Dear All,

It’s hard to believe we’ve been back in the US for a month now; in a lot of ways, it still feels to me like we just got here. We’ve been enjoying copious amounts of time with our friends and families and taking advantage of wonderful inventions like hot showers, flush toilets, and freezers that turn Michigan blueberries into sweet little icy treats for us to devour. I’m a little surprised we haven’t turned blue.

We returned to the states with a number of ambitious plans that began to fall apart before we even landed. Fletch had a fever starting the night before we boarded the plane, and it didn’t go away for five days. We spent those days just laying around his parents house waiting for him to recuperate, and in that time we realized how unbelievably tired we were. We’d planned so many things–family and friend visits, a two and a half week road trip to the west coast and back, a trip to Europe and then the move to Oregon scheduled for October. Forced relaxation felt good on one hand, but made me so anxious about the time I was wasting not visiting people. I would sit and try to plan the road trip only to feel irritated and upset. The truth was we weren’t ready to go anywhere. We decided to cancel the road trip, and then we canceled our attendance at a friends wedding in Utah over Labor Day weekend, and once we started canceling things, it felt so good that we completely canceled this year’s trip to Europe.
It’s funny to realize how all these plans were so instrumental in helping us get through our last few crazy months as Peace Corps volunteers. They gave us something to look forward to at the time, but once we arrived home we realized we didn’t need an escape anymore. Every day we spend with our parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and close friends is full of a million enjoyable things we spent two years living without. We don’t need to escape anywhere. It’s been good staying right here close to home.
I think the most difficult part of being back is reconciling this life with our lives in Guatemala. I haven’t really been able to do that; they’re like living on two different planets. I feel more comfortable not thinking too much about Guatemala, or it makes my heart and my head hurt. We’ve talked to our host family in Temux a few times, but the phone is such an awkward, inadequate thing between us while navigating the multiple languages and space and time. It was always so easy just to pop over and say good morning or good afternoon. For the time being, looking forward feels like the right thing to do.
Instead of running around on multiple vacations living a life in flux we’re working on ways to start a more permanent life. In the last month we did make a short trip to Oregon to set up our residency there, to visit dear friends, and to follow up on some leads of people who might be able to help us with our ultimate goal of starting a farm. The trip was more than we’d hoped for on all fronts. Time with friends was great, and the connections we’ve made with organizations working on food security in the area are very promising. With the arrival of September, though I would say we aren’t fully adjusted to being in the states yet, we’re trying to focus more on making our farm dream a reality. Job searches are underway. Piles of books are being mulled through for information and advice. We feel fortunate, hopeful, and very happy to be right where we are.
Those feelings were part of what led me to do Peace Corps in the first place, to give back in this life that has given me so much. Literally two days after I arrived home my sister said, “Emily, I’ve signed up as team captain for Pedal for Peace to raise money for girls’ education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You’re either bicycling with me or donating money!” We are a bossy bunch. It’s so comforting to know there are quite a few things that didn’t change in our absence.
Fletch and I thought our blog readers might be interested in an update on our lives, and because you’re all a very global thinking bunch, we wanted to make you aware of this little opportunity to donate to yet another good cause. All the money raised in the Pedal for Peace bike-athon will be donated to the Central Asia Institute, founded by Greg Mortenson. For more information on the Mortenson click on his name, or for more in-depth information read the New York Time’s best-seller Three Cups of Tea.

(We’re accepting donations via PayPal just like when we were in Guatemala, as well as cash/check for any of you who live in Indiana or like to use the US Postal system. We also are going to try a little PayPal donate button, for those of you who want things to be “easy” like the Office Depot commercials. You can use it, but it takes 30 cents out of the donation to give to PayPal. If you think “easy” is worth 30 cents, feel free to give it a try.  -Jaime)

Guatemala made me understand how instrumental girls education is in building productive communities throughout the world. Your donations would be greatly appreciated, not just by me, but by the girls and young women who are the beneficiaries of the project. As little as $5 goes a long way. All donations must be collected by September 25, the bike-athon will take place October 2 at the velodrome in Indianapolis, Indiana. I’ll be there racing alongside my brothers and sisters. It’s so good to be home!

Thanks for your time. We hope you’re all doing well!
Best,
Emily and Jaime/Jim/Fletch Fanjoy

So, anyways, we’re back home after our 27 months of Peace Corps service.

I guess this is it.

Goodbye.

But I have a few things that I want to say before I go. First, the administrative stuff: as I have promised, this blog is now done. I used to think that blogging was a vain and self-important activity, the domain of angst-ridden emo teenagers and obsessive new parents. I have since discovered (largely due to you, the reader) that it can be a powerful tool for disseminating knowledge, opening discourse, and making a difference in the world. Our blog was a fortunate confluence of the right place, the right time, and the right subject matter. Now that our Peace Corps service is over, I will be returning to a more private life– a life that would be both vain to write about, and boring to read about.

Having said that, though, I realize the how important this blog was to not only Emily and me, but also to our villagers and our regular readers, both of whom I will miss very much. It is my plan to lock the comments and user registration functions after a few weeks, then leave the blog online permanently as a resource for anyone who wants to learn about the Peace Corps and Mayan culture.

And us? We have a life to get back to. After spending a few weeks traveling around the country in our pickup, visiting friends and family, we’re going to take a long-overdue trip to the UK to pay visits to several friends. Emily showed me where she studied in Spain, so I have to return the favor and take her to where I studied in Scotland. In the fall, once we’ve reacquainted ourselves with our long-lost loved ones, we are moving to Oregon, where we are going to start a small-scale agribusiness. To keep ourselves afloat while that ramps up, Emily is going to start grad school and I will start looking for freelance architecture jobs again. Oh, and I’m going to start constructing an airplane in the evenings. Living in the mountains for two years builds up a lot of unrealized energy, so I guess we’ve got to release it somehow.

We’ve received a lot of encouragement to write a book when we return to the US, and I think that we are interested in doing that. It will be more than just proofreading and reformatting the blog then sending it to the printer: Emily has several journals filled with notes and commentary that she wants to pull from, and we have many posts that never “went live” because we couldn’t publish them. Discussions of politically-charged themes, specific locations of volunteer sites and activities, or accounts of things that happened to us that would unnecessarily worry our family members can now be included, allowing us to tell our story more completely. I want to do some more illustrations, including some maps of the places we visited. I imagine it will take a year or so for us to come to terms with our Peace Corps service, organize our thoughts, and do all the work necessary to get the book to print. If you’d like to be on the mailing list to receive notification when we finish, please send me an email and I will add you. And don’t worry, I won’t send your email address to anyone else. If you don’t know my email but want to be on the list, post a comment at the bottom of this page, saying something like “add me” and I will copy whatever (hidden) email address you typed in when you entered the comment.

Now, to the final and very important task of thanks. My mom always used to tell me to be careful about listing specific people in a Thank You section, because you are going to offend anyone that you forgot, and in a large and complicated endeavor, it’s guaranteed you’re going to forget someone. If I forgot you, please forgive me. It’s been a long two years. If you feel REALLY sad or offended, please email me and I will add you… that’s the miracle of the blog! Revisionist history at the click of a mouse.

I wish to thank:

Ruby, for being a good wife and my best friend, for making me have adventures and always being there. We survived this, and have many more adventures yet to live.

Mike and Millie RIchardson, who worked tirelessly for two years as our stateside coordinators for project aid. Our boss called Mike “the best Peace Corps volunteer than never was.”

Dick and Ann Fanjoy, who sent insane amounts of care packages bringing us regular joy in down times. They also made sizeable financial contributions to our projects at the end of our service.

The Online Gaming Crew: Hammer, Yath, and Zanek. A slice of home, once a week.

Jerry Hoffman, for project assistance, technical advice, and being a good friend.

The Schneiders, for encouragement as well as financial support that was WAY beyond the call of duty.

The Youngs, for more of the same. Man, I have the coolest friends.

The Fahss (Fahses?), for sponsoring our chickens and lots of emotional support as well.

Mark at guateliving dot com, for starting this ball rolling. Four thousand hits in one month! Four thousand!

Robin Ragan & Tony Prado, for giving me two years of free college spanish classes, so I could go with Emily to Guatemala in the first place.

Everyone in Training Group 120. You are a compassionate bunch of footsoldiers, and can hug me with your crab hand any day.

And last, but not least: all of our readers. This blog would have been so much less without you.

Yujwal dyos, hemasanil. Gracias a ustedes.

Update: The blog is now closed to comments and new registrations, to reduce hacking and spamming opportunities as well as the amount of fluff email I receive in my inbox. If you only just now got to this page and still want access to the book, you can email me directly to be added to the list, or if it’s sometime in late 2011 of after, you can try searching for “Fanjoy” on Amazon.com.

Besides relaxing, we spent the last few days of our Guatemalan experience buying some presents, saying goodbye to old friends, and packing our bags. Bags aren’t normally a problem with us, but after two years and a pile of going-away gifts, we’ve ballooned up to about 250 pounds of crap to bring back. That’s AFTER some ruthless discarding and regifting. Good news? You can take extra bags on international flights. Bad news? The airlines charge you $100 apiece for your third and fourth bags, and $50 for each one that’s overweight.

That makes our big challenge “load distribution,” to keep costs at a minimum. While I was paying our last visit to my host family in San Luis, I made a makeshift balance scale from a broomstick, some string, a jug of water, and a tape measure. It works on basic statics: moments are equal to each other in a balance, and are the product of moment arm times mass. In this case, the moment arms can be measured with the tape, and we know the mass of the jug (1 gallon of water = 8 pounds). For my backpack, for example, the jug is at 37cm and the pack is at 10cm from the fulcrum. Do the math:

37cm x 8lbs = 10cm x ??lbs

…which means that my backpack weighs 29.6 pounds, still within the airline tolerance. I can throw in 20 more pounds of clay idols, toy marimbas, native traje, and organic coffee before I get fined $50. Yay! The kids were pretty excited to help me weigh our stuff. Things went well until Memo asked to be weighed; two seconds after I took this picture we discovered that he exceeds the load capacity of my apparatus. BAM! But everyone laughed.

We also stopped by Froilan’s tailor shop for the final fitting of the suits we ordered. After Emily ordered hers, my mom got wind of it and suggested that I order one for myself as well, in memory of my Grandpa Wildy. He was a Great Depression survivor, always felt that you should “dress for success”, and it was his custom to buy his grandchildren a fancy suit when they graduated from college or other important occasions. What my mom didn’t know is that Froilan is cut form the same cloth: as a local craftsperson, he was in the Antigua newspaper a year back, the article entitled “Hay Que Vestir con Elegancia“– a direct quote from the interview (“One must dress with elegance”). After three visits, we slipped into our new togs, and WOW! do they look and fit great. Indeed, Froilan is a professional: we gave him several photos we’d taken from online fashion magazines, picked a fabric from his sample swatches of fine imported English wool, and he did everything else.

“Part of the reason I agreed to do these suits,” he explained as we were admiring ourselves in his mirror, “was because I wanted the challenge. How can I call myself a professional if I don’t ever aspire to doing trickier projects?’

Indeed. I apologize for the quality of this photograph; it doesn’t do the suits justice. When I get to a place that has good lighting, I will take a more flattering picture and post it– these suits are amazing. And at just under $200 apiece, they are a steal. Now our only concern is putting back on those 30 pounds we lost; my real dad tells me that during Vietnam, all of his crew had clothes tailored, but within a year or two of returning, nothing fit anymore.

I know that some of our blog readers are actually living in and around Antigua, so I want to post a shameless plug for my host dad/ master tailor, Froilan Menchú. Do yourself a favor and visit his tiny shop if you are in the market for new formalwear:

Diseño Profesional (Froilan Menchú)

2o Calle Poniente 34

Antigua Guatemala, Sacatepéquez

tel: 4074-8512

That’s about it for now; we have to finish packing for tomorrow’s big trip.

Besides the novelty of seeing a new country, the real reason for our trip was to check out the Mayan ruins at Copán. We heard about them when we visited Tikal and El Mirador, and although the architecture at those two sites is larger and more grandiose, the sculpture and engravings at Copán leave the others far behind. It is generally considered the best site in the world for Mayan sculpture. Dozens of extremely elaborate carved stellae dot the site, as well as altars, capstones, and other stonework. All of the stellae are dated to the exact year they were built, since the Mayans are both obsessed with carving the date into everything, and also contrived one of the most sophisticated astrological calendars in history. Good news for the archaeologists!

Copán was a major Mayan capitol in the 600s and 700s, operating later than Tikal and El Mirador, much farther to the north. To see these amazing works of engineering (highways, plazas, ball courts) backed up by such an elaborate infrastructure of culture and trade boggles my mind… especially when I think about Europe at the time, cowering in their tiny wooden palisades against the rampaging Vikings. Here is a picture of the pride of Copán: the grand staircase. The stairs climb the entire side of a pyramid, and each riser is carved with elaborate hieroglyphs depicting the history of the city in over 2,000 separate images.  

But all good things must come to an end, and in the early 800s, the city died out. Archaeologists sampled gravesites and looked at bone development, age at death, and disease evidence. They found that like so many other places in history (Tikal, El Mirador, Mesa Verde), the culture grew too big for its britches. Overfarming and deforestation lead to extreme soil depletion, unchecked erosion, lost water resources, and eventual social collapse. By the time the Spaniards arrived in the 1500s, this former city of 30,000 was inhabited by five families.

This got Emily and I talking about how these things apply to modern life. We face many similar problems today: our freshwater resources in North America are running low, deserts in Africa are expanding, the rainforests in South America are disappearing daily, and the polar icecaps are smaller than they’ve been in millennia. Add this to a still-unchecked population explosion, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize that some time soon, we’re going to run out of food/water/air to go around. You know the old saying, “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But despite all this doom and gloom, I remain optimistic, because we have something all these other ancient civilizations didn’t: communication. If one or two people in ancient Copán saw the writing on the wall, they could shout from a soapbox for a while but no one would take them seriously, if they were heard at all. In contrast, we now have internet and newsmedia and so forth, so as the situation worsens, more and more people are going to become aware of the problem, and (hopefully) we can get organized to take action before it becomes critical. Furthermore, we can draw scientists and thinkers to solve our problems from a world-wide pool of millions. I think we’ll be OK.

In Lanquin, the closest town to Semuc Champey, there aren’t a lot of lodging options. Two backpacker hostels cater to tourists like ourselves: El Retiro, which has a reputation for being a pretty extreme party at all hours of the day, and The Zephyr. It has really good reviews, despite being only 8 months old (El Retiro is about 15 years old), as well as hot showers, a few private rooms, and a lot of nature close by.

“I dunno,” Anne said as we talked to her last week about our plan. “I stayed at the Zephyr when I went to Semuc Champey in November, and they lost my reservation. I had to sleep in the attic with the cockroaches! They’re a bunch of disorganized hippies.” She wrinkled her nose.

Not to be put off by hippies, we turned up yesterday at The Zephyr after a loooooong 9-hour ride in a microbus. “Sorry, but we seem to have lost your reservation,” the friendly guy at the desk said in a moderate British accent.

“You’d better look again,” Emily said, putting on the Battle Hat despite her fatigue, and wondering why we didn’t listen to Anne.

He did so, only to find that they DID have our reservation, but it was written on a different paper that no one ever looks at, and all the rooms were already given away. “If you want, you can have the bed in the attic,” he offered apologetically, “and we’ll knock a little off the price.”

After verifying there would be a proper room the following days, Emily sighed at the irony of the situation and accepted the attic bed. We were so beat from the last two weeks of goodbyes, running around, and paperwork, that we were too tired to look elsewhere. I hauled our stuff up the ladder into the attic as Emily went to check out the showers.

I set my pack down at the bedside, listening to the music blaring from the bar downstairs. A quick look at the structure revealed that the speaker for the sound system below us is about three feet from our bed, on the other side of a bamboo wall. A bamboo wall with poor acoustic qualities, as you might imagine. What I didn’t imagine was that that speaker would be blasting music until 5am the next morning, which it did with gusto.

“Showers are cold,” Emily said, frowning, as she poked her head up through the hatch in the floor. She climbed up in to the attic to join me, then stared over my shoulder at the bed. “What’s THAT?”

I turned around. “Oh, it’s a two-inch long cockroach crawling across the bedsheet. Wonderful.”

At that point, we gave up and settled in for a fitful night of screaming guitar riffs, beer-and-cigarette smells, and sex noises from the dorm bunks next door.

Luckily, the next day our room became available (complete with hot shower) and after a long nap to make up for lost sleep, we got back onto the right foot. That evening, a local Q’eqchi guide was offering tours of the caves in Lanquin. The departure time? 5pm, so you could hang out and see the bats leave for their night’s business.

We took a tuk-tuk to the cave a few kilometers away, paid our fee to the man in the little shack at the trailhead, and hiked a few hundred meters in. The cave entrance itself was a crack above a stream that gushed forth from the mountainside, sortof like Faramir’s hideout in The Lord of the Rings. This analogy turned out to be slightly off, though, once we were inside and realized we were actually in Moria. Perhaps I am too obsessed with Tolkein’s masterwork, but there are a lot of cool Tolkein-esque natural wonders in Guatemala that would make it a good runner-up for filming the trilogy…if only they had the technology and social infrastructure to match New Zealand.

As we hiked into the caves, it soon became apparent that the cavern complex was elaborate: a half-dozen main chambers, some of which were fifty or sixty feet high. “This is a lot like the caverns at Cave Junction in Oregon, or Luray Caverns in Virginia,” I said to myself as we explored. This is when I found out that Emily had never been in a cave before. What? How can that be possible? Caves are incredibly cool. But I guess there aren’t many in northern Indiana.

We passed stalactites, stalagmites, curtains, pools, and all sorts of cool geologic wonders. The caves were remarkably free of graffiti and abuse, a rarity in the third world. We saw a name and “1966″ painted high up on one wall, apparently left by one of the first professional explorers, and then came to a flat area atop a high shelf. The entire area was black with soot. “This is where the Mayan priests come to burn offerings of incense and copál,” our guide explained. “For hundreds of years, up until a few years ago, they were the only ones that ever came into the cave.” A few years back, the locals realized the tourism potential for the cave, strung up some electrical lights, built a little guard shack, and are doing a respectable job at keeping it vandalism free. Most of the tour companies around here are owned and operated by Guatemalan Mayans, something they’re proud of and working to continue, fighting off foreign megabusinesses that threaten to commercialize the industry and monopolize the market.

When our tour ended, we returned to the entrance of the cave. “It’s almost dark, the bats should be starting soon,” he said as he looked at his watch. “Turn out your lights, and we will wait.”

A dozen or so of us waited, lights out, as the last rays of the evening sun casting a dim light into the first chamber. I was pondering how bats could know it’s time to do their thing, since it’s eternally night in the caves, when I noticed that the roof was swimming. OK, not really “swimming”, but it looked like a river was running along the ceiling in all the nooks and crannies, like gravity was reversed.

“Ok, turn on the flash of your cameras, and shoot at the roof,” the guide advised us. Poof! Flashes went off, and we realized there were THOUSANDS of bats zoming everywhere. Within minutes, they were zipping around us, streaming out the entryway. It was like the Dan Ryan Expressway at 5:30 pm on a Friday night. Bats everywhere! But unlike on Scooby Doo, the swarm of bats howling out the cave entryway did it in total silence. “They are just getting started,” the guide advised us. “There are millions in here.”

The next day, we made it to Semuc Champey proper. The entire region is filled with limestone, moving water, caverns, and karsts. The morning’s event? Checking out another cave. This one, however, was filled with water.

About a decade ago, I visited New Zealand for a few months, and tried Blackwarer Rafting while I was there. The Kiwis have tourism down to a science, and really make use of their cool natural wonders: in “blackwater rafting”, the idea is that you float the rapids in a water-filled cave complex. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s pretty cool. To prepare, the guides equip you with a wetsuit, water shoes, life preserver, helmet, headlamp, rock climbing harness, and (of course) an inner tube. Hey, I said they made it a science, right?

In Guatemala, for the exact same trip, you get: a candle.

Yep. We all stripped off our clothes down to a bathing suit, were each given a candle, and plunged into the mysterious world of undeground waterways. The guide was a little better equipped: he had a headband made from a strip of old innertube, into which he stuck a half dozen extra candles.

It was truly amazing seeing the mysteries of the deep by candle light, and it made me feel even more like Gimli, Gloin’s son as I held up my lone flickering flame to check out deep crevasses, towering spires, and dripping stalactites. As we dogpaddled our way along, gripping candles between our teeth, I though about what it means to “adventure” in the third world. Most of humanity doesn’t know about liability insurance, tort law, and negligence lawsuits. People are expected to act reasonably to safeguard their own wellbeing. In the US, coffee cups say “Caution: Hot Coffee” so McDonalds doesn’t get sued again when some moron burns themselves on the hot beverage they specifically ordered that way. Geysers have guardrails. Scenic overlooks have fences. I’m not saying that leaving the handrail off of a stairway with a 100-foot dropoff is a good idea (seen it), but sometimes the lack of over-protectiveness here is charming in a way, and shows us things that would never be possible back home. It’s life in the raw, it’s being responsible for yourself… it’s seeing millenium-old natural wonders by candlelight, and it can be beautiful.

The final part of the tour was the star of the show: the pools of Semuc Champey. This photo is the one I think of as “the money shot,” one of the most famous in all of Guatemala. Semuc Champey translates into “where the water goes underground” in the local Mayan dialect, and that is exactly what you’re seeing here. A giant raging river drops through an enormous hole in the ground at the top left of the photo, due to a strange geologic condition, and flows under massive plates of limestone. The plates, in turn, are covered with a small percentage of water that doesn’t fit thorugh the hole, forming beautiful green pools of slow-moving water that are arranged like giant stairs down the hillside. At the bottom, the river comes raging back out of the exit hole, about 50 feet wide and a reported 25 feet deep. THAT is a lot of water.

We hiked all over the site in the steamy jungle heat, climbing the limestone cliffs to get the money shot, then back down to swim and wade in the scenic pools. The cool water of the caves and then the pools, alternated with the oppressive humidity of the jungle, made for a really enjoyable day.

Back at the hostel, we had a beer to celebrate a good day. I’m not much of a beer person, but we’ve discovered something new in Guatemala: Russian beer. It’s all the rage in the more touristy areas, and feels strangely at home in this weird country of Korean-made cars, Chinese-made electronics, Indonesia-made condoms, and yarn from the Ivory Coast. This particular company, Baltika, has four different beers that are regularly available here: 5, 6, 7, and 9. Hah, yeah, the different varieties just have a number, not frivolous names like “Special Draft Amberbock.” Russians are very cool that way, all business, just like their airplanes. Here’s our take on the beers:

5: A lighter beer, tastes like a heffeweisen. Probably our second favorite, and it’s really good with a lime in it.

6: Stout, like Bass or Guinness if it didn’t have the burnt taste. Strong molasses flavor makes it not so good with food. But if you’re hungry? Yumm, like the monks of old who drank doppelbock to sustain themselves whilst fasting.

7: We like this one the best. It’s a medium lager, sortof like Heineken, and comes in a green glass bottle. It’s the only one with a pull tab to open it. What?

9: DANGER. RED ALERT. This one tasts like beer, but is actually a mechanism to cause inebriation in the incautious. It’s a crazy 8% alcohol, very high for a beer and challenging some wines. We first tried it at the tasty falafel place in Antigua after a full day’s camioneta ride. We were starving and the restaurant owner (who is a friend of ours) recommended it, so we tried it. Unfortunately, we’d not eaten all day and the food was slow in coming, allowing us to finish the entire beer before the food arrived. Despite the fact that we’d SPLIT the bottle between the two of us, we had trouble finding our hotel room that evening.

6,506 pictures taken (Jaime)

4,735 hits on the blog in our busiest month (June 2010)

3,706 pictures taken (Emily)

3,476 dollars of Uncle Sam’s money spent on infrastructure

417 blog entries posted

400 trees planted

300+ chickens vaccinated

295 square meters of concrete floor installed

271 pounds of baggage brought back on the flight home

209 women trained in preventive health

92 morrales produced by Temux Mayan Artisans

91 formal health lectures given

46 posters drawn

31 pounds lost (Jaime)

30 pounds lost (Emily)

29 gringoes who visited our home *

27 months spent living in Guatemala

18 computers delivered

16 stoves built

13 articles published in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune

12 other volunteer sites visited **

9 water tanks built

4 latrines built

3 confirmed types of parasites contracted (Emily)

3 nights spent hospitalized (Jaime)

2 lives changed forever

0 times victimized by crime

* visitors we had: the 4 witches, karen, elke, devin, robin, elena, mike, millie, alta, anne, dan, zack, joe, katy, matt, sarah, norm, steve, donaldo, alice, charlotte, 3 trainees, katal, nick. Wow, that’s a lot!

** PCV sites we visited: alta, charlotte, S&M, K&J (both sites), sara furman, N&K, anne, kristin, dan, cat, kaying

In short, today is the first day of us no longer being Peace Corps volunteers. We are going to be in Guatemala for another week and a half or so, finishing up a few social obligations, traveling a bit, and taking a few days of VACATION to celebrate our 4-year wedding anniversary in relative peace before we head back to whatever insanity awaits us in our homeland. We expect to be back in the US by the first of August.

So expect more posts through the end of the month, to find out how it all turned out. And don’t worry, we’ll let everyone know when we’ve returned safe and sound to American soil.

But to get these things, we have to collect a dozen or so signatures from various officials and administrators at Peace Corps headquarters. Some are easy, like the facilities manger who affirms that we’ve returned our handbook and toolkit, or the bursar who checks our bank paperwork to be sure we have no outstanding debts.

Others are more time consuming. At the medical office, for example, we turn in our Peace Corps medical kit, but we also have an exit interview with the nurse, who goes over our medical records with us, returns our W.H.O. vaccination cards, and explains the forms we would need if we were to claim any workman’s comp medical coverage in the next year. She also gave us our terminal malaria prophylaxis: you know, a hefty set of pills to take for four weeks once we’re back in the US, to kill any malaria parasites that might be camping out in our livers (gross!). Even though our village is not in a malaria-endemic area, we spent time working and traveling through areas that are. Better safe than sorry. A few years back, a volunteer had a malaria relapse almost a year after returning to the US, and had to go to three different doctors before anyone even thought to test him for it.

Collecting all the signatures is a weird experience. We visited many people we’ve known and worked with for two years, doing this routine administrative task, but at the same time knowing that it is also saying goodbye. There are some people on staff that have treated us like adopted parents, people like Basilio and Ana Isabel, who we will miss a lot. Besides farewell, we wanted to say thanks to everyone for looking out for us for two whole years. But to our surprise, most of them actually thanked us: “Thank you for giving up two years of your lives to help my country. Thank you.”

On the way to get the signature from the director of the language department, we passed by the office of Craig Badger, the head of training and a long-time ally of ours. We stopped in.

“I can tell by the looks on your faces that you’ve come to say goodbye,” he said in a serious but friendly way. At that point, it all became very real, and a few tears came unbidden to both Emily and me. Craig’s always gone the extra mile for us, even after we were done with training and his official responsibility to us was over. He helped us get extra funding for our Q’anjob’al lessons, gave us advice when we were fighting for more volunteers in Santa Eulalia, and gave me his copy of A Mayan Life to read. He’s always been very positive, encouraging, and levelheaded. He’s one of the good guys.

A bit after noon, we were all called into the central courtyard of the training center to have a farewell lunch. Several of the administrators were there, and we had a chance to get up and “dar palabras“, or say a few words. Standing there, we all gasped at how few of us were actually left from the initial 30 or so in our training group: six in Healthy Homes, seven in Youth Development. We’d lost some due to health issues, emotional issues, administrative issues, and a bunch went home early to start grad school. But here we are, the survivors from the original picture with George Bush:

As I should have anticipated, the scavenger hunt couldn’t be completed in one day. Farewell hugs, people gone to meetings, lost paperwork, and other coincidental events forced us to return the next morning for the last few signatures. Perhaps it was meant to be this way; the next day was the swearing-in ceremony for our replacements, people we hardly know who will carry on the work after we are gone. We got there early, to avoid the rush and catch the administrators before they were embroiled in the ceremonies of the day. Within minutes, we had what we came for and were ready to leave.

“I want a picture with us with the Peace Corps flag,” Anne whispered to Ashley as we were standing by the front door. But the flag was gone! A quick search revealed that it had been moved to the pavilion, in anticipation of the swearing-in ceremony that would be starting shortly. We casually meandered out to the pavilion and discovered Wendy, the acting Director, waiting patiently by the podium.

She’s a very friendly lady, and the five of us started talking. “You know, if you’d like, you can come with me to meet the Ambassador when he arrives,” she invited. “Just keep an eye out, and if you see me leave suddenly, meet me at the front gate.”

About that time my phone rang. It was Froilan, my host dad from training. “Jaime, We’re here!” he said.

