 22 students through TSA lines and quickly gave up on that idea.

Regular readers of this column may recall hearing about Guatemala before. My wife and I led the same trip for Waynesburg University over the week of Thanksgiving in 2010. This is the first trip since then, and will once again see the university return to the Centro Nutricional y Hogar de Ninos (Nutritional Center for Children) in Patzun, Guatemala. (My wife and I also led the trip together in January 2007. My wife has been there in 2003, 2004, and 2006. In fact, this will be the tenth trip Waynesburg University has taken to Patzun; my wife will have been on six of them.)

The easiest American comparison for the Nutritional Center is an orphanage. It houses more than 80 children — mostly those whose parents can’t care for them, or who are developmentally disabled or abused — and is run by Franciscan nuns.

Most of the kids there aren’t orphans, but they live, eat and sleep at the center, which is comprised of several buildings within the walled compound in the Patzun hills. The kids — who range in age from infants to early teens — live within the walls, going outside for Mass (which, with that many nuns around, you better believe you don’t try to skip) and school.

The center is a 2-hour van ride from Guatemala City, which itself is six hours in the air and a layover in Texas and several hours in airports and customs from Pittsburgh.

When the college students are at the Center for the week, they split their time between playing with the children (and trust me, the kids love the attention) and doing often back-breaking work to help repair or improve the center. When my wife and I were there last year, we spent hours and hours making cement from scratch (wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow of sand and gravel) to repair the driveway into the center. It was tiring, difficult work, and each of the students brought home more blisters than they expected. (It was also incredibly gratifying working with the center’s diminutive, yet tireless handyman Silverio.) This year, the students will again be making cement and replacing more of the driveway out to the street. (This will likely only be slightly less work than wrangling 22 college students through an international airport.)

What’s particularly exciting about this trip is that three Waynesburg University students (who all were on the trip with my wife and me last year) actually flew to Patzun on their own earlier in December and will then fly home with the rest of the college group. While it’s impressive that college students will give up a week of their Christmas break, it’s nearly unbelievable that students would give up three weeks of that break. But that’s what Guatemala means to these students.

Each group of college students who travel there is made up of different backgrounds, majors and interests — yet they all have the same reaction. Even though I write for a living, I find it hard to explain the way spending a week in Patzun impacts you.

It’s especially poignant, so soon after Christmas, to see how very little these children at the center have — yet how little it bothers them that they don’t have an iPhone or a Facebook account. Despite living what we would consider to be an extremely meager lifestyle, they are happy, outgoing and loving.

It’s hard not to be impacted by the life-changing trip. I’ve only been there twice, and find my jealousy that Heidi will be going on the trip without me growing as we get closer to her departure. I’m very happy she will get to spend the week in our favorite place; I just wish I was going with her.

As we get ready for this non-New Year’s celebration, Heidi has tried to tell me (repeatedly) that just because she can’t celebrate New Year’s doesn’t mean I can’t. But there’s no chance of that.

If she’s going to sleep through the start of 2012, so am I.

If you’d like to know more about the Center in Patzun or how you can help, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.