Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in amie216's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
12:28 pm	El Salvador Part 1 Friday, November 9: The ride to El Salvador was smooth, full of first class buses, packed PBJ sandwiches, and movies. Except I missed all that because I decided to take PM (over the counter Tylenol PM without the Tylenol). Halloween was the night before, and after a night of Quailman, superhero fun, PM seemed genius to catch up. It actually just sent me into a sickly, unsightly coma, which turned into the group’s entertainment throughout the journey. Mario, my seat-mate from Xela to Guate, said that at one point he considered calling for medical intervention. I only really remember coming into and out of consciousness once we were past the El Salv border, long enough to wolf some crunchy peanut butter sandwiches and watch part of White Chicks – what now undoubtedly replaces Clifford as the worst movie I have ever seen. Especially because it was more like some night terror than a movie during that drugged ride. El Salvador is incredibly different from Guatemala. You notice it right away, from almost the minute you cross the border. It is a palpable difference, like it is a different air. The people are different: taller, lighter complexion, and NO traditional dress. Because of the intense civil war and genocide of the indigenous people, there, Mayan ancestry is something to hide. Something to be ashamed of. Something to fear. So the streets and markets, which we were used to seeing crowded with loud indigenous prints and head wraps, were blue jean and t-shirt ridden. Everything moves at a different pace. Probably to do with the weather. It is warm, tropical, and with that comes a brightness, a feeling of movement and laughter, of life that is somewhat dulled under the cold and gray Xela days. I guess it is an exchange: bright fabrics for bright people. One of these bright people is Cristy, our Salv coordinator that picked us up from the bus terminal when we got in around 4 in the afternoon. Cristy is a tiny woman, young, round, and always laughing. She was always better dressed than we were, and spoke to us more in English than she did in Spanish. She, and the organization that she works for, CIS (Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad), were a blessing. First of all, it was just that…organized. For the first time since we’ve got to Central America, things were laid out for us. We didn’t have to struggle to do things, to figure things out as we went along, to eek by by the seat of our pants. We were picked up from the bus station in a mini bus, fondly called a coaster – our minibus. With our own driver, William, who could work miracles with that bus that I couldn’t manage in a civic. We were taken to our hostel: The International Guesthouse. 6 of us were led to the back of the place, to the Party Warehouse. It was a huge space that had been added on to the building and was complete with huge metal bay doors and metal sliding doors separating the bathrooms (that made such loud scraping noises when you opened and shut them that we made an early pact that everyone had to piss with the doors open during the night). It turned out to be great: cooler than the rest of the rooms, and enough room for sprawling games of Euchre and Pinochle…however it did turn out to be as ghetto as promised as the right shower electrocuted you occasionally and the fan shorted once during the night, showering the room in sparks. After an orientation at the CIS office and a delicious dinner of garlic pizza from Pizza Nova, we tucked in for our first night in Party Warehouse El Salvador. we spent the next few days traveling around the city in the Coaster, learning about El Salvador’s history, about Romero, about repression and war. Romero was one of the main voices of opposition, of liberation theology, during the war. He was a conservative archbishop who surprisingly came and spoke out against the genocides, death squads, and crimes against humanity by the government. He spoke of the preferential option for the poor, was killed for it during mass, and has become a hero. He is the Mandela of El Salvador – the Che. His face is everywhere, on billboards and murals, Tshirts, and car windows. His message continues, as much now a commercial tool as an ideology. Sat night, there was a huge event at the university for the anniversary of the murder of 6 Jesuits during the war. It wasn’t until later that we went to their museum, saw their rooms and their clothes preserved with blood stains and bullet holes, saw unimaginable pictures that carefully documented their crime scene – pictures of their brains that had been removed from their skulls and laid out on the lawn, ordered as a statement against the ideologies that they promoted. (The government literally wanted a public display of blowing their brains out). But that night, there was a parade, along the streets of the school which had been completely covered by ‘carpets’ of colored sand that were poured to make pictures and statements. The murals were slowly smeared, Romero’s face and maps of El Salvador were distorted, as the procession of people wound around campus, carrying candles, signs, and enormous tree-like plastic things that shimmered in the streetlights. We followed the procession to an outdoor concert, where we scaled a steep grassy bank to watch troubadour groups and crowds of young students sing to them. On Sunday, we headed out of San Salvador for the first time, to the rural community of Cinquera. It was a small town about 2 hours outside of the capital, but 2 hours on dirt roads that could barely pass for wide, dilapidated trails. For most of it, we skirted along an enormous artificial lake, created by the damning of the river that now supplies power to the capital, but not to the thousands of people whom the rising waters displaced. Knowing that makes you feel guilty for admiring how beautiful it is. It took my attention away from most of the “Flushed Away” animated movie that was playing on the coaster DVD system. (We had to change it from White Chicks when we got in. We quickly learned that El Salvador apparently has 2 movies of choice: White Chicks, and Men in Black). We went on a hike upon arriving that gave us a view of that lake that took your breath away. It didn’t feel artificial then, didn’t feel wrong or unjust, just magnificent. Sort of the way it would be hard to think only of the slave labor that built the pyramids or the Great Wall when you are standing in their shadows. The hike also took us through the forest where some of the heaviest and most prolonged fighting occurred during the war. We saw the guerrilla camps, their trenches, kitchens, and hospitals where surgeries were done on sheets of metal propped up on tree trunks. The community itself was more similar to the city than expected – with a central park, cement buildings, a couple small comedors, a church – just all on a smaller and more run-down scale. Most of the buildings that still stood from before the war were pocketed with bullet holes like it was some intentional architectural texturizing effect to get a good rustic look. All of the houses were rebuilt from about head-height up. Where their roofs had all collapsed following a decade of abandonment after the massacre that occurred there. We were there primarily for a testimony from an old priest named don Pablo who was one of the few survivors from that period, who had witnessed unspeakable things including the death of 5 of his sons, and the suicide of his 6th and last. For almost 4 hours the next morning, we listened to him speak in the church. In the church that was still riddled with bullet holes. Where hundreds were lined up and shot, tortured, burned. Where babies were tossed in the air and made to land on knives in front of their mothers eyes. Where people were fired on in groups and the surviving children under the corpses of their parents and neighbors were lured out of the pile with promises of sweets before being shot. I sat next to the wall where the death squadrons left their mark after massacres. I can't imagine seeing these things and continuing living. I still cannot imagine that these things are capable of happening at all. And that I didn’t know. And that many people will never know. And that many people who do know, many people who are responsible, ignore it. The people in the US embassy wrote the report of the Cinquera massacre to say that few people had died, and those that did were FLMN (communist) guerillas. The people who are still at the embassy today, who we would meet with the following day. The man from USAID who told us of all their good work ‘fixing the roads that the damn guerillas destroyed during the war’. 85% of the human rights violations that were committed during the war were done by government forces (who were granted immunity by ARENA, the reigning party now). Those government forces who the US government poured 1.5 million dollars PER DAY to support. Bottom line, the war here would not have lasted so long if Reagan, in all his wisdom, had not poured in this money ‘fighting communism’. Millions of lives would have been saved. Maybe the walls of that church would not have been so full of bullet holes. Maybe don Pablo would have some of his sons left. The homestay family situation there started as a bit awkward, and turned into downright horrifying come nightfall. Awkward because practically the entire town was gone at a meeting in the capital when we got there and didn’t return until long after we had gone to sleep. So only an elderly woman was there to show Kate and I our bed, which unfortunately was not the hammock hanging next to the TV. We did have a mosquito net, which looked promising, and later turned out to be essential when I turned on my headlamp in the night to see surfaces glittering in silent movement of thousands of insects. Turned to horrifying when Kate and I went to the bathroom in the dark before bed. We went out back to the outhouse, stumbling over various animals on the way. When we finally made it to that dilapidated structure, Kate and I made 2 creepy discoveries simultaneously: hers was that the entire outhouse was crawling with prehistoric-sized roaches, mine was that the largest turkey that perhaps has ever existed was standing eye-level on a tree stump maybe 12 inches from my head (I made the mistake of surveying the premises while Kate tried to piss, and my headlamp shone Blairwitch-style on the towering legs of this mega-beast-turkey like something out of a nightmare). Kate and I both shrieked, pissed as fast as we could on the ground next to the outhouse, and literally ran to our bed. In my terror I had pissed on my PJ pant leg and had to force myself to change before entering the relative safety of our mosquito net. It took a long time, and maybe a dozen playings of Moonlight Sonata on my iPOD before I could calm down enough to sleep…which I did a little, plastered to Kate as the bed became one giant concave quicksand mattress. Though it was probably for the better, considering that this place, where they told us would be “sweltering hot”, was freezing. We had a blanket and the inseparable warmth of each other…the others were not so lucky. The next morning we met the rest of the family when we packed up our things and left. As we thanked them, they looked at us as though they had no inkling as to who we were or why there were 2 white girls walking out of their house. Not even a polite nod. On the way home to San Salvador, we stopped for the afternoon at Suchitoto, which was another smaller, movie-feeling version of Antigua, complete with a cobblestone town square with a bubbling fountain, beautiful white church, and ice cream stalls. I made Antoinette do Sound of Music spins around the courtyard, which really looked more like drunken pirouettes. That was the day that the impossible happened…we all got sick of pupusas. Pupusas are to El Salvador what tomalitos and plantains are to Guatemala...basically all you eat. They are big corn tortillas that are stuffed with cheese and beans and cooked to form oozing, warm goodness that also happens to be your best bet at not getting parasites when eating at comedors. We had them for breakfast lunch and dinner in the communities. We had them for lunch every day before that in the city. Then, just for a change of pace, we had them for dinner back at the hostel. They were made of rice this time. Just for variety. Wednesday: The Day of Meetings. The Political Day. One of the highlights by far of the El Salvador