I turned around and looked into the pavilion, which was mostly empty chairs when we arrived, but had since filled with over a hundred people, American and Guatemalan. An arm waved from the back.

Of course! All of the host families from San Luis would be here; they had trainees this cycle, and were here to celebrate with them at their swearing-in. I ran back to visit with Jovita, Froilan, Doña Suzanna, and Doña Lydia; all long-time friends of mine from the very beginning, more than two years ago. The circle was closing before my vary eyes.

Just then, Emily caught my attention. Wendy had disappeared. The ambassador was coming.

We found Wendy outside the front door of Peace Corps headquarters, within the secure outer wall that enclosed the grounds. We chatted for a while, discussing the last time we saw the Ambassador a few weeks ago at the Fourth of July party. We’re fortunate in that he’s interested in the Peace Corps and actively supports the mission.

Suddenly, the guards started bustling and the front gates opened up, allowing two sleek Suburbans to enter the compound. The first one had strange-looking windows, obviously heavily modified with bulletproof glass to protect the Ambassador. The doors of the second Suburban opened while it was still moving, and imposing-looking Men in Black with sunglasses and earbuds stood on the running boards. When it slowed enough, they hopped off and secured the area.

“The veterans are here!” the Ambassador said, recognizing us and smiling as he walked up. In the past two years, we’ve each had a few opportunities to speak with him, and he seems to have a good memory for that sort of thing. “Sorry I missed the farewell lunch. I really wanted to come, but I had a meeting I couldn’t get out of.”

We chatted for a few minutes in the front yard of the Peace Corps office. Like I said, he’s a very personable guy. He mentioned that he hoped to get a chance to visit Santa Eulalia some time in the next year or two, and I suggested that if he were to go to the trouble to travel all the way out there, it would be worthwhile to go a bit further to enjoy the view in Nick and Katal’s site. “If you go to Santa Eulalia, I am sure that the people there will talk about if for years afterwards,” I smiled. I wish I could be there to see it!

By this point we’d already stolen too much of Mr. McFarland’s time from those waiting in the pavilion, so we thanked him for his time and support. He smiled, shook everyone’s hands again, and started inside.

“Can I get a picture with you, Mr. Ambassador?” Anne blurted out, shoving her camera into my hands.

“Actually, why don’t you all get into the picture?” Wendy offered. So we all posed with the Ambassador.

“Oops, I think I cut off your feet,” Wendy said, looking at the camera. Everyone laughed; it’s a gag we never get tired of. Guatemalans have this obsession with making sure every inch of a person is in the photo, leaving all their snapshots oddly-composed.

Mr. McFarland chuckled as we posed for another. “That’s OK, my feet aren’t that good looking anyways.”

“The Ambassador made a joke!” Ashley squeaked, mostly to herself.

“The funny part is that you laughed,” he replied, smiling into the camera for the next shot.

After the brief photo shoot, we parted ways for the last time. The Ambassador went inside with his entourage to start a brand new group of volunteers on their two years of service. And the four of us? We walked out the front gate of the Peace Corps compound, terminal papers in hand, to start the rest of our lives as ordinary citizens.

This marvel of fine living comes with a price, though. Our stove burns a tarea or two of firewood a month (about half a chord?), in a country where deforestation is already a serious concern, and 99% of people cook with firewood. We give lectures about how the loss of forests encourages landslides, global warming, and degradation of freshwater springs, so we’d be hypocrites if we didn’t do something about it.

“I think we need to plant some trees,” Emily said a few months ago. We talked it over, and realized that was no other responsible thing to do. And by “some” trees, we were talking about several hundred, bought with our own money, as an act of contrition.

But where would we plant them? It would be good double-duty to plant them on some of Nas’s land, thanking his family as well as the Earth, but we didn’t know where all of his property was located, or if he’d even accept that sort of gift. After the sheep poisoning incident, he’s refused any sort of aid we’ve ever offered him, thinking it would cause envy in his neighbors and make life difficult for his entire family. But a few weeks later, I found myself sitting at the edge of the field, chatting with him as the sun went down, and saw my opportunity.

“Nas, we’ve been thinking that we need to plant some trees to replace all that we’ve burned in our time here,” I began. “Would you be interested in helping us? We’d like to plant them on your property, if you have the space. This isn’t a project from Peace Corps or some agency; this is a personal gift from Emily and me.”

He stared off into the field for a while, not answering. Then he nodded. “I think I’d like that. How many trees were you thinking?”

“About five hundred. I don’t know how many cuerdas of land you’d need for that many, though.”

He looked up at me, with a twinkle in his eye. That’s when I found out that he’d done reforestation projects long ago, and knows exactly how many trees you can plant in a cuerda of land.

In the next few days, we made plans. Nas spoke with his family a few times, and they decided they’d plant the trees on his land, as well as adjacent properties owned by Abel (his son-in-law) and Masha (his second oldest daughter). By accident, I’d discovered a vivero (nursery) a few weeks ago, right next to the new high school construction site. I chatted with the nurseryman, and found which seedlings he was selling, how much they cost, and how to get them delivered. But the luckiest accident I had was mentioning the idea to my boss Basilio during the COS conference.

“You know, before I was the director of the Healthy Homes program for the Peace Corps, I ran the now-defunct Reforestation program,” he said with a huge smile. Duh, of course! Mike Bosio (who comments often on this blog) worked as Peace Corps volunteer with Basilio in the 70s for that very program. Basilio was really excited about our idea, and gave me all sorts of pointers on what type of trees I should and shouldn’t plant, as well as offering to come talk to Nas next time he was in Santa Eulalia. He was particularly excited about us planting aliso, which I later discovered to be the alder tree. It’s a fast growing hardwood that thrives in the regional conditions that we have, whose wood can be used for both construction and burning, and they regrow when cut down, so they don’t need to be replanted.

After much negotiation, we ended up buying 400 white pine seedlings. Everyone here likes white pine, they are cost effective, and they grow well in our climate. I wanted to plant half in aliso, but the nursery was out of them. “Don’t worry,” Nas said. “I planted aliso last time, and there are still a lot growing up there on the adjacent property.” We finalized the details with the nursery’s office manager, and I took out my money.

“Oh, you’re going to pay?” she said, getting out a receipt book. That’s when I found out there are actually two ways to get the trees. The second way is to have a government technician come out to your land, survey it, and they give you the trees for free- with the provision that you can’t cut them down for 5 years. Neat idea, but we didn’t have time to wait on a government guy that could take months to show up. Better to just pay now, and start tomorrow.

“OK,” she said. “We’ll send the technician by about this time next year, then, so he can check on the trees before he pays the landowner the annual incentive money.” WHAT? Turns out under the pay-as-you-go option, the government has a cash incentive program that rebates money to landowners if they maintain the trees. Sweet! Not only are we repaying our debt to nature and leaving trees for Nas’s family, but they will get cash in their hands for the next half decade as well.

The fateful day finally came, on the last full day in our village. Talk about putting something off until the last minute! We got up early, and went down to Nas’s son’s house, where we’d stored the seedlings that had been delivered to the village the day before. “I got some muchachos to help,” Nas said as he hoisted a bucket full of baby trees onto his horse. I knew all of the guys except for one, a half-dozen friends and relatives who each picked up their own 50-pound sack of seedlings to carry up the mountain. Between the horse and everyone carrying, we had about 250 seedlings this trip.

After about a half hour of hiking, we arrived at the land. It was a wide swath of rocky scrub and sheep pasture, bordered on two sides by immature woodland. “I planted those woods years ago,” Nas said as he took the picks and machetes off of the horse. I looked out over the valley that we’ve called home for the last two years, sighing deeply. What a beautiful day. What a beautiful way to spend my last day in the village.

Galindo disappeared with a machete and returned with a few long, slender canes he’d cut from the underbrush. Nas measured them to three barrras, the spacing we were going to use between the trees, and everyone gathered around him as he gave a lesson on how to plant seedlings. Then, we broke up into work groups and started planting a forest: one person with pick and measuring stick, the other with a bucket of trees. We continued row by row, working our way down the hill.

“Where we plant this row of trees is very important,” Nas said as he pointed out a red painted rock. “This is the border between two inheritances. Right now, the properties have the same owner, me, but if we plant trees right on the line, it will cause a big fight over the firewood two generations from now.” It amazes me that despite their general lack of preplanning for anything, people here sometimes anticipate subtle social conflicts far in the future and work hard to avoid them. If only they could plan like that for latrines and concrete floors! Galindo waved from atop an alder tree a few hundred yards away, and they sighted between the two markers to keep the plantings straight.

Around noon, Masha and Gela came up the hill with lunch buckets on their heads and Delmi and Michelle in tow. Boiled potatoes, chili peppers, and coffee for everyone! It was a lot tastier than it sounds, and I ate a half dozen potatoes as Delmi sat on my lap. From this vantage point, I could actually see the roof of our tiny house, nestled in the valley directly below us. Maybe these trees would one day keep a landslide from wiping out Nas’s entire family?

“This is the Jaime Forest!” one of them joked. They all smiled and laughed.

“Actually, it was Emily’s idea,” I said. “You should call it the Fanjoy Forest.” Some confusion ensued, as almost no one here knows our last name, since they don’t have family names in the same sense that we do, and never use them. I explained that unlike the custom here, Americans often share a family name between married couples, and ours is Fanjoy, and that name is passed down from my father.

“Fanjoy Forest it is!” they beamed, thinking it a great idea. “We will call it that, and our children will call it that.” What they don’t know is that calling it the Fanjoy Forest also pays homage to my father and my father’s father, who were both avid outdoorsmen, men of woods and water. I can’t think of anything either of them would like more than to have a stand of trees named after them.

With lunch wrapped up, we set back to work planting more trees. In the next few hours, our total for the day climbed to 250 saplings. “We’re out of trees!” Nas smiled. “We’ll come back tomorrow and plant the remaining 150 without you. We know you have a very important journey to make.” Empty buckets, picks, machetes, and hoes were all strapped onto the horse for the trip back down the hill.

About that time, I heard a yelp, and turned around to see that a full-on mud fight was under way. Abel, Lucas, and a teenager who’s name I think is Ixtup were slinging clods of dirt at each other and laughing uncontrollably. They closed, and as Abel and Lucas struggled to make each other eat dirt pies, Ixtup jammed a fistful of mud down Lucas’s shirt. In seconds, it degenerated into a mudwrestling match, ending in a cartoon-like ball of bodies, arms, and legs going rolling down the mountainside, flattening bushes as it went. It disintegrated about 50 feet downhill, everyone laughing so hard they were almost crying.

I sat amongst the fresh seedlings and looked out to the west, where the mountains of Mexico fade away towards the horizon in layers of steel grey, and watched as puffy clouds rolled into our little valley to the sound of laughing Mayans. Definitely, my last day in the village was one of the best of my entire Peace Corps service.

After getting over the initial shock that I am able to actually read a “grownup” book in Spanish now, I realized that this book is a treasure trove of great cultural information about the people we live and work with. It’s a shame that I didin’t find it a year ago, when I’d been in site long enough to frame the information in its proper context, but still had enough time left to pursue its inquiry further. As it is, every few pages I find a gem that really gets me. For example, just last week we were riding with a microbus driver and got to talking about place names. A nearby village is called Yich Joyom. We already knew that Yich means “place of,” but the driver informed us that Joyom is slang for the hat worn by people from Todos Santos, and by association, can also mean anyone from there. Apparently, way back when, a Todosantero passed through the area and his hat fell off, so people started calling the place Yich Joyom.

In the book, LaFarge talks about ethnic relations between the Q’anjob’al and various neighboring tribes, and lists off a bunch of slang words the locals use to describe their neighbors. Joyom is one of them. He goes on to say that these words are ethnic slurs (much like the word “nigger”) and will often start a fistfight when used within earshot of the neighbors in question. That’s good to know, and our microbus driver failed to mention that important subtlety.

LaFarge also names several of the most helpful villagers he worked with, and all the names that look familiar: Lwin Ximon, Matin Palas, Pedro Mateo, Antonio Juárez, etc. They love to recycle names here. Although most of his acquaintances were old men, he worked with a 15-year old named Vírvez Diego. Could he yet live? He’d be, what, 93? It’s possible, and even more likely that people who knew him are still around. But I have no idea how I’d ever find them.

His interactions with the locals are also eerily famliar. “As friends,” he says, “they are loyal, considerate, reliable, generous, and tend to be dependant. As enemies, they are tranquil, secretive, meek, and untiringly patient.” Yep. He goes on to say that the Q’anjob’al are laconic, and the best stories can only be had from close friends after sitting around the fire in the late evening.

  

The large part of LaFarge’s study, though, is religious life and customs. The cover of the book is a black and white photo of Santa Eulalia from the nearby mountainside, showing the church surrounded by a few straw-roofed houses as they were in 1932. It stopped me in my tracks when I saw it; I know that church well, but how the town has changed! I climbed the hill above town a few weeks ago to take the same picture LaFarge took, 78 years later. LaFarge claims that the main town itself had an urban population of about 85 people. I believe it, based on the photo, but now the town center has about 10,000 people, and about 30,000 more can be found in the surrounding villages of the municipality.

And the church? Well, it was the same until shortly after we got to our site. The local congregation decided that since they could no longer fit everyone inside, they needed to knock the historic church down and build a new one. After a lot of serious debate and many angry dissenters, demolition began. They’ve been tearing it down piecemeal for over a year, building it back fancier and bigger as they go.

Just last month, I witnessed the final destruction of the two towers flanking the entryway. No heavy equipment or explosives here; they do demolition the old fashioned way: muscle and sledgehammer.

What’s there of the new church so far looks quite nice, but I am a romantic, interested in both history and architecture. I side with the crowd that wanted to keep the church, or at least, retain its historic façade and towers. I don’t even think they kept the cool old woodwork, like the main doors or the elaborate wooden screen that was in the entryway. Last weekend we were talking with our friend Antonio, and he told us an interesting tale about the church that he heard from his grandfather, who heard it from his. Some time in the late 1800s, the villagers were sleeping one night when they awoke to a noise like an earthquake. They went outside to the field where the church now stands, and saw that the lowest level of the church had sprung from the earth. They were amazed (and probably terrified), and over the course of the next few nights, this continued until the church towers you see in the black and white picture were fully built.

Make of it what you will.

This all gets back to something I’ve marveled at many times, one of the unique powers of our species. Through the miracle or writing, we are the only species on the planet where one of us can learn things from another who’s long dead, crossing the boundaries of time and space. LaFarge’s book has done that for me, and it makes me wonder if eighty years from now, someone will come across the blog of our experiences and gain something useful as well.

These memories came flooding back last week when I received an email from Peace Corps high command: the new volunteers will be arriving for their first view of their new home. “You are encouraged to show them around your community and workplace, introduce them to key community members, but you are NOT required to provide them with food or lodging,” the email added. They are getting 50q a day for hotel, and 60q a day for food.

Well THAT sounds like a drag, Emily and I decided. It would be so much more fun to host all three of them in our little cabin and cook up some good eats! We talked it over with the newbies at the fourth of July party, and they agreed that would be a fun time. Nas Palas and his family were thrilled to let them sleep in the new room they built onto the side of our house, and after getting their dietary restrictions straight, we made a stop at the supermarket in Huehue to get the good stuff I remember missing during our own training: organic coffee, wine, cheese, bacon, and chocolate chips to fuel our ambitious menu of pizza, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, cashew curry, fruit salad… top that off with a pile of the ambassador’s brownies, and a good time is guaranteed.

Treating guests well brings us back to civilization, in a way. It reminds us of how good things can be, and these sorts of experiences are best shared. It extends beyond food, too: with a little gentle prodding and four armloads of our own firewood, we even talked the neighbors into firing up the chuj so our new friends could soak up the steamy goodness. We introduced them to many of our friends in town, and brought them along to our farewell dinner with Pedro and Lucia, as well as our farewell lunch with the village where we did the SPA project.

So who are these three new women? The volunteer replacing us in our village is Cathleen. She’s energetic and seems to have a lot of good experience and ideas regarding development work; I feel like she will be a good fit. Katal, our friend who’s already been in another village in Santa Eulalia for a year, was really worried that Cathleen would go by Katal as well (that’s the rough translation of the name in Q’anjob’al), so we brainstormed for a while to come up with a new name for our replacement. We weren’t having much success until Nas Palas’s family solved the riddle. “Lina”, they said. Of course! Use the second half of her name, not the first. “Lina” seemed hesitant at first, but everyone else jumped on it so quickly that I think it’s “Lina” for good. And, in appropriate local fashion, there are now three Linas in the household. But hey, the important part is that they can now tell the gringas apart.

The second volunteer is Kelly, and she will be working in a village about 40 minutes walk from here. She was especially interested in meeting the people we did the SPA project with, since some of them are actually from the region where she will be working and living. She’s also volunteered to go a few weeks from now to visit some of the houses that were involved in the project, to do follow up and evaluation. Yay!

The third volunteer is Rebecca. She is quieter than the others, so it was harder to get to know her at first, but she has a sense of humor and reservedness that sits well with me. She is also very independent, which will be a useful trait in her site. Her village isn’t within practical walking distance of ANYONE, more out in the direction of Nick and Katal. She dug right into my Q’anjob’al notebooks from last year’s classes, copying words and asking questions. “The elders in my village told me at yesterday’s meeting that they would politely ask me to leave if I wasn’t interested in learning Q’anjob’al,” she said, explaining her intense study. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not… and I like that in a person, too.

Last night as we sat drinking hot chocolate and tea around our toasty woodburning stove and listening to the cold rain on the tin roof, Emily spoke up. “I hate to interrupt with this sort of thing, but we were wondering if you’d like to collaborate for the food. We spent a little over Q600 at the supermarket, in addition to buying a lot of fresh produce in the market.” She shrugged. “The suggested donation is Q150 each.” They all nodded as they chewed, and the conversation moved elsewhere. Q150 was a pretty generous offer; we actually spent a lot more than that keeping them comfortable and well fed, but I really was having a pretty good time.

This morning as they were packing to go, Cathleen handed me a stack of money. “We talked about it, and decided that Q150 was too much for the food. Here’s Q125 from each of us.” Then she picked up her bag, and walked out the door.

Um, what? I was totally caught off guard, and really unable to respond. As we made our way down to the waiting bus, I wondered at how unthinkable that would be in normal life. Perhaps I was being overly sensitive since it took so much for me to ask for anything at all in exchange for our hospitality… but as Emily says, we’re poor now, so we can no longer just give things away like before. I needed to look at it through their eyes: they are on a REALLY tight training budget. But aren’t they getting a stipend of over Q100 a day for this week? These things bounced back in forth in my mind for a while as I walked through the cornfield with them, until I figured out what was really bugging me: the very Guatemalan way it was presented. Short-changed right at the end, minutes before they left, AFTER they’d eaten the food and drank the wine. Where I come from, that is NOT cool.

I was afraid that I was just being stingy as the issue continued to bother me throughout the day too, but then when Fletch and I sat down to dinner and began to talk about the whole thing, I realized exactly why it was bothering me. It was as though she implied that after all our hospitality, we weren’t giving her a good-enough deal, or that we might be trying to take advantage of the situation and make some money off of her. That was hurtful. The 25q less than we asked for isn’t a huge deal, despite all the incidentals we also bought for them like toilet paper, snacks, and firewood. But our time and the extension of our life and home to total strangers–in the midst of a very emotional life transition–is meaningful to us, and I felt like that sacrifice meant nohting at all to our guests. -emily

As we were waiting for the bus, Rebecca came up to me quietly and slipped me Q25. “I don’t know what that was all about up there, but I don’t agree with it,” she said under her breath, then walked back to stand with the others.

To me, that was a tremendous show of character, and somewhat redeemed the situation in my eyes. I would gladly give up Q25 anyday if it helped me sort out what kind of people I was dealing with. But it left a bitter taste in my mouth about the whole visit, and that makes me sad. Maybe it’s a sign that it really is time for us to go, to move on, and that the pressures of quitting this oddball way of life are more than we’re ready to admit, causing us to be overly sensitive in ways we normally wouldn’t be. Emily and I have both caught ourselves snapping at each other this week as we pack our belongings, take down the faded crayon drawings on our walls, and try to decide which kid is going to get which book. We don’t like to be that way. But it’s almost over. Almost over.

NOTE: In the week since I originally wrote this post, we’ve had a chance to talk to Cathleen directly about the issue. This was mostly at Emily’s urging; I am the sort to just shrug and cease interacting with someone. But Emily is wiser in these things, and I feel like our discussion was productive. Her main concern was to make Cathleen aware that she had done something grossly offensive, not because we wanted to get an apology, but because we hoped to god that she would never mistreat our poor-but-generous Mayan friends in a simliar manner. Besides being rude, it would get her relationship with the village off to a really bad start.

By the time it was all over, we came to the conclusion that much of what had happened was a result of the stresses and alien nature of the situation, for all parties involved. She seemed genuinely regretful about the misstep.

After we finished the construction in Yulais, we planned to have an opening ceremony to inaugurate the projects. As per Peace Corps custom, we invited our boss Basilio; coincidence also allowed us to invite the three new volunteers who will taking over after we are gone, as well as Nick and Katal who had been specifically invited by the Yulais elders. Since the inauguration was so close to our departure date, we figured that it would probably evolve into a despedida as well.

What we DIDN’T expect was how much effort they would put into the party. On the selected day, we followed Diego up the path into Yulais, and crested the hill to see a pretty elaborate party set up in the town basketball court: tables, chairs, a backstop, pine boughs on the ground, a sound system. “Come, sit down,” Ximon said over the loudspeaker, gesturing to the chairs at the fore.

A little startled, I took my seat in a seat of honor, and watched things unfold. Several town members got up and said how grateful they were for our health talks, how much they’d learned, and how good it was for the community to have these water tanks, floors, and stoves. As they spoke, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how much organization it took to put this party together. Many got up and gave thanks on behalf of the community, and eventually the agenda fell to us.  

“As we were building,” I said as I took my turn at the microphone, “people many times told me, ‘This is Jaime’s work!’ But the truth of it is, this is not my work, it’s YOUR work. This is Ximon’s work. This is Gaspar’s work. This is Eulalia’s work.” They want a hero, but the hero isn’t me. It’s them, and they need to know that, even if I have to say it every single day I work. “You all made this happen. You all should be very proud of yourselves.”

Then we got to handing out diplomas. Diplomas hold a special significance in Guatemala, a place where few have education, and there are no organized and accessible records to prove it. Everything of any significance that you do in life deserves a diploma, and those who receive them hoard them away in case they one day have to get a job of some sort, at which time they wheel out these carefully guarded pieces of paper. Knowing the seriousness of the occasion, all four of us experienced Santa Eulalia volunteers dressed in local traje*.

As the ceremony started to wind down, I motioned to Emily to give me the microphone one last time. “I have a few special awards I’d like to give out,” I explained. From my bag, I pulled out several tools that I’d spray painted gold a few days before. “These golden tools are to recognize three special people who did a lot of extra work to make this project happen. All of you worked hard, but these people put in months of extra work, many times working after hours: ordering matreials, filling in paperwork, organizing deliveries, arranging bank accounts. Their sacrifice for the community is an aid to every one of you, and they should be recognized. From this day forward, when ever you see someone working with one of these golden tools, remember that they earned it through sacrifice for the good of the community and they deserve respect. They will forever have MY respect.”

I then handed them out to Juárez, Ximon, and Diego in recognition for their support. Everyone seemed pretty excited about it, causing quite a stir. I wish I could claim the idea as my own, but it came in part from my father-in-law, an avid Boy Scouter who suggested that special recognition be given to Diego for his work. The gold paint idea came from my own Dad, who used to make “golden awards” for achieving Scouts back when I was a kid. Applying a little Scout showmanship to a Mayan ceremony seemed like a sure thing.

Once all the words had been spoken, it was time for the entertainment. A weird tradition at Guatemalan ceremonies is “lip synch” concerts, where teenagers put on rodeo clothes and hats and shuffle back and forth with a micrphone pressed against their mouths, looking down at the ground so you can’t see that they really don’t know the words to the Mexican banda song they’re “singing”. It’s hilarious (though I don’t think it’s supposed to be). After that, an elaborate troup of masked kids dressed as monsters came pancing up, and pulled us onto the makeshift dance floor to do a few rounds of marimba. The four of us old-timers are experts at this sort of thing, but I can’t help thinking of the three new volunteers, who had the “what the heck?” face off and on thorughout the entire afternoon.

Once the ceremony was over, we all gathered to dine in Diego’s house. I smiled as we entered; after a year and a half of giving health lectures on his dirt floor, we were eating on his BRAND NEW CONCRETE FLOOR. And I must say, it looks pretty nice! The women all pitched in and made a really tasty kaq trigo, a sortof chicken soup of thick wheat gravy. Originally, the village decided that since there was no money left in the project fund, everyone would split the costs… and Emily and I offered to pay for the other volunteer’s shares as well as our own. But the ladies decided that since we’d not had the chance to eat in everyone’s house during the project, they would pitch in and we weren’t allowed to pay. That was an awfully sweet gesture from people who don’t have a lot of discretionary income. As I sat eating, I looked around the room at so many faces I’ve come to know, people whose houses I’ve spent time in, who I’ve helped to build a water tank or a stove. People I probably won’t ever see again. “Jaime, chili,” a smiling lady said, handing me a bowl of peppers. Most Mayans don’t put chili in their soup, but word got around months ago that I love it, so they all take great joy in making sure it’s available if I am coming to dinner. That’s how they are.

As I finished, I made my way to the kitchen, which was filled with many women I know from the health lectures. They were all chatting happily, eating their share of the meal (the men generally eat at the Table, with the Honored Guests- an awkward situation for the female volunteers, who are Honored Guests and threfore the only women at the Table). “Yujwal Dyos, mero watx’ kolobej,” I said, thanking them for the tasty meal. The looked up, smiled back, and I came in to give goodbye hugs to my friends. About then is when they realized that they wouldn’t see me again for a very long time, if ever. It all got very sad after that, and I don’t remember much more until I was walking down the hill away from Yulais.

“Take a picture,” Emily said, crying as she was walking away.  

I was confused, and she pointed back the way we’d come. There, standing on the hillside amongst the tin and adobe shacks, were a few dozen women. They were all standing in their Sunday best, watching us go, waving at us as they’d done every week for over a year. But this time, they were weeping instead of laughing.

That was a very public despedida, but we’ve been having all sorts of private ones as well. Here’s Emily, reading to Delmi one last time. I think this was one of the hardest things Emily had to do during her whole service. This near-daily ritual has become so important to both of them, it makes ME sad imagining how they will get along without each other in the coming months. I think this time they read The Best Nest by PD Eastman, an old-time classic that I read when I was Delmi’s age. Emily likes reading it to the kids because they started yelling “Cham Jaime!” every time they got to the picture of the bearded guy sitting on the bench reading. Hmm, I guess he DOES look like me when I have the beard on.

* Nick still doesn’t own his own capishay, so he had to borrow my spare one. But the good news is, he’s getting his own to celebrate his one-year anniversary in site!

Some time in Week 9, we started to have some of the problems typical in Guatemalan endeavors. A few key community leaders stopped talking to each other and the American donors, and there were some doubts about where the money was all going. Building materials, an important part of any construction project, stopped arriving in a timely manner- further reinforcing the idea that money wasn’t all going where it should. Concerned, the donor held off sending another material shipment pending verification, starting a vicious cycle. No material shipments, no progress on the work. No progress on the work, no material shipments.

About this time, the weather started to move in. The arrival of rainy season coincided with a few missed shipments of materials, and the masons left the site to look for other work. When there are no materials, there is nothing to build… and around here, if the mason isn’t working, he doesn’t get paid. One has to feed one’s family, right? Abandoned footing trenches filled with rainwater, and rusty steel reinforcing was left swinging in the breeze like barren trees after a forest fire.

After all the work I put into the project, this was very disheartening for me, but I realized that these are only temporary setbacks in a place like Guatemala. Given enough time, things start up again. But now my time has bled away, and my inflexible date of departure has nearly arrived. Without me, how will the project continue? I had hoped to be with the building at least until they completed an entire wing, to answer questions and clarify problems. If they could build one wing, doing three more would be a simple matter of re-doing what they’d done before, a really effective teaching technique here.

Last week, I went to the site and talked to León. He was pleased to inform me that they were back to work, and materials were arriving again. Although he’s a little nervous that I’m leaving, he’s still as knowledgeable and conscientious as ever. After a long conversation and a thorough look at his work so far, I feel confident that he can continue without my advice. After all, the building was designed using simple technologies and building techniques that the local workforce is comfortable with.

And me? I’ve spent my (scarce) spare moments in the last month or so working on a scale model to help with local fundraising. Models are great for helping people understand what a building will be like. I haven’t made one since college, and though it’s time consuming, I forgot how fun it is! This model is going to sit on display in a municipal office in town, so potential local donors can get excited about giving money to the cause. I’ll post some pictures when it’s done.

