had family back home they needed to be thinking about, and it was tough.” They picked up the pace. Rather than sightseeing, they were now hoping for an earlier departure date. “We were as much as three or four days ahead of schedule,” Hoffman says. “There wasn’t much we could do about the situation other than keep doing our jobs, so that was what we did.” As the overhead crew ran the conductor across the poles, another crew hung meters and did the outside work to get each house ready; the rough-in crew went to every house to mount the boxes for the switches, outlets, and panels; and the wiring crews followed right behind them, connecting everything together. “We were really the first ones in each house, so we got to interact with all of those families and children, and it was a good reminder of why we were there,” says Mason Shoemaker, a lineman who works at Bellefontaine-based Logan County Electric Cooperative. “We were changing lives, giving them a better quality of life and more opportunities than they ever could have without electricity. We felt like superheroes.” Thanks to the head start and the increased sense of urgency, the team finished about 98% of their work just a week in. They were about four days ahead of schedule and figured they’d be able to flip the switch by nightfall on their seventh day. But then the calls started coming in fast and furious — from families, from the NRECA: Guatemala had closed its borders. No one would be able to enter or leave the country for at least the next 15 days. “We got word that they were pulling us out, and we needed to get to Guatemala City by midnight in order to be able to leave,” Hoffman says. “We had just a couple of hours to button everything up, make sure it was all safe for the local guys to energize the lines, and say our goodbyes.” After those last inspections, the team gave out the water purifiers and some other gifts they’d brought — additional provisions were supposed to have been bought in-country, but there was no time — then loaded up their caravan and pulled out. They were in Guatemala City eight hours later, just before midnight.
On the job (from top): Crews installed light sockets, switches, and outlets in more than 70 houses and buildings with help from the local electric company and students from a nearby trade school; interacting with the children of the village is one of the most rewarding aspects of the project; the schoolhouse got lights in each of its four rooms; wiring the buildings went smoothly once the crews found their groove.
6 OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING • MAY 2020
There, however, they hit a roadblock. It was no small feat to get the team out of Guatemala. They had permission neither to leave the country nor to land in the U.S. once they did get off the ground. With borders closed, Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives and the NRECA had to call in the diplomatic strength of the federal government. Senators Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown and representatives Bill Johnson, Troy Balderson, Bob Gibbs, and Bob Latta alerted the U.S. State Department to open diplomatic