trip was our political meetings. In the morning, we put on our ‘fancy’ outfits to go to the US Embassy, which consisted of a black Target skirt instead of jeans to go with my Tshirt and Old Navy flip flops. It was an unbelievable experience: unbelievable in the attitudes of the US ambassadors to the country in which they serve, unbelievable in their complete ignorance of El Salvador’s history, current political climate, culture, and language; unbelievable in their unwillingness and true inability to answer our questions about anything. For 2 hours we sat with a group of people who told us that CAFTA was providing great opportunities for economic growth (when we asked other El Salv politicians and leaders about this same free trade policy, they said that their people were “jodidos”…they were “fucked”). They told us that rural women would be able to export their pupusas to the US under new trade regulations (except that their beans don't qualify for selling in the states, their cheese is unpasteurized and therefore unacceptable, and the concept is otherwise just absurd and impossible). They told us that the 200 dollar fee just to apply for a tourism visa was actually quite cheap when you consider that they last for 10 years… “when you think about it, that’s just 10 dollars a year”. ($200 mineaswell be 2 million for the vast majority). In their defense, the ambassadors are only allowed to stay in their first 3 posts for 1 year…just long enough to not really be able to be knowledgeable and effective anywhere. And 3 of the guys did peace corps. They can’t just be evil people with rotting souls. I could imagine it being quite a struggle for some of them to deal with what they know and know is right and what they are required to do and think under their job. We moved on from the incapable to the truly ludicrous when we met with a Congressman in the ARENA party named D’Aubuisson, son of Roberto D’Aubisson, founder of the ARENA party, founder of the death squads, and orchestrator of some of the most gruesome massacres in history. He was a frightening man in a frightening office – with an enormous, long, shiny conference table and huge chairs that looked like something out of Austin Powers and mini shrines of his father all over the walls: enormous blown up pictures, quotes on plaques, cases full of trophies that I liked to imagine bore inscriptions like “Biggest Plague on Humanity” or “Douchebag.” He spoke loudly, banged his fists, smiled, and joked while telling us just complete lies about everything in his country – the privatization of health care (said it wasn’t happening), effects of CAFTA (said it was good…that’s why the US loves ARENA)…etc. Kate, sitting in her big chair right next to him, was spit on more than once. After ARENA, we moved 1 story downstairs, which minaswell have been to the other side of the world, for our meeting with a Congresswoman from FLMN. We all doubled up on chairs around a little table next to the kitchen. It was swelteringly hot because with the loud box-AC running, we couldn’t hear anything. It was apparent who was in power, and what the 2 parties chose to spend their money on. The woman was above all else, smart as hell, logical, and candid about current problems and what needs to be done to fix them. Pretty much every question we asked got an opposite response from our good ARENA friend, and she actually answered them rather than pounding her fists and dodging. By the end of our 7th hour of Spanish political talk, my brain had died in my skull, and I spent the last bit of that meeting focusing solely on the metal bar of my chair that was pressing firmly on my tailbone. I learned more about the country in that one day than I have about Guatemala in our 4 months there - even though it almost melted the Spanish part of my brain. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 8th, 2007
6:13 pm	Mexico: Mud, Guerillas, and Guacamole Sitting in Cuartito, my first time here in over a month. Feels like home sweet home, complete with it’s teenie chairs and wobbly wooden tables that look like they are meant for children’s tea parties. Feels great to be in Xela too, with the fam, traversing the cobblestones, speaking particularly rusty Spanish following my trip home and time with the group. Feels especially great following our week of intolerable cold, living in pools of mud and mist, eating avocados, onions, and tomatoes 3 times a day with a Mexican guerilla group. We spent last week in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, camping with a group of Zapatista rebels. The Zapatista movement that started like most revolutions in Central America…and everywhere else in the world where poverty and disparity make life literally unlivable. Chiapas is home to some of the poorest, most marginalized, and most desperate indigenous people in the world. The people there were pushed by colonialization up into the least arable land in Mexico and ignored by the government. They have no education, health system, and no real way of feeding themselves…and from this sprung the Zapatista movement, seeking to call attention and action against the unimaginable poverty of the people. What is different about the movement is that it has managed to continue to this day. The difference is that they have made no attempt at gaining state power…in which case they would have been instantly crushed by the state (or the CIA like every other ‘unfavorable’ Latin American groups). Instead, after initially trying to peacefully negotiate a change in the Mexican government, have completely withdrawn from all interaction. Basically they are against everything the government is supporting: neoliberalism, capitalism, NAFTA, the corruption of the elite, the perpetuation of disparity…and they refuse to participate in a system that contains all these things. So they have formed these 5 ‘caracols’ throughout Chiapas, which are autonomous bases in which they have their own government, education system, health system, agriculture, and income generation programs – completely separate from the government. They run a basically socialist or ‘collectivo’ system, distributing income, food, etc around the community. And there are some serious flaws and shortcomings of their system, and of their entire ideology. They are essentially trying to establish little socialist utopian societies complete with equal rights for women, religious tolerance, gay rights, free education and health care, etc among a system that is completely incompatible with all their objectives – on economic, political, and social levels. And so it is a constant struggle. They are not self-sustaining. It is impossible, they are on some of the least productive land, and don’t even have enough of that. Their health care is about as inaccessible, under staffed, and under stocked as every other resource-poor system, meaning that literally almost none of their population can get to care, and of those, they can actually treat only a small portion. They rely heavily on outside/foreign support and donations to survive. But what struck me most, what is the most heartening, is that they are doing something. Despite the external pressures, despite the small impact and uncertain future of their movement, they are working to educate themselves about the forces that make their situation so miserable, and they are attempting to take their fate in their own hands. And there is progress. Some of it indirect: the current president of Mexico, was forced to enact a welfare and education system for the indigenous poor as an attempt to placate the population just enough to keep the Zapatista movement from spreading out of control. So we spent the week in Caracol II, about an hour outside San Cristobal. It was a lot like boy scout camp: we slept in bags on the dirt floor of a wooden building which Kate termed “the Lodge.” We had no showers and outhouses which we got to by traversing a swamp and a river on various pieces of brick and metal poles. We spent our nights cooking and playing Yuker in the kitchen, where it was maybe a couple degrees warmer because of the gas stoves…though you could still see your breath even when breathing through your nose. However, never been to a boy scout camp where all the people wore black ski masks with slits for eyes and were locked in every night in our compound surrounded by barbed wire. Thank God for our group. Everything turned into a joke. I laughed more last week than any other 7 day span I can remember. Otherwise, it really would have had to been categorized as a completely miserable experience. The temperature alone. We could see our breaths at all times. When sleeping, when laughing, when sitting through lectures in clinics, when cursing as we took group trips to the latrines at midnight. And the cold would have been tolerable if it was a dry. Which it was not. Chiapas is apparently actually the misty mountains from Lord of the Rings. We never saw the sun. We never even saw the ground we were walking on for that matter, which became particularly problematic during our late-night bathroom runs, as the head lamp really just looked like a light saber one inch from my eyes as it reflected off of the cloud we were walking through. Most of the time you couldn’t even see across the Lodge as the mist seeped in through the cracks in the wood walls. As a result we were wet the whole time. Especially the shoe situation. Much to all of our delight, Mario at one point resorted to putting plastic grocery bags over his socks before putting on his shoes again in an attempt to avoid the solid blocks of ice that were our feet 10 minutes after putting on shoes. Whenever our two leaders weren’t around, we took to lighting the burners on our gas stove and huddling around them, or boiling water bottles and snuggling with them in our sleeping bags…while sitting at the table and playing cards. And the wet unavoidably meant mud. Everywhere, in every crevice of my body, glued to every inch of my clothes, on my toothbrush and caked into my hair, squishing out of my shoes. By the end of the 7 days I could almost pass as a Moreno Guatemalan…if it weren’t for the blue eyes and my full mouth of teeth. The mud also had interesting effects on the travel situation, as most of the roads began to collapse earthquake-style around our camp. At one point we got to a gap in the road where we had to hug the mountain and walk across the little road that remained after 80 percent of it collapsed down a 300 foot cliff and hop in a van on the other side. A bit creepy. The cold did have it’s advantages…apart from the excessive amounts of mud, we weren’t all that smelly after a week of no bathing. It felt like we were in the twilight zone most of the time. Cooped up in our compound, with nothing visible more than 10 feet around us – occasionally a masked person appeared out of the cloud a few feet from you and disappeared again. Though, granted, this did make peeing a much more doable, and made us so lazy that we generally had group pee sessions maybe 5 steps out the back of the kitchen or Lodge, enveloped completely, giggling at each other trying to avoid our own piss and mud puddles simultaneously. On the last day, when we finally got a couple hours of relative clarity, it was a strange moment to look around and see the area where we had been living. It was beautiful, green and mountainous. There were also a ton of people around the caracol, apparently big shot coffee growers from around the area, coming for a meeting about trade policies. They were all in their traditional traje pants, which looked like itty bitty white linen shorts, boots up to their knees, and were puffing on cigars while. There was one particular man who had the most unbelievable frowny-face I have ever seen. It was like a cartoon character where the ends of his mouth drooped well below his jaw line. We spent the entire 12 hour chicken bus ride home trying unsuccessfully to replicate the expression. Our coordinators were two old hippies that were never dealing with a full deck of cards, most likely a result of their mad years of drugs in their glory days. They were quite the dysfunctional duo/partners/boyfriend girlfriend, and neither had a bone of leadership, communication, or organization skills in their bodies. The man, Peter Brown, or as he insisted on being called here, Pedro Café, was a patronizing tool – both to the Zapatistas and to us – who donned a ridiculous cowboy hat and never took off his Birkenstocks, only put on crusty brown socks on the coldest of days. Susan was his sort of bumbling side-kick, who speaks minimal Spanish, puts placenta face cream on her face every day (which she is convinced makes her look 20 years younger than she actually looks), and proudly recounted to us the story of how her birth was the first one aired on TV in Milwaukee and ran in a 5 night special segment on a news station….to which Ben answered: “I am going to vomit. Why would they put that on TV, I don’t even like to look at her.” They also were lacking in their ability to grocery shop. Before we got there, they went shopping, and for a group of 15 people for 7 days they bought the following: crates of avocados, tomatoes, and onions, a sac of potatoes, and an enormous bag of Tuna fruit, which are sort of like Kiwis, but have a thousand of hard round seeds which makes eating them very similar to trying to swallow a dozen pills with every bite. Thank God everyone in the group likes Guacamole, because we ate it 3 times a day for 7 days. That is 21 meals of Guacamole. I have had the most incredible breath lately. We got to spend a day in San Cristobal after leaving our misty rebel camp. It was basically the Mexican Antigua, compete with a shady park and fountain, benches, and trees planted along paved roads. We actually got sushi for lunch, which gave a MSG hangover like I haven’t had since leaving China. Kate and I had to make 2 entire laps around the artisan market because we literally couldn’t concentrate on anything we were seeing the first time around. It felt like my brain was numb. But it was a much needed dose of civilization. It is off to El Salvador tomorrow at 4 am, I need to go and shovel all the bug repellent I own into my bag. Looking forward to another 16 hour travel day, full of the delicious trail mix that I loaded up on at Fresh Market while I was home. Mmmm, yogurt covered raisins. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