Speaking of fundraising, you too have an opportunity to help the project and it won’t cost you a cent. Chase Bank and Facebook are sponsoring a grant, where people vote for their favorite charities. The top 200 charities will receive a donation of $20,000. Computers for Guatemala, the sponsor for the Mayan school, is currently in contention for one of the spots. Don Livingston, the founder of CFG, told me today that they plan on spending all $20,000 on the Mayan school if they get the grant. If you have a Facebook account(1), you can go here and cast a vote for them, potentially giving the Mayan school a BIG boost. There is less than a week left to cast your vote(2), so don’t delay. Let’s get this school built!

1. It seems that Facebook will share your public info with Chase if you vote, but not your private information. You HAVE set your privacy settings, haven’t you?

2. Update: i just got these instructions from Don, in case the voting process is confusing:

1. Go to our website:  http://computersforguatemala.com/school
2. Click on the “Support Us” Vote box.
3. Click on: “Get Started to Vote” in Green
4. Request for Permission to Access Basic information – click on “Allow”
5. Pop up window asks you to “Like” Chase Community Giving – click on “Like”
6. Verify you are still on the Chase Community Giving Computers for
     Guatemala page
 7. Click on VOTE.  If you are not on Computers for Guatemala’s vote page, go up to “Search and Vote”    

This did not keep Dan and me from rocking the house, however. As promised, his band showed up and we made a scene. I wasn’t really sure how people would take it- heavy metal doesn’t fit everyone’s taste. But as we stepped on stage and people started screaming, I knew everything was going to be all right. The crowd was ready, and they were in the mood to be rocked- Search and Destroy style. It was time to cut loose, and no music cuts loose like Metallica. Luckily (?) , Emily was able to catch some of the concert on video, which can be enjoyed here. I edited out the parts where lightning bolts flew out of my guitar and struck several bystanders dead in their shoes. But metal is like that, and some acceptable losses must be expected.

But it was not all heavy metal mayhem. Several months ago while we were hiking El Mirador, Sara and Charlotte were looking at the journal I made and asked me if I’d teach a bookbinding class. I love teaching anything, so we agreed to do it if we could scrape up the materials. Sara is very resourceful and found us all some leather and paper, so I made a few awls from nails and chunks of wood, and we finally held our class. Everyone was pleased with the end results, and we got to spend some relaxing time with a few of our remaining friends that haven’t yet left the country.

This weekend was also useful in that we met the new volunteer that is coming to our village. Her name is Cathleen, and she’s very enthusiastic. In the hour or two we spent together, we talked nonstop- so many questions! So much to say! I can remember how anxious I was two years ago: desperate to know what the village was like, if the people were nice, what the housing situation was, how to get there… a thousand questions. I’d also forgotten how little you actually KNOW about Guatemala at that point in your service, basic things like how to use the bus system. She has a big adventure ahead of her, that’s for sure. But I’m really glad she’s coming. Sure, she’s well qualified and has a lot of experience in development work (more than we had when we arrived), but more than anything, she’s ENTHUSIASTIC. She is fresh and ready to go. In comparison, we sometimes feel tired, impatient, and burnt out. Passing the torch will be good for us, good for her, and most importantly, good for the community. We’ve built a lot of opportunities for her in the last two years, and she has the fresh legs to take them and really make them work.

Cathleen, as well as two other new volunteers that will be working in our municipality, are arriving tomorrow to visit their new home before they move here permanently at the end of the month. I have to get some sleep; we have a big week planned for them.

But that is not what I’m here to talk about; today we have the last post about the SPA project. Tuesday’s work was pretty straightforward, the latrine. We actually only built a single unit (huh) because no one was really interested in having one. Also, to my disappointment, the one they wanted was the less-fantastic “ventilated latrine” type. These are built in essentially the same way as the ones we built with Charlotte a few months back: better than pooping in the field, but not at nice as the fancy composting type. They don’t give you compost, and you have to move them every few years when the pit beneath them fills up. This is extra problematic in our local soil, where the pit walls have a tendency to collapse, causing them to fill in even faster than they otherwise would.

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When we arrived at the participating house, we found a mixed situation. The good news: the family had already dug the 8-foot deep pit as they’d agreed to. The bad news? All the rain last week had caused the pit to fill completely with water, giving it the deceptive appearance of a shallow muddy puddle. We spend the first hour of work tossing in buckets with a rope attached, to dewater the hole. Despite this setback, we got it done: the last of the four technologies.

Emily was gone for much of the time we were building, collecting the last of the photos of the finished projects as well as the signatures (thumbprints, in most cases) of the people who donated labor. I can’t imagine how we’d have ever finished this if there were only one of us. That was subjunctive, by the way, for any of you who were wondering what “subjunctive” was in the first half of the post. It doesn’t come up often in English, but it seems to sneak into about half of the sentences you hear in Spanish.

We’ve also had to go back and deal with some problems. Most of our tanks leak (aieeeeee!) because we have a cold joint between the base and the walls. This is not as big a problem as it sounds; it just means that the plaster is no longer an optional extra. We are kicking in a bit of money to plaster all the tanks, thanks to the generous donations from several of you who know who you are. I once worked with a contractor in Oregon who told me that “Being a good builder ain’t about not f*cking up, it’s about knowing how to fix the f*ckups when they happen.” True, that.

I was having the obligatory mosh drink during a work break with one of the families, and noticed this cat. I’d seen her before, but now she had these strange brown stains on her fur. “What are those marks on the cat?” I asked.

“Burns!” they told me.

Huh. Weird. “How’d that happen?” I asked, remembering that cats around here love to sleep at the very edge of the wood stove, the only toasty warm place on the house.

“The neighbors next door ran out of firewood, so they tried to burn the cat instead!” the lady said. There was a pregnant pause, then everyone exploded in laughter. I like these people, they have a good sense of humor.

We still have a lot of other stuff cooking in the coming weeks, but I want to celebrate the end of our construction with the fruits of Emily’s work, a little montage of “before” and “after” photos. Enjoy!

pisos de cemento- concrete floors

pilas- water tanks

estufas mejoradas- improved woodburning stoves

letrinas ventiladas- ventilated latrines

Traveling by myself in Guatemala is kindof strange, since Emily and I go almost everywhere together. This was the third time I’ve done it in our entire service, and I have to say, it was sortof fun. Like us, Dan lives “Hue, Hue out there” and the trip involved three different busses and about 9 hours of travel. The roads are not direct: I had to go over the Cumbre then back though Todos Santos, and it’s quite a haul. Out of curiosity, I checked on Google Earth to see how far apart we REALLY are, as the crow flies. The answer?

Thirteen miles. 13. I can’t get my head around that.

You could probably make that hike in a day, if you knew the way and your mountain legs were up to it. And to give you a better idea of how powerful and effect geography has on human culture and development, bear in mind that if you walked that journey, you’d go through four different ethnic/linguistic regions: The Q’anjob’al speakers (where we live), the Chuj in Coatán that we see across the valley, the Mam people all around Totos Santos, and finally the Poptí in Dan’s site.

I’m glad I went. His site is beautiful, and he gets even fewer visitors than we do… he said I was the second in two years. Speaking of years, Dan is the one person in our group that is going to extend his service for the extra year. He’s got a lot of good stuff going on in his site: the mayor has asked him to start an Alcoholics Anonymous program (very badly needed!!), he’s working on a SPA project, he’s the goalie on his town’s soccer team, and he’s the lead singer for a Guatemalan heavy metal band.

Which brings us back around to the point of this post.

Dan’s been cooking up this idea for months, to bring his band to play some metal at the annual All-Volunteer Conference and 4th of July Party. He called me up a month or two ago, and it went like this:

Dan: “Hey.”

Me: “Hey.”

Dan: “My band is thinking about playing at the 4th.”

Me: “Sweet. Do it.”

Dan: “You once told me you played bass in a band back in the US.”

Me: “Yeah, I played with The Hoot Hoots. Why?”

Dan: “We don’t have a bass player. You know any Metallica?”

So, basically, I was hooked. I like heavy metal, but I don’t have a lot of experience with it. The good news is that metal bass lines are pretty easy to learn, and the people running the party are only allowing bands to play two songs each. His band is into Mexican speedmetal (um, what?) but also likes Metallica, Twisted Sister, and Black Sabbath/Ozzy. This week was our dress rehearsal.

Dan’s band practices in a creepy little concrete room beneath a darkened bus-repair garage that smells of mildew and used engine oil. This tiny acoustic burial vault is packed with amps, equalizers, microphones, speakers, audio cables, mixing boxes… and instruments. This is good, since I left my bass in the US when I came to Peace Corps. “The ex-mayor lets us use this stuff. I have no idea where it came from.”

As the amps started warming up the damp, chilly cell, I was introduced to his VERY youthful band. Handshakes and smiles all around, then we got down to business. As best we could, anyway, in a room that small packed with a dozen teenage fans that follow the band to every performance and rehearsal. “They’re pretty stoked to have a bassist,” Dan shouted in English over the din of guitars tuning. “Lucas says that metal without a bassline is like a softdrink without the sugar.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I am the Sugar Daddy.

Pedro, the drummer, hammered away like he was the happiest person in the world, and Lucas picked out the riffs like a good boy should. Dan, for his part, growled the lyrics to a wide range of metal tunes, showing off the special skill that sets him apart from every other singer within a day’s drive: he speaks English. We rocked the evening away, until everyone went home with bleeding eardrums and smiling faces.

Despite how much fun it was, it’s probably good that we only get two songs; most mortals have a limited tolerance for heavy metal. In fact, Dan was worried about scaring off the audience. “I’ve been thinking maybe we should learn a Beatles song. Twist and Shout?”

“Yeah, that’s a crowd pleaser,” I shrugged. “We used to play that with the Hoot Hoots, and it got people dancing. Sometimes girls threw underwear.” After a trial run with his boys, though, it looked like Twisting and Shouting was out of the picture. Mexican speedmetal doesn’t do 60’s Fab Four.

“Maybe we should just do two Metallica songs?” I suggested. “Your band seems to like them the best, and those are the ones I’ve been practicing. That, and if the audience is going to hate it, a Beatles song at the end isn’t going to change their minds anyways.”

Dan nodded. If you are going to do a thing, you have to do it all the way. No prisoners. Heavy metal style. “OK. I’ll get the wigs ready.”

The big downside to this system, besides my secret fear that the tabletops would crack when lifted, is the actual process of lifting them. Like I said before, I estimate the weight of each one to be about 600 pounds. And they’re flat on the floor. I had some ideas how to do this with levers and blocks, but Emily said I should just let them figure it out. Being from a primitive setting with little equipment available, the locals are really good at physical labor, and working out the specifics of how to do it.

I was not disappointed. The day came for me to teach the class on how to do the upper half of the stoves, and my three team leaders showed up… along with twelve strapping men. “Where do you want this thing?” the asked, and I pointed to the base we’d built last week, with a fresh layer of mortar on top. They hummed ad hawed for about two minutes, then picks and poles came out of nowhere, there was some grunting, and they had the entire slab a few inches off the ground, set on some blocks of firewood. A heave-ho and a bit of grunting later, and a 24-legged monster scuttled its way across the room and our table was set.

“OK, see ya” they said and they all filed out the door. “We’re off to the next house.” What? Turns out, they are good at organizing, too. Diego and the leaders told the guys to just run ahead to all 13 houses that day, and lift all the slabs. Nice!

As an interesting side note, our friends Joe and Katy built stoves in their village as well, but didn’t add the table. They looked more like this one we built during training, and took a lot less time and money to build. But we try to make the project suit the culture and climate of each village, and their village is in the blazing-hot jungle climate of the south coast. No one wants to be anywhere near the fire if they can avoid it. In contrast, our village is in the bonechilling highlands, and everyone can be seen gathered around the fire when they’re not working the fields or sleeping. Having a little fireside table is the rage in all the homes here. It’s such a good idea, in fact, that I want to invent some sort of analog for avant-garde homes in US when I get back.

Now, without any further ado, the rest of the stove building process.

Day 2: The Upper

Like I said, the Brute Squad already went around an hoisted all the 600 pound concrete slabs onto the block bases. That streamlined things quite a bit, and some groups (like Emily’s) were able to do two stove uppers in about 5 hours.

Lay out the fire brick in the center of the table, but don’t mortar them down. Grab the blocks you filled with concrete last week, and set them along side to make sure everything fits right.	You will have to cut a few bricks. This can be done easily by tapping the brick with the trowel, but around here they like to use a saw. They ruined my hacksaw blade after three bricks, then switched to their own crosscut saws.	Set the blocks in a bed of mortar, then mortar in vertical firebricks to line the side of the firebox.
We need to make an elbow to support the chimney and pass the smoke. Take a block and knock a hole through it with a chisel or piece of rebar. Cement it in place at the back of the stove, with a brick to close the opening at the back.	Using a hammer, straighten the hooks on the plancha and door frames. The tabs help hold the frame in place, but the hooks stick out of the finished plaster.	Lay a thick strip of mortar on top of the firebrick, and set the frame for the plancha. Check for level. Plaster the door in place.
Set the chimney on the stove with mortar so you can get it plumb. Plumb is important, because it’s really heavy and we don’t want it falling over. Cut the roof as needed to let the chimney pass.	Most of the installations need three chimney sections, but some have low roofs and only need two. Contrary to local belief, the chimney should extend a few feet above the roof, so it can draft properly. Pack the opening with mortar.*	You’re just about done. Plaster the whole thing to make it pretty and easier to clean. At one point we ran out of fine sand for the plaster, so they just got a screen and sifted us some more from the gravel.
Sometimes you have to fix messups, too. On Gaspar’s stove, the crew broke three of his four corners off the table because they were too rough when they took off the forms. Yikes!	Perhaps next time Gaspar’s voodoo charms will be more effective at warding off this sort of bad luck.	I was hanging around at the very last house waiting for my assistants to show up, and these kids looked like they needed some toys. So I made them some turwex (dragonflies) out of some scrap wire left over from Day 1.

You guys know how much I like SketchUp models. Click here to download a model of the stove I made to help check materials quantities and be sure it all fit together with the things we were ordering.

*Everyone around here uses mortar to seal chimney openings through their tin roofs. It makes me crazy! Concrete is NOT waterproof, and its also very stiff so it can’t move with the tin roof as it expands in the sunlight or moves with the wind. How can that possibly NOT leak? What they need is a proper flashing, but no one here does it that way and there are no pre-made ones available in stores.

Last night, however, was probably the single most important meeting we’ve had regarding the future of our site. After the numerous problems with the leadership in general and Manuel in specific, there was some uncertainty as to whether the Peace Corps was even going to replace us with a new volunteer when we leave. This would be a big blow to the community, but the reality of it is that if volunteers can’t work here, they shouldn’t be here. Basilio and Aurelio, being clever and politically-minded guys, worked out a plan: the village needs to replace the Health Committee with new leadership if they want another Peace Corps volunteer. Basilio sent an official fax to Aurelio explaining this, who then acted surprised to get it and sent it along to our village elders.

That was a few weeks ago. Last night we finally had the Big Village Meeting to discuss this. I got there early (about an hour after the announced starting time), and waited outside the community hall with all the people I’ve come to know in the last two years. What would happen? They’re all friendly and nice to us, but there’s also this undercurrent of misunderstanding and blame… why are we working in Yulais, and not here? What happened to the “project” they were promised? Almost simultaneously, Aurelio and Nas Palas showed up.

“Let’s go upstairs and have a talk,” Nas said, leading Aurelio by the shoulder and nodding me towards the Health Post. “You have a key, right?”

I do, so we walked across the square to the health post. The four or five others in the oligarchy of the village magically appeared out of thin air to join us. You see, this is how it works. There are some older, respected men who sortof run things, but have no official position. They’d all met at Nas’s house the night before to discuss this very issue, and even invited Emily and I to answer a few questions at the end of their meeting, making sure they knew how to handle everything before it happened in public. They’re wise, community-minded guys… and now they were going to brief Aurelio. I felt kindof pleased to witness it, especially since I knew every one of them and trusted their judgement: Nas Palas, Don Ximon, Don Tomax, Santiago. And the people I don’t trust in the community were notable absent.

The conclave happened in Q’anjob’al, and I followed most of it not because I have a high competency with our Mayan dialect, but because I am pretty familiar with the material. The one notable change in the plan was that they’d decided not to replace the Health Committee leadership. Instead, they were going to form an entirely new committee, with the exclusive purpose of working with the Peace Corps. Aurelio and I both approved of the idea, so we all returned to the community hall.

There were about 50 people in attendance- not a big turn out for our village, and a little disappointing for a meeting that seems so important to the future of Peace Corps in this area. Would they vote to do what’s needed to get another volunteer? Or would apathy, petty grievances, and misinformation rule the day? Aurelio picked up the microphone and convened the meeting, inviting someone to come up and give the obligatory opening prayer.

To my great glee, Don Marcos appeared out of the crowd to lead a short prayer. He’s always been one of our staunchest supporters, even though his busy schedule of church work, coffee growing, water commission, and running a business in Barillas keeps him from participating a lot. He smiled at me as he finished.

Aurelio reclaimed the microphone, and started taking about our work. He explained that we’re not lazy (an occasional rumor here), that we’re working on projects in Yulais, that we’d brought computers for the village, and that the other Santa Eulalia volunteers were already doing a water project in their village after only a year of service. He read the fax from Basilio, and presented the idea of forming a committee especially for working with the Peace Corps.

Looking around the room as he talked, I was pleased to realize that I could stick a name and interesting story to the majority of the faces looking at Aurelio. That’s so different from two years ago when I started across a mass of indistinguishable brown faces welcoming us to their tiny village.

About that time, Antonio stood up. “Why does xxxxx (village name withheld) have a water project already after just a year, and we’ve got nothing? Who is at fault here? That letter you read hints at the Health Committee. If that’s so, we should replace them. Who is at fault? Maktxel culpable?” He seemed pretty agitated.

“I don’t know,” Aurelio lied, “I don’t live here. You’d have to ask the committee.” This meeting was turning into a showcase of indirect communication and careful maneuvering. Once again, I noticed Manuel was conspicuously absent.

Nas picked up the microphone. “The point is that Jaime and Emily are leaving on the 13 of July. If we want more volunteers, we have to organize a committee. If not, we don’t need to have this meeting.”

There was some more chatter, then an older guy in a weatherworn capishay stood up. “But what about the morral project? What happened to that money?” The thing about Mayan town meetings is, they are all over the place. Topics fly in from every direction. But you have to have faith; after everything is exhausted, they eventually come home to the main theme. You just have to be patient.

Several women then got up and said versions of the same thing: “Jaime and Emily really support us and help us, but we don’t speak a lot of Spanish. The leaders don’t help us to understand what’s going on.”

Then Malin* stood up to talk. I cringed; she’s a total wild card. She’s been really helpful and understanding at times, and a few weeks ago she even invited us over for dinner to talk about what happened to the project, actually ASKING US instead of listening to the gossip. However, she was also one of the main perpetrators in the fiasco with the girls from Yulais. “You know, Jaime and Emily found us some money for the project. They did a lot of work for us.” Yay Malin!

Then Petrona stood up next to her. “Yes. And they also told the leaders that we needed a NIT (tax ID number) to receive the money. Then the leaders did nothing; I was there, I saw it.”

The discussion went around a bit more, and landed on Marcos. “Jaime and Emily do lots of good. I don’t generally benefit personally, because I am too busy to be involved, but I know that they brought computers to our community.”

Then Antonio stood up again, still mad enough that he was shaking. “But what happened to the project? Who is at fault? We have a right to know that.”

Nas leaned over to me. “He’s just being mischievous. He knows good and well who is at fault. They all do.” And that is one of the keys of indirect communication: saying leading things over and over, and never actually saying the person’s name. So many people in this room had been cheated by Manuel; Antonio was just keeping it in the front of the meeting. In fact, after the meeting ended, Antonio was one of the last people to leave. He came right over to us, and apologized repeatedly. “I want you to know that what I said was not aimed at you. I know you worked hard. I am sorry if I offended you. Very sorry.” He was still shaking from emotion. We reassured him that we understood who the comments were aimed at, and didn’t take offense. His effort to comfort us was very kind and appreciated, though.

About that time, Palxun stood up. He doesn’t speak often, but he and his wife run the store down the hill from us and are always exceptionally kind. “Is the morral project still going? What’s happening with that?” No one really answered, and the discussion drifted.

“We have to WORK, to collaborate, if we want to reap the benefits from our volunteers.” Nas said. “Yulais is kicking in 400q each and a bunch of physical labor to get their projects.”

“There are women here who are good workers,” Petrona replied. “But there are also lazy ones. In the morral co-op, we have some that show up late, or do bad work. They don’t get the benefits if they don’t put forth the effort.” That is a good parallel, and I was pleased that SOMEONE got the point. “Emily also organized us to teach others how to make morrales. We were ready and willing to do it, too. It’s not our fault if other women are too lazy to come.”

Then the capishay guy got up again. “We have to support these volunteers.” Some nods, some murmurs.

“But every meeting, they ask us for money,” Lukie’s mom piped in. It was like that record-scratching noise, and the meeting erupted into bedlam.

What? Money? We never ask anyone for money. We’re not even allowed to HANDLE community money. I looked over at Aurelio, and he was looking down, massaging his temples with his thumbs. This happens to almost anyone who tries to help the community, and he has been accused of it as well… taking money, abusing power, corruption.

I took the microphone. “Which group? The morral group?” I asked her. “Who took the money? The leaders? Us?” Through a translator, she said the morral group.

I tried not to get angry. “All of you listen. We aren’t allowed to handle money, and we don’t. And I know for a fact that no one has EVER taken money at a morral meeting.” I looked at Lukie’s mom. “And I don’t know how you could say these things, because you have never even attended. Not once. Repeating that sort of gossip is bad.”

The bedlam continued for a while, but eventually got talked down. Then Lina, Manuel’s wife, stood up. She was there to look out for her husband’s name in his absence, surely. “What we need here is clarity, transparency. We need a committee for just these Peace Corps projects, to keep things simple and not confuse the people.” Whew, getting the meeting back on track!

Bernabe stood up. “I think that only those who want to work, want to participate, should do so. There shouldn’t be a penalty for those who don’t.” This seems obvious to you and me, but “obligatory participation” is pretty common in Mayan culture, and is enforced with powerful social pressures.

“What do these volunteers bring to us, anyways?” Marcos asked, handing Aurelio a cleverly-timed rhetorical question. He knows that answer better than almost anyone in the village, and has always been fully on board with our mission of health education.

Aurelio responded with a 5-minute lecture on the lasting benefits of education in third-world development. “They want to help. They are only working in Yulais right now because we’ve denied them the opportunity to work here. Then, out of nowhere, Aurelio called a vote. It happened really quickly, hands up and down, and the village decided to nominate a new committee and to host another two years of Peace Corps volunteers. That fast.

Then Nas Palas got up and gave a very animated speech about how the village wasn’t working with Jaime and Emily, and it was their own fault for not getting full benefit from their volunteers, and how they had to do better in the future.

“We need to elect a committee that’s energetic, one that will work,” Don Ximon said.

The capishay guy got up, and said “I nominate Marcos.” Then he walked out of the meeting. Another guy did the same.

Marcos stood up, and explained that he’s love the job, but he had too many other obligations to dutifully serve the villagers in that capacity. We were a little disappointed; he’d be a perfect candidate: organized, smart, understanding, commmunity-minded. But knowing your limitations is important, and we respect that.

“How about Nas Palas,” someone else nominated. I looked over at Nas Palas, whose face was an unreadable mask of fatigue. That poor guy is supposed to be retired, and he already gets shit from the village because some people still think the gringoes give him sacks of money to live in his house (which is actually donated to us, at personal expense to Nas). Being on the Peace Corps committee would only deepen his headaches in that respect.

“I don’t want the job,” he said, leaning over to me, “But I serve the community when they want me to. I hope someone else comes forth.”

A few more people were nominated and declined for various other conflicting obligations. Then the meeting broke down in to more hubbub. The trouble, it became apparent, was getting the women involved. Emily asked if she could get up and say a word to animate the women, and Don Tomax said, “Sure, but first we need to elect a president.” I was more caught off guard by that sublime sexism than Emily, who grudgingly conceded that we can’t change the world all at once. Just getting some women to be vocales (committee members) was going to be challenging enough.

It looked like no one was going to volunteer for the committee. It’s all fine to raise your hand and say, “It’s OK to have a committee and allow the volunteers to stay,” but when it came time to actually do something, no one was interested. We were about to fail from apathy.

“What’s wrong with you all?” Aurelio asked, taking the microphone and launching into an impassioned speech about civic duty. “This is the problem with Guatemala. We’re a third-world, underdeveloped country why? Because no one wants to stand up and change it.”

Then, as if by magic, the room emptied… leaving seven people standing before us: Don Tomax, Don Ximon, Nas Palas, Bernabe, Petrona, Juana, and a woman I’ve never seen before. “Congratulations,” Aurelio said. “This is your new committee.”

A postscript to all this is that there was a second drama going on concurrently in the meeting, regarding the posada, or living-place. We think our house with Nas’s family is cute, safe, and comfy- a perfect place for the next volunteer. After much discussion amongst themselves over the last few months, the family decided that having us was so much fun that it made up for them not having use of one of their rooms, and they’d like to host the next volunteer as well. The problem, though, is that they were socially obligated to give the rest of the village a chance to host us. Several people had been asking, seeing the $$ they might be getting from the new Gringoes.

But Nas is a clever guy and knows how to work the system. He announced at the meeting that anyone who wanted to host the new volunteers should come talk to Emily and Jaime, who would visit their house to evaluate it based on the Peace Corps requirements, and that the village agreement of “rent free” would be continuing, as decided upon by the leaders. This subtle reminder, as well as the daunting idea of actually talking to the scary gringoes directly, put off any would-be suitors. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s 99% likely that the next volunteer will be living with Nas’s family as well. And that thought is comforting indeed.

As important as these stoves are, we were at first hesitant to do them here. In our villages, most of the families already have some sort of rudimentary stove, and other project types (floors!) are hardly in use. But a LOT of people wanted the stoves, so we surveyed their houses too. That’s when we started to realize that this was still a good project: nearly all of the stoves were substandard, with broken chimneys, no doors, and cracked tops. The majority were handmade from xan (adobe), crumbling and leaking smoke into the house. Those stoves are better than nothing, but still a health hazard worth replacing.

This presented us with a quandry. The specifics of the grant, as well as good development practice, prevent us from building a second stove in a house. It’s wasteful of resources, unethical, but happens here sometimes… and everyone has an excuse. “Fijese que, this stove belongs to my father-in-law. I want my own.” Stuff like that. Emily has been a real hardass, and told several people that there are NO EXCEPTIONS, and the old adobe stoves had to be removed before we put anything new in. This even caused a few people to drop the project. So imagine the conflict when last week Diego asked us what the families are supposed to do for food during the two weeks it takes the new stoves to dry. In a perfect world, we’d be building for families that were currently cooking over open fires, and adding two more weeks of smoke inhalation while the new stove dries isn’t going to do much extra harm. In the end, it was Emily that came up with the solution: they can keep using their adobe stove while the new one dries, but we won’t give them the magic final part (the plancha, or stovetop) of the new stove until we return and see that the adobe stove is really gone. Then, we just drop the plancha into the steel frame that is cemented into the stove. It’s sad, but we have to use a “trust but verify” system; if we just assume people will do what they say, some will not- either out of laziness, or seizing the opportiunity to have their two stoves after all.

In two of the 15 houses, we’re just going to do “upgrades.” The owner already has a reasonably nice stove, but it doesn’t have a door and the plancha is old and warped. A new plancha will not let the smoke out, and the door is AWESOME TECHNOLOGY. Besides holding in some of the heat to increase efficiency, it has a little vent on the front that can be adjusted: wide open, for maximum heat and starting the fire, or partially open, for better efficiency and lower heat for making tortillas, or closed at the end of the day to kill the fire by oxygen starvation. This makes some nice charcoal in the stove to start the next day, instead of a bunch of useless ashes. Everytime we explain how to use the door, the women are besides themselves with excitement at this amazing new idea.

So, now that you know the What and Why, here is the How…for your reading pleasure.

Day 1: The Base

To get 15 stoves built in two days, we had to break into teams. The actual “working time” per stove isn’t much- two hours to build the base, wait about a week for the concrete to cure, then two or three more hours to build the top. But to make the schedule, we are doing two bases per day, for two days, in four separate groups. Then, the following week, we’re doing it again for the tops (with work on more tanks in between. No rest of for the wicked).

