28 de Mayo

Que pasa: nada. I'm going to start using this blog as my journal, a constant assignment on which we are graded, so you can expect updates every 2-3 days now. I was going to post this last night, but the internet was down.

For the past two class sessions, we have met at a dock in Panajachel to take the lanchas to Santacruz and today San Marcos, the first of which is only accessible by boat—one look at the surrounding mountains and you'll see why. On the boat ride, you'll pass expensive yet small resorts and modern-architecture houses that stud the sides of the cliffs, some of which are owned by nationals, some by wealthy folks who only live there once in a while (according to Dr Wallace, one guy with a house near my town only visits once in five to seven years). The sun is warm and the air is cool and the water is deep blue-green.

San Marcos hosts a hippie scene, generally Australian or American ex-pats just chilling the time away. It's flatter down by the beach, and there's a long cobblestone walkway, almost a tunnel underneath the canopy of vines and trees, nice fences with hand-made signs for saunas and inns, “places to create” and “places to be.” There was a sign for a “moon course” and a “sun course,” I don't know what for, some kind of self-exploratory journey vision quest thing. Thatched-roof huts and a shop built around a tree, all very tranquil. We had class in the balcony\cafe area of one such hut, “La Paz” (the peace). And the hippies: the skinny, well-bronzed, late-fifties guy with long nappy blond hair and colorful pants, slopped on a bench, not doing anything, smiling at you. I saw the end of one conversation between one of these types (though younger and more clean-cut) and a girl in maybe her thirties: instead of shaking her hand or waving goodbye, he placed his hand on her forehead, Jesus-style.

Panajachel (where most of us meet to travel to class together) has its share of these types too, though they're easier to miss with all the street vendors and traffic. Dr Wallace and Carla have kept talking about this guy named Mike who owns a coffee shop, Crossroads Cafe. Today, a group of five of us decided to try it out.

Mike strikes me as lively guy with zests for living, chance-taking (the healthy kind), and coffee. Fit, has a moustache, very friendly, but in the funny way, not the touchy-feely way. Ex: he made a smily-face out of the thicker cream on top of my cafe con leche. On the wall is a vintage-style sign with a smiling woman that says something like, “Drink coffee: do stupid things faster with more energy.” The ceiling is covered with flags. He opened this cafe eight years ago after the two-hour commute in the San Fran Bay Area became too much: here in Panajachel is the longest he has been in one place. We sat in his cafe for two hours as he continued to refill our mugs. The door stays open, upstairs (where he lives) one of his two daughters practices the violin. Regulars come in and out—Lupe, a student from (I don't remember, somewhere in Northeastern Europe) whom he calls “Loops” who has known them for seven years (Mike: And you're still here! That's 'cause you young kids are tolerant. Or is it resilient? Lupe: It's because I get a free cup of coffee.). He talks to a local supplier in Spanish that is fluid, but he makes no attempt to water-down his Northeast-U.S. accent. I also got tiramisu, a recipe that he learned from the (Italian?) wife of a friend of his in exchange for teaching them about coffee. Yes, it was delicious. And the couple now live in Birmingham and have a place called Primavera Coffee (heard of it, anyone?).

Mike asks us if we can keep a secret. He then takes us into a secret room (bookshelf for a door) and shows us his big red coffee roaster, his stacks of sacks of local coffee. He tells us all about this new kind of bean that roasts better (and explains the thermodynamics of it on a dry-erase board), about a storm that brewed up near New England and swept down through the Caribbean to wipe out “this one and that one” (he points to two stacks from two different suppliers), about how these things are all up to God's will. He pays better than fair-trade prices, enjoying the relationships he builds with his suppliers, who always give him free samples and stuff. On the walls are charts about coffee tastes and posters or plaques for awards.