11:49 am	Make it stop.... Today is the 5th straight day of incessant raining. I have never seen anything like this. Even in India during monsoon season it stopped raining every few days. We wake up and it is raining. Go to bed and it is raining. I can’t speak for the few hours that I am sleeping during the night, but can be fairly certain that it is still indeed raining. The drainage system, which is normally nonfunctional after 20 good minutes of rain, mineaswell be nonexistent at this point. The streets are rivers that tear through Xela, picking up speed as they go down hills so that if you try to cross towards the bottom, the water sprays up to your waist as soon as you put your foot in it. Pot holes the sizes of trashcans are randomly appearing in the streets, and when they are so full of water, you can’t tell whether they are the normal ankle-deep, or the fun thigh-deep ones. It really just reminds me of that scene from Vietnam Forrest Gump where he is talking about the months of rain. The only saving grace is that I bought a pair of neon orange rain boots made for kids at Hyper for 11Q that the group makes fun of me for without end. As if I needed to be more of a spectacle. But oh, my feet are dry…though the plastic makes my sweaty socks smell unspeakably rank. Asi es la vida. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
11:51 am	"Private Hospital" - Dwight, Twix, and Nurses Galore What a long past couple of days. Centuries long. Sunday night, a trip to Cortito to work on med essays finally pushed Kate far over the health edge. I came home to check on her to find her curled up on her bed, moaning with fever that she couldn’t feel her legs. It took her 10 minutes to get up and unlock her bedroom door, so that Joe, Ant, and I could drive her to the private hospital over in Zona 3. The hospital is literally named “Hospital Privada”. She was in rough shape. Rough enough that she didn’t even notice that the doctor that first examined her was unquestionably the most attractive man in Xela, and possibly all of Guatemala. She didn’t even remember it later when we told her. So we get there around 8, and proceed to do test after test, which Kate started resisting with more and more force. After about 8 missed blood draws, the xray experience was the end of her cooperation. God knows why they even needed xrays for her chest, she wouldn’t even get out of bed until the cute doctor came and persuaded her, mentioning something about infection. She had to put on some gown, which not only required her to stand up, but lift her bum chicken bus-injured arm above her head…then she had to do it again after the nurse got the IV cord tangled up in the gown. When the technician botched the first xray, and asked her to stand up against the wall again, I thought she was going to physically injur someone (that is if she had the physical strength to move from her wheelchair). Ant and I were absolutely terrified of her at this point, and spent the night calmly and carefully suggesting she obey the various people who came into her room… And there were quite a few of them. Nurses traveled in squadrons. I never saw less than 5 come in at once: 5 nurses checking the IV drip, 5 nurses changing her sheets, 5 nurses coming in at 5 in the morning to wake her up and ask how she is sleeping. How many nurses does it take to put in an IV? Apparently more than 5, because not only did they miss multiple times, but then when they got the vein, blood poured out onto her arm and bed, which was more black than red at that point. When they took out the needle 3 days later, it was bent 2 or 3 times at 90 degree angles, and they had spent the last 3 days telling her that the drip was too slow because she was moving her arm too much (and actually strapped her arm to the bed when she was sleeping on the first night). Her doctor that they had to call in that night was the short, bald man in a 1980's track suit who said Mhmm Uhuh Uhuh Mhmm repeatedly while anyone talked to him. He sounded more like a creepy Italian man than any Chapin that I have heard. More than once, when he came in and Mhmmed in my face in the wee hours of the morning, I had an overwhelming desire to press a finger to his lips and slowly and deliberately walk him out to the hallway and prop a chair against the door. Kate made me call her mom, where the conversation went something like this… “Hi Mrs Schedel, this is Kate’s roommate. I was just calling to let you know that she is in the hospital. But don’t worry, she is ok – sortof….no you can’t actually talk to her, she is a little out of it" (she was moaning and moving her hand back and forth in the air like she was doing a slow mo wave at noone at the bottom of her bed). Ant and I spent the night that first night, on this itty bitty little bench against her wall, fading into and out of half-assed sleep. We lived off of miniature twix bars that she threw in her bag and had increasingly delirious conversations as the night went on. This went on for 3 days, though that first night was definitely the roughest. After that, Kate regained consciousness enough to talk and laugh about the Mhmm doctor and the nurse squadrons. Our lives were saved when we brought a laptop and watched the entire 3rd season of The Office, only stopping for pee breaks and one visit from Mhmm. The downside is that I don’t think that I will ever be able to listen to Dwight talking about Bears and Beets without thinking about that dungeon room or the smell of my clothes from living there for 72 hours. Ant had to divide her time between Kate’s hospital and Elise’s…where she was with Malaria. It was not a good health week. We never got a verdict. Mhmm said something about infections from food. Not really likely. But whatever it was, it was fixed right up by a few drips of Cipro, 6 bags of IV fluid, an anti-parasite medicine, and some oral antibiotics. We followed what has become our post-hospital tradition of going to Smoothies Rum for a bagel after hospital stays. A little cream cheese can do wonders sometimes. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 21st, 2007
1:11 pm	Wedding Day!! ….a great day. The wedding was really beautiful. We have been talking about it for so long, and it sort of snuck up on us. when it came it was beautiful. And it definitely had some flares that could only be Guatemalan. Jodi and Aaron did most of the ceremony in Spanish, which was thoroughly impressive. We did the Guatemalan version of the bouquet throwing (which is done for both the boys and the girls), where Jodi stood on a chair and all the girls circled around her like musical chairs and she randomly just chucked the bouquet. But it is done 3 times, and the first 2 times don’t mean anything, just damage the bouquet beyond recovery so that by the time the unlucky recipient of the 3rd toss doesn’t manage to duck out of the way it is disintegrating. There is also the ‘rice shower’…where a little bucket of rice sits underneath some cheesy cardboard dove cutouts, and right when the couple walks back down the aisle, they stand under the doves and the bucket is released on their heads. Again, not quite as fun as our tradition of actually getting to chuck the rice as they dash past you. There was a live singer who was either an Elvis impersonator, or coincidentally happened to rock out a Grease hairdo and side burns and a white silk jumpsuit, who sang old American songs that were phonetically memorized and so thoroughly butchered that we only recognized half of them – and never before the 2nd go around of the refrain. (then for some reason during the boys’ bouquet throwing, Elvis latched on to Joe’s shoulders like they had their own unannounced conga line and didn’t let go until the obnoxious boy who always hogs the school’s computers got the 3rd toss and ‘married’ Erin…who was mortified and then had to dance to “Dance like That” by Shakira alone with him) After maybe 20 minutes, we commandeered the speaker system with Molly’s MAC and put on all the best jams like ‘bright eyes’ and twist and shout. Elise and Joe made a cake that would quite literally have kept the soldiers at Leningrad from turning to cannibalism. 6 layers of dense banana cake, layered with dark chocolate, homemade icing, whipped cream, and strawberries. Elise had to times the recipe by 12. It was big. After the festivities had died down, we had sort of a Somos powwow on in a circle in the garden, just reflecting and laughing about all the ridiculous memories we have made so far. It was a good moment, to sit and realize how well I knew everyone, how good it felt to be back together after the break, how much I enjoy all their company, in just a few months. Miraculously, the weather completely held out until after 4pm, at which point the temperature dropped a solid 20 degrees and it started to rain – just at the point when I had eaten too much cake to put together coherent thoughts much to sit in those plastic lawn chairs anymore. So we headed to Mujdeh’s for the ‘after party’, which consisted of pushing beds together, making hot chocolate, and watching “Superbad”…some hilarious movie that came out recently in the states and Joe made a bootleg for. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