Cut the 2×4 formwork and nail it together. These women are having a blast, using “men’s tools” for the first time ever, under the watchful tutelage of Emily.	Level the ground, and lay out your 2×4 formwork with some nylon underneath it. Check for level and square, then stake it down. This needs to happen in the same room as you’re going to build the stove (more on that later).	While this is going on, have some other workers cut the reinforcing steel and wire it together into a grill. Bring it in and put it in the formwork.
If things are confusing, you should take notes. If you don’t have paper, improvise.	Place rocks under the steel, so it will be in the center of the slab. We will be lifting the slab into place next week, and if the steel is NOT in the center, the slab might explode. Avoid this Epic Fail.	Mix up about 4 wheelbarrows of concrete. By now, you should be very good at it. Here we see Brenda helping out with the water.
Shovel the concrete into the forms. This is going to be the “table” of the stove, and I estimate it will weight about 600 pounds. We have to pick this up next week, hence building it in the room where we’re going to install it.	Trowel the slab smooth, and leave to dry. Protect it from animals. You’d think that being indoors, it would be safe from the chicken footprints we had on other projects. Not the case! I’ve already had to fix some.	Fill the cores of six blocks with cement. Set them aside to dry; we’re going to use them in Day 2. For what? You’ll have to read that post to find out.
Cut trenches where the concrete block base of the stove will go. Make them about 4 inches deep, if you want a low stove or your soil is soft. Throw some concrete in the trench, to give you a level base for the first course of block.	Start laying up the block. It’s funny; I’m not a mason, but I took a two-hour class on blocklaying one weekend in architecture school, and amazingly, I found the things I learned 18 years ago to be exceptionally useful here. Blocklaying is not rocket science, but is definitely a “skilled trade,” with lots of tricks to make it easier and improve quality.	You will have to cut two blocks to get it to all work out. No one here has a masonry saw, so they do it with… a machete! What Guatemalan construction project would be complete without THAT? Incidentally, chipping block is prohibited in the specifications of most architects I’ve worked for.

Well done. Clean up your tools, drink your mosh, and get on to the next house. We still have a lot of work to do.

Day 2 is coming soon….

Last week I was assembling the galvanized steel water piping for a tank, and realized that I was out of Teflon tape. For those of you that don’t do plumbing, Teflon tape wraps around the threads of the pipe to ensure a tighter, more waterproof connection. It’s not necessary, but it’s a cheap way to increase the quality of the work- especially if no one has a monkey wrench and you have to tighten the pipes with vicegrips. Anyway, I had used some on the previous tank, so I sent a kid to run down to that house and get me some from that tank’s owner, José.

“He doesn’t have any,” the kid said when he came back 10 minutes later. Um, bullshit. He had some two days ago. I walked down the hill to José’s house, to exert some gringo influence.

“Hi José!” I smiled as I walked into his yard, and casually leaned on his brand-new tank. “Man, this tank stuff is a lot of work! Say, how’s your tank drying?” Playing innocent/ dumb is usually the best way to master the Latin American system of “indirect communication,” and beating around the bush is always a good intro.

“Great!” he said. “We’re all very excited about it.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m happy to hear it,” I smiled. “I’m working on Eulalia’s tank up the hill, and realized that I don’t have any Teflon tape! Silly me. You don’t happen to still have that almost-empty roll from two days ago, do you?”

His eyes lit up. “Actually, I do, Jaime! Let me get it for you.”

And that is how it works. Part of it is that I’m The Gringo, and people will do things for The Gringo that they wouldn’t do for their own blood relatives. But more than that, it’s a need to be recognized that they’re making a contibution or sacrifice, and I’m a high-profile witness for that sort of thing.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have had some “misses” on materials estimation. One fortunate error is that I over-estimated a tiny bit on the steel required for the tanks, so instead of 16 bars of steel, we just used 15. I explained to each tank owner that the extra material belonged to the community, not them, and that we might need it elsewhere before the project was all done. If we didn’t claim it by July 1, then they could have it as a gift. A few weeks later when we started the stoves, we were a tiny bit under on the steel order, and I sent runners to reclaim our rebar.

They didn’t have much trouble recollecting the supplies, because I’d thoroughly explained the deal to the various owners. Yesterday, however, we went to Lataq to build a stove base* and we needed another bag of cement. “Thank goodness,” I thought, “that we had one extra after we built that floor two weeks ago.” Lataq, as you might remember, is about an hour walk from here, on top of the mountain, and has no road or electricity. We are doing two projects there, because there are two ladies that come a LONG way every week to hear our health lecture. Our supplies had run a tiny bit over on the first one, a floor, and at the time I told the owner to hold onto that extra bag of cement, because it would be a bear to try to get another one up there if we needed it suddenly for the second project.

Diego hung up his cell phone as we were climbing the mountain. “She says that it’s hers, and you said she could use it when we put a floor the other room of her house.”

Ugh, that was an unfortunate misunderstanding. She’d asked me if we could put a floor in the other room of her house, and I told her we’d be happy to show up and help her, but she’d have to buy the materials. If we didn’t need to use the extra bag of cement elsewhere, she could use that too. Part of what we try to do is encourage people to take their projects that extra step: in the case of the tanks, for example, we aren’t plastering them if they hold water as-is. We’re keeping the project cost down, and they can save up their money and make these sort of aesthetic improvements on their own anyways. And in many cases, they are.

This lady never did anything about her second floor, but the thought of losing something she thought was hers was painful to her. I explained that the cement belonged to the community, for the benefit of all, and that that we were coming to get it. When we arrived, she was conveniently gone and we got the cement from her teenage daughter. Yep, she was pretty mad.

This all seems petty and senseless to me, but it comes from their cultural history and poverty. The Mayan idea of “mine” is strong; once the material hits their property, they all assume it’s theirs and no one else has any right to it. I suppose this is a factor of their economic situation. As Diego and I were walking back from Lataq, we crossed the new bridge the community had put in a few months ago. The old wooden one was lying in the field next to it. “What will they do with that?” I asked him.

“Nothing, until the community has a meeting about it,” he said. “They could re-use it, but they might just decide to chop it up and give every family a handful of kindling for their kitchen fires.” Oh, that. The Mayan obsession with fairness takes things to extreme, sometimes absurd, ends. I vividly remember when we first proposed our project, the leaders heard that we were only going to bring enough money to build sanitary infrastructure in about 40 houses. Their response? That it wouldn’t be fair, and that we should split the money between every single family, maybe buying each a piece of sheetmetal roof** or something. To them, giving everyone the same thing and having no useful improvement in their lives was FAR more important that doing something that would actually make a difference.

But right when I start to dismiss this equality obsession as a purely Guatemalan condition, I remember how aghast I was the first time I ate in a restaurant with Emily’s family. The bill arrived, and everyone broke out the calculators to figure the shares to the nearest penny. Money changed hands, bills and coins, even to the point of someone writing a check to someone else because they didn’t have exact change. Dude, in MY family, half the time everyone just throws some twenties into the center of the table and if it’s a little bit over, it’s a good day for the waitress. The other half of the time, someone says, “I’ll get it,” knowing that someone else will get it the next time. But, the truth of it is that Emily’s family has always had a little less money than mine, and that drives their level of care. And our villagers have a LOT less money than anyone I’ve ever known before.

I said goodbye to Diego as I we parted ways. I started down the gravel road to my village, and he stopped me. “One more thing. Can I put a roll of Teflon tape on the material list for our final delivery? José says we used up his, and he wants it replaced.”

I nodded, too tired to point out that he’d “given” it to me, and just petty enough to notice that we’d be replacing his almost-empty roll with a brand new one.

*A post on how to build efficient woodburning stoves will be coming out very soon, don’t you worry.

**Interestingly, Nick and Katal are now starting to work up a project in their community, and came across EXACTLY the same thing. How can a sheet of tin roofing improve the health of a family? In both cases, we avoided the issue by explaining that if the project doesn’t make a demonstrable improvement in family health, the aid organization wouldn’t fund it.

My dad emailed me several days ago to tell me that I needed to slow down or I would get sick. But to stave off any “I told you so”, I must explain. Way back in training (two years ago! wow!), we had a panel of volunteers come in and talk to us about the SPA project process. They all mentioned as a side note that the participating families would be very grateful for the aid, and it would be almost impossible to avoid eating in their homes one or two meals a day for the entire duration of the project. That, of course, means eating in Guatemalan sanitary conditions… if they’d have paid attention during our lectures, they would be boiling their water and taking all the other sanitary precautions. But the reality of it is, some of them forget or didn’t “get it” in the first place. As a result, Emily and I have both been exposed to several dozen opportunities to catch some gastrointestinal illnesses. With odds like that, you can only get lucky for so long.

So here I sit, within running distance of the outhouse, thinking that the “I told you so” actually goes to the volunteers from two years ago, not my Dad. Thankfully, Emily was feeling a little better than me today (last week was the opposite), so she’s supervising today’s pour on one of the pilas.

I want to start off by thanking everyone who responded so positively to the appeal from a few days ago. It’s humbling to see how many people want to help, and to realize how many friends I have. Besides the numerous people that commented, I received several emails directly from others who want to participate. I will be sending out an email to everyone involved sometime before Monday, explaining what the options are. To all of you, thanks.

Onward to the day’s post about apodos, or nicknames. They aren’t really common in the US, except for odd situations like summer camp (Emily and I still call each other by ours to this day, hence the occasional reference to “Fletch” in her posts). In contrast, Guatemalans love them. So much so, that it sometimes makes it hard to know what’s going on in a conversation. My host family during training had a nickname for almost every adult, and they used them interchangeably with given names all the time. The best one belonged to Guillermo, Froilan’s son-in-law. They called him mono rojo, or “red monkey”. Apparently, when he was young, Guillermo went to see Planet of the Apes with his family. Like my brother Dave, he always picks a favorite character in a movie, and upon exiting the theater, he exclaimed “Yo soy el Mono Rojo!” (I am the Red Monkey) and beat his chest like an ape. Nickname unavoidable, for the rest of his life.

Once we got to our site, though, we didn’t come across any more nicknames. Could it be that Mayans aren’t into that sort of thing? Of course not; we just weren’t in their confidence at first, and they were very formal with us. Little by little, though, we started hearing them. Mateo, the village drunk, is called El Burro (the donkey), because he’s very strong and always carries 200 pounds at a time when he’s sober enough to be working. Mario, our friend that drives a microbus, is apparently called Tx’itx (the rabbit). Maybe it’s because he drives fast? Last night, Lina the Younger was visiting, so I asked her about nicknames.

“Oh yes, just about everyone here has one,” she said.

“Really? Interesting,” I replied. “Can you tell me some examples?”

She thought a bit. “Well, you know Lucas down below? They call him Bomba (The Bomb). And Abel, they call him Lustre (shoeshine). And Ixtup, they call him Paj (shoulderbag).”

“Wait, do any women have nicknames?” I asked. She shook her head no. Wow, there is a cultural difference between Ladinos and Mayans. “How about the older guys? Do they get nicknames? What about Don Tomax?”

She shrugged. “He’s Yal Nawal“. That means “little earth spirit”, more or less. The nawales are these semi-divine beings that roam the countryside, causing mischief or doing good, depending on their nature.

“How about Nas Palas?” I asked.

“They call him Tzul,” she said. I have no idea what a tzul is, and neither did Lina, so the next day I want and asked Nas’s wife. She laughed. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “There used to be this guy named Nas Tzul that came around, and since the both have the same first name, people started calling our Nas, “Tzul”. Who knows where that guy is nowadays? He could be dead.”

The thing about nicknames is, they almost always have an interesting story. They could be a reminder of a strange or memorable incident that happened long ago, but more often they’re a looking glass into how your friends and neighbors see you, what your place is in the community. A few days ago, we were having lunch with Diego, Ximon, and several other people in Yulais, and we got to talking about the long, long road we all traveled to do the paperwork for the SPA project. Manuel came up, and we were all relieved that Yulais had narrowly avoided the trap of his deceitfulness. He’d told them he was en expert at paperwork, and he would do it all for them. “Yeah, I’m glad we didn’t trust him,” Diego said. “We’d be without a project, just like your village.”

As I was sipping my soup and likely ingesting this thing that is keeping me home right now, my mind drifted to nicknames again. “Speaking of Manuel,” I mused aloud, “does he have a nickname?”

They all chuckled. “Sure. Everyone calls him “The Chucho”.

*Except Antigua. Being a well-organized city that relies heavily on the tourist dollar, Antigua has a special patrol of guys that makes chuchos “disappear” mysteriously in the night.

We’re getting close to done with the tanks. This morning we did the base of the next-to-last one, and as I was gluing all the PCV drainage plumbing together, I kept thinking “one more time… one more time…” I think I like the tanks (pilas) the best of all the projects we’re doing, but MAN, are they a lot of work. As part of figuring out the construction sequence, I made a SketchUp model of the tank, showing how the forms all go together and the bracing and the construction sequence. You can download it here, much like the latrine model I posted last year, to explore and play with on your own.

This week’s good news is that Diego and Ximon are at the point where they can pretty much build them without my assistance. That’s the point of the exercise, to build capacity in the local leadership. A few of the days, I just showed up at the very end to make sure everything was right before they poured concrete. There have been frustrations, though. One day I decided I would do NOTHING but watch and wait, allowing them the chance to make their own errors, and only step in when a disaster was about to occur. I think this is a very important aspect of teaching, and it’s my weakest area. It was super annoying, since I’m a get-in-and-do-it kind of guy. Another frustration happened when we didn’t properly brace a form, and the pressure of the concrete caused a blowout. Concrete went squirting out, things got out of alignment, and we had to run around like our hair was on fire disassembling forms, scraping concrete, reassembling forms, then refilling the walls before the concrete set. Ugh. But the bright side? When it happened THE SECOND TIME a few days later, Diego and Ximon knew how to take care of it. I just sat back and bit my fingernails for a tense two hours, “supervising”.

Part of the stress of this is the schedule. We can’t let up, or we won’t get our project done in time. To the guy that commented about the material distribution, yes I know, we have a LOT to do in very few days. But life wouldn’t be interesting if were easy, right? Here is where I should mention that Emily is really picking up the slack. I have been a bit scattered lately, very tired, and not completing sentences. She keeps on jumping in, making people work, taking on stuff that she is only just now learning herself. Granted, she’s pretty good at building things after all we’ve been through, but a lot of this stuff is new to her. Thankfully, she’s great at improvising, visualizing, and has a get-it-done attitude that is unstoppable. She’s the bomb.

The stress of this project is now further complicated by financing. We have had a really tight budget all along, so we could reach as many families as possible on the fixed grant we received from USAID. However, as happens in the “real world”, several things have gone awry. We took the latrine out of the grant, since we thought Rotary was going to pick that up. Due to a miscommunication on my part, they no longer want to… their funds were alotted for composting latrines, and this family wants a ventilated latrine. This is not meant as a criticism of Rotary, either: they donated a big chunk of money to put a floor in the school, and that helped a lot. I just need to find $250 somewhere for the latrine. Also, I missed a few times on some material estimates and we had some unexpected expenses come up. For example, the forms on a few of the tanks weren’t braced right, and we used too much cement. Or the stove bricks availble locally are much smaller than what we’d used during training, so we needed to order more. These types of errors happen in construction, and most professional projects have a contingency fund of 10% to cover it. We don’t, as I was trying to budget “tight”, so now we are a few thousand quetzales over. But the worst expense of all is purely a paperwork problem. We were told that we would be refunded the 10% sales tax we paid on the materials, since Peace Corps is an aid organization, and I budgeted accordingly. Last week I emailed the Peace Corps accountant to get our 10% back, and she told me that I was actually supposed to send her the receipts BEFORE i paid, she would make a form, fax it to me, I would hand it to the business, and they’d give me a discount at the time of purchase. Wow, it would have been nice to know THAT several weeks ago. Her best advice to me was to go visit the business, and ask them to hand me some cash. Riiiiiiiiight.

10% of our project, by the way, is about 6,000 quetzales. More than Emily and I make in a month, combined. I am once again holding out the hat, hopefully for the last time in our Peace Corps service. If any of you awesome blog readers are interested in financially supporting the little village of Yulais, you can comment it or email me directly.

Despite all this stress, Diego mentioned something in passing today that made me feel really good. “Can you draw out another sketch for me, with the dimensions of the horizontal steel spacing?” he asked. I’d drawn him about everything else in the last few days, so one more sketch was no biggie. He continued, “I’d like to make another tank for some of my relatives after you leave.”

Now THAT is what it’s all about.

Even though we’re buried to our ears in work, we decided to take a Saturday off to visit some good friends of ours, the other volunteers in our municipality. Or maybe it was because of the work. You see, Nick and Katal work in a village even more remote than ours, one that doesn’t even have electricity. Basically, a day of forced rest.

I often brag about the view from our window, and I have posted a lot of pictures of how beautiful our village is. But if there’s a Peace Corps house in Guatemala with a prettier view than ours, it would be this one. After 26 months of Peace Corps*, Emily and I finally experienced our fist twinges of “site envy”. I suppose it’s a good sign that it took so long; like I said, we love our site. And I realize that if we actually LIVED in Nick and Katal’s site, the honeymoon might be short lived (What? We have to leave at 5am or not at all?”).

But it has so much to recommend it. Their cute little houses are nestled on a mountainside, with no neighbors in sight (though they are just over the hill, about 3 minutes away). Majestic mountain peaks rise up on all sides, and when the clouds roll in, they fill the valley below. Their road is 40 minutes of 4×4 trail, so they only hear a car or two per day. No electricity would seem like a bad thing, until you realize that the neighbors can’t play loud music and many modern distractions are unavailable. Even better, though, is the nighttime view of a valley completely devoid of electrical lighting as far as you can see. A view completely unavilable anywhere in the US, except for perhaps the deepest reachest of Denali national park in Alaska.

What they lack in services, they make up for with ingenuity. Their kitchen sink/ laundry station is a board on stilts at the edge of their yard/cliff. Nick set up a 55-gallon drum and gutter system to collect rainwater for drinking and domestic use. They also have some technology; besides their solar panel that runs their rarely-used lightbulb (they use candles like the neighbors, to not isolate themselves culturally), they have a handcrank shortwave radio for entertainment. I occupied myself with it for an hour, tuning in stations from as far away as Russia and somewhere in Asia. Then, we played euchre. Simplicity.

After they’d visited us so many time, it was nice to give them the opportunity to show is their style of hospitality. The food was great, the quietude was restful, and it was fun to see other volunteers living the same sort of life we do: working with very poor, very rural Q’anjob’al Mayans in a personal, one-on-one setting.

*Just one month from today, we leave our site for good. Ohmygod, how did that happen so fast?

You see, a family in our valley has a big satellite dish in their yard, and there’s coax cable all over the valley to bring TV to those who crave it. For some reason that is beyond me, Galindo is the designated guy who hooks up new customers, collects the money, and writes receipts. Perhaps he has a teenager’s affinity for technology, and he’s a clever guy like his cousin Chalio? He’s done this job since we met him; about once a month I see him in his room with a desk and a pen, writing out receipts in a little book. Occasionally I bump into him as I’m walking somewhere, with a reel of cable under his arm and a pair of wirecutters, on his way to hook up someone else.

But this all changed in January, when he got accepted into post-secondary school. Galindo decided that he wants to be a PE teacher, and that requires taking classes full-time in the capitol city Huehuetenango, about five hours away. Nas Palas went with him to find a room to rent, get him settled in, and we didn’t see much of him after that except on the occasional weekend.

Then, disaster struck. A few weeks ago, Emily and I had a meeting planned with the leaders of the village to decide if they want a new volunteer after we leave. Nas Palas, being a staunch ally of ours and a respected village elder, was key to the meeting. About an hour before start time, his daughter mentioned to us that Nas had gone to Huehue to “visit”. ARGH! He knew about the meeting, and just bailed? We tried not to be hurt, and held the meeting without him.

Turns out, though, that Nas had actually gone to get Galindo and move him out. There isn’t a lot of gang activity outside of Guatemala City, but apparently there’s enough that one of them came across Galindo and tried to extort him. This kid has rotten luck! Now, he’s back in the village, helping around the farm and being The Cable Guy once again, and trying not to be bored.

And this is where the computer center comes in. After we initially explained to the leaders how the computer center would work, they all just sortof lost interest. Things have stalled out again, much to my dismay. “Why not talk to Galindo?” Emily said.

What a great idea. I went over to his room, and explained to him everything I’d told the leaders and they’d then ignored. He listened intently, and decided he was game. He really seemed to understand the basic ideas behind what I had in mind- a group of young people that could watch over the center and keep it open, collect money to pay the bills, and work together to develop the center further. I also told him that getting other people involved would protect him and Nas Palas as well- if it was only Galindo, rumors would start that Nas’s family was trying to steal away the computers, or that they struck some sort of deal with the Gringos. He said he understood, and would get some more people together and do it.

In our time here, I’ve learned to be suspicious. It seemed too easy… would he follow through?

This evening, though, I saw the proof. I went by the Health Center to get our cheese out of the vaccine fridge (heh) and saw lights on in the adjacent computer room. Galindo was in the computer center, with a few kids I’d never seen there before, as well as a teenager who was working on homework! I was floored. This is how I’d always imagined the center being used, and finally, in our last weeks here, it happened. We still have a long way to go (especially with collecting and managing money, paying light bills, and getting internet), but this somehow makes me feel like finally, we have success.

When we arrived, villagers were already unloading the two trucks that contained all we needed for 15 stoves, totaling about 10,000q in materials. A festive atmosphere prevailed; everyone was smiling, the sun was out, and there were lots of new toys for everyone. Kindof like Christmas. A bucket brigade of women in traje were unloading concrete block from one of the trucks, and the other truck was disgorging steel planchas, fire brick, bags of cement, precast chimneys, you name it. Everyone was carrying materials, chattering to each other, comparing notes. I saw three ladies sitting together on the ground, looking at the planchas. A plancha is a cooktop made from plate steel with removable holes for pots and pans, where all the meals are prepared. “Pim!” one lady said, smiling. The other nodded. “Pim.” I learned that word last week, it means “thick”. They were excited because we bought some high-end stovetops that won’t warp after a few years of use; thicker is better, and these brutes are a whopping 3/16″ thick.

Out came my camera, and everyone started goofing around, wanting their picture taken, saying stuff to me in Q’anjob’al so I could reply with my limited vocabulary. At one point, I looked back at my backpack I’d set on the ground, and saw that a bread I’d been given as a gift was lying on the ground next to it, half eaten. “Blah blah blah no’ tx’i!” shouted the women, laughing. I had to laugh too; I caught enough of what they were saying to know that a dog had stolen my snack. “K’am miman xeka!” (My big bread is gone!) I yelled back, feigning horror and bringing even more laughs. “No’ tx’i!” That darn dog!

I looked over my shoulder to see Diego standing, notebook in hand, talking to people and marking stuff down. I’m proud of him; he’s done a great job of managing a lot of the back-end of the project, and has been diligent in making sure that everyone gets their fair share and the right things show up at the right place at the right time. Times like this make me realize how much work the leaders are really doing for this project.

Once all the materials were present and accounted for, people started carrying off their stuff, to store at their house until the work crews can arrive. I saw guys load up with two 100-pound sacks of cement on their backs at once, then start down the mountain trail to their house a quarter mile away. Old ladies only carried a single 100-pound sack. Even little girls joined in; I saw one with a cinder block attached to her headstrap, and another carrying the steel door to a stove. I must not forget that it’s more than the leaders doing the work; each and every family has put a lot of time and effort into this, carrying hundreds of pounds of gravel, cement, brick, and so forth over great distances.  

The brotherhood of working together for something good, combined with the sense of pending success, was almost tangible. Quite by accident, it turned out to be one of my most rewarding days as a Peace Corps volunteer.

One of my favorite things in life is “making”, the process of creating something out of nothing. Creation is mankind’s highest calling. I’ve done it all my life, and I’m attracted to people of the same cloth: blacksmiths, knitters, homebuilders, woodworkers, painters, writers, cooks. Making is not something that is much valued in most of Mayan culture, so when I find people engaged in creative endeavors, it brings me special joy.  

One of the examples I’ve mentioned before is Chalio. He’s a pretty creative kid, always drawing and making toys. Last December, he found a discarded set of Christmas lights and took it apart (another thing I like: people who take things apart). “This airplane needs an anticollision light,” he must have thought to himself, so he scrounged up an old battery, and wired up a lighting system for the toy plane he’d built out of cornstalks. Pretty awesome.  

Although airplanes and helicopters are his favorite, he makes other things as well. He built me a little house out of the cardboard from a care package my mom sent, and he made this awesome boat out of, you guessd it, cornstalks. Mayans love corn.

A different time, I’d left my toolbox out as I was working down below the house. After asking if he could use my tools, he found some scrap wood and got his little brother and some other kids together and they had a toy car building session. I got a lot of it on tape, and my friend Brian patched it together into a fun video, that you can see on YouTube or right here (if I got the video to embed correctly)

Brian’s daughter is in presechool, and being an active parent, he wanted to host some kind of virtual exchange between my village kids and her class. He showed this video to the kids, and he even brought a toy car he’d built the way Chalio does.

“What’s interesting about this car?” he asked the kids, holding it up.

“It doesn’t have wheels!” they said. I guess they really liked the video, and thought it was cool that kids build toy cars, even if they don’t have wheels*. But the funniest part is that Brian tells me the teachers had shocked looks on their faces during most of the video; he figures they were expecting to see a bunch of Mayans dressed in traditional garb walking around in an idealistic rural village. Heh.

This car thing seems to be pretty universal, too. Besides all the other toy cars and busses and trucks I’ve seen kids make around here, I saw more examples when I went to one of Charlotte’s Mam-speaking villages. Everyone likes cars!

It seems like most of the creative stuff in this culture comes from kids. It makes me wonder if the realities of subsistance living eliminate the time or energy required to create, or if there is some cultural prejudice against it that only allows the eccentric to participate. Regardless, some adults around here are creative as well. One of the most visible examples is morral making. Many women do it, though some are more creative than others. Like most things Mayan, there are a few designs that are really popular, and the majority of the women do the same ones over and over, almost like a nervous habit. Some ladies, though, show up with new and innovative ideas, and are really excited when Emily challenges them to make something they’ve never made before. A few months back, we tried wine cozies as an alternative new product idea for the ladies in the co-op. Sales have been lukewarm, except for a big order we got from Pete, a long time family friend and one of my father-figures from thirty years ago. I can imagine his friends and family getting pretty awesome Christmas persents this year, and I am sure that he will send them with a nice botte of wine as well. The ladies have finished the order, and they all came out great. Look at that variety!  

Speaking of which, we’re still waiting to see what will become of the crafts co-op when we leave in July. Since the beginning, we’ve wanted to get it to a place where it could be self-sufficient. But the reality of it is that things move so slowly here, no one is ready to take the reigns, do the books, check the Etsy site, go to the post office, or any of the other millions of little jobs that we do to make it work. We’re now pinning our hopes on the replacement volunteer, that she will be interested in supporting the project and continuing to develop leaders amongst the women.

We also have a BIG pile of inventory, and Emily and I will probably buy a few when we leave. If any friends and family want one, let us know and we’ll bring it back with us, saving you the shipping charge. There’s still a lot of stuff in the Etsy store (as well as some new items), and we have a mountain of stuff that isn’t shown well. Email us if you’re interested.

And me? I’m still making my first morral. It’s slow work, but it’s going to be awesome… a mix of Mayan technique and pop gringo culture. It’s still secret, but I’ll post pictures when it’s done.

*Historical fun fact: Mayan culture never invented the wheel. Man, were they shocked when the Conquistadores showed up on motorcycles listening to their CD players! And to this day, their ancestors feel the wheel to be inconcequential to toy car building.

In some rural communities, however, the traditional pila is a much larger affair. Unlike in the city, where the water might be shut off for 6 hours every night, the pilas around here have to hold enough water to get you through a few months of dry season. They still have the two washbasins, but are built on-site and are about two meters square, holding around 3,000 liters of water.

Being very poor, most of the villagers do without and get by during the dry season by making the women haul jugs of water from the river a quarter mile away. Besides the obvious social implications, this has a lot of negative health effects as well: less water for cleaning, clothes washing, and toothbrushing; less time for the mothers to spend properly maintaining the household; and less education (health related and otherwise) for females who are hauling water instead of sitting in school.

When we were deciding what projects the community wanted, tanks was the most requested. At first I was hesitant to do them, since I don’t have a lot of experience with them, but after I looked at a few, did some design calcs, and estimated materials**, I figured it would be possible make them… but they would be the most expensive of the projects. That scared away some folks, but we still have 8 families that want one. In one case, a family joined the “tank group” late, and I was standing in their front yard with the village leaders when they got the news that they would receive a tank. The father nodded, looking pleased, but his pre-teen son started jumping up and down, waving his arms, singing “We’re getting a tank! We’re getting a tank!” There are no sisters in his family, so guess who gets to haul the water…

After a few painful 12-hour days of work, we have the process streamlined. Again, for your enjoyment, I present How to Build a Pila.

