ANOTHER WORLD—Ron Li-Paz, center, wearing a ball cap, traveled with youths from the Valley Outreach Synagogue to Guatemala. They worked and lived for a week with the Mayans in a Guatemalan mountain village, far from the comforts of home. I have been fortunate to work closely with nearly a thousand preteens and teens in my 13 years as a cantor. Most of these wonderful kids have lived in relative affluence. Teaching them blessings has been fairly easy, but teaching them the reality of being blessed has been a challenge.

On Dec. 26 I led a trip to Guatemala with my son and a dozen teens from my synagogue community, including Agoura Hills, Thousand Oaks and Moorpark. We set out for a tiny and impoverished Mayan village, Xicam, in the northern mountains of the country. There we left the material life of the West Valley behind and found ourselves harvesting in order to eat. We lived in the simplest of houses, some without running water or electricity, with Mayan families whose grateful smiles lit the darkened rooms.

Bathrooms were nonexistent. Bathing involved either a bath in a large outdoor bucket or standing under a garden hose. Hot water was not an option. In place of a toilet, there was a hole in the field which was surrounded by upright sheets of plastic for privacy.

I wanted our teens to see that children their own age could be happy, perhaps happier even than they were, without the material trappings that we presume cause our joy.

For a week we worked—no, we labored. Work had previously meant thinking, perhaps typing or writing, but it had never been the arduous tasks of brick laying, cement mixing, tree cutting, harvesting—all without power tools. We formed an assembly line up a steep hill to move two tons of sand from the dirt road to the property where we were working to build a Mayan Weaving and Cultural Center. A trip to the market for building materials, that at home might have taken an hour, took an entire day.

Refrigerators were nonexistent, so meals were derived from the harvest of the day or week. Corrugated iron rooftops were covered with corn, drying for use in tortillas and tamales.

We ate whatever the women of the community prepared for each meal, and we thanked them with smiles on our exhausted faces.

Before our trip, our team leader from Global Citizens Network flew into Los Angeles from Minnesota for our orientation in Agoura Hills. Someone asked, “Can I bring my iPod?”

Christie, our team leader, said, “I don’t want you to meet these people through your objects. That is something that we do in our society, but there they have nothing, so they get to know one another as people.”

In that Guatemalan mountain village, those words rang true. Without objects, we were stripped down to our simple humanity, and it was on that level that we met the indigenous Mayan people. We worked side by side with them. We shared meals. We taught one another songs from our respective cultures and shared card games without common language. We found common humor without language.

When we returned to the U.S., I invited each of the teens to share the experiences of our Guatemala trip with our congregation, Valley Outreach Synagogue, in a service called A Shabbat of New Perspectives. They stood before the congregation of 500 people and spoke.

What had they taken away from Guatemala? Some spoke of it as an awakening to meaning and a new perspective on their priorities and relationships, and a proper perspective on challenges in their own lives. Other teens talked about their preconceptions of poverty and the shocking realities that came from living in it for that cold and uncomfortable week.

One said, “I expected to feel sad for the indigenous people, but the reality was that the people seemed so happy, happier than some of us, and yet they had nothing.”

We did encounter sad and depressing realities on our trip. Violence and alcoholism were eroding Mayan culture and destroying Mayan families. Television, a relatively new luxury for only the most affluent among the poor in Xicam, was starting to take the place of storytelling and conversation in Mayan households. The traditional wisdom-teaching role of the elders was being replaced by images on the screen.

In my work my goal is to positively impact one person out of the hundreds who are present. In this trip, I hoped for the same odds. Perhaps a single teenager would return more grateful, more aware and more able to live an extraordinary adulthood. Time will tell if the lessons learned by the 12 teens in Guatemala will impact their characters.

Ron Li-Paz is an Oak Park resi dent and cantor and spiritual leader of Valley Outreach Synagogue.