1:00 pm	The Break: whale sharks So we got back to Xela around 10 at night from the elections. The next morning the plan to catch the 4:30am bus to Guate was once again not so solid, when I got to the bus station early with Steph and Kate, only to watch the bus pull away at 3:58. It was a Monday. Apparently that makes a difference with the whole schedule thing. Steph and Kate hopped on, with flights to catch. I was left on the dark street corner by myself. I started walking to catch Mario and Molly, who were in the process of leaving their houses. Not a great position to be in, at all. and all i could do was mutter shit repeatedly under my breath. A couple in a pickup offered to give me a ride. They had just dropped off their daughter, and saw me being left. It was that moment when I said a silent prayer of thanks for every minute of spanish class I had received as I was able to tell them where to take me, and to thank them profusely for saving my gringa ass. We ended up taking the 5 am bus on a different line, and it actually worked out. The 4 am bus got half way to Guate and had to turn around because avalanches had completely blocked the only roads. They were forced to come all the way back to Xela and take the roundabout way along the coast. Our bus left late enough to know to take that route from the start. We ended up getting in 2 hours before them. But not soon enough to make our connections in Guate. Instead we had to wing it, and caught a bus towards the Honduras border. We made it to Agua Caliente, a border town, around 3 in the afternoon. And were stuck. There was nothing there, and according to everyone we asked, no way to get out until 6 the next morning. We sat for awhile on the dirty wall of the immigration building, debating our next move, when the ricketiest chicken bus I have ever seen sputtered to a stop right in front of us. The doors opened, and a man with a sagging face and liver spots all over his arms and face invited us to come to Quatrapecke. It didn’t look too inviting, in fact I was quite sure it was the opening scene of a horror movie about backpacking Central America, but we glanced at Lonely Planet to see that it was actually on the map, which gave us a better shot than the shit hole we were in and stepped onto the nightmare bus. Wait for it. After we got on, all the young men on the bus piled out, went to the back of the bus, and started pushing. After we had gained a small amount of speed, the driver threw the bus into gear, the boys piled back on, and we were on our way. We were in Little Miss Sunshine. The rest of the trip involved passengers running alongside the bus, hopping on and off the moving vehicle. I just hoped we never had to stop again. In Quatrapecke we had enough time to scarf some pupusas and caught a bus to San Pedro Sula for the night. “Team Arrive and Survive”, which we cleverly coined that night in the sketch hostel in SPS, finally made it to Utila the next morning around lunchtime….and was it ever vale la pena (worth the effort). Basically, Utila shouldn’t exist. It is an island, sitting on top of some of the world’s best diving, that has somehow avoided being bought out, and built up, to remain a sort of backpackers oasis. There isn’t a word of English spoken on the island. Maybe at the one grocery store, which sells things like cans of beans and has dedicated half of it’s shelf space to hard liquor. It is an extranjero playground, covered by small dive shops where you can get certified and stay for a week for maybe a 10th of the price of anywhere else in the world. Between the dive masters and the visitors, the average age on the island may just push 25, and all the ‘residents’ (the young dive masters and instructors and office personel) have identical stories: “I came hear a couple years ago and just never left”…all of them. Apparently, after you finish your certification, and want to stay, the procedure is that the rest of the dive instructors vote on whether they like you and want you to stay to become a master. After a week there, I was almost one of them undergoing the survivor-style vote. And who wouldn’t want to stay? Every day, you wake up in your bed out over the water on the dive shop dock, get your gear ready, and head out to the North Side for a morning of diving. After a couple dives, you eat snacks, drink beer, and cruise the shallows in search of whale sharks and dolphins. Get home for a nap, some reading in hammocks, then head out for some of the best food and a night of drinking, dancing, and general merriment. (and by good food, for example I mean Dave’s, which is run by the former head chef of the White House, who was sucked into Utila like everyone else). Repeat. This is what the entire island does, day in and out, for as long as anyone wants to stay. Though there seems to be some strict requirement that any divemaster must smoke like an absolute chimney…most of them directly trade their regulator for at least 3 ciggies upon hauling themselves out of the water. The director of our dive shop (Alton’s) was randomly the inventor of the animation techniques and head animator in movies like toy story and Lord of the Rings named Ian. He is in all the extra features of the LoR movies being interviewed…Daniel would have died. Highlight of the trip, and quite possibly most of my life, was our last morning out, when we found a pod of 18-20 bottlenose dolphins who were playing with our boat on the way back to the dock. We all grabbed our masks and fins, lined up in 2 lines sitting on the deck of the boat, and when Joe killed the engine, slid navy-seal style into the water to find ourselves completely surrounded by this pod of dolphins. They stuck around to swim with us for 45 minutes. It was a weird feeling to look at them and see that they were looking at us just as much. They were just messing around with us. Charging at and past us, flipping around underwater, riding the waves like body surfing. It was like something out of National Geographic. I was in Planet Earth. On the way home, we stopped for the night at Copan, some of the best Mayan ruins. It was pretty sweet. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
5:54 pm	Elections: International Tension We embarked on our mission for human rights and the international battle against political corruption on Saturday morning: armed with special badges and a Tshirt that says "International Observer". We met up with another small group of observers at the terminal who had been roped into this by Jorge. Most of them were from Germany, and so accordingly spoke Spanish that was entirely unintelligible, even to Guatemalans. For some reason the German accent just does not function with this language here. My favorite is ‘pero’, which they pronounce as a distinct ‘pehwo’. One of the Germans insisted on bringing his guitar for our one night out in rural Guatemala and wore these insane neon patchwork pants that caught your eye across a bustling terminal. Just what we need to blend into the background as observers. The bus ride there was horrid, taking just over 6 hours instead of the prescribed 3. It was raining steadily, and I sat next to a window that fell half open every time we went over bumps. Guatemala’s roads are just extended series of bumps of varying severity, so I spent the entire trip in a cycle of passing into sleep against the shaking window, getting rained on, waking up to shut the window, and passing out again. We observed around the city of Tacana, way north of Xela, in the province of San Marcos. The landscape as we drove north was incredible. The lushly forested volcanoes of Xela turned into rocky, sparse, green rolling hills covered in sheep and goats. It reminded me of pictures of Scotland. And it was freezing. My cracked window had sheets of ice on it, and for some of the more pleasant parts of the journey, it was hail that smacked me in the face and woke me up, not just frigid rain. Things generally went downhill and plateaued at a indescribably strange level from there. We stayed at a hotel called “Las Vegas” in Tacana, and then proceeded to eat some of the most bizarre ‘chow mein’ at a hole in the wall comedor. We had a pre-big-day meeting with all the volunteers and Jorge in an old run-down church, where he proceeded to work out a complex plan to scatter the group into 10 or so small communities in the area. None of us were aware that we were going to be strewn across the countryside. Most of the places were out in BFG (bum fuck Guatemala), and noone had worked out our transportation considering that public transport to these areas was nearly nonexistent on normal days, and elections generally meant a shut down of transport. I got assigned to Toujchuk, an hour outside the city of Tacana. After an excruciating 3 hours of trying to coordinate this (the night before elections, really on the ball there), we came to the conclusion that we really had no plan, and left the abandoned wing of the church freezing and in search of some hot street food before falling asleep in frosty Las Vegas. Kate and I pushed our beds together so we could spoon for body heat. In the morning we all embarked, dawning our official observer t-shirts and badges over fleeces. I quite literally was wearing every article of clothing that I brought on the trip, except for my extra pair of undies, that totaled something like 2 tshirts, a longsleeve, a light sweatshirt, my fleece, and my raincoat, with the observer tshirt on the outside. I was essentially Sanka on CoolRunnings, and similarly considered cutting up my duffle bag to add an extra layer. Antinette and I headed towards the bus terminal to see who we could beg or bribe to take us to Toujchuk. We commandeered a micro after much bargaining, and got to our village just before the polls opened at 7. It only took us to about 7:04 to realize that not only did we have no actual purpose, but we had no real business being there, as was quickly demonstrated by the open animosity of the election officials when we went up to the tables to introduce ourselves. One table actually just stopped their ballot sorting to stare nastily at us until we awkwardly just ‘um, bueno’ and left the room. No one knew we were coming, and from the looks of it, had no idea what the concept of international observers was. We were stepping on toes. Our official job description was to do things like monitor for corruption, ask people wearing clothes with political slogans to leave, and bring mothers with babies up to the front of the line…none of which we felt at all empowered to do. We made the mistake of bringing one woman up to the front of the line – which drew such a uproar of jeers and violent yelling that the woman actually stepped out of line and went home without voting, for fear that the cut in line would be retaliated. For the rest of the day, we sat along one of the walls of the school where the voting was taking place, huddled together against the cold, and trying to invent jokes to keep us entertained. We also played games: find the ugliest man in the lines, the most uncomfortable looking shoes, the mouth with the least teeth. We both got interviewed for some radio station. We were accompanied by a Guatemalan girl observer and her shadow-mother, both of whom it was obvious had absolutely no desire to be there. The mother never ever spoke to us, which added just a bit more of awkwardness to the day…except for the time that Ant and I went to the bathroom (popped a squat behind the building) and the mother popped out of nowhere ‘looking for us’…giving the impression that she had been sitting somewhere for the last unbearable 4 hours, intently watching us without cessation. When I offered her some of the bread that Ant and I had bought the day before as our only food that day, I turned back to her just in time to see her shoving the whole bag in her purse. If I hadn’t rescued it we would’ve had to survive off of the gum and Coke that the little tienda down the road sold. The most excitement (other than our failed humanitarian attempt with the women) happened around 4, just before we left. There was one particular line that literally barely moved all day. At most 15 or so people made it through to vote during the 8 hours we were there. It was a line with only older men, who all happened to be wearing their best white cowboy hats and standing so close to each other in line that each person’s toes touched the heels or even overlapped the person in front of them so that they were forced to lean on each other, resting hands on each other’s wastes or shoulders. They stood like that, mostly motionless, for hours. I got a kick out of trying to imagine American men, in line for a Packers game or something, with their beer bellies firmly pressed into each other. Anyway, I don’t know what finally tipped them off after a whole 8 hours, but at some point they just decided that they had had enough, and started a general riot. We stuck around for awhile to see lots of yelling and gesturing, then decided to head out when things started looking mosh-pitesque. We were lucky enough to hop a ride into town before pure chaos set in….which apparently it did. On the way out of town we learned that 2 police officers were being held hostage, and they wanted Joe to drive his car over to check it out. They tried to bribe him with 100Q for it. Right. The other communities had similar experiences: of various boredom, complete uselessness, and at times disorder. All in all, never quite so glad to be crushed into a vehicle and winding my way home…with all the break ahead of us…. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 6th, 2007
11:44 am	Bake Shop Today is the two month mark. Commemorated by going to Bake Shop and eating an obscene amount of MM cookies and banana bread. Bake Shop is the only place in town where you can get bonified, soft, delicious baked products. It is only open on Tues and Thurs because it is run by a group of Mennonites that live outside of Xela and come in a couple days a week to sell their magical treat. I pretty much just imagine a little community of Keebler elves somewhere in the mountains around xela, held up in their tree and pumping out the best garlic bagels I have ever had. You can't go there without seeing foreigners coming and going. It is like no one local has discovered the true inferiority of their hard cookies or "tres leches" cakes. Thankfully...more for me. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