Day 1: The Base

Expect to work about 8 hours using four people, depending on your crew. Mayans are hard workers, don’t complain, and toil tirelessly… but do it at their own pace. That includes the celebratory chicken stew luncheon, as well as the mandatory breaks for corn gruel that always seems to occur just as you add water to the concrete mix. If you had four Peace Corps volunteers doing it, you could probably get it done in 4 hours. But then, the locals wouldn’t be learning to do it themselves, making the whole exercise pretty pointless.

Level the ground, and lay out your 2×4 formwork. Check for level and square.	Assemble the PVC drainage tubes. I ended up making a sketch so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. Then I got smart, and started giving the sketch to the brightest looking teenager present so I could do something else.	There is a drain off of each washbasin, as well as a drain in the bottom of the tank for cleaning. The cleanout drain has another section of PVC tube in it that is NOT glued, that acts as the (removable) plug. It’s left open at the top and will later be cut off just below the high water mark of the tank, to serve as an overflow drain.
Decide where the basins are going to go. They can go in any corner; each tank is designed for two. The housewives get really excited about this part, since they don’t get a lot of choices in life. One lady was so grateful, she insisted I allow her to wash the concrete out of my shirt after we were done for the day.	Cut the trench for the plumbing, deep enough so that the cleanout drain will be 1/2″ inch below the level of the formwork. Slope the tubes slightly so they drain away from the tank. Hopefully some day, there will be a sump or (heaven forbid) a sewer to connect this all to, but for now, point the free end towards the cornfield. Bury, and pack down the dirt.	Assemble the galvanized steel water supply plumbing. It can come up anywhere in the wall of the tank that there isn’t a washbasin. If there is a water line, connect it. If not, cap the bottom of the plumbing so it can be connected some day in the future.
Cut all the rebar you need for the tank. Every now and then, the women get excited and participate too. Yay!	I made this sketch to help them understand how to fabricate the individual pieces of the rebar puzzle. Circled numbers are how many of each; other numbers are length (in centimeters).	Bend the rebar into the shapes shown in the sketch. For this, we use a tool call grifas to get tight, exact bends where we want them. It’s really fun, and I am going to makes concrete stuff when I get back to the US just so I can use grifas more.
Once the pieces are made, assemble the rebar cage. I don’t put all the horizontal wall reinforcing on until the second day, so we can reach into the tank to work with the concrete.	Tie the rebar together with wire at every intersection, and place rocks beneath the rebar to ensure that it’s entirely encased in concrete when we pour. Check that there is 5cm clear between the steel and the wooden formwork, to ensure adequate concrete coverage. Attach the uppermost of the horizontal rebar bands to the verticals, to hold them in place.	Mix up the concrete, just like for the floors. This first day, for a 2-meter-square base, we need 6 wheelbarrows of mixed gravel and 3 sacks of cement.
Pour the concrete in place and level it with a 2×4 screed, working in from the sides of the tank (this is why we don’t tie on all of the horizontal reinforcing until tomorrow). Taking the overflow tube out makes this easier, but be sure to stuff it with paper so it doesn’t fill with concrete.	Taper the concrete in the center towards the drain, then trowel it all smooth.	Leave the concrete to set for 24 hours. It’s a good idea to put barricades around it: not so much for the kids, but the animals. We shooed a curious dog away from the first tank, but weren’t fast enough on the second one and a big ol’ rooster strolled across the wet concrete.
Tie together the reinforcing cage for the washbasins. We will attach them tomorrow, because if we do it today and drop one, it will make a big mess of the wet concrete.	Here is a happy housewife doing laundry as we work on her new tank in the background. I bet the smile is because this is the last time she’ll have to do laundry this way.

Interestingly, the time it takes to do this phase of the work is cut in half if Emily is present. She missed the first few days of work due to illness, but when she showed up for the third tank, she was all business. I am not always good about keeping others busy, but when she sees people leaning on their shovels, she’s all over them. It’s pretty funny watching her go to work on those poor guys… they really don’t know what to make of it. None of them have ever been told what to do by a woman before, and they are so taken aback they just get busy, with confused looks on their faces. Sometimes she just picks up a hoe and starts working herself, and that gets them moving even faster… within seconds, someone relieves her of duty and hops to it. I can’t decide if they hate to see a women doing a man’s job, or they feel guilty that a woman is outworking them. Being a man and somewhat oblivious, I didn’t notice the phenomenon until she pointed it out to me. “Hey Jaime, watch this”, she said in English as she picked up a trowel and started smoothing concrete. Within seconds, someone came over and tactfully offered to “help” her.

Day 2: The Walls

Expect to work about 10 hours, depending on your crew. We actually worked 13 hours on the first tank, because we had to also build the wooden formwork to support the wet concrete. Subsequent tanks went a lot faster, even with the added step of removing the formwork from the previous tank.

Take off the 2×4 formwork around the slab perimeter. The concrete is still green, so walk lightly and don’t bang it with tools.	Clean out the drain, scraping away any extra concrete with a steel trowel or machete.	Tie on the rest of the horizontal bands of steel, making sure that any splices overlap at least a foot and are staggered around the tank.
Re-assemble the formwork, making sure that it’s plumb, level, and spaced correctly to assure that the walls of the tank will be 10cm thick.	Wedge rocks between the rebar and the walls of the forms where needed to make sure that the steel will be located in the center of the concrete.	Cut off the drain pipes at the right height for the washbasins. Heat up a nail in the fire, and push it through the side of the drain, to make a lint catcher. It will also help key the pipe into the concrete.
Brace the formwork. This is as much art as science; you have to imagine where the pressure of the concrete will try to explode outwards, and counter it accordingly. Counterintuitively, you want more braces at the bottom, as the hydrostatic pressure is greater there. BRACING IS SUPER IMPORTANT, because if you have a blowout, you waste a lot of concrete, have a huge mess, and time is not on your side for fixing it.	At the top, you can nail a bridge across the forms, using the inward and outward forces to counter each other.	At the bottom on the inside, you can run some 2×4s from one side to the other, using two opposing inward forces to counter each other. See? Bracing the formwork is so important that it deserved three times as many pictures as the other steps.
Mix up some concrete, 6 wheelbarrows at a time. Much more than that and it’s too hard to do it all at once. The second day of the tank will take about 14 wheelbarrows of gravel and 7 more bags of cement.	Start the bucket brigade, and fill the forms. Work your way evenly around the tank; if you fill one side first, the forms in the center will move and your walls won’t have the same thickness. Disaster!	Run a stick or piece of rebar in and out of the formwork as you pour, and tap the sides of the formwork with a hammer. This consolidates the concrete, getting rid of air pockets.
If you don’t, you will get honeycombing and voids. It looks bad, makes the concrete weaker, and if they’re big enough, might even cause a leak.	When you get to the wash basins, mix up the concrete so it’s extra stiff (dry). Mold the sides of the basins by hand with a trowel. You could form these, but it would add a lot of extra days to the construction schedule… days we do not have to spare.	Taper the bottom of the basin towards the drains, so the water runs out. Take care to make the bottom really smooth. If the owner wants, make a washboard bottom by repeatedly pressing a piece of rebar partway into the smooth concrete.
When the forms are full, trowel the tops so they’re nice and smooth.	Add some nice finishing touches, like carving out a soap dish next to the basin, or having the owners put their name and/ or date into the top of the wall.	Go get some rest; we’re starting the base of another tank tomorrow.

Day 4: More Walls

Wait, where did Day 3 go? Well, we started over, and it was Day 1 all over again… we have eight tanks to do, remember? But the second day of every tank after the first begins with a few extra steps, like this:

Strip the formwork off of the previous tank. Go easy; the concrete is still pretty green and you’ll break it if you’re unnecessarily rough.	Cut a 2×4 to the right length to fit snugly under the corner of each washbasin. For the first seven days, concrete has a lot of creep and the basins could sag if not supported.	Knock off any fins and extrusions from between the boards. Take something hard, like grifas or a crowbar, and rub down all the sharp edges and corners so people don’t get hurt on them.
Tell the family they can’t use the tank for two weeks. After that, they can take the temporary braces out from under the basins. If they save some money, they can plaster the tank to make it pretty- though it’s fully functional as it is. Enjoy!	Now, carry all the forms over to the next tank, where the base of the tank is in place from yesterday.	Continue with the aforementioned Day 2 routine.

There you go. I’m pretty proud of these pilas, not just because they will be so helpful to the community, but because they look great and are built to last. Everyone keeps saying how they are a “memento of Jaime” as we work, and I have to keep correcting them, saying they’re “a memento of how the community worked together.” One thing’s for sure; these 4500 pound chunks of concrete are going to be getting use long after I’m dead.

*In older communities, there is sometimes a central town pila with dozens of wash stations. They can be quite artistic, and harken to a more romantic era when women congregated to work and socialize in a semiritualistic way.

**I forgot to add in the cost of the wood to make the reusable formwork, which ended up being nearly as expensive as another tank. Belkar, an old friend and regular commenter on the blog, came to the rescue. His donated funds for the formwork not only saved my ass, but also helped about 50 people have access to water year-round.

The next day as we sat looking out the window at our garden with a big hole in the middle where the potatos used to be, we noticed that the whole thing was completely overgrown with weeds. I guess that’s the downside of having super fertile soil. We then realized that this is THE END, at least for the garden. There isn’t anything we can plant besides radishes that will be ready before we’re gone, and this month is going to be so busy with the construction crunch that we won’t have time to garden. It’s time to pass the torch.

“Chalio,” I said as I saw him on the way to Yulais, “come to my house this evening, and we are going to look through my seeds to decide what you want to plant.” When he came, he was pretty excited to look through my massive collection of half-used seed packets. He selected broccoli, pumpkin, watermelon, and popcorn. I was surprised by the last one; there isn’t a seed packet for that. I just planted some popcorn kernels from our supply in the kitchen, and they sprouted. Chalio didn’t forget. He never forgets.

Emily wasn’t surprised. “Every time we’re down there, he points to the rows that you told him are popcorn, and reminds me,” she said.

So today we went down to the garden with all the kids and planted a few flats of greenery to leave for when we’re gone, our legacy to gardening. I’m pretty confident that Chalio will do a good job tending everything until the harvest, but I have visions of total neglect after that, the earth being returned to boring old cornfield. After all, he’s only 11 and has an attention span to match.

“Lina also told me something while you were away building water tanks yesterday,” Emily added. “Nas Palas has decided that the garden is such a great idea, he’s going to do his own once we leave.”

Things are getting exciting! The storm is getting worse, though for us that just means buckets of rain. We’re still trapped (administratively) in site, but some PCVs on the pacific coast of Guatemala have actually been evacuated. Hmm. I don’t figure that will happen to us, because we’re actually safer here than trying to go anywhere else. But look at all the rain we’re expecting! This map shows this thing heading right for Huehuetenango. I’m not scared, though, because we have the massive wall of the Cuchumatanes Mountains to deflect the worst of it. We’ll keep you updated.

We are back from our long trip, and just in time. A few minutes ago we got a text message from the security chief that Peace Corps Guatemala is on “standfast”, and we aren’t allowed to travel anywhere for the next 48 hours. Some sort of tropical storm is on its way, and might bring landslides, washed out roads, and so forth… as happens in the third world. I’m actually kindof excited about it; I am tired of traveling anyways and it will be nice to be stuck in site for a while. I feel bad for some of our friends, though, who didn’t get out of Huehue in time after yesterday’s meeting and are now trapped away from home.

This is the first time in our entire service that we’ve seen the emergency action plan activated. Being a federal agency, the Peace Corps is all about disaster preparedness. The first level, standfast, means that we can’t travel. The idea is to keep us where they can find us, in the even of some sort of natural disaster or civil unrest. Experience has proven that being in your site is usually the safest place to be, where you have friends and neighbors: locals that know you and can help watch out for you. If things get worse, then phase two is consolidation, where we all move to a predetermined (and secret!) central location. Apparently it happened twice in the year before we arrived in Guatemala. Uncle Sam picks up the tab for our time in the hotel with all the other volunteers, as we wait for the emergency to pass or degrade further to the final phase. That’s evacuation, and it’s a pretty big deal. We like to joke that this is when the Marines show up with Blackhawk helicopters and rescue all the volunteers. What it really means is that we as a group use any means at our disposal to escape the problem; usually a bus to the border or the airport. Evacuation hardly ever happens, but Peace Corps Bolivia had to evacuate in 2008.

Strangely, this has nothing at all to do with Volcano Pacaya erupting yesterday, as we originally thought when we got the message. I am sad to say that we JUST MISSED being in Antigua to see the rain of ash and sand all over the city. We’ve climbed that volcano twice, and got to see molten lava pooping out the side. Sadly, a journalist was killed when he was hit by rocks shooting out the top of the volcano, but for the most part it has been more of an inconvenience than a serious danger. The airport is closed right now, so some of our friends who are finishing early might be trapped in Guatemala until the ash cloud subsides.

We returned to our village to meet the happy faces we’ve come to know so well in our time here. Our friend Antonio invited us into his house for lunch as we were waiting to switch buses in Santa Eulalia, and we had a dozen conversations with various locals within the first few hours back in site. It reminds me that we really HAVE made friends, and I’m going to miss many of them. As is their habit, the neighbor kids started jumping up and down and chanting our names from the mountainside as soon as we stepped off the microbus, then came tearing down the valley to help us carry our various bags and packages up to the house. It’s a ritual now: let’s see what neat stuff the gringoes brought back from their trip. Occasionally we have a sweet or little toy for them, but more than anything they just want to see all of our strange travel items: collapsable toothbrushes, goretex hats, sleeping bags, deodorant.

This particular time, we had a care package from my parents that we’d picked up at the post office in Santa Eulalia. The kids can sniff these out like bloodhounds, and know by now that they often contain a kids’ book in Spanish. My mom started sending them after her visit, and the kids now love to read new books. It’s our private little battle against illiteracy, and I feel like we’re winning it on a small but important scale. Emily had the kids in a circle and was reading to them before I’d even opened the potato chips my Dad sent.

As usual, Chalio and Alberto did a great job watching the garden while we were away. Since the rains are in full swing, it’s like Jack and the Beanstalk. To everyone’s glee, the sunflowers are now taller than Alberto (they still don’t believe me when I say they will get taller than I am). The potatoes are ready to harvest, and we have about five melons. The guicoy (Guatemalan zucchini) I planted has put on fruit, and will be ready soon. I am especially pleased about that one, since Nas’s wife gave me the seeds to plant because she loves guicoy and can’t get it to grow. Heh. The cucumber harvest is now over, but Chalio says they ate a ton of them, and the new ones are already past their seedling leafs. A tomato is FINALLY growing, and my chili plant has mature fruit now as well. The broccoli has heads bigger than my own, though one went all the way to seed while we were gone. Except for a few sweet corns that were munched by the stupid cow, all is well… though the entire garden could stand a good weeding.

So, we’re back and we’re safe, ready to launch in to the final lap.

000
ABPZ20 KNHC 281739
TWOEP
TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
1100 AM PDT FRI MAY 28 2010FOR THE EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC...EAST OF 140 DEGREES WEST LONGITUDE..

SATELLITE IMAGES INDICATE THAT THE BROAD AREA OF LOW PRESSURE

LOCATED A COUPLE HUNDRED MILES SOUTH OF THE GULF OF TEHUANTEPEC IS

GRADUALLY BECOMING BETTER ORGANIZED. ONSHORE WINDS TO THE EAST OF

THE DISTURBANCE CONTINUE TO PRODUCE LOCALLY HEAVY RAINS FROM EL

SALVADOR WESTWARD ALONG THE PACIFIC COAST TO NEAR THE GULF OF

TEHUANTEPEC. THESE RAINS COULD CAUSE LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODS

AND MUD SLIDES IN THESE AREAS OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS ARE FAVORABLE FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT...

AND A TROPICAL DEPRESSION COULD FORM LATER TODAY OR SATURDAY AS IT

DRIFTS NORTHEASTWARD. THERE IS A HIGH CHANCE...70 PERCENT...OF THIS

SYSTEM BECOMING A TROPICAL CYCLONE DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.

ELSEWHERE...TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED DURING THE

NEXT 48 HOURS.

$$FORECASTER BROWN/STEWART

To my surprise, my weight had dropped even further, but the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) says not to worry about it. It’s still within acceptable limits, and appears to be from a lot of exercise and improved diet. Huh. So, yeah, I am now officially TWO POUNDS heavier than when I was a skinny 10th grader. I was 178 when I got to Guatemala, and now weigh 149. Between the two of us, Emily and I have lost over 60 pounds in these two years.

After yesterday’s testing, we dropped by to visit Froilan, my host dad from training. He is a tailor and has a little shop in Antigua, where he does really nice work for very reasonable (by American standards) prices. Emily wants a new business suit for interviews when we get back to the US, and has been printing off pictures of trendy and attractive suits she likes from the internet. She showed them to Froilan, who assured her that he could definitely do that, which I do not doubt having seen some of his other work while I was living with him. We looked through his vast fabric sample collection to pick just the right material, and asked him how much it would cost. “And I want the real price,” I told him. “Don’t you dare give us a low number because we’re friends.” He would probably do it for free if I let him, and that wouldn’t be right. It IS his livelihood, after all.

He thought about it a bit, and when he hesitated, Emily said, “You have to tell us the real price, because all the other volunteers are going to ask us when they see it.” That logic worked, and he said the normal price would be about 1500q, but he’d like us to pay only 1200. We agreed without hesitating; besides helping out a really good friend, getting a custom-tailored, custom fabric, hand-tailored business suit for $150 USD is a pretty amazing deal.

So amazing, in fact, that I think I will have to get one for myself. Only one question remains: how much material to have him leave in the seams, for when all that weight comes back.

Here I am, spending the night in a treehouse in the mountains overlooking Antigua. My friend Belkar saw that we’ve been having a rough week, so he suggested we treat ourselves to something nice and he’d send us a few dollars via Paypal. My friends are the best.

We just finished our COS Conference (Close Of Service; the government loves acronyms). It’s several days of seminars to bring to a close our time in the Peace Corps. The topics are retrospective, like evaluating the success of the program and how to fill out all the final paperwork, as well as preparing for the future: how to leverage Peace Corps service when applying for federal jobs, getting ready for reverse culture shock, and how to get health coverage. It’s nice that the government addresses the importance of making tidy ends; apparently in the early days of the Peace Corps they returned shell-shocked volunteers to normal society to fend for themselves, with little preparation.

I think the best part of this week, though, is all the incidental stuff. Peace Corps put us up in a very swank hotel for the seminar, and we have all our evenings free. This is the last time all of us from our training group will be together, and we all know it. I hate goodbyes, and that’s what this is all about. After the day’s meetings, Tim broke out the guitar and we all taked and sang and enjoyed each others’ company until the wee hours.

It all reminds me a bit of summer camp, saying goodbye to a small group of energetic, happy, skillful people that have become a surrogate family by virtue of an intense, shared experience. Back when I was a camp counsellor, we jokingly called every other Friday “Cryday”, because we would have a big closing campfire and all the kids would reminisce about the experiences they’d had, and cry buckets knowing that the end was near. Of course, at the last campfire of the summer, the counsellors were always the ones crying the hardest.

The Peace Corps is probably the most “touchy-feely” branch of the entire US government. Several of the sessions were retrospectives, where we looked back on that we’d learned and experienced, sharing our thoughts openly with each other. At one point, David Castillo, who lead our training during the first three month in Guatemala, came out to speak with us. We all smiled immediately when we saw him; we haven’t seen much of him since we swore in, but he was always there to answer questions or give advice, his voice always cheerful and unceasingly enthusiastic.

“Today, we are going to talk about shoes,” he began in his singsong accented English. “Where have your shoes been in these two years? What have they seen?” We were all thinking about the unexpected paths we’d trodden, both literal and metaphorical, as he stretched out casually on a chair in front of us. “Take for instance, these shoes…” He nonchalantly pulled up his pants, showing a classy but well-worn pair of cowboy boots. Raucous laughter broke out in all sides; we recognized them immediately as the boots* we’d pitched in to buy him as a thank-you present the day we graduated from training.

Many volunteers shared their personal stories, as well. Our group has volunteers with parents who immigrated from places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Colombia, and Bolivia. I was surprised to learn that ALL of them had to overcome negative feelings from their families about their Peace Corps service. “Why would you want to go back THERE, after all the work we did to become Americans and escape that sort of life?” they were asked. But now, after all my friends have done and seen, their families are seeing the importance of how they’ve given back to others who are less fortunate, as well as served their country as Americans. That’s one of the things I love about America: we really are a melting pot, citizens regardless of where our ancestors came from.

After that discussion, Gregorio brought out letters that we’d written to ourselves the day before we swore in as volunteers, two years ago. I laughed aloud when I read mine, and I will share it here:

July 17, 2008- S. Lucia, Guate.

Dear Jaime

I hope you were smart and focused on the “now”, especially since it will be “then” now that you’re reading this. Was Qu’anjob’al (sp) as scary as you’d feared? Did you get your Wanderings book done? Did you learn to live simpler, both mentally & physically?

I hope people from home continued to support you. Does a finish come easily (& quickly), or are you doing an extended year? It’s a shame time travel is a one-way street, as you cannot answer. But I guess it’s better this way, I don’t REALLY want to ruin the surprise.

If you are going home, please say hi to Ryan and Brian and Dave and the padres for me. Travel the US some and get reacquainted with it. It’s a good place and we should forgive some of its faults and silliness– every place has them.

That is all, you brave footsoldier of compassion*. Now go out and play, before you’re 40.

-f

I laugh because several times in the last weeks while thinking about our impending return, Emily has repeated a Mark Twain quote previously unknown to me: “You forgive a place once you leave it.”

On the last day of the conference, we met with Basilio (our boss) and broke out in to small groups to brainstorm ways to improve the program for the coming volunteers. Basilio’s command of English is modest, so we did the exercise in Spanish. He left my group at one point to go check in on another, and we kept on jabbering away.

There was a pause. “Creo que es la primera vez que hablamos en Español hasta entrenamiento,” I though aloud (You know, this is the first time I think I’ve spoken to any of you in Spanish since training). Everyone laughed, realizing how far we’d really come, linguistically. A few minutes later, our groups rejoined to give presentations over their findings. Jane got up to speak for my section, and people started applauding after just a few sentences: we all remember that when she got to Guatemala, she had the lowest level Spanish of everyone and was deathly afraid of public speaking. Yet today, she gave a ten minute briefing in a foreign language with full, natural confidence. Maybe that is one of the best parts of this entire thing, seeing how far each individual has come, how much they’ve developed, how much richer they’ve become for this experience.

After the conference ended, Basilio and Ana Isabel (his very capable assistant) invited all of us Healthy Homes volunteers to dinner at a pretty nice restaurant in Antigua. This is not the norm, and we’re pretty sure he did this out of his own pocket. We have developed a special relationship with Basilio over the two years; he’s been very fatherly to all of us, taking a personal interest in our well-being that goes beyond the general parameters of his job requirements. We, in turn, were the first volunteers in this new program, and performed far above expectations. It was a very emotional evening.

Here I want to pay homage to all the special people that have become my family over the last two years. Many of them have appeared in the blog, a few of them have not. But they will all be forever welcome at my table.

Back Row: Thea Chun, Ana Nightingale, Jessica Vandivort, Carmen Muñoz, Aliyya Shelley, Maggie Hume, Jane Zimmerman, Tim Slattery

Middle Row: Anne Ballard, Ashley Kissinger, Lynn Nguyen, Grant Picarillo, Kelsey Field, Ellen Ostrow, Amanda Geller, Kaying Vang, Emily Fanjoy, Sarah Allen, Matt Crane, Casey Kittredge, Faviola Rubio, Kristen Petros

Front Row: Joe Busch, Zach Nosdal, Dan Grinnell, Freney Giraldo, Katy Clark, Jim Fanjoy

Not pictured: Leoti Laferriere (medically separated the week before, still received COS status)

*George W Bush called us “brave footsoldiers of compassion” in his 2008 Volunteerism Day speech we attended at the white house. We have all joked about that unfortunate wording ever since.

There are two basic types of latrines in use here: letrinas aboneras, or composting latrines; and pozos ciegos, or sanitary pit latrines. The composting latrines are generally better: they last indefinitely, protect groundwater, and you get some fertilizer out of them every year as a bonus- though they are a bit more expensive. The pit latrines aren’t quite as nice, but are WAY better than nothing and they seal the pit so that flies and rodents can’t spread diseases. On the down side, they fill up every five years or so and have to be moved, and can contaminate groundwater if the geologic coditions are wrong. Unfortunately, they are the local favorite in many areas because of their low cost, ease of maintenance, and most importantly, the people are just accustomed to them. After talking with the village, Charlotte found that they really wanted the sanitary pit, despite the good reasons to go with composting… and as we see time and time again, if you give someone something they don’t want, they abandon it. We went with the traditional.

Her town has many Ladino (spanish-speaking) city dwellers, but most of their outlying villages are rural Mayan. Unlike the Q’anjob’al we live and work with, these are from the Mam ethnic group. Their dress is a little different, and their language is VERY different. It’s strange to be surrounded by Mayans jabbering away and not understand a word of it. Some things were the same, though: their friendliness, the communal way they work together, the kids smiling and giggling, and the babies screaming in terror at the sight of white people.

We piled into the back of a pickup at 6am to travel with the teachers headed up the mountain to the village. It was a beautiful, half-hour climb up a steep 4×4 trail to a verdant vallley near the top of the mountains. When we arrived, the villagers were waiting in the schoolyard; only one truck a day comes up there, and they’d heard it long before we arrived.

Charlotte had done her homework, and most of the materials we’d planned out had already arrived: precut wood, sheets of corrugated steel, PVC tubing. Over the course of the next few days, we divided up all the materials amongst the 41 participating families. The extent of the careful planning reflects in part on Charlotte’s good organizational skills, but also on the Mayan preoccupation with everyone getting their fair share. This is important in a culture that is both communal and VERY poor; they even counted out how many nails each family would get: 25 three-inchers, and 50 roofing nails.

One of the most exciting challenges was getting the materials from the staging point in the schoolyard to the individual houses scattered across the mountainside. They do this the way they do everything else here: by mecapál. This is a headstrap that ties to a rope that goes around whatever you’re carrying. Across hill and dale, through mountainside cronfield, down steep ravines, until you come to the adobe hut perched precariously a thousand feet above the valley floor.

The construction went really well. Most rural families have great do-it-yourself skills, and I was able to stand out of the way most of the time. I am a hand-on guy and love to build things, so this is sometimes a challange for me. In a way, our presence was largely ceremonial, an endorsement of the validity of the project; their presence was a sort of thank-you for helping connect them with the resources they need to make things in their village a little better. We built one latrine one each of the days we were there, and I am confident that they will have no trouble doing the rest of them themselves (which is really the point of the exercise, anyway). We’ll know for sure when Charlotte goes and does the evaluation sometime next month.

And now, much like last week, here is a play-by-play of how to build a sanitary latrine.

Having been warned beforehand, the villagers had the pit dug before our arrival. This one is about 10 feet deep. The loose soil here is great for farming, but makes for crumbly pit walls and rim. Logs help distribute the weight of the slab away from the edges of the pit.	The concrete slabs that seal the pit were prefabricated in town. They weigh about 200 pounds, and are a fair bit of work to haul through the jungle.	Once the slab is in place and leveled, the next job is to plant the vertical wood posts of the outhouse. They go about 2 feet into the ground, so the outhouse is resistant to being blown away but can be moved in the future.
Getting the posts plumb (vertical) makes it all fit together better, and is easily done with a level.	Once we get the 2×4s around the top and bottom of the walls, we can attach the corrugated steel siding.	2×4 beams at the front and back are nailed into the vertical posts, to support the roof.
The same steel is used for the roof. A string with a weight is hung above the vent hole in the slab, to locate the hole for the vent in the roof. It’s then cut out with sheet metal shears.	The vent pipe is painted black, so it heats up in the sun and starts a convective current that draws air and odors up and out of the latrine while drawing in fresh air through the seat. Bug screen at the top prevents flies from getting in, and the T keeps rainwater out.	Once everything is in place, the concrete taza (seat) is set in place. It’s actually quite comfortable once you’re used to it, and WAY better then the typical muddy board with a hole cut in it. I built a lid of scrapwood while we were waiting, an important mechanism for keeping flies OUT.
No Guatemalan project is complete without a little machete work. Here they are doing the fine joinery for the corners of the door.	The final joints, testing for fit. I was very proud of them; I was planning to do the joints a different way, and they suggested this stronger, easier to fabricate option. “Go with it!” I told them.	The corner joints are nailed together, then the door is covered with a sheet of corrugated steel. Besides giving privacy, the steel acts a bit as a shear panel to prevent wracking in the door frame.
The door is on and ready to go. They were still pretty intrigued about how spray paint works, and while we weren’t looking they tagged the inside of the door.	Here’s the old latrine, about ten yards away. By comparison, the new one is puro lujo (pure luxury).	While we were working, the grannie of the family receiving the latrine invited us into her kitchen to have some tortillas and thin coffee. I would think it was to say “thanks”, but it’s more that they’re just naturally hospitable people.

