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

We have successfully returned to American soil, a two full days ago. Look at all that luggage! Sorry it took me so long to let you know, but as luck would have it, I’ve been really sick and only just now feel up to opening the laptop. We had a really nice dinner with Nick and Katal the night before we left (they were in Antigua on unrelated business, just by luck), and I can’t think of two people with which I’d have rather spent my final hours in Guatemala. Unfortunately, I was feeling pretty ill by the end of the evening, so I wasn’t much fun by the time I got back to the hotel. This got worse during the plane flights the next day, and if you zoom in on my face in the picture, I am looking pretty unwell. Anyways, I just got back from the doctor and they have no idea what is wrong with me, but much of the tests aren’t back from the lab– except for the one that says my white blood cell count is low. Now my dad tells me I must have leukemia or AIDS or some congenital bonemarrow disorder. He’s such a drama queen sometimes.

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.

Early tomorrow morning, we’re getting on the plane. Sorry about the landslide of posts in the last day or two; after more than a week of being extremely busy, we took two days of “vacation” at the lake, and we finally got caught up with the blogging. The idea was to relax a little and enjoy each other’s company before returning to what we know will be a few more weeks of busy, intense socialization in the US. Oh, and yesterday was also our anniversary. We’ve been married for four years now, more than half of it while living in Guatemala.

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.

Fletch and I got married promptly, much sooner than we might have otherwise, to be able to serve together, and after a year and a half of waiting for a placement we received one only to have it taken away a week later due to a funny little conflict of interest rule…and Fletch supported and worked alongside me as we banged and shouted and beat down the door through their appeal process until Peace Corps let us back in. I didn’t believe we’d even make it to Guatemala, assuming that something else would come up to stop us from going, until we were sitting safely on the tarmac at the Aurora airport in Guate. For two years of chronic ailments, when I would find myself painfully doubled over in a latrine or with my head in a toilet (somehow I was always lucky enough to only throw up in toilets), or through ridiculous amounts of job related frustrations and thwarted projects, I would tell myself, “Hey, you asked for this. Remember, you wanted to be here!” And I think now I believe it was all worth it–I just hope my stomach goes back to a healthy normal once we’re home.

I want to thank you all for your time and comments and really just for caring. We started this blog mainly for our parents, but it turned into a project bigger than we ever could have foreseen, read not only by our families and best friends but also the ambassador and perfect strangers and former teachers and professors and fellow Peace Corps friends and RPCV’s and folks just invited to serve in Peace Corps Guatemala. Thanks, ComputerBrian, for pressuring us to do this.

I realize that I wasn’t exactly regular with my posts, not like the ever-faithful Jim/Fletch/Jaime. I also do not have a style as organized and concise as his. I had a lot of comments over these two years from numerous friends that they really try to read my posts, really, but it’s very difficult for them to get through the sheer volume sometimes. They pointed out that they have jobs and children and other things that require their attention in a day. I understand, and I thank you for trying. The four people who were meant to read this blog, I’m fairly certain, have read every single word.

I struggled for a time trying to make my writing more Jaime-like and more singulary focused, but it’s just not me. In the end I’ve tried to relate to you all our lives as I experience them. Though we were almost as literally side-by-side through this adventure as we were figuratively, we’re two separate people. I do not believe that a marriage makes one. We experience the same things differently, sometimes very differently. And we express ourselves differently, sometimes very differently. For me this was an endurance experience with a lot going on, things blind siding you out of nowhere. That’s how I wrote about it. I hope that our different perspectives and styles made the blog more interesting, more complex, maybe even more fun for you all.

For Jim, this blog became his journal. He hasn’t written in his little leather book but two or three times in the last 27 months. I, on the other hand, am too attached to my uncensored personal opinions and filled something like 3.5 little leather books. fully detailing all aspects of the last 27 months as I lived them. So my lengthy posts were really just a small, small sample of the volumes I write. In that sense, the blog was difficult for me, writing at length about things I’d already written at length about for myself. I found that giving you all a fair presentation without being too critical, or political, or iced over, or insincere here and there took a great deal of emotional energy and real time. For this reason I am very glad to be signing off of the blog once and for all at the end of this post. Fletch will take care of telling you about our decompression and anniversary, celebrating twelve days of vacation in and around Guatemala. To those of you who have suggested or in some cases demanded that I write a book, I’ll think about it, but I will make no promises.