11:31 am	PEILE This week we finally started our work with the organization PEILE. We only have a week before break, so without real time to organize any projects or work in particular, we are spending the week ‘tutoring kids one-on-one in English and math’. When we are with Alerio, the director of the program, he pretty much won't stop talking about that status of horrendous education in Guate. Even 'good' schools are less than mediocre. Schools here only teach how to read and write - and sometiems that is even questionable. That was sort of the original purpose of forming PEILE: to create a community of men, women, and children who are given the ability to learn and think critically - or as Alerio says, "the ability to live freely". We got a chance to see just how lacking the system is. We were told that they would have books, homework, or at least some semblance of a framework to jump into and help them with. I thought they may even have a specific question or two about something they were learning. What I have gotten are kids who range from 6 to 17 years old and who all know just about the same information. at one point i tutored a pair of sisters in math, making up simple addition problems for them. one was 8 and one was 16, and they were both at identical levels. most just wanted to play with the extranjeros for an hour. Not only did they not have any books of any kind or a pencil, but most also did not read or write, which makes teaching English literally impossible. I spent a few hours pointing at things on my body and around the room and teaching the names fo them, singing songs. One kid only possessed the ability to retain the word “soccer ball”. Some of the other Somos kids got luckier. Jodi’s last kid, who strikingly resembled Alfalfa, had a notebook in which numbers were written over and over on pages. 3 whole pages of ‘5’. 4 of ‘8’. Not so much you can do with that. Hopefully, we'll be able to make it through the week, maybe teach a few kids the word "soccer ball", and then try to get organized. There is a clinic up in the mountains that wants us to design a curriculum for women’s groups on nutrition, first aid, hygiene, self-esteem, and infant health. PEILE currently doesn’t have any funders from English-speaking countries because none of their material is translated into English. We want to start working on translation and distribution of their stuff, trying to drum up support for them. Alerio does community diagnostics every week that we can go on and help – which is basically a perfect lesson on exactly how community organization and aid should go. It could be really cool. Meanwhile, Joe and Elise got a call from Rebecca, the AMIGAS woman, who told them that she would not be able to make it to Chichi this Friday, but liked Jodi and I so much that she wanted us to go in her place and lead the class for her. The problems with this are numerous, including the fact that Jodi and I don’t speak Ki’che. Or that we have only been once, and observed a competition between two women to see who had better tooth-brushing skills. Making that wretched journey alone, trying to lead a women’s group in a language that we don’t speak without a translator seems like the worst idea ever conceived. We politely declined. We have the afternoon off from PEILE tutoring because we went with Alerio this morning to the ground breaking ceremony of a school they are starting to build about an hour outside Xela. Alerio is an incredible man, intelligent, charismatic, and completely passionate about everything he does. He got up there today in front of an entire rural indigenous village and talked to them about the current political situation, calling for them to empower themselves, just as he would any academic circle – without patronizing, without condescending. The community is in the area of Chivorreto, which is written up on the side of one of the volcanic hills in huge white letters as a Hollywood knockoff. There’s the irony of Guatemala for you, 90 percent of the population here can’t read or write, there are no public health centers in the vicinity, they survive on subsistence farming that doesn’t provide much subsistence – but lo and behold, they do have a Hollywood sign. The village is called “Los Pinos”, named for the pine trees that surround their home. We were basically just the token white people there for the occasion. To show that there is international interest in their project, and to take pictures to send to PEILE’s Swiss funders. Somehow, projects are more fundable if you have a few white chicks in the picture. Most of the speakers constantly thanked the “extranjeras” for coming, which made you feel even more like a useless, pretentious fish in your fishbowl as maybe 200 people stared at us for a solid hour and a half, sitting front and center in our tiny chairs. Then there was the big moment of laying the ‘first brick,’ which went as only it could in Guatemala: by choosing the most oddly shaped, random rock they could, digging a hole maybe an inch deep, shoving it in the ground, and piling dirt on top. What exactly were they planning on stacking on top of it? Jodi and I lost it in giggles. I know that the whole thing is just symbolic…it won’t necessarily be the ultimate weight bearing stone in the school (though I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it was), but what a perfect representation, perfect symbol for the kind of foundation and infrastructure here, for planning and stability and sustainability – for the pure inexplicable lunacy of so many things here. After, they took us into the existing school, which was surprisingly solid, just not big enough to support their population (as of now they only teach up to primary school – 4th grade – because there isn’t enough room for anything more). We sat in a room with 25 or so men who barely spoke or lifted their heads high enough to see their eyes beneath their beaten cowboy hats…until a few young guys came around insisting that each and every person took a glass of moonshine rum that was the size of a large Dixie cup. Which sat wonderfully with the lunch of chunks of meat that were the consistency of jerky and mayonnaise salads. On the ride home, we were all in a fog of nausea and rum that made it almost possible to sleep as Alerio floored it over dirt trails fast enough that I hit my head on the pickup ceiling a half dozen times. At the last minute, Felix, the 2nd category 5 hurricane in 2 weeks to come at Central America, turned south, conveniently missing the Bay Islands in Honduras…so it looks like all is clear for our break. Whale sharks here I come. I need to consider taking some Malaria meds, considering that there are 10 different types that have been identified on the island, and we are staying in glorified lean-tos on the beach for 2 dollars a night. Vamos a ver. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
4:26 pm	Despedida and Hotel Soap Sitting in my room upstairs, it is raining, Kate is sitting on my bed. I am clean, full of oatmeal, listening to Matchbox 20, and almost ready for bed at 7: 15 pm. I can feel the last 3 days start to melt off of me. This weekend was Jodi’s “despidida” party…her bachelorette weekend….that was much more just a group trip to the beach more than a bachelorette anything. The beach is called Tilapa, and according to Joe and Elise, is about 3 hours away. Which, naturally means that it is 6 hours away, given that there are no road blocks. The directors have the tendency to underestimate by about 50%, generally they take into account only the time your ass is sweating and sticking to the chicken bus seat, not the hours spent waiting for the right bus to roar past, or the hours spent at the 3 or 4 changes along the way, or even the time it takes for the ‘scenic route’ that drivers generally take. So, leaving at 6 am on Sat put us into Tilapa right around noon. Leaving Xela for the coast in the morning is an interesting experience, because the gradual warming of the morning and day is compounded as the altitude drops. About an hour outside of Xela, the temperature increases about 10 degrees in 15 minutes. It sneaks up on you, leaving you suddenly frantically trying to peel off layers of fleece while elbowing your 4 other seat-mates. By the time we slid into Tilapa it was officially a thousand degrees. Our shirts, soaked with sweat, took all of the chicken bus grime right with us as we strolled into the rather depressing and quiet town. It is one of those places where things move so slowly in the oppressive heat that you can feel your brain processes slow down just looking around. The only people in sight are sitting on door thresholds, or kids circling aimlessly on bikes. Dogs and pigs rummage through trash. Even the few junk cars seem to crawl by, a few of them circled the run down relic of a fountain that may have once been some town square as if their only reason of running was to give their drivers a bit of a breeze. From Tilapa, we caught a Lancha to “Tilapita”, an island a short ways off shore, accessible only by maneuvering through the most enormous mangrove forest I have ever seen. It was like mangroves on steroids, like you would expect mangroves to look in Jurassic park, each of their roots that stick above the ground the size of normal mangrove trunks. If Tilapa was slow, Tilapita was dead. Creepy even. It looked like an abandoned beach neighborhood that looked like any normal neighborhood except that everything was sand. Fences and palm trees lined sand roads, walls surrounded houses forming sand yards. In most of the houses, the only separation of inside and outside were half-walls of cement and polls that held up tin and wood roofs. The sand continued right into the houses, which were generally furnished with hammocks strung in the structure. Our “cabin” was one of these half walled jobs, with the exception that there were 4 big beds covered in tarps. The cabin is in a little lot right next to water, behind a ‘hotel’ where we ate some of the best whole, fried fish that I have ever had. It was fantastic being on the beach again. It was hard to believe we were on the same planet we have been living in for the last 2 months, much less the same country. The waves were great, though with a funky color that potentially resembled red tide. The sand is volcanic, and in the sun, got hot enough that it mineaswell be lava as it scalded 3 layers of skin off yoru feet for every 4 seconds that you spent sprinting and screaming on it until reaching the relative safety of the intense surf. That night we had a bonfire from driftwood that we had collected. Joe’s day was made when he had to borrow a machete to chop it up…and then proceeded to use it to split open 2 dozen coconuts even though we had drunk and eaten our fill after 4. I love bonfires. Not even the insane heat and humidity of the evening could deter my sheer joy…or my craving for smores – of which I ate 4. We played my invented version of Apples to Apples for Jodi’s bachelorette activity. Wasn’t the most exciting in the world, but I was the only one who made an effort. I literally fell asleep sitting up by the fire, and we were all in bed at 11…like the crazy premeds that we all are. I was tempted to down some tequila for the sheer reason that it weighed me down for those 6 hours on the bus. The night was pretty unanimously wretched. 