The point of all this: I really enjoyed just sitting in this place with this neat guy and chatting with Zach, Nicole, Mayra. I talked in the last entry about the little things that put me in good moods down here... I'm still kind of beaming with the atmosphere of Crossroads. Being in Santa Catarina—where I don't know what to make of things, how to deal with things, where I only crack the surface of social interaction and yet people whom I don't know know my name—has at least taught me the value of familiar company.

I've changed my research topic. Dr Wallace and I discussed it at length, and I have begun to see what he means: the presence of American pop-culture icons in miscellaneous things (clothes, clocks, pen-holders) isn't really a phenomenon that I would be able to pin down. There are too many variables that go into decisions to buy things, much of the time even unknown to the buyer, and even if I could account for all these variables, they don't really represent a unified cultural phenomenon. It's not really something that I could “get to the bottom of.”

Someone could perhaps track the flow of used goods (like clothes) from America to Guatemala, but this wouldn't really be an anthropological study. Why would I live in this pueblo for six weeks in order to study this?

So, my new topic: dogs. In one entry I talked about the dogs have gotten my attention here because they seem paranoid and edgy. The dogs here definitely know their places: they don't cuddle up to you; instead they shy away from you or cast you nervous glances. They appear spend much more time focused on survival, sleeping and looking for food. You won't see a dog here romping around and barking and panting, rather, they dart around on light feet like foxes. The people don't interact with the dogs except to chase them out of their shops or even throw water or rocks at them when they're causing trouble.

So why do they have dogs and feed them their table scraps? To guard there homes, maybe, or for a little companionship. I'm probably going to focus my paper on two things: describing the role of dogs in society from a kind of ecological perspective (symbiosis and all that), and then maybe try to portray how a dog appears in a Catarineco's eyes. This study has a few advantages, namely that I can understand the language that people use with dogs (all I'll have to learn are Kaqchikal words for scram or some cuss words–the body language anyone can understand).

More about Santa Catarina. Here is something that I wrote about five days ago:

The only thing that I can compare this town to from the outside is a college campus, and a small one at that (pop. 3000). At all hours of the day, but much more in the afternoon, are children running around in the plaza in front of the church, in the main street, on the street to the lake, by the lake. I can hear them now down below. It's like a college campus in its sense of community, a word that is inflated these days but retains its true value here; everyone knows everyone, you have privacy in your room or your house, but other than that, everyone hangs out with everyone else.

Today I was walking by the school house right as the bell rang. Students poured out of the huge green echo-y school building, running wherever they wanted. There was no carpool line, there were no kids asking their parents if they could go play with their friends...it's all kind of the same when your whole life takes place in a space of about a square mile.

I guess all this applies for life in any small town. Then you outgrow it. One time I asked Wilson what he wanted to do after school. He said something like I don't know, I play with my friends, come up here to my house. I said, no, like after you finish school, when you are older. After thinking, he just said, I don't know, and then started talking about something else.

I was walking down one morning when a very young girl (I'm not good with ages, but she must have been only 3 to 5... I didn't expect her to be able to talk, still working on being able to run) asked me, “Un quetzal?” I turned around and she was extending to me some kind of tiny woven doll. I told her, “No, gracias,” (as I do with everyone... I don't want the reputation of a guy who buys things from street vendors, because then I may hear no end to it). Anyway, I guess the moms recruit them while they're young.

My stomach continues to be funny... “angry” I call it to Luis & co. Last night we ate grilled fish—quite good—caught from the lake, gutted and then grilled whole. We used our fingers.

Enjoy the photos. If there`s anything that anyone wants to know about in particular, email me or comment on it, and I could address it in an entry.

Erin`s homestay in San Marcos: she`s popular with the kids.

Mike behind the counter.

Me in my room, probably writing this journal entry, with Luis Miguel. Photo by Wilson

Visiting Andrea`s homestay in Santacruz

This and the following are all pictures from the beach in Santa Catarina.

A culta (evangelical worship service) from Chichicastenango came to visit the shores in Santa Catarina. They were having a baptizing here.