While I have you all here, just one more thing. Thank you, for being part of this dream of mine, for supporting both of us through the best of times and the worst of times. Even if we’ve never met in person, your comments and well wishes buoyed our spirits on many, many occassions.

To our friends and families, we always liked you guys quite a lot. Now we’re convinced that you’re all the best, really. We love you beyond words, and we’re pretty much thrilled to be coming home!

To Fletch, after 4 years of a crazy marriage preceded by eleven years of the most unlikely friendship and noviazgo, what do I say to you? You were a great Peace Corps volunteer. Thanks for coming with me and making it your own.

El Fin.

Emily RR Fanjoy

Peace Corps Guatemala April 2008-July 2010

We took a little side trip to Honduras today, to see something of Central America besides Guatemala. This trip was in some ways similar to visiting Illinois from Indiana: hard to tell the difference, unless you read the patch on the policeman’s shoulder. Same language, same accent, same poverty, same natural beauty. The money is different (lempira instead of quetzales), so we had to change some so we could get a room for the night. Or so we thought; turns out that most everyone we met takes dollars. At first, we thought it was because they have heavy tourist traffic, but now I feel it might be because dollars are more stable. If you are a Honduran businessman, having some dollars hidden away could be a much more secure savings than holding onto the local coin. The exchange rate is also more favorable if one brings dollars instead of quetzales (18 lem to the dollar; 8 Q to the dollar), so our tourist dollar goes farther. Thank goodness we still had a few greenbacks left over from our last visit to the US. At the end of our trip, we brought back some leftover lempira to give to the nieces and nephews as “funny money”, much like my uncle Bill used to give to us when he came back from his various oddball assignments overseas. What WAS the currency in Botswana, anyways? I can’t remember.

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.

The Grand Finale

by Emily Richardson Fanjoy

Guest Columnist

I was talking to a Peace Corps friend of mine not too long ago. “I just ran into a boy walking home today. His toes were sticking out of holes in the end of his shoes, and I almost started to cry. Isn’t that strange? I mean, I’ve been here so long and suddenly a boy with holes in his shoes makes me want to cry, after all the things we’ve seen?” She responded that she’s been startled to realize how infrequently these sort of things, the poor state of shoes and clothes and even homes, affect her now that she’s used to the way of life here.

“It sort of makes me worry that I’m a bad person,” she told me.

I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s more that these things are symbols of poverty that we learn from the safety of our lives in the states. In commercials asking for donations to the poor, you see children with toes sticking out of their shoes. You see children carrying water. You see dirt and flies. You learn these visual cues of poverty. I think they stop affecting us here because, first of all, we’d never make it through two years if we cried every time we saw this stuff. But it’s also because everything becomes personal.

After I caught myself from crying about the little boy’s toes sticking out of his shoes, I realized this stuff doesn’t bother me because I don’t usually see it anymore. I continued, “I know those toes. They belong to Frankie, and Frankie always greets me with a smile when I walk by. He usually tests my Q’anjob’al, and sometimes when I don’t understand what he’s trying to say, his friend Javi translates it into Spanish for me. I know Frankie and Javi are pretty excited about the carrots in my garden, since I’ve promised them each one when it’s time for picking. I don’t usually see their shoes during our conversations. Today it just got me.”

On that day, the symbols of poverty that I’d learned as a child suddenly connected to everything I’ve learned here as an adult. It’s not the poor state of Frankie’s shoes, it’s what they stand for. I saw intellectual poverty, a lack of life opportunity, restrictive gender roles, poor access to health services, and the plague of alcoholism stretching out before those exposed, dusty toes. It just broke my heart that Frankie is such a good kid who deserves so much more, and all I could promise him was a carrot.