15 of us were set up like sardines on the beds, sweating DEET and ocean salt all over each other, each of us struggling with the two urges of bundling up against the storm of malaria and dengue ridden mosquitos and ripping all our covers and clothes off and roaring a guttural scream of pure, disgusting, sweaty misery. All of us practically ran away from our beds as soon as it was light enough to make it to the door. The chicken bus back was another 6 hours....this time we went through Reu and sat stationary, honking our horn for no apparent reason. Maybe to attract more riders to stack on the 2 men already piled on my lap, or maybe because the driver liked the sound fo the horn on our 1960’s school bus, complete with mint green paint coating the inside, reminding me of the inside of an antacid tablet. I spent at least 2 hours on the way home with Antinette entirely slumped into my lap sleeping. It really was just too many chicken buses in too short of a time. Friday was my first run on the Amigas project. Amigas is an organization who works with clinics and runs womens groups for empowerment and education around the highlands area. We are involved with a group in Chichi every Friday. The woman who works with them is an extraordinarily short Guatemalan woman. Which is saying something. She may come up to my belly button. The funny thing is that from far away, the women here don’t look THAT short. Because they are normal looking I think. I mean in the US, generally if you see people who are that short…we are talking just barely skimming into the low 4’s, they have some sort of disorder or deficiency. Here, they are perfectly proportional women, just in miniature. Plus they are all the same height, so from far away, they look like normal women. It isn’t until you get right up to them and their foreheads are almost exactly level with your sternum that you realize you have seen bigger 7 year olds. This particular little woman was great. She speaks fluent Spanish, htough her first language is Ki’che, so her speech si slow and deliberate enough that I could easily follow everything she said to me. After the 5 hour trek, we arrived at a tiny clinic just outside of Chichi, which consisted of a small cement building painted in murals showing not to go to the bathroom near streams and other public health messages. A dozen sheep were grazing in the yard, eating grass out from under a bran-spanking new ambulance that had been donated from the states almost a year ago. The gurney and other instruments inside still had bubble wrap around them. The woman said that they just had not found an occasion to use it yet. And no one in their clinic had the training to use most of the equipment in the rig. Ah, foreign aid. The women’s group was fantastic. So interesting to see not only what was being taught – from hand-washing technique to what ‘balanced diet’ means, but also how it was being taught: with a lot of the same games we have been using with young kids at the Primero Pasos clinic. Many of the women seemed to have about the same reactions, questions, and thought processes as the kids we have been teaching. It was also interesting that out of the small group of women, 3 of their kids had severe defects: 2 intense cleft pallets, and some crossed eyes. The indigenous populations generally have a much higher incidence of genetic diseases and defects across the board because of their long history of inbreeding. When you flee into remote, isolated communities first against the Spanish and then during the civil war, and the population pool shrinks that small, it is difficult to avoid. Now pile on top that those populations are still the ones with almost no access to any medical treatment, and you’ve got a pretty unhealthy population. The highlight of the day definitely came when the woman with 2 teeth in her mouth won the tooth-brushing contest, and won a piece of Holiday Inn hotel soap as a prize. I have never seen anyone so pleased. My mind immediately went to the almost obscene stash of hotel goodies under our bathroom sink at home….we could provide shower caps and conditioner to almost all of Chichi. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
3:53 pm	The end of an era I moved today. Thankfully, I got one last dose of unimaginable strangeness during the ordeal. I packed last night late and finished this morning. I tried to ease into the subject of the switch yesterday during lunch. For maybe the 100th time in the last 2 months, Esmeralda asked me how long I was going to be staying. I used the opportunity to say that I was considering changing families at some point just to experience something different, see more of the culture…etc. Her reaction: she dropped the metal spoon she was using to stir the canned soup onto the stove, where the open flame immediately started burning it, and turned to me in wide-eyed horror. She pointed at her chest “malo, malo, malo?” Are you kidding? I was torn between my final straw of disbelief that I possess after 2 months of this, and complete, absolute entertainment and satisfaction. It could not end any other way. It was the perfect complete circle. It was the final piece of evidence: someone like Esmeralda does actually exist on this planet, and she is indeed exactly as weird as I have come to believe. My new family is night and day different. For starters, there is a thankful dearth of porcelain figures, valentine's decorations, and stuffed animals. But beyond that, it is an actual, normal, human family. I live with my mom, Elena, and her two kids: Yoselfi, who is 13 and as far into the color pink and texting her friends as you can get, and Harvies, an 18 year old in school to be a computer programmer, and accordingly may spend 95 percent of his time awake at the computer - with occasional breaks for his nintendo system. The two kids are completely opposite. Yoselfi hardly ever shuts up. You have to literally pry words out of Harvies he is so shy, which he then mutters with an awkward look on his face. -I am also living with Kate, which is such a relief to be able to speak a little English before bed every night. It feels like the equivalent of being tucked in with a bedtime story about the Smurfs that dad always used to come up with. Our mom is who is about 40 and has sold gas as the sole family income since her husband died of cancer a couple years ago. Basically, she gets deliveries of propane-ish looking tanks into the big garage space in the bottom story of the house. At any given point, she has maybe 50 tanks in the area, which really makes me hope that Yoselfi, who is a rebel in her 13 years of age, doesn't decide to light up one of her ciggies in the house with her 18 year old boyfriend (whom our mom absolutely does not know about). I have my own room. With a real lock. And a few shelves to put my things. Noone is wearing my shoes when I am gone. I look forward to meal times, where we sit and talk about our days and laugh...instead of scarfing food so fast that I am taking hte next bite before I swallow the last one. And the food is pretty kickass - with some real variety. On my first night we had "tortas de papas", which are basically potatoes that are mashed mixed with 4 pounds of queso fresco, then molded into patties and fried. Basically everythign that McDonald's hash browns dream about being. At the same time, dinner every night is an egg, sometiems with beans. Somehow that combination keeps getting more and more delicious. Sometimes I get to make burritos with tortillas eggs and beans. SO good. Who would have thought. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
3:53 pm	Interviews: so far, and yet so close When I made the decision to apply to med school while I was in Guate, initially it didn't seem all that big of a deal, even a bit humorous. I figured, sure flights would be a bit more expensive, but people do it from out of the country all the time...I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Then it became a pain in the ass. Working on secondaries, writing about 'what satisfaction I expect to get out of practicing' or my strengths and weaknesses when I spent the entire rest of the day trying to learn and think in another language and working with TB patients. A pain in the ass, but doable...trucking to the couple of wireless internet cafes every afternoon, my 4 year old laptop which weighs a metric ton clutched to my chest under an umbrella during the daily torrential rains. I've even gotten to drink some kickass coffee while I've done it. Yesterday I got my first two interview invitations. Well, here is that bridge to cross, and suddenly it not so doable and definitely not so humorous. I am here, they are there, and they are asking me to pick out of a handful of dates in November or some other obscenely distant time period to come to chat. Here, there are an infinite number of things that could happen this afternoon, not to mention the 2 months in between now and Thanksgiving. Here, you can't even guestimate what time you would be arriving in the capital after a 4 hour bus ride to the nearest 5 hours. Trying to predict and nail down inflexible dates 3 months in advance is just laughable. It reminds of me of that scene from Apollo 13 when the newscasters said 'if you hold this basketball and tennis ball 15 feet apart, the astronauts will have to hit a target as wide as this sheet of paper'... I am wondering what exactly was running through my motivated little mind when I decided to plow forward with this process. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007
12:54 pm	A week in the Green House Today is Kate’s Birthday!! I spent last night watching CNN and making her a crown by cutting up a folder and coloring it with markers that were so thin tipped that it took almost 3 hours to color it in. But as long as Anderson Cooper is with me, I am a happy camper. Her arm is in a sling after the xrays yesterday apparently showed 3 hairline fractures in her shoulder from getting hit by the chicken bus. She is still insisting on dancing tonight…what a trooper. On a different note, it finally happened: I have bedbugs. But I don’t have any real reaction to the bites, they don’t itch for me, and plus, I generally fall asleep so fast that I can get to sleep before I start to feel them crawling. It is perfect for me. Almost everyone has them at this point. Molly is freaking out about them, not so surprising. My teacher didn’t help the situation. Today we moved inside during class because it was freezing out in the garden, and sat at the same table as Molly and her teacher, where my teacher proceeded to tell Molly that she did not have bed bugs, but rather some bug that lives inside your skin….i think she was describing Scabies. But she doesn’t have Scabies. My teacher just likes to say things like that like they are absolute God-given facts of life. Yesterday she told me that global warming was happening because we were using all the petroleum up from the ground – which normally acts as a buffer between the heat of the earth’s core and the atmosphere. She has informed me of great things like this all week: that your spleen is the source of all your blood in your body, that there are so many earthquakes right now because of population growth, and the people in India are so poor because they don’t work very hard to change their situation. I’ve taken to just nodding and acting interested….otherwise we never actually get to learning anything new. But we did learn today that we had the wrong word for bedbugs before. We had been saying pulgas before, which is just fleas, which is what Lauren has. The real word is acobas…at least I think so. Es bueno saberlo. I am super psyched to change houses this weekend. I am glad that I had this extra week to fully realize the extreme weirdness of my house. For example, someone has been wearing my sneakers while I am gone from the house. I noticed at first that my laces were untied sometimes. I never untie my laces, I am a shoe slipper on and offer. But I figured that maybe they just came untied while my mom came in and obsessively cleaned the floors everyday. Then this morning when I went to put them on, they were retied, single-knotted, way looser than I ever wear my shoes. Hmm. Maybe it was the fat boy who has appeared recently in the house. I don’t know how he fits into the weirdness, but honestly he is the Guatemalan doppelganger to Dudley in Harry Potter. He is a 13ish year old who is wider than he is tall, wanders around the kitchen looking for food with his constantly moist lips hung open, literally constantly clutching his gameboy. I was first entroduced to Guate Dudley when Esmeralda scurried into the kitchen while I was eating my heated-up dinner alone, muttering and gesturing “bufanda, bufanda, bufanda”. . (scarf, scarf, scarf) She has the habit of not only speaking in one-word phrases, but also repeating them in sets of 3. maybe it’s a tick, like the people who can only sneeze in 3s. I was tired and cranky, and determined not to play in her game of mono-word charades. “Bufanda QUE?” “Bufanda tienes?” (do you have a scarf)… yes, of course I have a scarf, you know this because you spend quite a bit of time in my room each day and they are hanging on the wall. “Si, por que?” …and so the conversation went…me eeking one additional word out of her at a time. After a painful period of time, I got her to tell me that she needs one, and then she repeated “moto” a dozen times. So fine, I’ll lend her a scarf. After I retrieved a scarf, she calls the