Wolverine and its member-cooperative employees feel satisfaction from providing essential electric service in rural areas.  Our linemen especially feel this when they restore service after nasty Michigan storms occasionally wreak havoc for days on end.  Imagine though, if you found a remote village that survived with no electricity for years, and you could light up the entire village.  This is exactly what Michigan cooperatives hope to do in Guatemala this November.

Matt Monroe, Wolverine’s Safety Coordinator and former linemen, just returned from Guatemala, along with Cherryland’s Jim Carpenter, Great Lakes’ Kevin Evans, and Dan King from MECA.  Their job was to assess a proposed four-mile mountain circuit, which we plan to construct as part of NRECA’s International Foundation program.

Matt will return to Guatemala in November, along with Bill Bremer and Trevor Stratton from Wolverine, to begin work on the project.  We have been loading a shipping container with material for the job and that ships out next month.  All the work will be done by hand.  No bucket trucks, boom trucks, digger trucks, etc.  Everything will be done the way we built our rural distribution circuits in the 1930’s — by hand, with hard work and ingenuity.

The crew will spend nearly three weeks in steep, mountainous terrain, constructing the single-phase distribution circuit, hanging transformers and installing simple wiring in a few houses.  I’m talking about one light bulb and one outlet!  The villagers are so excited to receive electric service (they will actually be members of an electric cooperative) and they will assist eagerly with tree removal, pole setting and material hauling.  Our crews will work long exhausting days to see the lights come on for the first time in the mountain village.  They will change the villagers’ lives forever, and I suspect, in turn, will themselves be forever changed.