And that was our latrine adventure. In the next few weeks, the village will continue to build the remaining units, and towards the end of the month Charlotte will return to the site to evaluate the final installations for conformance with the projects specifications, as well as give some additional training and answer any questions the villagers might have. And us? We’re off to the South, to attend a bunch of work-related conferences. More on that in coming posts.

Although this trip is unavoidable, it comes at a bad time: we are only about a quarter finished with our SPA construction, and a two week break will really interrupt up the tempo of the work. The good news, though, is that these two weeks are an opportunity for the village leaders in Yulias to show us how well they’ve mastered what we’ve taught them so far. Can they successfully order materials, get the appropriate legalized receipts prepared, withdraw money from the bank, pay the bill, arrange a delivery schedule, and organize the villagers to carry all the materials to the respective houses? We’ll know at the end of the month. If they did it right, we’ll start building the water tanks the day after we get back. I have a lot of faith in them; for the floor project, they anticipated a lot of the problems before they happened and prepared accordingly. And when dealing with the materials supplier, Ximon and Don Diego took over in rapid-fire Q’anjob’al once I’d explained what were trying to do. Here is a picture of them with Paricio, the owner of the building supply store, as they received their change for paying the balance of the bill for the floors: Q7,999. No, that wasn’t a tweaked price. It actually came out to that.

But today I want to talk about Aguacatán. A few weeks ago, our friend and coworker Lucia was over to our house for lunch, and she invited us to attend her son’s first communion. I’m not a particularly religious guy, but I like to attend the occasional Catholic mass every now and then, just for the pomp and circumstance. They have such cool architecture, and incense, and candles, and golden altars, and pretty robes… it’s like The Discovery Channel, except I’m inside the action. This aside, we agreed immediately, because Lucia’s really supported us throughout all of our work and it’s nice to return favors like that. Our personal interactions with their family, as well as Nas Palas’s’ family, have given us some of the best memories of our service.

“One thing, though,” she said. “It’s going to be in Aguacatán. That’s about five hours away, and we’re going to hire a private microbus and leave at about 3:30 am so we can get there in time for mass.”

Goodness gracious! I’m getting pretty tired of getting up at 3am to travel. Emily fished for more information: why weren’t they having it at the church in Santa Eulalia? The cost of the microbus alone is going to be over Q500.

“The priest here says that I’m not active enough in our church, so they won’t do it. The priest in Aguacatán is an old friend of ours, in fact he was the priest here a long time ago, and he said he’d be happy to help us.” Wow, if that doesn’t speak to the state of religion in these parts. Lucia didn’t say it, but we know why she doesn’t have time to volunteer the extra required hours at the church: she is responsible for seeing to the medical needs of several THOUSAND Mayans in this region singlehandedly: manning the health post for general consultations, as well as hiking for miles into the hills with a cooler to vaccinate their children. And on the weekend, she gets stuck filling out all the paperwork. She goes about this task cheerfully every day, and receives little thanks from anyone. Not even from the church, apparently.

We thanked Lucia as she left our house to return to work, and I turned to Emily. “Where do I know that name from, Aguacatán?”

“Maggie lives there,” she said. Emily remembers everything.

I like Maggie. She’s the only volunteer in our training group that is older than I am; I’ve got about ten years on everyone else, and she’s got about ten on me. She’s cheerful, energetic, levelheaded… and a total Tae Kwon Do devotee. As a side project, she has been teaching self defense classes to teenage girls in her region since shortly into her service. I’ve wanted to visit her for quite a while, but could never find a convenient excuse.

“Sweet!” I replied. The Sunday in question was only a few days ahead of our big business trip, so we could use this chance to avoid a lot of chicken bus time, too.

In the two weeks between the invitation and the trip, Pedro called to invite us as well. He had decided to split most of the associated expenses with Lucia (including the cost of the live turkey they were taking the priest as a gift) so he could get his two young children baptized as well. Even more reason to go! “Can you take pictures?” he asked me. Ha! We told him that we were already planning to, and we’d be happy to share them all when we got back. Everyone wants us to be their staff photographers, a job that gets annoying after a while, but we love to do it for friends.

The appointed day finally came, trailing a few hour behind the finishing touches on the last concrete floor. We arrived at the central park of Aguacatán during the first mass, so we waited in the church plaza until the intermission. Maggie showed up a few minutes after we did, and smiling introductions were made all around.

A few minutes later, the family was lead into the parish to do the baptism and first communion paperwork. While the church secretary diligently processed the forms, we got to meet the priest himself. Padre Juan David is a friendly, outgoing guy who erupted with a cheery “watx’ mi hek’ul?” when he saw Lucia and Pedro. Yep, he definitely worked in Santa Eulalia at some point. They exchanged pleasantries, then introduced Emily and me as well. He was pleased to meet us, and knew all about the Peace Corps in general, as well as Maggie specifically. She later told us that she’d met him when she was first setting up her martial arts classes, and needed a meeting place. The catholic school’s community room was the last place she checked, having been turned down elsewhere. When she told him of her plan, he said, “It’s for the youngsters? Do it!” and waved his hand, making it so.

As we were talking, the priest mentioned that he’d been to the US before, working on a catholic committee attending to the specific needs of Mayan immigrant groups. Then he asked where Emily and I are from.

“Emily is from Logansport, a small town outside of Chicago,” I replied.

His eyebrows shot up. “Logansport! I worked there several times,” he answered excitedly. We both said the next sentence at the same time: “About 200 Cuatanecos live there.” We all had a good laugh about that. It turns out that the last time he was there, Emily was still in high school. They could have even seen each other. The world is indeed a small place.

  

The mass itself was relatively routine, performed in much the same way they have been for centuries. “It’s best if the mothers hold the babies,” the priest said before he started slinging around the holy water. “They will cry less.” He gave a pretty good homily on the virtues of peace and reconciliation, especially between different ethnic groups and cultures. It’s an appropriate theme; Aguacatán is home to three different Mayan groups as well as a Ladino population. A few years ago, a dispute over what constitutes an “official” Mayan language exploded into bloodshed in Aguacatán, killing over 20 people… ironically, about the same number of words difference between the two tongues in question. Maggie is a Youth Development volunteer, and works in high schools instead of health posts like we do. She teaches in four different high schools, each of which speaks a different language.

“I’d also like to recognize one of our community members, as well as her two companions from Santa Eulalia,” the priest sad at the end of his sermon. He asked us to stand, and the congregation clapped and smiled. “They are in the Peace Corps, and work for peace in our communities as well.”

Why a concrete floor? Well, most of the houses in the area have dirt floors. Guatemala is host to lots of germs, microbes, and parasites that are passed through dirt: when toddlers eat it as they’re playing, when people walk on it with bare feet, even when they sweep the floor and the dust settles onto their tables and eating utensils. But “concrete floors” here aren’t quite like the ones we build in the US, and I have to lower my standards as an architect. For a concrete floor in the US, I’d lay down a 6 mil vapor retarder, then 4″ of crushed gravel, run a vibratory compacter over it, roll out welded wire fabric for reinforcement, then pour 4″ of concrete. I’d use a laser level to get it flat, and finish it with a steel bull float.

Here, though, that would be prohibitively expensive and total overkill. Vapor retarder? Most of the moisture is going to get in through the holes in the roof or the adobe walls. Compacted gravel? The clay of the floor is already hard as a rock from years of people walking on it. Wire reinforcing? People that own one set of clothing, cook over a campfire, and bathe once a week don’t care if they have hairline cracks in their floor. And that 4″ of concrete becomes 2″; we’re not parking cars on it, and cutting the depth in half cuts the project cost in half (meaning we can reach twice as many families).

Now, for your enjoyment, I will walk you through how you build a concrete floor, Guatemala-style.

First, get everything out of the building. If you don’t have a place to put your wardrobe, just tie it to the rafters. No worries! Call your in-laws, and let them know you’ll be sleeping on THEIR dirt floor for a week until your new floor has cured.	Get the guys to bring their hoes and scrape your dirt floor until it’s level. Ruts and humps several inches high are great for catching the mouth-rinse water you spit on the floor, but are going to protrude from a slab only 2 inches thick.	Run strings across the room at the new floor height, to make sure you actually got the dirt level.
Sweep the dirt and banana peels and so forth from the floor; we don’t want that getting mixed up in the concrete.	Bring in many wheelbarrows of gravel*. Make a big pile in the middle of the floor. Break open half as many sacks of cement as you have wheelbarrows of gravel.	Mix this giant pile thoroughly by turning it over three complete times. My back is killing me.
Make a big volcano, and add water while mixing until the consistency is right. Explain to the workers that even though it’s easier to work with, more watery concrete is weaker. Explain it many more times, until you are hoarse.	If your house is adobe, you can make provisional screed guides. Pile concrete under the strings you set up earlier, and trowel it level with the strings. Let it set about halfway.	If you have a luxury concrete block house, you can use the exposed edge of the foundation. You can make screed guides with 2×4s, too. Stake them down so the top of the 2×4 aligns with the string.
Spread the concrete out with hoes, then screed it level by dragging a straight 2×4 along the guides you made earlier.	Follow the screed with a steel trowel to get the surface smooth and nice.	When done, take a well-deserved rest in any available equipment.

There you go! I must say, it all works pretty well, and the people are really excited that they can do this themselves. At the start of the day, I am usually doing a lot, but as people get over their fear of something new and try their hands at the various jobs, I can usually step back, and by the end they’re doing everything. A few people have really taken to the work; Juárez (who has also helped us by translating health talks once in a while) can now finish concrete better than I can.

After the first floor, I had a meeting with Diego and Ximon, the two leaders I’m working with. They’ve done a great job, and are surprisingly proactive. For example, I gave them the list of materials we needed when we went on our trip to the south, and when I returned, everything was in place: they ordered through the hardware store, rode along with the driver to show them which houses to drop the materials at, and organized the villagers to carry everything to where it needed to be. But there was a problem: they were worried we’d been shorted materials.

“When they unloaded the gravel, they said that it was 15 shovelfulls to a wheelbarrow. But it’s supposed to be 20,” Ximon said. He went on to explain that if they were unloading 15 shovelfulls from the truck and calling it a wheelbarrow, we were going to be 25% short on our materials.

This is one of the challenges of building in the third-world: measurements. Yeah, I can do metric. I worked on some federal projects, and studied architecture in Europe. But here, they measure in barras (a bit less than a yard; lumber is measured in barras), quintales (100 pounds; rebar is ordered by the quintal), cuerdas, and other medieval anthropomorphic measures. When you ask for so many cubic yards (or cubic meters) of gravel, you get blank stares. They measure it in wheelbarrows, and for larger quantities, in truckloads. Thankfully, there are only three sizes of wheelbarrows in Guatemala, and they are regional. Around here, 15 wheelbarrows makes a cubic meter.

“Well, we paid for wheelbarrows,” I replied. “I don’t care if he uses a big shovel and 15 will fill one, or if he dishes it out with a spoon and it takes 200. If we don’t have the wheelbarrows we ordered, we aren’t going to pay him.”

They seemed pretty pleased with that; sometimes it’s nice to know that we’re all on the same side. They explained that the building materials guy wouldn’t even discuss the issue with them, since I was the one who first contacted him. “Well, we will go talk to him together. He needs to know that you two are running this; I’m just the advisor.” I chuckled. “And you guys have the checkbook, so he’d better get over it pretty fast.”

The next floor we did called for 50 wheelbarrows, so we were extra careful to measure exactly the materials we’d been sent. To everyone’s surprise, there were 50 and a half! This gets back to the Mayan paranoia of being cheated, of not getting your fair share. Every day as we work, we hear comments like “um, we’re not going to have enough materials”. What’s the big deal? If we come up short, we’ll just grab a few wheelbarrows from the next house, and order some more to replace it at the end of the project… and that’s exactly what we did when we needed two extra sacks of cement on one of the houses. But I guess if you’re as poor as they are, you don’t think that way. What’s funnier is that Math Doesn’t Lie. I worked out the quantities pretty carefully, and so far, we’ve been dead on except for a case where they overdug the floor when they were leveling, and we had to use more concerete in one spot that we’d planned on.

In the first house we did, Juárez kept saying, “Man, I think we need more gravel. This isn’t enough. How many? Three of four wheelbarrows, I think. Yeah, we need more.”

I just kept shaking my head. “No, I think we’re good. This room called for 12 wheelbarrows. We’ve only used 8 so far.” Half an hour and four wheelbarrows later, we were leaning through the doorway to trowel the last piece. “So, how many more wheelbarrows do you think we need now?” I asked, winking. He laughed.

After this week, we might have one more floor to do. With the support of the Rotary Club of Logansport (Indiana), we put in a floor in the one-room schoolhouse. I am going to ask them if they are also interested in sponsoring a floor in the village meeting hall. It’s about the same size as the school (60 square meters), and it’s really dusty and dirty in there during the dry season. It’s a good, worthy project and we’re already in the groove for floors. But I’m making this my ace in the hole. Diego, one of the two village leaders, is really excited about it and has made the meeting hall floor his pet project.

“If you help me, I’ll help you,” I told him a few days go. “You have done a fantastic job of bringing the people together and keeping on schedule. But to be honest, I’m a little worried. We have to be done with this project by the end of June, paperwork and everything, or else Emily and I are going to be in big trouble with our boss.” That last bit was a half-truth; the “big trouble” is that we would have to stay in Guatemala an extra month to finish the project, something we want to avoid. “So I’ll make you this deal: if you keep the project on schedule, when we are done with ALL the other construction, we will show up and build the floor in the meeting hall. You won’t even have to pay the 30%; we’ll cover all the materials. It will be the grand finale, a thank you for all the work you’ve done to make this project happen.”

He seemed pretty excited about it, and agreed wholeheartedly. When I got back from the meeting, I was a little scared to tell Emily about the “insurance” deal I’d made, since we don’t yet have the support of Rotary. But I see it this way: if Rotary isn’t interested, I’d fund that floor with $300 out of my own pocket if it would mean that I’m home with my friends and family come August 1.

Lets hope the other three project types go as smoothly as the floors.

*you need as many wheelbarrows of gravel as you have square meters, times .8. You need half as many sacks of cement as you have wheelbarrows of gravel.

The tallest point in Central America is not a mountain, it’s a volcano. That’s appropriate, since we have so many of them here. It’s called Tajumulco.

We’ve been talking about climbing it since we got to Guatemala, and our time here is slipping away. My birthday was the perfect excuse to finally do this thing. A lot people hire a guide, but many of our friends had gone before and claimed it was pretty straightforward and we didn’t need one. Sounds like adventure!

Our original team consisted of four PCVs: Emily, Zach, Dan, and myself. Zach has done the climb a few times before, and would show us the way. A week before, though, he called us with bad news: he was still in terrible shape from his bout of whooping cough*, and would not be able to make the trip. “But don’t worry, it’s easy,” he said. “Just tell the bus driver you want to get off at the Tajumulco trail, and keep walking uphill. Go early, though. The rainy season is starting, so you need to get there early to have any chance of avoiding the weather.”

Other friends had warned us of the cold to be found at 14,000 feet above sea level, so we packed as we normally would for serious backpacking: tent, down sleeping bag, therma rest, rain gear, hats & mittens, trekking poles, the works- all in a giant pack. When we got on the bus with all the Guatemalans in their street clothes, we felt a little overdressed for the occasion. When we got off the bus at the dropoff, though, we realized we’d made a good decision. 40-degree drizzle, mud, and fog with fifty feet of visibility is a hard way to start a weekend outdoors even if you have the RIGHT gear. The bus pulled away, leaving us facing an abandoned-looking stone road heading uphill.

Zach’s directions proved accurate; the road just kept climbing. The visibility was so bad that we had no idea how far we’d be going; we’d heard that the hike was about five hours to the base camp below the summit. After the first hour, the road petered out and turned into a pretty poorly marked trail across grassy knolls and volcanic crags.

“Which way do we go now?” Emily asked. I looked around, pondering.

“We follow the trash.” Yep, that is how it is in Guatemala. Everyone here is a litterbug, and we were able to guide ourselves for the next hour solely by picking our way from one piece of garbage to the next, metaphorical breadcrumbs left by previous hikers. Much of Guatemala is covered with litter, a heartbreaking contrast to the stark beauty that can be found in every square mile of this country.

As we made our way into the higher reaches, the altitude started to affect us. Our pace slowed, and my leg muscles burned with every step, in the same way they do when I’m in the last mile of a ten-mile run. But the scenery was changing, and path was more visible as it wound between scrub pines and large ourcroppings of volcanic rock. After a few more hours, we crested a ridge. “Do you think this is it?” Dan asked.

Zach had told us that the basecamp was identifyable by some scrap sheetmetal strewn about and a wooden latrine. “You guys rest, I’ll go look around,” I said. About 50 yards up the hill, I found the place Zach had mentioned… though I could not have missed it, due to the staggering amount of trash lying around. What a dump! And what a contrast to the beauty of the place. The fog was still pretty thick and the rain still drizzling, but we could make out a massive granite spur above the camp.

“That’s for tomorrow,” Emily said as we set up the tent. In order to catch the 5am sunrise, we’de have leave at 4am to do the final summit ascent. After the tents were up, our next challenge was dinner. Thank goodness it was only 4pm; we’d need all the remaining daylight. Normally we carry a Whisperlite stove with us when we backpack, because it is fast, convenient, and is appropriate for LNT (Leave No Trace) camping. But we didn’t bring our stove to Guatemala, largely due to airline baggage restrictions, so we had to build a fire.

This is a tricky thing to do on a volcano at 14,000 feet in a rainstorm. I scrounged up some small sticks while Emily and Dan made a makeshift rain shelter out of sheetmetal scraps. It took about half an hour to get any fire at all, and it was a full hour before we had a cup of something warm to make dinner with. I’d sent Dan and Teresa, his Guetamalan friend, back to their tents a long time ago- no point in all of us standing in the rain being miseable. Emily took them the first cup of hot water, and we were able to get one more for ourselves before the rain finally won the battle. Here is Emily, taking her turn at Fire CPR. We wolfed down our warm dinner with gusto, thanks to my dad (who sent the freeze-dried lasagna in a care package) and Belkar (who gave me the titanium cup and spoon more than a decade ago).

We hopped in the tent, stripped off our wet clothes, and got in bed. The time? 6pm. It took about another hour to get warmed up, and the rain kept pounding against the tent. “If it’s still raining at 4am, I’m not getting up,” Emily grumbled. There really wasn’t any point; there would be no sunrise to see. We drifted into a well-earned sleep.

Many hours later, I woke to a blinding light. The moon! It was full a few days ago, and its presence could only mean one thing: the weather had broken. At a few minutes before 4, we climbed out of our tent into a cool, crisp night. Looking around, we were amazed at the view we’d missed yesterday; all of Guatemala was spread out below us, the tiny towns lit up like twinkling stars on a crumpled blanket of mountains. Above us, we could clearly see the volcanic spur we were to climb. We took headlamps, but didn’t need them: the moonlight etched the surface of the rocky slope, making it look like a photo from the 1969 moon landing.

The final climb to the summit was steeper, and the air thinner, than the previous day’s work. But we’d left our packs behind, so our only remaining challenge was the cold. After two years, I still think of Guatemala as a steamy tropical country. But like our climb up Mauna Loa in Hawaii a few years back, this was yet another time we risked hypothermia in the tropics. Ice crystals were forming on all of our gear as we climbed into higher altitudes. My fingers and toes were numb from the cold, and as we crested the ridge, we were blasted by the high-altitude wind, taking our breath away. We followed the ridge to the highest point, the top of Central America, and huddled together to await the sunrise.

click on the picture to get a hi-res version you can save as a desktop for your computer

Despite the bitter cold, watching the sun rise was one of my favorite things I’ve done in Guatemala. This amazing transformation from the slumber of night to the glory of morning unfolds in such a slow, dramatic way. It reminds me of the futility of life, and this very futility is part of life’s beauty. I think about times I’ve spent with my dad, hunting and fishing, being in the woods, as I watch the miracle of dawn unfold.

What a birthday present.

By that time, some other hikers had joined us on the ridge. Many were Guatemalan, and were hooting and hollering. Why is it that Guatemalans are so darn noisy all the time? I may never know. Their guide was a friendly American (ironically), working for a local backpacking tour company, Quetzaltrekkers. We started chatting with him.

“Turn around,” the guide said. We did, and realized we’d almost missed one of the most famous views of Tajumulco. They call it a “finger shadow”, a massive shadow cast by Tajumulco in the early morning over the entire countryside of Guatemala. It stretches all the way past the Pacific ocean, which is actually visible in the photo as well (click to enlarge).

After properly soaking up the beauty, we headed back down while we could still move our extremities. Once we got moving and it seemed likely we wouldn’t lose anything to frostbite, we could take in the amazing views that were unavailable to us during yesterday’s rains. Wow! Here we see Emily making her way back down the steep face of the upper reaches of the summit. If you look closely, you can see our tents at the basecamp hundreds of feet below.

This is one of those times that I am grateful we are stationed in Guatemala, not only for the friendly people and diverse culture, but for the amazing natural wonders that can be found in every corner of this little country. In our two years here, we’ve seen ten times more of Guatemala than most Guatemalans will ever see in their lifetime. That’s the white man’s luxury, I guess. I feel like our part is to respect it, to enjoy it to its fullest, and share it with everyone else who can’t see it themselves- both Guatemalan and otherwise.

*Zach has collected a staggering array of diseases during his Peace Corps service, including dengue fever. He still hasn’t had tuberculosis, though, which has infected nearly a quarter of the PCVs in our department.

I’ve spoken before of Pedro; he was our Q’anjob’al teacher for our first six months of service, and he and his family have always gone out of their way to help us, never asking for anything in return. One time when Emily was away at a conference overnight, he drove all the way out to our village just to play chess with me. On my birthday last year, he had a barbecue and we made hamburgers- and he somehow found a bottle of ranch dressing to put on them. I’d say he’s the only real Guatemalan friend I have. So when he mentioned last year that he was dreaming of opening an internet cafe in town, the wheels in my head started turning. The next day, I emailed Don at Computers for Guatemala.  

“I have a friend in town that wants some computers,” I began. “But he’s a private individual. I know you only work with schools and community groups, but I was hoping you might make an exception.” I explained further that Santa Eulalia has a real lack of publicly available computers, but many teenagers are now starting to get computer-based homework in the schools.

To my great glee, Don was open to the idea of trying out capitalism as a quicker, more efficient route to sustainable development. “There is a lot to be said for the free market,” he emailed back. “This will be a good test of what results you get.” Don is pragmatic, and knows that the end goal is to get computer access for Guatemalans. A fair-minded, community-oriented private business might do this faster and more efficiently than a committee of volunteers. And if someone were to make a quetzal or two along they way, that’s fine… and it’s very sustainable, because the business will continue after the foreign money has left.

I cautiously approached Pedro about it. “These aren’t gifts,” I explained. “You have to pay the shipping fee. It’s gonna cost about 500 quetzales per machine.” I winced; asking Guatemalans to pitch in their own tumin is usually a deal breaker.

He pondered a bit, and to my surprise, said he was still interested. That is a lot of money by local standards, but unlike most people here, Pedro’s good about saving and can visualize how an investment will pay itself back and eventually make money in the long run. He asked me if I could get him six, and paid the 50% down payment before anyone else in the country.

Then began the waiting. Computers for Guatemala faces an incredible task: they receive donations of outdated computers from all over the US, stage them in a big warehouse, clean the hard drives, repackage them, load them into a 40-foot shipping container, arrange international maritime transport, negotiate customs at the port of arrival, and hire a semi to move the container to the staging facility in Guatemala. While this is all going on, Don and his very small staff are collecting the fees to cover shipping, in both quetzales and dollars, and moving the money to all the people they need to pay along the way to make this happen. In all, a pretty monumental, months-long undertaking with little thanks or recognition.

This Friday, however, all the waiting finally paid off. Pedro rented a microbus to make the 7-hour journey to Chimaltenango to pick up his machines. It was a festive occasion; he took his wife and two kids along for the ride, and Emily and I bought everyone lunch at our favorite falafel and schoarma joint in Antigua. Mario, who drove our parents around when they came to visit, was the low bid for the trip, so it was fun to hang out with him again… and I think he gave us such a low price for the trip because he likes traveling with us. Gringoes are fun!

At the pickup, we met Kirk, a friendly American who lives in Guatemala and runs the IT department for a large seminary. He volunteers his time and the seminary’s gymnasium every time a shipment comes in, sorting the boxes and helping everyone get what they’ve ordered. Since we live so far away, we couldn’t get to Chimaltenango on the official pickup day, but Kirk held our machines in his office for a few extra days to help us out. We loaded the boxes (about a dozen, all told) into Mario’s microbus, Pedro paid the balance, and we started the journey back home.

Final note to parents: the child seat requirement in the US not only keeps your kids alive, it keeps them found! At one point in the return trip, Pedro’s 2-year-old was playing on the floor of the bus and we went around a hard corner. She slid all the way to the back of the bus, under all the seats and the boxes stacked upon them. She was trapped and scared in a dark cave under piles of computers, crying, and couldn’t figure out how to escape. We were all trying not to laugh as the car pulled over and we tried to unload all the boxes to get at her. In the end, Pedro decided it would be easier to go in himself and pull her out… and here is the picture to prove it.

When Don approached me about the Mayan school, I modeled it in SketchUp, of course. As I was refining the design, I posted a few drawings on a user forum, and soon thereafter, I got word from Google. Yep, THE Google. Google is the parent company of SketchUp, and they wanted to post my designs for the Mayan school on their blog as a way to show alternate uses for SketchUp in the architectural community. You can read the post at the Google SketchUp blog, here:

http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2010/05/school-for-mayan-teachers.html

And it wasn’t just one guy at Google. Another fellow emailed me as well, and he wanted permission to use some of the Mayan school drawings at their booth at the AIA (American Institue of Architects) convention in June. Now THAT’S exciting! I never thought my work would appear at an AIA convention. I wonder if my alma mater would be proud?

As a side note, our site visits spiked to over 300 hits yesterday. Not the record (401), but about twice our average. Go Google! And I just got word, I’ve made the Peace Corps Facebook page as well.

A lot of interesting people have come to visit us during our time in Peace Corps, and for that we consider ourselves lucky, especially since we are so far out in the boonies. It lightens our spirits and recharges us to keep going. Last week we got a visit from someone very special: Flat Stanley.

Flat Stanley is a pretty normal kid, except that one day, a large bulletin board mounted over his bed fell off the wall and smashed him… and now he’s as flat as a pancake! This sounds terrible, but Stanley soon discovered that he could do things while flat that he couldn’t when he was rounded. His friend Makenna thought he might like to see Guatemala, so she mailed Stanley to her Aunt Emily.

Guatemala is a small country in Central America, about 1,750 miles from Indianapolis. While the United States touches the northern border of Mexico, Guatemala touches the southern border of Mexico. Guatemala is full of steamy jungles, frigid mountains, and everything in between. Since we live high up in the mountains, Uncle Fletch worried Flat Stanley might get cold on his travels through Guatemala, so he made Stanley a capishay to keep him warm. The men in their village have worn the capishay for as long as anyone can remember, and they make them out of wool from the sheep they raise.

The first thing Stanley did in the village was to meet the kids. I like to read to them, so Stanley joined in… even though he doesn’t speak any Spanish! At least the pictures were familiar since we read Where the Wild Things Are, or Donde Viven los Monstruos. Guatemalans speak Spanish, so we took turns translating for Stanley. Some Guatemalans also speak a Mayan language. There are 22 different ones, and in our village, the kids speak Q’anjob’al.

Stanley played with the kids for a while, and made friends with Chalio. Chalio makes toy boats and airplanes out of cornstalks, and he shared one with Stanley. Then, they went out to play in the garden. The bright sunlight and volcanic soils in Guatemala are good for growing just about anything, like potatoes and carrots and beets and spinach. Some plants like warmer weather, though, so Uncle Fletch decided we should have a greenhouse for growing cucumbers and tomatoes and melons. We like to teach the locals about good nutrition, and growing and eating fruits and vegetables is really good for your health. You guys should try this at home!

Later that afternoon, we went for a hike. We live in the mountains, but in the nearby valley they have a pretty stream.

Stanley arrived in Guatemala just before my scheduled girl’s weekend at the lake. Now, I know Stanley is a not a girl, but he was only going to be here for a limited time, so I made an exception and let him come along. Long ago, Lake Atitlán was a huge volcano surrounded by several smaller ones. When it stopped erupting, the crater filled with water until it became a very deep, cold lake. It is the second largest lake in Guatemala, ten miles wide! The locals have tiny boats they paddle out into the lake to go fishing for their dinner.