Guate Dudley into the room, proceeds to wrap him up in it, giggling. I am in my normal state of general disbelief that I keep in that house. He makes a remark about the purple color, she unwraps him, and hands me back the scarf. The Dudley slumps out of the room without so much as a glance in my direction, and Esmeralda scurries behind him. So yesterday I actually stayed home after lunch to crank out some secondary essays. Normally I am gone all afternoon until dinner. I have a lock on my door, but since I share the room with Esmeralda, she has a key and just leaves it sitting in the kitchen right outside my room. As I was sitting on my bed, typing away, Guatemalan Dudley unlocks the door, open-mouthed equipped with his Gameboy, and casually starts to stroll into the room as if it was his normal afternoon activity…who knows, to play with my computer, rummage through my suitcase, try on my shoes or maybe all my clothes. He jumped when he saw that I was home, muttered a quick excuse me, and backed out of the room, probably to return to rummaging in the fridge. So weird. Today I got home from a hike a bit early. I was walking towards my room when my mom swooped around me to block the door, giggling and holding her arms up to her chest in her normal odd stance. “Un momento, un momento, un momento…mi padre, mi padre, mi padre” and she gestures that her dad is sleeping in my room So my host grandfather, whom I had never met, was actually napping in my bed. When the other rooms were open – not that that particularly matters, it would be weird regardless. I messed around in the kitchen for a little while, until he came out of my room, bleary eyed, shuffled right past me without a word or eye contact, and left through the front door. Somehow, I was not even mildly shocked. Somehow, in that house, things like have become almost reassuring…they help create the consistency and familiarity of weirdness. Each time it happens it just solidifies this alternate universe that is Esmeralda’s household, until it is almost a reality. What am I going to write about when I move? (Comment on this)
Monday, August 20th, 2007
12:21 pm	The biker A couple of days ago, I was walking home late with Jodi and Stephanie when we saw a Guatemalan man stumble out of one of the cantinas on 8th Avenida, so drunk that he slumped over like he was trying to go to sleep as he made his way over to his parked bike outside. Then proceeded to try and ride it down the street. We got a safe 20 paces up the road and then couldn’t resist just stopping to watch the spectacle. It was a train wreck in progress, simultaneously so hilarious and so mortifying that it was impossible to look away. After some intense effort, he managed to get his leg over the bike and teetered maybe 3 or 4 feet before crashing back into the curb and rolling off onto the sidewalk. This process repeated maybe 6 or 7 times over the next 10 minutes as he moved down the street. The scary part was when he managed to stay on the bike for a good 20 seconds and built up speed. The next crash into a lamppost was a bit more horrifying. We decided to watch for just enough more time to make sure he got up, and then were afraid to keep it up…nobody wanted to watch him turn the corner and get plowed into by a car. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
12:10 pm	Chichicastenango In the US I usually consider the trip down the Verteran’s expressway too far of a journey for shopping. So how I found myself on a 4 hour chickenbus ride to do it is beyond me. Though granted, shopping at Chichicastenango, the biggest market at Guatemala, is infinitely more entertaining than perusing Hollister with other tweens. (the vast majority of the cities in the area end in "tenango" which means "land of", so usually you just leave it off...so it's just Chichi, or Momos, or Huehue) The scale of the place is pretty spectacular. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of vendors come to Chichi every Sunday, selling everything ranging from purses, traditional traje, antique masks, not-so antique masks, hammocks, everything you could imagine wool being made into (including robberesque ski masks….never figured that one out), and oh so much street food. The stalls turned the streets into intense mazes of tarp that you practically need to drop trails of tortilla bits to find your way out of. And since it is high tourist season right now, the place was absolutely teeming with white people, and the North Face that they are toting...it was the tourist group that we had avoided so far. The girls with enormous sunglasses and shiny lips, sporting tiny white wife-beater tank-tops and loudly bargaining with shop-keepers in English – and in dollars. It was gross. And hilarious. The fun was never ending. Bargaining here is not quiet as interactive and violent as in China, but more fun because we can actually speak Spanish. As we walked up to a stall, the vendors usually looked us over and quoted us in broken English some obscenely high price… “300 quetzales”. We would just laugh, to which they replied “quetzales, not dolares”. Once we started talking to them, they were usually pretty shocked. I let Kate do most of the talking, who is pretty close to fluent. They would drop quickly, maybe to something around 40 Q, and as we were putting our find in our bags, a balding man would come up and pay 400 Q for it, with a little sheepish grin on his face as he did the conversion to USD in his head. My favorite moment of the day was when I was getting some cool carved plates with Mayan figures on them, and the sales-kid told me that it was obscenely expensive because it was over 400 years old…meanwhile the stall next door sold the exact same plates. We joked with him about it so mercilessly that he let us walk away with it for almost nothing. I bought two wool, hand-made beanies. One of them has llamas on it. Yes. At the end of the day I ate street tortillas stuffed with beans that looked so old they literally just looked like ash stuffed inside. But I was so hungry that I had eaten 3 of them before taking a good look (broke the first 3 rules of street food, damnit: look before you eat, smell before you eat, and assess whether it is worth the potential ensuing days of pain and misery). Only thing to do now is wait… The way home was without a doubt the worst chicken bus ride I have had. At least in part because Kate got hit by the chicken bus. Literally. Well, clipped is a more accurate term. We were all standing in a crowd, waiting for buses, when one came barreling from behind her and at full speed rammed into her left arm and shoulder, launching her forward. It looked and sounded awful. A couple of the money-takers hopped off the bus and just shoved her on saying that she was alright. It all happened so fast…For over 2 hours we all stood crushed together in the back of the bus, Kate groaning as we all clung to the overhead rails in the careening bus. There was no room to get my feet under me, so I basically hung from the ceiling for 2 hours. When I finally let go near Xela, I couldn’t straighten out my blackened and bloodless fingers for quite a few minutes. To top it off there was a drunk man half-cheeking it on the seat I was standing next to, who kept falling into a comatose sleep, and my body was the only thing preventing him from slumping to the floor of the bus. All in all, an experience that I am not anxious to repeat…no matter how amazing my llama-beanie may be. Kate goes for Xrays tomorrow. I am grateful because in all reality she probably just saved my life. I had come to completely ignore buses as they roar inches past you...thinking that it was just impossible for them to actually make contact. I should buy her a drink for that. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
7:00 pm	Aerobics Class There are aerobics classes in a gym near central park. A teacher at our school goes to them every morning and told us about it. Aerobics classes in the US are entertaining enough, I couldn’t even imagine it here. I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t disappointed. The gym is on the second story of a building right next to PocoLocos, so the ‘night before’ stench hangs thick and hundreds of beer bottles are stacked in crates along the stairs and wall leading to the door. The gym is exactly what you would expect: a few benches with various amounts of rust and ripped padding, some scattered dumbbells that inevitably have no partner of equal weight, and some really fun machines that serve no discernible purpose other than to take up space (most of those are conveniently located under the major leaks in the roof). On one side of the room is an open space where the concrete has been covered with a workout floor that one can imagine was once flat and maybe even shiny, but now looks like a variety of cardboard boxes tacked to the floor. The classes start promptly at 6am. The radio speakers located at head-level on one side of the floor erupt with Raggaeton that is so frenzied and loud it makes my hair stand on end. It is not motivation for exercise as much as seizure inducing. Fittingly, there was no warmup…rather a sudden tornado of movement that can only be described as something of a combination of a jumping jack and uppercut. Ty Bo gone wrong. But I jumped right in, if for no other reason than pure fear of fierce looking Guatemalan woman that was doing the Uppercut jumping jack as if it was her last action on this earth. This continues without cessation for the next hour. Most of the seams in the floor are mismatched by at least 2 inches, which adds a sense of excitement and danger to the already humanly impossible workout moves….not only will you look like a sweaty, uncoordinated, utterly ridiculous gringa when you do this, you may also break your ankle. The best part is that the class is full of 20 or so Guatemalan woman who are a good 4 inches shorter than all of us and 50 pounds heavier….and who PERFECTLY keep up with the whole routine. So there we are, these white, enormous bean poles, doing exactly the wrong movements and then laughing about it till we piss ourselves in the back corner of the class. There is one small mirror in the front, and whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in the whole situation the hilarity of it threw my focus and I spent at least the rest of the song awkwardly trying to get back in step. I guess the saddest thing was that I managed to be insanely sore afterwards. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
6:03 pm	Homemade chocolate and Primeros Pasos The last 2 days have been pretty intense. We had training at Primeros Pasos from 8 – 1, run home to stuff tortillas down our throats, class from 2 – 6, and then respective discussions and conferences. Basically have gotten through the days fuelled by an unimaginable amount of chocolate from the batch that we made last week with Suri that is now hardened. During the chocolate class, we did the whole shindig from buying whole cocoa beans, toasting them, shelling them, grinding them, adding 4 pounds of sugar for every pound of beans (no kidding), and adding water. Mama Chayita made the mistake of showing us where the stash was hidden under the cabinet with all the glasses and I have not been able to stop. Seriously, it is a sickness. Bascially tastes like a dark chocolate flavored sugar cube. Hit a low when I dipped it into my hot chocolate (which is made by dissolving the hard chocolate in boiling milk) until it was almost dissolving and then ate it. I have a problem. But so good. Primeros Pasos is a clinic and NGO in a valley in the outskirts of Xela. It serves 10 communities/municipals that really have no access to care even though they are still in the district of Xela. It is a 20 minute chicken bus ride that we catch from a big yellow church in zona 3. For a free clinic it is incredibly clean and kept up. It has multiple rooms for examinations, a fully functional lab, a big room for education, and a screened in porch for all the mothers and children waiting to be seen. The rooms are all painted bright colors and the floors are well washed cement. They are the only clinic in the area that has a doctor every day, in addition to the volunteers and med students from the US that rotate through. Their main target is the kids in the area, and they pay to bus in kids from different schools for checkups twice a year. Today they had 3rd graders from their farthest school. Kids swarmed the place, demanding toothbrushes and pestering the volunteers. All their funding comes from private donations. A lot of their budget goes to the education programs that we will be teaching. They have pretty extensive curriculums that volunteers go out to the 10 schools each week and teach….on topics from nutrition, to sanitation and hygiene, puberty, domestic violence, to natural disasters…each geared towards a different grade of kids. Today we listened to Carlos and Jessica, two of the coordinators, give us example workshops all day in Spanish. Other than concentrating on the severe discomfort of the little wooden bench for 4 hours, I was torn between excitement that I could actually understand their lessons on parasites meant for 2nd graders, and mortification that I would be expected to teach it in a very short period of time. Though I am looking forward to the opportunity of getting to dress up in the parasite costume in one of the lessons. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