A few weeks from now my government acronym will change from PCV, Peace Corps Volunteer, to RPCV, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. We signed up for twenty-seven months of service which has felt like both an eternity and the blink of an eye. In the case of my husband and I, we have spent more of our married days as PCVs than not. When we arrived, we were told by the outgoing volunteers that “The days are long and the months are short,” and we have found that to be absolutely true. To be sure, the process of leaving is full of mixed emotions, doubts, questions. What did we do here? Could we have done more? Did we cause unintended harm? Then there’s the thrill of going home, so searing sometimes that it’s accompanied by a real physical ache. Yet the same can be said for the thoughts of saying goodbye to the people with whom we’ve grown so close, and to leaving this stunningly beautiful place.

This time next year I might find myself in an apartment full of natural lighting and great windows, but none with the view we get from our tiny, smudged window in Guatemala: a deep green valley filled with Van Gogh-esque swirling clouds as the rain moves in. We will miss our “star status”, the fact that everywhere we go people are excited to see us, but we’re looking forward to a little anonymity. We will miss the kids that come and visit us every day, who work in the garden with us, who we read to on rainy afternoons, but we’re looking forward to spending time with the kids we’ve left in the states, our nieces and nephews. We will miss the pleasant evenings listening to rain on the tin roof of our house, but we’re looking forward to living somewhere that keeps wind, water, and pests out while enjoying modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing, climate control, and refrigeration. Although I’m sure we’ll miss the hilarity of bumping along country roads in antique American school buses, revamped and repainted for Guatemalan public transport and so lovingly dubbed “chicken buses”, we’re looking forward to the freedom of driving our little truck on the wide-open highways of America. They are so well organized and so well maintained in comparison!

From where I sit now, it’s hard to say exactly how this experience has affected me or what it will move me to do in the future. But what I will take with me, as I hope the above story illustrates, is the acute knowledge-through-experience of what poverty is, what it means, what it really affects in the hearts and minds and lives of people. And, ridiculous as it may sound, I count myself as fortunate to know these things. Before Peace Corps, I had never before experienced such a profound sense of gratitude for all the beautiful things in my life: family, friends, community, education, opportunity, convenience, justice, good government, country, home.

I have been challenged these past two years: mentally, emotionally, and physically. For one of the first times in my life, I’ve been able to see the world pragmatically, rather than just through books read in comfortable places. I’ve applied so many of my skills and latent knowledge to my every day work, and it has been immensely rewarding. It has also been a great pleasure to share my work, realizations, and experiences with my hometown of Logansport. I’d like to thank Kelly Hawes at the Pharos-Tribune for this opportunity, and to thank all of you who felt compelled to read my articles. And once more, thank you to all of you who have been a part of my life, as you’re all a little responsible for me being here today. Am I allowed to quote Ozzy Osbourne here? If so, I’d just like to shout, “Mama, I’m coming home!”

Emily made me promise that before we left Guatemala, we’d see Semuc Champey, the only major attraction we didn’t get to in our two years of service. It’s been a while since we’ve “traveled” in the fun sense of the word, so these few extra days between our Close of Service and return to the US seemed like a good chance to tie up this loose end.

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.

For all you left-brain people, we collected some objective, quantatative data to summarize what was actually a very subjective, qualatative experience. During our time in the Peace Corps, there were…

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

Wow, it’s been about ten days since we’ve posted! I hope no one was worried. We’re still alive, we’ve just been extremely busy. So busy, in fact, that we have a half-dozen or so posts to make to chatch up with everything that just happened. So as not to overload you, we’re going to be sending out a retroactive post every day or two this week until we get caught back up.

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.

Our last day as Peace Corps volunteers was spent in an elaborate scavenger hunt. Being employees of the US Government, we have a lot of papers to fill out to officially terminate our service, especially if we want to have access to the benefits that we receive for successfully completing our two years. By an executive order signed by John F. Kennedy, returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) get one year of noncompetitive hiring preference for certain government jobs, much like a watered-down version of the benefits extended to honorably discharged veterans. In addition, we get a few thousand dollars of “readjustment allowance” to help us secure an apartment, make a down payment on a car, and so forth to get us back into normal American life once again. Although our fantastic socialized healthcare finishes when we leave the Peace Corps, we get a month of free health insurance on the way out the door and can pay for up to 18 additional months through a special group coverage offered to RPCVs.

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.