Stanley really liked the volcanos, so we invited him along for Uncle Fletch’s birthday trip to climb to the highest point in all of Central America: a volcano called Tajamulco. The trip took two days, and we had to spend the night in a tent near the top. Stanley didn’t mind the climb though, because he rode in my back pack all the way up, so his legs didn’t get tired at all. And, unlike Uncle Fletch and me, Stanley didn’t get soaked on the way up either. We took extra clothes and jackets and mittens, because the freezing wind and thin air would be dangerous to someone without a way to keep warm. Stanley was concerned about being on top of a volcano, but I explained to him that Tajamulco has been extinct for a long time, so we had nothing to worry about. Here’s a picture of me and Stanley at sunrise on the top of the mountain. We could see lots of volcanos in the distance (Guatemala is home to 34 volcanos) AND we could see all the way to the pacific coast. It was pretty cool, and super cold. Frost collected on our hiking boots while we watched the sun come up, and I had to hold on tight so the wind didn’t blow Stanley away!  

After we climbed Tajamulco, I had to go to some meetings near the city of Antigua, Guatemala. It’s the oldest city in the country. It was founded by the Spanish Conquistadores a few years after Columbus discovered the New World. Some of the buildings in Antigua are 500 years old! That’s older than the United States.

But all good things must end, and so Flat Stanley had to head home. The mail in Guatemala is very slow, so Stanley is probably in a big mail boat in the middle of the ocean right now, sailing his way back to Indianapolis. But he asked that we write a blog post about his adventures, so Makenna and her friends could know what he did in Guatemala and not be worried about him.

Thanks for sending your friend to visit, Makenna. Too bad you can’t fit through the mail, too!

Love,

Aunt Emmy and Uncle Fletch

This will probably put the garden into overdrive. Our potato plants are already shoulder-high, and we keep on piling dirt around them just like Farmer Betty told us. Emily pulled the first of the beets this afternoon, and they are MONSTERS the size of softballs. Then she made a tasty stew out of them. We also gave a few of our new Jalapeño peppers to Nas Palas, fulfilling one of my original gardening dreams.

That was then. In the following three months, I’ve been trying to get the leaders to come together… JUST ONCE… to form a computer committee and allow us to open the center for good. However, things here have stalled out. We agree on a meeting time, Emily and I wait, no one shows up. Over and over. It’s been more than three months since the “soft opening”, and the machines are collecting dust.

Finally, last week, the leaders came by to talk to us. It seems they’re worried about the computers. They started by telling me a little story.

“When our village beat the others to get the right to have a Peace Corps volunteer, we were the envy of all the surrounding communities,” they began. “But now, nearly two years on, we have nothing to show for it. We’ve squandered our chances at projects, and we have computers sitting collecting dust. Now we’re the laughing stock of the municipality.” Wow, I was kindof caught off guard. Until that moment, I had never heard a single word of remorse about their unwillingness to collaborate with us.

“Jaime, what else needs to be done to get the computers running?” Nas asked. “We know you will only be here three more months, and we don’t want this opportunity to slip away.”

I shrugged. “Nothing. They’ve been ready for a while. We just need a committee to allow me to open it, and to tell the public about it.”

“But what about the outlets? The electrical wires?”

“They’re in there. It’s all there,” I replied.

“But who paid for that?” Nas asked.

There was a pause, then Emily spoke up. “Jaime did. Out of his own pocket. He installed it all, too.”

They chatted some more, and the issue of the light bill came up. Ever since the meter was installed (and the ensuing drama about paying for it), bills have been arriving. But since the village leadership is broken, no one has been paying them. Nas estimates that they will cut the power after three unpaid bills… which is right about now.

This is when I re-explained my plan for paying the bills with the revenue from the computer center’s tiny user fees. It’s a sound model, and only needs their green light. They mulled the idea over, and decided it was a good one.

“We need to allow people from other villages to use it, too,” I continued. This was one of the sticking points earlier; some locals wanted to hoard the computers for just our village. “That way, we can get more interested teenagers to run it, and draw in more money to pay the light bill. But it will also have benefits for others in the village. People who come will want to buy snacks and sodas in the local store, things like that.”

After the brief lesson in economics, they seemed satisfied. “We also had this other idea,” Don Ximon said in his slow and quiet manner. “We we thinking that with the new distance learning class that started this year at the school, computers would be really helpful to them. Maybe we could just give the computers to the teacher, for his class? That way, they would get used.” The implied ending he didn’t say aloud was, “and we won’t have to do anything at all.”

I pondered it some. The problem with that idea, though, is that it puts the computers under the control of a single person, the teacher. As we’ve seen several times already, that is a very tempting opportunity for embezzlement and abuse. Also, it defeats my primary vision for the project: to make these computers, which are the property of the community, available to the community…. not just the 20 distance learning students.

I explained my reservations to them. “And if we want the students to use them, that’s great. They can pay their tiny fee just like anyone else. We can even give them a reserved time block. But the most important thing is that we have an elected committee to oversee this. It can’t be part of another committee like the Health Committee; they already have too much work as it is.” I nodded to Manuel, and didn’t add, “and they would steal all the money.”

“What needs to happen now,” I concluded, “is that you need to get the village together and elect a committee of interested people. I can’t do it; I am not from here, don’t speak the language, and it’s not my right. It’s your right and responsibility as leaders to do it. Once we have a committee, I will be an advisor and do everything else we need to get this thing working.”

They agreed, and promised to meet back in two days to tell me the plan for organizing a computer committee. That was about two weeks ago; I’ve not seen them since.

Lately, I’ve been leaving the door open while I’ve been working on the machines. The village’s school is next door, and when recess starts, I am visited about a dozen kids that are pretty eager to play with these wonderful machines. Chalio is one of them. I showed him how to power up the machines a few days back, so he’s my defacto lab assistant right now. I feel like I’m staging a grassroots protest of sorts: if the leaders won’t get together to make this happen, I am going to at least give the people a taste of what they are missing out on. Maybe that way, they will be moved to complain to the leadership and motivate them to take action.

Word processing isn’t very interesting to the younger kids, so I figured I’d get some video games. Although excessive gaming is not healthy, for these kids it’s a way to get them accustomed to the keyboard, the mouse, and even basic things we take for granted like “the red X at the top of the window makes it go away”. These old computers are able to run a Nintendo emulator, so I downloaded one and a bunch of games to plug into it. I wasn’t a huge gamer way back when, but I had some favorites, and they’re all so old-school now that they are free: great classics like Castlevania and Spy Hunter and Choplifter. It’s funny how perspective changes over time, though. A few days into the experiment, I realized that some of the old standbyes are definitely NOT appropriate for a bunch of Guatemalan elementary school kids, and will have to be deleted: Double Dragon (evil thugs graphically beat up your girlfriend, and you have to go beat them up in return) and Operation Wolf (shoot the enemy soldiers as they go about their business) are examples. If anyone wants to recommend some good, nonviolent NES games, please leave a comment. Joh especially.

And today I got some final bad news. Ever since it was built, the Health Post (within which our lab is located) has flooded every time we get a big rain. This is just one of those things you have to deal with in a third-world country: an inch of water on the floor of your computer lab from time to time. You keep everything up on blocks and tables, and continue with your business. But today an engineer from the Ministry of Health came, and decided that they are going to jackhammer up the floor in my computer room and put in drainage pipes. This could take MONTHS at the speed things happen here, which means that on start day, all the computers will go into the storage room with the syringes and gauze pads and manual autoclaves. And will stay there until after I am gone. Will the next Peace Corps volunteer be able to reassemble the computer center? Will the computers disappear while in storage? I may never know.

Jogging here is great, if the weather is cooperating. The road winds up and down through amazing scenery, and you’ll only encounter two or three cars in an entire half-hour jog. Kids smile and call out my name as I run by, and I respond with that strange sound the locals make to acknowledge a greeting: “eeyooooo!!” About five minutes into the jog, though, the 8,000+ feet of altitude start to work on me and it’s all I can do to weakly wave at them in reply.

About halfway into my jog, Francisco’s truck passed me. He’s a pretty nice guy and we did him a favor a long time ago, so he usually offers to give me a ride into town. By now, though, all the drivers know that if I am jogging I don’t want a ride, so he tapped his horn as he passed.

The countryside continued to unfold before me, donkeys braying as I pass. What luck that there isn’t any rain! The road gets pretty slippery and treacherous when wet, and a torn ligament usually means the end of Peace Corps. Before I knew it, I was at yich k’isis, a set of beautiful old cypress trees that is a local landmark. There is a tienda (general store) there, and the road is a little wider… and Francisco’s truck was sideways again, moving back and forth to get turned around in an impossibly small space. Perhaps he forgot something?

As I normally do, I ran up to the rolled-down window to greet him. “Francisco! Watx’ mi hak’ul?” I asked.

“Jaime! Buenos dias!” Nas Palas responded cheerfully. That was a surprise! I knew both the guys in the cabin. Francisco just looked at me kindof funny.

“Tz’et che yunej?” I asked him. (What are you all doing?)

Nas made a funny gesture with his hand, a sort of “Y” with the thumb pointing to his mouth. Oh no.

“We’re drinking!” Nas said. Franciso’s eyes came into focus on me, his tongue lolled out, and he added a slurred string of incomprehensible stuff in Q’anjob’al.

I backed cautiously away from the truck. “Don’t you think it might be a bad idea to drive while you’re drinking?” I asked. “You could go right off a cliff or something.” I am embarassed to say, that was the best deterrant I could think of in the moment.

Francisco’s head rolled to the side, and I could hear the truck’s gears grinding. The clutch popped, the tires spun a bit in the gravel, and they were off, lumbering back down the road the way they came. Did I mention that it was Francisco driving?

I continued my jog, bemoaning the way the locals deal with alcohol. I post about it more than I want to, and less than my encounters would indicate.

Since our valley has one dead end road, there isn’t a way to plot out a nice circular run; every time it’s a there-and-back proposition. As I made my way home on the final leg of the jog, I passed a relatively new tienda. One that I didn’t know until today sells beer.

“Jaime!” Nas called out from the tienda. Francisco was standing next to him, penis in hand, peeing on the side of his truck. I saw some beer cans on the counter, apparently they were refueling for the long journey home. “Come over here, have a beer!”

I thanked them for the offer, but explained that I would puke if I had one while I was jogging. Francisco seemed pretty insistent that I join them (he bear hugged me and said several more unintelligible sentences), but Nas was very understanding. I had a beer with him once before, and it was a culturally important thing to do at the time, but he knows I don’t get drunk. He led Francisco aside and I jogged on, making my escape.

I see so many people sabotaging their own lives here. It’s depressing. I want to help, and perhaps a more aggressive person would lecture with fire and brimstone, but I know the hard sell just alienates everyone. So I watch these things happen, put up a quiet word of caution, and get off of the road.

Postscript:
A funny ending to a not-so-funny story. When I returned home, there were a dozen people sitting around in my front yard, most of whom I know… including Manuel. “What’s up?” I asked.

“We’re going to have a family meeting,” Manuel said.

“Are you waiting for Nas?” I asked.

They nodded. “Yeah, he always does the speaking at these things,” they replied. We made small talk for about ten minutes, told some jokes, and then Lina (Nas’s wife) came up and said some stuff in Q’anjob’al. It seemed that no one knew where Nas was.

“I know where he is,” I shrugged. Everyone turned towards me.

“Why didn’t you tell us you knew where Nas was all along?” Manuel asked, mildly annoyed.

I know I shouldn’t have said what I said, but it was like Odin open up the clouds and commanded me to say it in retribution for two years of suffering this peculiar Guatemalan mode of communication.

“You didn’t ask me.”

I returned to the construction site today after about a week absence, due to the previously mentioned materials shortage. If there are no materials, there won’t be much building and no point in me visiting. But they have worked some since last week, using up the last of their remaining supplies. Walls are up mostly to the level of the second floor on one wing, and the rebar for the columns and foundations on the west wing are now in place. I snapped a few pictures of their empty storeroom as I arrived, then León waved me over.

“Is it OK if I use two #4 bars in place of a #5 bar in the foundations?” he asked. “We’re totally out of #5″.

It would actually make the foundations a little stronger, but is not an efficient use of materials, so I want to discourage that. In this case, however, by substituting we can keep the project rolling while we’re waiting for Monday’s material shipment we just heard about. I shrugged, and told him that would be fine for now.

We walked around the rest of the site, and he showed me the conduit they’ve already placed for the lighting circuits. Pretty ghetto looking right now, but I am sure it will be fine when it’s done. We also discussed the merits of putting both lighting switches in the same box, then León pointed over my shoulder to the far wall.

He asked me some questions about the exact dimensions of the big bay windows that will look out from the classroom to the hillside across the valley. Turns out, he found a conflict on the drawings: two different dimensions for the same item. I looked it over, gave him the correct dimension, and apologized. Architects HATE to make errors like that, but it’s pretty hard to catch every single one before the drawings go out the door. It’s part of the business. As a contractor buddy of mine once said, being a good builder isn’t about never making mistakes; it’s about being able to fix the ones that happen.

“Part of why I ask you all these questions is that I don’t want to have to botar (tear down) anything,” León said. “See that microbus terminal they’re building over there? They spent all day yesterday with sledges, knocking down the upper part of that wall they built last week.” Someone didn’t ask the right questions until AFTER a lot of work had been done. Yep, I agree, we don’t want to build anything twice (click on the picture to get a high-res version).

So now we wait with baited breath for Monday’s materials shipment. Friday they are going to pour the very last of their concrete into the foundation trenches they are preparing today. If the materials come, I will be back out on Tuesday to get photos of all the stuff after it’s been unloaded. If not… I guess we will wait. Guatemalans are good at waiting.

If you are annoyed by the lack of consistant material supply for this project (like I am), you can help! Don at Computers For Guatemala is taking tax-deductible donations for the school. He’s working hard to get donations from “big guys”, but even the little stuff helps. If you’re interested, send Don an email and tell him I sent you. I am sure he’d be glad to hear from you.

After more than a year of meetings, paperwork, planning, interviews, audiences with the mayor, and so forth, we finally received word a few weeks ago that we’d been approved by USAID, a branch of the US government that deals with third-world development and gives grants for this sort of thing. It was a happy day, the culmination of a lot of work and frustration. I have to hand it to the Yulais leaders; they gave it their all to cope with a very alien concept and jump through the multiple hoops set up by our federal government. They did things that they would never have imagined doing before- filling out forms on a computer, opening a community bank account (that took MONTHS), and organizing the villagers to work together for a common goal.

After all that, it was a pleasure to meet with the leaders last week to explain our success. “Congratulations,” I said. “We just received word that your community account has been credited a bit over 29,000 quetzales.” Smiles all around; happy day. “I have here a form with the names of all the participants in the village, and the project type they said they wanted.” Hand shaking, nodding. “On this column after the project type, is shows the cash contribution each family needs to make to match the grant. I can’t wait to start!”

It was like in the movies, when you hear that record scratching noise and all conversation stops.

As Emily said after the meeting, Diego (the speaker for the committee) looked as though he’d been punched in the gut. “Um, that’s a lot of money,” he said after a pause. Some fast discussion ensued, and it became apparent that despite our saying it repeatedly for months, no one really realized that they’d have to spend THEIR OWN MONEY to get some nice stuff from Uncle Sam. I mean, they heard us say it, but just didn’t get it. Or believe it. Or think we weren’t joking.

We all discussed the situation, and set up a meeting to explain it all to the participating families a few days later. The families all filed in, and we explained everything again. At first, they were all excited to look at the drawings of how we are going to build the project. But their excitement soon changed to sticker shock as well. The meeting drug on for hours, and we eventually dispersed so that each woman could go home and talk it over with her husband.

Afterwards, we got on the phone and called some other volunteers. Several of them said that they were able to work their grants so their villagers paid little to nothing, except for pitching in all the labor. One volunteer just did half as many families; another got a huge donation from her hometown church to put more money in the bank. Now we are second guessing ourselves… did we royally mess this up?

The grant is for a fixed amount of money, so the more families that participate, the higher the amount each will have to pay. I can’t make the price of the materials go any lower; I got signed quotes from three different vendors. After the meeting, we toyed with the idea of calling people in the US to look for more money to supplement the grant… but where do you stop? I am against the idea of giving stuff away for free; that sort of paternalistic gift fosters dependency and promotes a welfare state. Is 600q really too much to ask someone? Yeah, yeah, i know they’re poor. It’s true. But put it in perspective: 600q is 20 days labor, but for that they get a major improvement to their home. How many days wages would you have to save if you wanted to add a new bathroom to your house? Also, they all receive Mi Familia Progresa, the local equivalent of a welfare check, every month. 600q is two months of welfare. Welfare that they did fine without, last year before the program started, and will have to do without again when the current president leaves office in 2012. We explain to them that it might make more sense to spend that money on a nice new floor or a stove that will be serving their family for the next few decades, instead of a lot of Coke and chips and DVDs, or a stereo system that will be broken in a few years. That is what most of them spend the money on right now.

The thing is, oftentimes when you build something, the client wants to get a bunch of cool stuff but doesn’t want to pay what it’s worth. They think there should be some better deal, or that you can somehow make it cheaper. But every architect knows that if you want it cheaper, you can either reduce scope or quality, and after more than a decade of that fight, I tire of the game. If they don’t want to pay, I can’t squirt out my own blood to make it cheaper. So some of them will just have to do without, and I will get on with business. Emily is less jaded and more amiable, so was feeling pretty ill about halfway through the meeting. “I know you’re used to this,” she said, “But I hate it. I just want to get to the part where we’re building stuff and everyone is smiling.”

Well said! I second that notion, and despite my “jadedness”, this whole situation gets me down too. Who I REALLY feel sorry for in all this is Diego; he has worked on this project thanklessly for months, only to get accused of tricking his friends and neighbors. We get to go home in three months; he has to live in Yulais forever.

When all was said and done, a third of our families dropped out of the project tonight. We expect that the number will drop further, because some are surely hedging their bets, waiting for us to re-allot the remaining money to lower the contribution for those who are left. Tonight I have to crunch the new numbers to see how the grant will split up over 30 families instead of the original 44, and tomorrow we have to have yet another meeting with all the participating families to try to sort this all out. One of the parts that really sucks and breaks my heart is that a few of the families that dropped out were REALLY needy and participatory, great candidates for this sort of aid.

This is a good example of how Peace Corps is hard. That superficial stuff like pooping in a pit and washing your dishes in a stream is more dramatic, true. But trying to get abysmally poor, uneducated people to lift themselves out of their situation while they are inadvertently kicking and screaming against all your help? That part is like trying to move a mountain.

Remember our budy Anne? She got on her hometown news this week for a really cool side projects she’s doing in her site: getting them an ambulance. You can check out the video of her news clip here-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cKtlc9YZbc

One of our other Peace Corps buddies, Charlotte, is in town visiting us. She’s working on a latrine project in her town, which is gutsy since she is a Municipal Development program, but their training does not include how to build infrastructure. She saw the need in her town, applied for the grant, and then her mason bailed on her. So we’re going through the materials list and I wrote her a spreadsheet to calculate costs. Sometime in a few weeks, I will be going to her site to teach a construction class. We don’t need no darn masons!

Today we’re going to go hiking up the other side of the moutain, in part to see the pretty scenery, in part to visit a really remote family that doesn’t have electricity or running water. They want to participate in a project we’ll be starting soon, and I forgot a number when I measured their house several months back.

Here she is, eating Ambassadorial Brownies with Emily.

I am not really sure why, but I grabbed a bowl and scooped up a big pile of the stuff to show to Emily. Her eyes popped, and she went out to see for herself. By now, the lightning was flashing pretty steadily, and I could see that all the freshly tilled fields were now white with a layer of hail. The temperature had dropped maybe 20 degrees in a few minutes.

“What should I do with this?” I asked her as we slipped back into our cozy house. It seemed a shame to waste it; potable water in solid form is a rarity in our primitive surroundings.

Emily raised an eyebrow. “Cuba Libre?”

She is often telling me that most of Hemmingway’s stories have an alcoholic beverage that is the “featured drink.” In For Whom the Bell Tolls, it’s anise with water; in Garden of Eden, it’s champaign; in A Farewell to Arms, it’s grappa. We have a simliar situation in our lives; prior to Peace Corps, we would enjoy a mojito on occasional evenings. But amongst many volunteers in Guatemala, the drink of choice is the Cuba Libre, and we’ve adopted the custom.

I’m not much of a drinker, and never have been. But these things are tasty on occasion, and can be made with things that are VERY abundant in Guatemala: rum, coke, limes… and ice. The ice is something we often forgo, since there is none in our village. But hail? The perfect mixer. Here we see the Cuba Libres under construction. Aaah, the good life.

I guess the brooding thing is cyclical. There is so much we don’t know about chickens! Our other chicken, Whitey, was also broody but about a week ago she decided to start going out again. Soon thereafter, she started laying more eggs. Since the brown one is still broody, she’s sortof stolen all of Whitey’s eggs and is now sitting on them. We have a babysitter.

Supposedly, 20 days is the incubation time for chickens. We’re kindof excited about having chicks, so we are leaving the eggs under the chicken to see what happens. But I still have questions: do the eggs just sit dormant until the chickens start sitting on them continuously? Most of the time, the chickens just lay and go about their business, totally ignoring their eggs. I thought originally that getting cold killed the eggs, but now I wonder if they are actually just dormant until there are several in the nest, at which time the chicken starts incubating them, keeping them continuously warm for the required 20 days, venturing out only rarely for a quick bite and a drink of water. This would have the advantage of all the chicks hatching at about the same time, instead of staggered over a week or two, which would be tricky for the chicken. How WOULD you guard some feisty, mobile chicks while still sitting on the rest of the unhatched eggs?

In other chicken news, we did our third chicken vaccination training in a village to the west of us. This town had a lot of chicks for some reason, and we did them with eyedrops only. That only protects them against Newcastle disease, unlike the injected vaccine that protects against three diseases, but I have no idea how to stick a needle in a cute little yellow fuzzball. They best part is that the women of the village carried big, wiggling sacks of chickens; the chicks were carried in little morrales by their toddler daughters.

This last chicken we vaccinated was so funny looking we laughed out loud. It looks like it stuck its toe in a light socket! We have seen a few of this breed around the valley, and I would really like to know what they are so I can get a few when we get home. They are ridiculous.

This week’s lesson is a study in cultural differences; the sorts of things I mostly know about, but sometimes forget.  

I arrived at the construction site today to see that a moderate amount of work has been accomplished since my visit last week. A second look revealed that the masons have been putting all their effort into laying block, neglecting the concerte work. Columns remain bare, the reinforcing steel exposed like orangish-brown skeletons. The trenches for the west wing remain unfilled, anticipating the coming of the absent foundations. I guessed the reason, and you can see it in this photo.

“You’ve been laying block instead of pouring concrete, because it uses less cement,” I stated to Pascual as I shook his hand.

He sighed. “Si, hombre. We are nearly out of cement. At this rate, we’ll have to stop working tomorrow.” He looked truly pained; this project is important to him. Not because he’s a mason, but because he’s a considerate old guy and the president of the PTA. He knows how much this means to the community, and he’s sortof the community’s representative. “If we stop working, it will be a verguenza (embarrassment or shamefulness) for all the community.”

I sympathize with him. Like me, he is in the awkward position of being stuck between the decision makers, and not always given all the information. “I understand your plight, and you are right,” I began. “You need materials to work, that is obvious, and I sent your list of high priority items to Donaldo last week. What you need to understand, though, is that Mario and Donaldo have an agreement. Donaldo will send materials, and Mario is supposed to keep contact with him and send weekly progress reports. But Donaldo and his representatives have been trying to contact Mario for several weeks, and he doesn’t return their calls.”

Pascual shook his head, annoyed. “That Mario, he hasn’t been returning my calls either.” I could tell from his eyes he wanted to add, “He’s going to mess this up for all of us,” but Pascual is too cautious to say it out loud. He then took out his phone and called Mario, who didn’t answer. We talked some about the work and what phases were coming up, with him stopping every few minutes to call Mario again. After several tries, Mario finally answered.

They spoke a bit in Q’anjob’al, much of which I couldn’t follow except the part where Pascual offered to bring me to Mario to talk about it. Pascual hung up, and looked up at me. “He says he will come out here to meet with us to talk about this. He’ll be here at 10:00, when school has recess.”

I looked at the time, it was 8:57 am. That is so Guatemalan, to expect me to just sit around an hour waiting. In the US, I’d say, “OK, I’m out of here. He can call me at the office.” Instead, I said, “OK, I’m going to pop into town and do some errands, I’ll be back by 10.”

And that is exactly what I did, except that like an American, I showed up at about 9:50. Knowing that I have to expect the hora chapina (Guatemalan tendency to show up late for everything), I got out my book and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

By about 11:00, I was starting to get annoyed. It’s hard not to think about my old life, one where my office would bill this joker $150 for the two hours of my time he just wasted. But I work for the Peace Corps now, and my time is theirs to waste. It’s just annoying that the last bus back to my village for several hours was leaving… right now.

Pascual, however, could see my annoyance. “That’s not very respectful of Mario, wasting your time like that,” he said. Wow, I have never before met a Guatemalan that even recognized that concept. He tried to call Mario a few more times, with no success. “Listen, how about we just walk down to his classroom? He teaches at the Escuela Urbana in the mornings.”

Sounds like a good plan to me! The elderly Pascual and I walked about 20 minutes into town, talking the whole time. And by talking, I mean HE did most of the talking; I was pretty out of breath. I’ve lived here for almost two years, two miles up, and I’m mostly used to the altitude. But Pascual is a tough old bird, and a lifetime of carrying firewood and farming by hand in these mountains has made him FAR more healthy that most Americans his age. His dialogue was frank and open, and further reinforced my opinion that he’s a good guy. He’s trying to do something good for the community, and I can tell it annoys him that Mario isn’t holding up his end of the work by communicating with everyone he should be.

When we arrived at the Escuela Urbana (urban school), we waited outside of Mario’s sixth grade class for about five minutes, and he came out. After the pleasantries, I explained to him the situation I’d explained to Pascual: basically, that he needs to send weekly photos and communicate with Donaldo if he wants to continue receiving material shipments. “I know this is not the case with you all,” I began, “but Donaldo has been burned before on other projects. Workmen steal materials, money disappears… he just wants to make sure everything is going as it should. You have to make him comfortable, build confidence, if he’s going to continue sending money and materials.” Pascual and I had already talked about this during our walk, and he’d assured me that they have been posting a PTA member near the site every night to watch for thievery. I believe him; the amount of material installed on the site roughly matches up with what I’ve been told has been sent.

“Fijese que,” Mario began. “I got a new phone. Maybe Donaldo doesn’t have my new number.” I am sure he doesn’t, but that doesn’t excuse Mario from communicating. I took the new number down. “And I talk with Eulalia (Don’s in-country representative) but she doesn’t ever send us anything.”

I explained that Eulalia will do only what Donaldo tells her to, and he’s been telling her to not send materials until they have heard something from Mario. “You know, this might be a cultural thing I can help you with,” I explained, trying to not implicate him directly with being irresponsible. “In Guatemala, I know it’s disrespectful to go over someone’s head. But Americans aren’t much worried about that; you can talk directly to Donaldo. You don’t have to just talk to Eulalia; in fact, Donaldo would PREFER it if you called him. He really wants to talk to you.” Mario seemed doubtful, but promised me he’d call Don this very afternoon.

I hope he does, for the sake of the project.

We are back from the jungle, and what a trip it was. Much like last year’s Holy Week, this one was a great opportunity to see more of what Guatemala is all about. But in this case, it was all about natural wonders and ancient Mayan prehistory instead of religious festivities and colonial Spanish architecture. So much happened that we’ve decided to jointly write this post, much like last year’s adventure.

Guatemala is full of ancient Mayan ruins, the most famous of which is Tikal, a Mayan city that flourished from about 300AD on. It’s located in the center of the Peten, a steamy low-lying jungle that is the northernmost panhandle of Guatemala. But soon after our arrival, we learned that there are hundreds of other ruins, and archaeologists estimate that they’ve located less than a quarter of what’s really out there beneath the jungle. Some are simple, small, and easy to get to, like Zacaleu, Ixtatán, or Iximché. They are relatively recent, dating from 1000AD to 1500AD, and are easy to find because they are located in or near cities that are still occupied by present-day Maya. Others, however, are more elusive. The vast jungle north of Tikal holds a plethora of ruins, the most famous of which is El Mirador.

