We're back! Seven weeks in Guatemala and I find it hard to explain what kind of trip this has been. At times very challenging and at others incredibly rewarding, but a trip full of amazing experiences and great friends. What follows is an attempt to break it down with out getting bogged down in details. Please visit my Flickr page to see more photos from the trip and I've posted a quick video above (click here for the full screen version on You Tube) containing ph
otos and footage from the trip set to No Basta Rezar (It's Not Enough To Pray), a great song about the regions disturbing past and persistent troubles. Of course there's way too much to tell here, but I'll do what I can. Tuesday May 19th.
We arrive in Guatemala City and spend two nights at
Dos Lunas, a comfortable and friendly hostel in a heavily gu
arded secure neighborhood. We would get used to seeing guys with
giant shotguns everywhere we went. Private security guards outnumber
national police by a ridiculous margin. While in
La Capital we visited El Museo Del Ferrocarril (Museum of the train) where we saw a great
exhibit about the country's racial, political
and social history,
something most Guatemalans are still afraid to talk about publicly.
Thursday May 21st
Sister Dani of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ
(the same order that founded Newman U) picked us up at Dos Lunas and off we went to La Labor, a small village in a rural area about 45 minutes outside of La Capital, where their health and outreach projects are based. As soon as we arrived we were handed over to our host families where we would live for the coming week. Sue stayed in the convent's guest house with Sonja (our fearless leader) but I was taken in by Hector and Lucina who lived around the corner
from the church and convent. This was just a
coincidence, but they turned out to be a very talented musical family. Hector builds his own musical instruments: guitar, mandolin, double-bass, and marimba, and though he was modest, he sings and plays beautifully. We spent the week doing volunteer work every morning and afternoon, going back to our families for meals three times a day. The work
included building a latrine for an elderly pair of indigenous Quiche Mayan women, who were very poor (one of them didn't speak Spanish, only Mayan). Other tasks involved visiting schools in the area to teach English, education
about dental and nutritional health and generally having a ball with the kids. Most memorable moment for me was being swarmed by the children in one of the school yards and being drafted into a riotous (and sweaty) game of futbol. Another great moment was being serenaded by my host dad and
entire family the night of my birthday, a total
surprise!
Thursday, May 28th
After a week bonding with the incredible community in La Labor, Oscar, the driver for PLQ which is the language school where we would be studying in Xela, and who is one of
many incredibly cool friends we made while in-country, picked us up and drove us to Santiago Atitlan, a beautiful city up in the mountains on the shores of a gorgeous lake. Our bus had a few problems getting up those steep inclines and a three or four hour drive took us over eight hours, which meant we were still on the
road after night fall, not an ideal situation. But we made it, and unfortunately for me, I was one of many who'd contracted stomach critters (to use the scientific name) in La Labor and by the
time we reached the comfortable resort overlooking the lake, I was having a hard time of things. The group took a launch across the lake
to the somewhat more touristy Panajachel and, later that day visited the church of Stanley Rother, the Oklahoman priest who was assassinated by a right-wing death squad for trying to help poor people. A
common story in that country. I missed out on of the trips, but I got to visit the small hospital (hospitalito) that Father Rother founded years before and even had the privilege of being treated there! Don't worry, everything turned out fine.
Monday, May 31st
We spent four days in Santiago Atitlan, a beautiful place for me to
recuperate,, afterwhich Oscar returned, with his bus fixed up a bit since our last adventure and took us further up into the mountains to Quetzaltenago, better known by locals as Xela. The second largest city in Guatemala, Xela is also home to many language school. PLQ (Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco) is one of the oldest and most respected of the schools and their program offers
many opportunities to learn about the countries history, the social and political situation, not just the Spanish language. Again, we were handed over to host families, this time for five weeks, and Sue and I
were able to stay with the same family this time. Mariza, used to run a Comedor (eatery) and really knew how to cook. We ate well. The children, 11 year old son Elton, and 9 year old daughter Zuye were a lot of fun and we enjoyed talking, playing and joking around with them. Father Gorge worked a lot and wasn't home too often but he was also fun to be around. He'd lived in the us and was thrilled to have an English Profesora living under his roof. Watching him struggle, I had a deeper appreciation
for how difficult English pronunciation and spelling is. As in La Labor, our families provided us with three meals a day. Each morning we walked to PLQ and studied for five hours. We rotated teachers each week so we could get used to different accents and teaching styles.
Every afternoon there were activities sponsored by the school. We visited nearby Mayan communities and even got to witness religions ceremonies. We attended conferences where we met and heard the stories of former guerilla fighters and survivors of the government's repression. We watched documentaries and films as well. It was an intense experience that was at times hard to take, but we
learned more than we ever could have otherwise about the country and its people and why they have the problems that they do. Every Friday night the school had a
graduation celebration for all the students who were leaving that week
and we sang songs and eat good food and danced. I have to say that the teachers at PLQ are some of the funnest
bunch of people I've gotten to hang out with. We were sad to leave.
Sunday, July 6th.
Five weeks was long enough to get used to a city, and more than that, long enough to become attached to a place and its people. It was an emotion experience saying good by as we loaded up Oscar's microbus to begin our next and final adventure in Guatemala. We returned to Guatemala City that day and checked back into Dos Lunas. At stupid'o'clock the following morning, we
boarded a small aircraft for the flight up to Peten, the hot and humid jungle region of northern Guatemala to visit the Mayan ruins at Tikal. The weather had been rather cold in Xela, with it's high altitude. but at Tikal we were fixin' to sweat our asses off. We took a bus to the Tikal Inn, a nice hotel just outside of the park and that
morning, took our tour. The ruins at Tikal are amazing. The site is huge and though it is totally overrun by jungle now (many of the yet-to-be-excavated ruins just look like hills), it was once a teeming city, covering sixteen square kilometers. As you walk through the park, the landscape appears to be undulating and hilly but it's in fact mostly the handy work of
the Mayans, who built massive platforms on which to construct their pyramids and temples and deep reservoirs for gathering rainwater
(since there were no springs or rivers in the area). We climbed several of the pyramids who's tops peer out over the canopy, perfectly laid out according to their calender and the movements of the sun and moon. The entire site is planned down to the most fine details. It was truly awe-inspiring. And did I mention it was sweaty? The following
morning we strapped ourselves into harnesses, climbed up into the
trees and flew through the canopy on precarious cables strung between distant platforms. Yes, it was crazy, maybe we'd had too much to drink at the hotel. But dang was it fun, and I'd do it again. Then it was back onto the plane for our flight back to the Capital.
Wednesday July 8th
This should have been the end of our journey, a day of connecting flights back to Wichita. But then Northwestern canceled our flight from Memphis and put us up in a Marriott and paid for room service. So, we made the most of things, heading downtown and visiting the Civil Rights Museum in the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr was shot, and having lunch on Beale Street, where there seemed to be a live band in every establishment, even on a boring Thursday afternoon. Memphis is a cool city and our brief visit was just a teaser, I'm sure we'll be back someday to experience it all.
Guatemala is a very poor country with a lot of social and political problems. And yet, as little as the people have, I was amazed time and again by the generosity and warmness of the people. A perfect example is the two old Quiche women for whom we had built the latrine. They lived in a corrugated little shack of a house perched on a hillside where the water runs through when it rains. They have almost nothing and are both old and their health is failing. And yet, when we'd completed the latrine, they gave us a gift of two dozen eggs, a small fortune. Guatemala is overflowing with selfless generosity like that. It's hard to put into words how that makes you feel.
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