Malta to Guatemala: 12 Island Volunteers Carry Limestone Spirit 10,000 km to Rebuild Storm-Shattered Homes

A dozen Maltese builders, teachers, nurses and students will lock the doors of their limestone homes next Saturday and point their passports towards Guatemala, carrying with them €35,000 in donated tools, medical supplies and—perhaps more importantly—the stubborn Maltese conviction that a neighbour’s wall is never someone else’s problem.

Organised by the Gżira-based NGO Spark15 and the parish of Jesus of Nazareth in Sliema, the three-week “Rebuild & Restore” mission will see the volunteers erect 20 storm-proof houses in the mountain village of Xecaracoj, a Qormi-sized settlement that lost 60 % of its dwellings to last year’s twin hurricanes. The group will also run daily after-school classes in Spanish and basic English, distribute 150 hygiene kits assembled in a Birkirkara warehouse, and train local midwives in neonatal resuscitation techniques first pioneered at Mater Dei.

“Guatemala is 10,000 km away, but the wind that flattened those roofs was the same one that rattled our balconies in February,” Fr. Anton D’Amato, the mission’s spiritual director, told Hot Malta during final packing at the Curia. “Our islands survived because neighbours showed up with planks and pastizzi. We’re simply extending that instinct across an ocean.”

Local colour travels with them. Each timber frame will be bolted with galvanised steel plates manufactured at the Marsa workshop of Joseph Farrugia, a 68-year-old Ħamrun carpenter who still signs his beams with the traditional Maltese cross. Inside every new home, a hand-woven Guatemalan tapestry will hang beside a miniature għonnella lace made by the Żejtun Women’s Co-op—an intentional pairing of two cultures whose identity was once stitched into fabric.

The human cargo is just as eclectic. Sarah Micallef, 24, a pharmacology graduate from Mosta, traded a summer job in Paceville for a crash course in tropical medicine on YouTube. “I calculated that the tips I’d earn in six weeks could fund maybe one prosthetic leg,” she laughed, labelling boxes of antibiotics donated by local pharmacies. “Here, the same time builds an entire house and teaches 50 kids to read. My mum still thinks I’m crazy, but my nanna kissed my forehead and said ‘Aħna qalbna kbira’—our heart is big.”

That sentiment rippled across the islands. Primary-school children in Gozo collected 8,000 plastic bottle tops to finance two extra wheelchairs; the Malta-Guatemala Friendship Society screened a week of Latin-American cinema in Valletta’s old embassy, raising €4,500; and a banda from Żurrieq threw a marathon karnival party where revellers paid €5 per polka, eventually sponsoring a clean-water pump.

Economists might call it soft-power philanthropy; the volunteers simply call it “ħidma”—the sweaty, joyful work that built Malta’s own parish churches stone by stone. “Our grandfathers left on British troop ships with nothing but a wooden trunk and returned with ideas about unions and cooperatives,” reflects Mario Sant, 42, a self-employed electrician who will wire the new homes for solar lighting. “We’re doing the reverse: taking our skills out, and hopefully bringing back humility.”

Airport farewells are scheduled for 05:30 next Saturday. The volunteers will gather near the departures gate beneath a banner that reads “Min jaf jaħdem, jaf jaħfer”—he who knows how to work, knows how to heal. It is a proverb Fr. Anton found scribbled on the back of a 1948 photograph showing Maltese masons rebuilding Gozo’s cathedral after World War II. He had it printed in red and white, the colours that unite the two distant landscapes.

When they return on 20 August, the team will tour local schools with VR headsets pre-loaded with 360° footage of Xecaracoj’s first completed street—provisionally named “Triq Malta”. Pupils who donated bottle tops will see the turquoise doors they paid for, and perhaps understand that the Mediterranean’s smallest country still carries the weight of the world on its gypsum shoulders.

Until then, the only luggage left to pack is intangible: the smell of sea-salt on skin, the echo of church bells at noon, and the quiet certainty that a Maltese hammer can still ring hope across a continent.