We heard about El Mirador soon after we arrived in Guatemala, and decided almost immediately that we needed to see it before we left. It was only discovered a few decades ago, and is largely buried by trees and vines. Archaeology work continues, but at a slow pace: access is by a two-day jungle trek with pack mules (or by helicopter)… and that only after you’ve made the tough journey into the Peten. That challenge itself was enough to grab our interest, but El Mirador has other noteworthy distinctions as well. Many of the pyramids predate Christ by 200 years, a full half millennium before Tikal; and the largest pyramid, La Danta (“the Tapir”), is bigger by volume than any of the Egyptian pyramids. El Mirador was the cultural and economic center of Central America for centuries, with highways stretching out to cities in every direction. It’s amazing how much we know about ancient Rome, but how little about classical Mayan civilization, its equal on the other side of the planet.

Travel of any substantial length in Guatemala involves mishaps, and this was no exception. Our original plan was to take the overnight bus from Guatemala City to Flores. We arrived at the bus station in Guatemala City at about 5pm, only to discover that our seat reservation, which Charlotte had confirmed several times, had been lost and the bus company staff was completely unapologetic about having given our seats away. This very Guatemalan outcome was a fortunate mistake; we ended up taking a taxi to a different bus line a few blocks away, where we found seats on a much nicer bus (AC and a bathroom!), if we could wait until 11pm to depart. Guatemala is all about waiting, so we got out the cards and settled down in the terminal. We were, for a time, very amused by the red glowing toilet in the ladies room. Some unfortunate lady’s phone apparently slipped from her pocket and into the bowl. The red glow was eerie upon walking into the dark bathroom, but hilarious once we figured it out. You should have seen the Guatemalans staring at the weird gringos who kept walking in and out of the bathroom in turns, laughing hysterically. We didn’t think to alert anyone to the situation, and after we were all focused on our card game, a local woman and her daughter walked into the dark bathroom and squealed. Hilarious! They did alert the bus station attendant, who couldn’t find anything with which to extract the phone. Finally a local man who looked ready to start his vacation (white sox with brown leather sandals) reached in and pulled it out.

With our departure pushed back, our new arrival time in Flores was set for about 8am. This later schedule proved handy when the bus ran out of gas, just after sunup. “You’d think that if his JOB were to drive the bus, the least he could do was make sure there was enough gas in it,” Charlotte grumbled as we stood around at the side of the road, blinking in the early morning sun. When she’d first asked him what the problem was, he told her, “oh, es solo un pequeno error.” (Oh, it’s just a little mistake.) But these things happen, especially here, and about twenty minutes later, another bus came by and a guy got off carrying a 5-gallon bucket filled to the rim with sloshing diesel fuel. Watching that chubby old driver sweating and struggling with pouring a huge bucket into a fuel filler at shoulder height made it all worth it.

I’d like to say that we had better luck on the way back, but we didn’t. Just different. The return bus was an old broken down Greyhound from the 80s, and the route wasn’t a first-class route. That saved us about 40Q each ($5), but meant that it stopped every ten minutes to pick up people, adding several hours to an already painfully long journey. And since the seats were filled when we left the station, all the newcomers had to stand in the aisles. Or, that was the idea. In reality, they leaned over the paying customers or pretended to “accidentally” sit on their laps. At one point, a kid was holding his poopy chicken right over Emily and the book she was reading. Luckily, the book was interesting and kept the chicken’s attention long enough to prevent any mishaps.

I was pretty excited that we’d get to spend some time in the city of Flores. While visiting Tikal with The Four Witches back in September, I’d read up on the city and really wanted to see it. It just worked out that our in-park rooms near the ruins and nearer still to a cool shimmering pool made the trip to Flores seem too long, too hot, too far away, and not nearly as enjoyable as the shaded corner of the pool or shaded porch of our thatched rooms. In fact, we were expecting a pretty arduous journey into the Peten based on the temperatures we experienced in September. Fortunately, the weather had mercy on us. Don’t get me wrong; it was definitely hot, but not nearly as hot as our first visit. A little behind schedule, our big red bus rambled over the bridge that connects the town of Santa Elena with Flores, a tiny island community in the center of Lake Peten-Itzá. Just the fact that we were on a little island made things feel a bit exotic. Because we’d managed to get the last seats on the 11pm bus, we were in the back seats which do not recline. Though we tried to take turns lounging across one another (at least Charlotte, Sara, and I all took turns), we didn’t sleep a whole lot, but the new scenery woke me up a bit and the prospect of a tasty breakfast kept me going. Guided by the more experienced ones in our group, we were led to Casa de los Amigos, serving up plenty of tasty treats. We all commenced to eat heartily. I felt like our vacation had properly begun.

At first, we thought it unfortunate that this same hostal didn’t have room for us (they don’t take reservations), but it turns out Alana, the first of our group to arrive, had found a great little hotel that offered clean, spartan rooms with private bathrooms. The best part, though, were the fans in each room and rooftop hammocks to enjoy the breeze and views of the lake. After eating, we moved into our hotel, showered, and hung around in the hammocks soaking up the warm breeze and pleasant views. Lake Peten-Itzá is Guatemala’s third largest, following Izabál on the east coast and Atitlán in south central Guetemala. The tiny town feels about 4 blocks wide in each direction, and while the building construction and bright colors seemed familiar, Flores felt a little different than typical Guatemala. The island was originally settled by Mayans that had migrated south from Mexico. The settlement was largely ignored by the Spaniards until late in the Conquest, and was therefore the last independent Mayan settlement before they got wiped out in 1697.

We used Flores as fueling station, filling up on food and catching up on rest before setting out on our epic adventure. It served us well in this respect, and we enjoyed the quiet streets and pleasant sunset. On our way out to dinner we ran into this giant dead tarantula squashed in the street. Thankfully, this was the only one we saw during the trip. Sunday we had half the day to relax and eat before our microbus showed up to take us grocery shopping and deliver the eight of us on the dusty dirt road to the tiny community of Carmelita, located three and a half hours away in the Mayan Biosphere National Reserve.

I got the name of Doña Pati from some PCVs who had done the trip before, so I called her and set up the reservations for all of us. When we’d begun to look into a trip to El Mirador, we’d heard prices between $250 and $400. None of us could afford this, but going straight to the tour guides in Carmelita instead of working through a tourist agency in Flores brought down the cost quite a bit. Most of our group elected to bring our own food and tents, which also helped. If you include what we paid for transport there and back (8 of us renting a van) and the food we bought for ourselves, the trip was quite a deal at about $100/ea. Little did we know what a bargain we were in for.

We arrived in tiny, quiet Carmelita around 4:00 in the afternoon. It felt more like a scene from Africa than the Guatemala to which I’ve grown accustomed; tiny huts with thatched roofs made a semi-circle around the perimeter of the town, backed by jungle wilderness. Pati had informed me that we were welcome to spend Sunday night in her backyard in Carmelita for no extra charge, and as a group we decided this was excellent. It turns out she and her husband, our guide Carlos, had invested much of their earnings into setting up a small campground with latrines and a shower area (bucket bath only, but WAY better than nothing).

Pati saw that we were all settled and said her good byes for the night, adding, “You might want to put your tents in under the porch. It looks like it’s going to rain.” A few people expressed some skepticism at this remark. Lesson: on matters of weather, you should trust the locals. The rain started shortly after sundown, but it brought cool wind and nice weather for sleeping. We got up early the next morning, and after the guides had loaded up the mules, we were on the trail by nine. Although we were under a light drizzle, I felt generally relieved we weren’t walking through sweltering heat. Everyone seemed in high spirits, and we were off!

Our guide Carlos was a calm, friendly guy. I got to chat with him on several occasions, and learn about his life and family and work. He has some crops planted, but most of his living is from guiding tourists and renting mules to other guides for their work. He told me proudly that he has over 20 mules. “How much does a mule cost?” I asked.

“About five or six thousand,” he said. “But it’s really more than that, because I have to pay the vet to come out every now and then to give them shots and check up on them.” Wow, that is a huge investment for a Guatemalan. About that time, we passed by a tomb that had a tunnel cut out of the side of it by grave robbers. We’d seen a few of those before, so I asked him about it.

“It used to be that people came to steal the offerings, to sell to antique traders,” he explained. “People need to make a living, get enough to eat. That doesn’t go on so much anymore, now that we have tourists like you, and the people can guide or lead mules. It all changed about 20 years ago. Now the only robbers are the Mexicans that come across the border to steal the treasures, but that is slowing down too, because now the government posts more guards on the site.” The Mexican border is pretty close to El Mirador, only about 6km away.

President Colom and others in the Guatemalan government are contemplating putting a rail line in from Carmelita out to the ruins. That would change everything so dramatically. It would change the tiny community of Carmelita, as well as the feel and level of development inside the park. I think El Mirador is a treasure to the world, but I also like the present challenge of really having to work to get there (or pay the right price). However, I’m sure over time, access will change and the traffic will increase. I found myself worrying that those who work in and around Tikal might suffer as tourist traffic skips little Tikal, and goes right to the world’s giant. But I will admit, I felt a bit smug after a while. We can tell our great nieces and nephews or anyone silly enough to sit and listen to old fogey ramblings that we walked to El Mirador before the train was there, before things were again so set in stone (literally) and programmed. This did feel like a pretty “epic” trip, as we all jokingly dubbed it in the planning phase. My niece at home will definitely term this as another one of “Aunt Emmy’s aVentures”.

One of the things I like about El Mirador and the surrounding area is that it’s a fantastically huge expanse of preserved wilderness, much like a national park in the US. That means it doesn’t have many of the downers of Guatemala: noisy busses, blaring music, aggressive salesmen. You can even pitch your tent and sleep under the starts without worry of being robbed. This is not to say that it’s perfect; the Peten region has its share of narcotraffickers, illegal logging, and related murders in both industries. But as Carlos explained, the narcos and the tourist guides know where each other frequents and stay out of each others’ way, as it’s mutually better for business.

There wasn’t as much wildlife as I’d expected, considering it’s a jungle. After the tarantula scare in Flores, we saw very few bugs. No big cats, either… the dry season is hard on the jaguars and they hunt elsewhere. The toucans and jungle turkeys were there, a few coatis, and a fox; as well as the monkeys (both howler and spider). We didn’t see much of the howlers, we just heard them at night, roaring away like King Kong. Our first night at El Mirador, shortly after we’d all bedded down and things had fallen silent, the howlers started up, and got closer and closer. It felt like they had to be in the trees just above us. It was crazy and cool. Then I put my earplugs in and feel asleep. I’m glad they found no need to descend from the trees and investigate those who’d invaded their territory. It would be pretty terrifying if you didn’t know what it was, and Emily got a great audio clip at sunrise for your enjoyment. The spider monkeys were more visible, though, swinging in trees and watching us with mild disinterest. Sometimes they did get interactive, though, like this monkey who decided he didn’t like us in his territory. He grabbed branches with all four hands and shook them like crazy, to try to intimidate us. We thought it was cool, so we hung around to take a video. He was not amused, and took to snapping off branches and throwing them at us. His aim got better on the next throw, and I had to dodge at the last second. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loaCcsycerI

But the most exciting wildlife we saw was the barba amarilla, or yellow-bearded snake. I came hiking up the trail one afternoon and Anne was standing there, staring at the ground.

“Jaime, look out. A snake.”

Anne had been paranoid about snakes the whole trip, ever since our boss told her that the jungle was teeming with poisonous vipers of all kinds. So far, we’d seen none, but I looked past her to see a tiny coiled snake in the middle of the path.

“Huh,” I said, bending over to get a picture. About that time Carlos came up behind me, leading his mule.

“Is that a rattlesnake?” Anne asked him.

He peeked, and shook his head. “No, that’s barba armarilla. Far more poisonous than cascabela (rattlesnake). Be very careful,” he said with caution. “Do you want me to kill it?”

Anne frowned. She’s not a big fan of killing things, and she told him so.

“Well, if we leave it, it might kill one of my mules,” Carlos warned. “A bite from that thing, and a mule will be dead within an hour.”

Hearing that, we all backed away an extra step, and Carlos took out his machete. I was sortof expecting an Indiana Jones type battle to ensue, but instead Carlos went to a nearby tree and cut himself a stick that was about 8 feet long and as big around as my thumb. “It’s very dangerous to attack them with a machete,” he explained. “It puts your had too close to where they can strike.”

WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

With three quick whacks of the long stick, the snake was very decisively pummeled to death. He lifted it with the stick and hung it in a tree, and we were once again on our way. “No, you go ahead,” Anne told me, stepping to the side of the path and smiling.

Carlos informed us at this point that he always carries antidote to the barba amarillo with him on these hikes. While the mule would die within in an hour, a man would die in two (slower heart rate), but with the antivenom and the possibility to call for a helicopter, there’s a chance a man could survive. Again, we were all pleased with Carlos and his preparedness.

FIRST DAY: EL TINTAL

We really lucked out on the weather. The mercury never passed the 90s, a rarity for the Peten. We had planned the trip for the dry season, which was a boon on many counts. The dry earth kept the bugs to a minimum, and it was possible to hike free of mud. Our guide told us that they still work in the rainy season, but everyone rides the mules because the mud is halfway up your thigh. Yikes. Carlos told us how he’s lost more than one mule to drowning, and just for the fun of it he led us across the makeshift “bridges” over the deepest ravines. I can’t imagine how treacherous it would feel to cross these lashed together logs while they’re wet and slippery, with water rushing below your feet.

Speaking of water, during the dry season there isn’t any. Much of the mules’ loads were jerrycans of water, about 5 gallons for each of us. Carlos told me that before he was a guide, he was a laborer at the archaeological site. He got paid 100q a day ($12, a kingly wage around here) to haul water ten miles each way on his back for the archaeologists, 12+ hours a day. He said it was awful work, and he would like to never do it again. The dry season doesn’t just affect archaeologists and hikers; the jaguars don’t hang around the park during that time and the snakes don’t come out much either. We got drinking water as part of the cost of the trip, but if we wanted to bathe in a bucket, we had to pay a guy 10q for some unfiltered brownish water to splash on ourselves. Which we gladly did. Some look at the glass and say it’s half empty. Some say it’s half full. A Peace Corps Volunteer asks, “Hey can I take a bath in that?”

The first evening we camped at El Tintal, a recently discovered ruin that hasn’t even been excavated yet. It is the remains of a pretty big city-temple complex, with a sophisticated moat system that is still evident if you know what you are looking at. It’s on the saqbe’, or ancient Mayan highway, that runs from Tikal up to El Mirador. We left our gear and mules at the base camp (a collection of straw roofs and a fireplace) and went exploring with Carlos. He took us up El Tigre, a temple that he and another guide discovered some 20 years ago. “He’s dead now,” Carlos explained. “He was an older man, and had been a guide for a long time.” He didn’t speak much more about it, but I got the impression that they were friends, or maybe this other fellow was Carlos’s mentor.  

From atop El Tigre, we could see an amazing view of the jungle canopy, complete with monkeys foraging for their evening meal. “If you look over there at the horizon,” Carlos showed us, “you can see El Mirador.” It was a green ridge in the distance, and it looked like a lot of jungle between here and there. We could also see another ruin off to the east, a bump of trees protruding from the canopy. It was the temples of Nakb’e, a ruin even more recently discovered than the ones we were standing one, that Carlos also claimed to have part in finding. We weren’t aware it was an option, but if we’d planned a six day excursion, we could have walked a triangle from Carmelita to Tintal, Tintal to El Mirador, El Mirador to Nakb’e, then Nakb’e to Carmelita. It was a shame to have passed it up, but we saw lots of cool stuff anyway. If you’re looking in to doing this trip, be advised that it would be a worthwhile option.

We didn’t run into many other hikers, but the ones we did meet were friendly. The first evening, we met a pair of Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras who were on vacation with their buddy, a yoga instructor. We returned from El Tigre ruin to find them practicing in the campsite. Oh, wait, did I say yoga? Sorry, turns out they do acro-yoga. We’d never heard of that before, so we sat staring at them, mouths open, until they noticed and invited us to join them. Emily and I once did acrobatic swing dancing, and we do yoga now, so we were totally game to give it a try. I am pleased to announce that we didn’t dislocate anything in the attempt, and will start looking for an acro-yoga studio when we return to the US. It was pretty much super fun and the stretching it provided was much appreciated after our first day of hiking.

Although most of us brought our own food to save cost, Nic and Katie shelled out an extra 250q (about $30) each to avoid the hassle. Who’d have guessed that for the money, you also got a muchacha to COOK the food? Her name was Maribel, and she was very friendly and a quick hand with the frying pan. The first morning in Tintal, she was very worried about those of us who had brought our own food. “Are you sure you don’t want me to fix you something? You have a lot of walking to do today. You’re going to need the energy. I have some extra beans and potatoes if you want it.” In spite of being around our age, she was like a mother hen. We went about making our bowls of loaded oatmeal, with tons of nuts and dried fruit. Maribel was not convinced this would get us through until lunch, and shook her head disapprovingly as we ate. When we were eating oatmeal and ramen noodes, Nic and Katie were having homecooked candlelight dinners, the last of which was broiled chicken. How do you get uncooked chicken to not spoil on a 5-day jungle trek? Easy… you don’t kill it until you want to eat it. On our last day hiking out of the jungle, I saw a larger group pass on their way into the ruins. There were three chickens strapped in make-shift holsters, like chicken straight jackets, to the side of a couple of mules. It was hilarious, but I wasn’t quick enough with the camera to get the picture for you. You’ll just have to imagine. [A note to my mother--notice the travel french press in use for puffy-faced me in the morning. Thanks ma!]

Maribel’s presence was actually a boon for all of us, and we owe Nic and Katie a favor for hiring her. She shared hot water with everyone, and was the source of occasional goodness like the time we stopped for a break in the sweltering heat and she busted out a watermelon from somewhere amongst the mules. That was the moment I realized that I had to tip big when we got back. And did I mention, the mules were a good thing too? I sure wouldn’t want to hike for five days with a ten-pound watermelon in my backpack. I wouldn’t have wanted to start out the trip like the mules, carrying five gallons of water per person. But I was glad to have it, since we all averaged about 3 litres a day just for drinking.

Sadly, no one told us about the option to buy bathing water this first night. We went to bed sticky with sweat from the days walk, and in the middle of the night the wind whipped up and chilled most of us. Fletch and I were only mildly uncomfortable, but a few people were miserable. When the first of us woke up a little before six, the fire had been lit for hours and our pot of water boiled to make food. Carlos was up and poking the fire; he sleeps in a hammock under the shelters and said it was so cold he couldn’t stand to stay in bed after about 3am. That’s something we weren’t expecting: weather in the jungle cold enough to see your breath!

SECOND AND THIRD DAY: EL MIRADOR

As I might have mentioned before, El Mirador is an active archaeological site. For several months out of the year, it’s swarming with workers and researchers and students- none of whom were present this week. The dry season makes work essentially impossible right now, due to lack of drinking water, so they only show up during the rains. Conveniently the rains in May, June, and July correspond with when University folks can make it down from the US to work on the project. Unfortunately for them, that means they get to work with mosquitos and foot rot and soggy clothes and 100% humidity, whereas we had a pleasant little jaunt in the woods. Carlos took us around to see some of the work areas that the archaeologists use: storage buildings for ceramics shards, washing stands for cleaning artifacts, tents for the researchers, and a screened-in building where they set up their computers. We also saw two gorgeous bungalows that are occupied by the park and project directors while they are in residence.

But the main point of the trip was the ruins themselves. I can’t really do them justice with words, so I will let the pictures do the talking. El Mirador is a massive, ancient Mayan city filled with temples and passageways, giant leering faces and lofty terraced plazas.

We hiked with gusto for two days to get into the park. Once we arrived, we got to take all the time we wanted that afternoon and the next day for resting at the campsite and visiting all the ruins. By this point we’d all taken a liking to Carlos, so whenever we sat down to take breaks and pulled out granola bars, dried fruit, and nuts, we’d collect some from all of us and pass it over to Carlos. On Wednesday we were sitting around camp snacking in the afternoon as he strolled in and laughed, “You guys have so much food! Like it comes out of nowhere.” He went on to explain that while he and Pati were separating cargo and loading the mules right before we started, they’d come to the conclusion that the six of us who said we’d bring our own food had come woefully unprepared. Pati, saying nothing to any of us nor adding any additional charge, had packed surplus food for our cook, Maribel. I think she was under instruction to pressure us to eat adequately. We all now understood Maribel’s concern, and laughed with Carlos. This was just another way we found them to be a very considerate touring outfit.

There were lots of great things about this trip. The group couldn’t have been better. Being out in the woods and hearing only nature do its thing for five days! No regatone, no honking chicken buses, no screaming kids. But I think what I loved the most was the feeling that we were somewhere with so much possibility. It feels like a National Park waiting to happen. The land is already a protected area/national park, but there’s none of the other stuff…hotels, swimming pools, tourist shops, kids attacking you to shine your shoes, even if you’re just wearing sandals and they’d be blacking your feet. There are some folks who come in by helicopter, like President Colom and Mel Gibson. The latter visited to glean inspiration for his film Apocalypto, which I have not seen but now feel I must when I resume my Netflix subscription, in spite of being told it’s a terrible film. The ‘copter ride is just $400 (witches, you would dig this place, but I think you’d enjoy the helicopter ride in and out rather than the five day trek). Anyway, this absence of traffic was cool and maybe a little eerie. The feeling of solitude was magnified by all the archaeology work stations in pause, all their dormitories and offices abandoned. The ruins are so raw, half uncovered. You feel like you’re standing on so much waiting to be discovered. Who knows what information they’ll have twenty or thirty years from now?

I also found it difficult, after a few days of just enjoying walking in the woods and appreciating nature, to really comprehend that what we were seeing at El Mirador (and a few stops along the way) were all man made, not nature made. To imagine whole societies and cultures existing and thriving here in a place the present-day archaeologists find uninhabitable for much of the year is pretty interesting. We spent each sunset atop a temple, and the morning we left the park, Charlotte, Sara, Anne, and I pulled ourselves out of bed to go with the ever-patient Carlos to sit atop a temple and watch the sun come up to the sound of howler monkeys in the distance and a breeze stirring the canopy. Many current theories propose that different indigenous groups left their cities (including the Anasazi [1] cliff dwellers in the U.S southwest) for reasons of environmental degradation: the masses of people could no longer support themselves on the available land. It’s fascinating, maybe also a little discouraging, that we humans are still what we have always been.

It was hard to imagine this vast canopy before me gone, to see the city in stone. There are so many ruins in this area. We started to see it in Tikal in September, and it was everywhere evident on this hike, that anywhere there is a rise in the land, there is a ruin beneath the trees. You see a tree growing with rocks squeezing out between its roots. In the middle of the woods, you’d start a climb and realize there were more rocks beneath your feet than before, that you walked up and over such a uniform bulge. Then we’d see the treasure hunters’ tunnels. In the distance around Flores, the hills look unnatural, and if you ever take a flight from Guate to Tikal or vice versa, you can see that the mounds below you are strangely uniform and steep like no hills pushed from the earth. There is so much here in Guatemala, under the surface. It cannot, and I think it should not, all be uncovered, but it’s really mind boggling to see and yet not see what’s there. These trees protruding from the ruins also brought to mind Tolkein’s Ents. The trees rip up, crumble, and move such carefully cut stone. I think the Ents are a genius characterization of the silent, persistant strength of trees. Carlos informed us that the builders of these ruins used obsidian saws to cut the stone and most of the forest was cut down and burned to procure the lime necessary for construction. It seems the trees are taking their revenge.

On one of the informational signs, we saw a timeline that I’d like to share with you.

• 3114 BC- The beginning of this cycle of the Mayan astrological calendar
• 2000 BC- Corn appears in the region (a BIG deal)
• 300 BC- Most of the ruins we saw were active (Tintal, El Mirador, Nakbé, Wakná)
• 150 AD- El Mirador was abandoned, for whatever reason
• 300 AD- Ruins to the south were active (Tikal and others)
• 600 AD- Ruins at Copán (Honduras) were active
• 900 AD- Most classical Mayan cities abandoned
• 1200 AD- Postclassical Mayan cities active (Mayopan, Zacaleu, Iximché)
• 1500s AD- Spanish show up and ruin everything
• 2012 AD- End of this cycle of the Mayan astrological calendar

This reminded me about this “end of the world” thing. I hear there is some silliness going around about great floods and famines and the earth ripping open and so forth in 2012. However, it’s the Maya who invented the darn calendar, and they know it just means that the wheel is back to the start and will continue turning. It’s like midnight, but for a MUCH bigger wheel.

At present, because of the relatively low traffic flow, the rules of the park are pretty loosey-goosey. What you can and can’t see, what you can and can’t do are often left up to the interpretation of your guide. For example, the previous volunteer group who gave us Pati’s information spent one night camping on top of the temples. We were told that hasn’t been done for 4 or 5 years. There is a tunnel under one of the temples that is full of paintings, and Carlos asked us if we wanted to see it. He told us we’d have to pay 20q each to get in, but he could talk to the man with the keys if we were interested. He also mentioned this had to be a hush-hush thing, so we were not to mention it to other groups and could only do it while if there weren’t other groups in the vicinity. From the beginning, this idea felt like it was just park guards out to make a little extra for themselves. Don’t get me wrong; I would have gladly paid 20q to enter that tunnel and see the paintings, but I get the feeling the official protocol for the tunnel is that it’s reserved for those who come in helicopter and leave hefty donations to continued research. Unfortunately, the man with the keys apparently decided there were too many people about, and we never did get to go in.

Also, upon entering the reserve there are signs saying that no alcohol is permitted in the park. Our first night in El Mirador atop the jaguar temple, there were a few foreign tourists who lit up their cigarettes and began swigging from a gallon size jug of Venado rum (the cheapest and nastiest stuff available). We are not so straight-laced as to completely disapprove; we often fill a Klean Kanteen with red wine for our multi-day hikes as it’s nice to relax around the fire in the evening. We were never told “no alcohol”, we just saw it on signage once in Carmelita; the only reason we didn’t bring any this trip was that we were planning for ridiculously hot weather and therefore concerned with dehydration. Another tour group we spent some time chatting with said their guide told them sleeping atop the temples was no longer allowed because backpackers like their pot and alcohol too much.

As the four of us girls along with Carlos carefully descended the treacherous steps of the Jaguar temple in the early morning light, a group of British boys was running up the steps and one of them cried, “Did we miss sunrise?” He was very disheartened, and his mate muttered, “That’s what happens when your guide spends all night getting stoned.” Tourism is a very tricky thing. Carlos confirmed that many operators spend most of their winnings on drugs and alcohol. Really, I felt some pity for these operators. They’re in charge of all these foreigners who come in, many who don’t speak Spanish with guides who only speak Spanish. They bring in drugs, they bring in alcohol, and they probably think they’re being friendly by offering some to the guides as well, much like we shared our snacks with Carlos. These guides are often young guys and they want to be good guides, they want to get tips. They’re going to try and please and integrate with the groups as much as they can, and eventually they get caught up in acting the wrong part for the wrong group.

One blog we found about the Mirador hike encourages groups to bring in alcohol for the guides instead of monetary tips. “What are they going to do with money in the middle of the jungle?” the author asks. This annoyed all of us. They don’t live in the jungle and barter for food and necessities; they just operate tours there. Carlos, for one, sends his daughters to a boarding school in Guatemala City where they can learn English and German, and come back to help with the tour operation. We were all completely opposed to tipping with alcohol, especially since we work in Guatemala and are painfully aware that alcoholism is the number one killer of the Guatemalan male. A lot of tourists and expats all over the world have this attitude that they can do whatever they please in these parts. And you know what? For the most part they can. No one is going to stop them. That doesn’t mean they should. I love to travel, I love these kind of trips, but all this felt like a cautionary tale about the dark side of tourism. Be mindful fellow travels, if not for your sake, then for your hosts.

On Friday as we got closer and closer to Carmelita, we were all excited to say we finished, to get real showers, to eat heaping plates of fresh food. But once we were back at the campground, packing up our bags and loading the van that we’d hired to pick us up, it was a little sad to say goodbye to Carlos and Maribel, and sad to think how many hours of travel still lay ahead of us. We doled out our tips, our thanks, our hugs, and then piled into the van to begin the lengthy stretch of dirt road back to Flores. We all fell silent, from exhaustion, from a week of talking to each other, from the van’s vibrations being too loud to compete with. I felt in my sleepy daze a sense of satisfaction of a vacation well executed, with the perfect mix of pleasant company, challenge, relaxation, and revelations of new things. The challenge now would be to get back to work and make these last three months count for something.

1. “Anasazi” as a term is under some debate; that is what the current inhabitants called the original people of Mesa Verde when first asked by archaeologists, but it has since come to light that the word literally translates to “ancient enemy”, which is pretty pejorative. We don’t know what the current politically-correct name is.

You can check out the new product, as well as our current offerings, on our Etsy store. I am pleased to say that the quality and attractiveness of the morrales has been constantly going up, and if we can’t sell these by the end of our service, I won’t mind taking a few of them home for myself.