5:28 pm	The weekend: mayonnaise, lake placid, and good will hot dogs This was a pretty intense weekend – somehow down here I end up waking up even earlier on Sat and Sun than I do during the week. Right now I am sitting on my bed with the sound of rain on the tin roof and my favorite scene from Notting Hill playing on the TV. I couldn’t wait any longer for Esmeralda to appear and feed me something I didn’t particularly want, so I am content with 3 tortillas and her famous concoction of refried beans with at least a half cup of mayonnaise in my belly. Today I discovered thick tortillas in the kitchen – not that machine press crap that she gets next door. There is a God. The lack of spices is really incredible here. Most people don't use any. They only flavor their food with mayonnaise, oil, butter, and occasionally half a ketchup bottle or so. It is a constant battle to assure Esmeralda that after she BOILS my plantains in oil, that they do not actually need a topper of mayonnaise. Mmmm. Carolyn where are you? Thurs night we went out to Bajo Café Luna for some cheap wine. Bajo Luna is a little creepy, a dark place with low ceilings and haloweeny decorations, including an enormous ceramic statue of an owl for tips. Kate’s mom and sister came out with us, which was great first because they are awesome people, and second because it forced us all to speak Spanish most of the time. We are long past the supposed mark where we should be predominantly speaking Spanish within the group, but it is just not really happening. It is so hard to force yourself to struggle through basic conversation when you can shoot the shit without any thought in another language. Saturday we met at the school at 6:30 to leave for the hike at Chicabal. We scrounged up a micro to take us, which was a nice break from the usual chicken buses, though none less crowded. At least in micros when you have other humans smeared up against you they are your friends. Plus you don’t have to guard your stuff. Chicabal is about 45 minutes outside of Xela…the only thing remarkable about the ride is that you pass through a town with a big cemetery where all the graves and headstones are painted a rainbow of bright colors. I couldn’t decide if it was creepier than the usual creepy all-gray cemeteries, until I realized it reminded me of an enormous jungle-gym, then it was freaky. The hike was good, you climb over some mountains and then descend into the crater of what once was a big volcano and now is a sacred lake. Sacred because of some legend about a female spirit there (didn’t catch it all, some dude told me in wicked fast Spanish)…but the take home is that there is no swimming or drinking of the water. Well, drinking never even blipped on the ‘any desire to do’ radar, and after taking one look at the place, swimming there was probably one of the last things I would consider doing on this earth. The slopes of the crater were covered in thick forests and a layer of intense mist and cloud streamed over the mountains and swirled down to touched the water before lifting and starting over. It was Lord of the Rings. Or a horror movie. But either way, there was no way you could set a toe in that water without the alligator from “Lake Placid” immediately catapulting out, swallowing you whole, and slipping back under without so much as a ripple in the eerie black surface. Today I went on the PEILE diagnostic in a rural community outside of Xela. PEILE is an NGO here that will be my main volunteer project. Their main area of work is education: both within Xela and building schools etc outside. But they do a little of everything – basically, they actually try and give communities what they want…whether that is a new school or in this case speed bumps on the highway that cuts through their town. Shocking. This morning met Ruth in the park a little before 6. Unfortunately we were the only ones there. Didn’t actually end up leaving until 6:45, when Alerrio pulled his oversized green pickup around Central Park. After an hour or so of stops at both the PEILE offices, we were off – for a good hour and a half of roads full of speed bumps that Alerrio refused to slow down for, the whole time with his stories about everything and anything. The town is about an hour outside Xela, a small farming community where the soil is just good enough to sustain a bit of corn, but not good enough to feed the average family with 9 kids. We had the town meeting in their old church that has been converted into a school. It was a surprisingly solid structure – other than the windows needing some glass, and the roof leaking. I internally noted that there was probably zero chance that they would actually get funded for a bigger school when this one was a comparative palace – complete with actual desks and chairs and drawings of astronauts and healthy foods on the walls. The real problem is just an issue of the space and number of teachers: the two teachers generally just divide the room up in half and teach 60 or so kids from grades kindergarten to 3rd grade on one side, and the 40 or so 4h grade and above on the other. Trying to teach a 6 year old to spell his name and a 10 year old arithmetic at once has its challenges. But more pressing is the fact that there are no latrines for the teachers or students. Teachers have the hardest time getting their dozens of kindergarteners to bury their poo. But being their for the whole meeting was incredible. It was basically just like taking a 4 hour seminar on exactly what community organizing should look like – speaking about what is important to them, what they need. After word got out that there were young extranjeros there the meeting slowly grew, and it was at times a bit awkward to have 50 people all staring at you as you tried to keep up with rapid-fire arguments about whether a public health center was more important than drainage problems…but as a whole pretty inspiring. I am looking forward to being a part of it, in whatever way I can help. They even cooked us lunch of fried hot dog pieces and “coffee” that was really just sugar with enough water in it to make it liquid, and enough coffee in it to tint it brown. Ah, the real Guatemalan coffee. And you thought you knew when you bought your Starbucks blend. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
5:24 pm	I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me. Last night I was asleep by 8:45. Great, even by my standards here. And that was with an hour nap yesterday. I don’t know if it’s the altitude, or using every one of my functioning brain cells to figure out what my mom is asking me, or just me taking advantage of limitless possibilities for sleep. Thank god for my earplugs. At night it is usually a competition between the screaming 7 month old and the two boys playing hide and seek, conversations at the table which is right outside my room. Then we switch to mom playing Christian Rock throughout the house, and Pedro drifting off to sleep to Reggaeton which vibrates our common wall. In the morning it is Perro’s incessant barking combined with mom’s cooking at 6. Though I do love waking up in the morning to the smell of frying plantanos and frijoles molito…reminds me of the office but with no danger of frying my foot on a George Forman grill. Went to the Traje museum yesterday after class. Traje is the name of the traditional dress of the Mayan people that is still worn by many of the indigena here. The museum was in a dilapidated and creepy train station that had only functioned for 3 years in the 30s – afterwhich they realized that most of their track had been destroyed by the brutal rainy seasons here. So now it has been converted to a museum documenting the 200 different kinds of traditional dress. There are 20 different languages that are still spoken today, and therefore 20 preserved groups that each have specific patterns and colors in their traje. I was so surprised at how many people still wear the traje here when I got here, and now I have a bit more appreciation for the nuances (before it looked like wrapping yourself in as many colors and ridiculous patterns you could)…though traipsing around that creepytown with school art projects as the main decoration was a bit much. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 5th, 2007
5:14 pm	Super Goats Today there was a big artisans market in parque central because it is the first Sunday of the month. Good fun…little stalls come and line perimeter of the park, containing more scary Jesus pictures than I cared to see in a lifetime. Yesterday was a great Saturday. I met Katy and Elise in the park at 730 to go rock climbing with the Xela climbing team – which actually turned out to be two 15 and 19 year old boys who were forced by their coordinator to take us to the walls instead of the Santa Maria volcano hike that the others went on. They were great though, I met the first Guatemalan male who likes to read and we talked about Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings for most of the time. Alvaro, the older one, is a wicked good climber, and recently placed 3rd in some national competition. Though to be honest, climbing is not exactly popular here, so I don’t know what the competition could be like. The outdoor walls are close to Muella, where we climbed that first weekend. It was amazing. I had only ever been climbing indoors, and it is not even comparable. The walls are all volcanic rock, which means great grip, but for little pansy uncalloused hands like mine, that also meant instant shredding. Can’t wait to go back…after my fingers regrow their fingerprints that were scraped off on those jagged hell rocks. Super Chivos Sat night we ate dinner at Sabor again….mmmm chickpeas. After we discovered that the 2 bottles of wine we bought had a 20 Q opening fee, Mujdeh used Erin’s chapstick to push in the cork and we drank from the bottles and stashed them under the table whenever the waitress happened by. Nothing but class. Turned out alright, because shockingly, they don’t sell any alcohol at the Xelaju games. Though after 10 minutes at the game, I decided that the prohibition was probably the best idea that has ever come to fruition. The fans are nuts. Like not fanatic nuts like at a Red Sox game, but nuts like have fits that look like epilepsy every time the ball enters within 50 feet of the goal. Nuts like it was a miracle that my hair didn’t catch on fire when every person in the stadium shot off fireworks when the team took the field…most of which weren’t properly aimed and showered sparks down on the front rows of fans and the field (we had wondered why people were spread out with fire extinguishers at the start). Nuts like a team of police holding riot shields escorted the refs on and off the field like a moving Pope-mobile. Nuts like every one of their chants rang with vulgarity like their chant ‘hijos de puta, su madre su madre, hijos de puta’. It was fantastic…I am just quite sure it didn’t need Gallo beer fueling it. Last year, Xela won the national championship, which apparently isn’t all that relatively amazing because Guatemala is known for crappy soccer. But don’t tell that to the lunatics fans of the Super Goats. Seriously, we are the Xela Super Goats "Super Chivos". Somehow it makes it all even better. And last night we played our archrivals: the Guatemala City ‘Cremas’…the super goats vs. the creams. Sounds like an epic battle if I’ve ever heard of one. In actuality, a bit of a let down of sitting under spitting rain for a couple hours huddled under torn up trash bags that vendors make you pay for to come to a scoreless game. With wet clothes and numb butts and fingers we trudged home with super chivo chants ringing in our ears. (Comment on this)