29 de Junio

Petrona making a huipil.

It's been longer than usual. I've been pretty busy working on my project and such. I'm now into the last week of the program; it has crept up on me.

To start off, I have a kind of hilarious story.

So I'm learning a little Kaqchikel. They teach me words like “finger” and “tooth” and I ask how to make plurals or say things like “I have.” Sometimes I will ask them the meaning of words I hear often. Well, before dinner last night I was washing my hands and I heard Luis say something about “mots'.” That's a word I hear them say a lot, and so when I sit down at the table I ask them what it means. Catarina immediately starts laughing, and Luis answers me stoically: “It means ladino...” pause, “or gringo.” “Oh, like stranger,” I say. Then I realize why Catarina is laughing and I laugh too. I say, “Ahh, now you guys can't talk about me without my knowing it!” Catarina laughs some more, but Luis doesn't laugh, part of the reason I think this is hilarious.

It reminds me of playing battleship. A random guess and bam, I got em.

Things have been accelerating. Even since my last update, my project, my Spanish, and my relationship with the family (which all affect each other anyway) have developed drastically. The day after my last entry, I had a pretty long and revealing conversation with Luis about certain aspects of his past. That night, Catarina told me a lot about Luis Miguel that I didn't know. They trust me more, I do more chores (carrying stuff up to the house), we are all more at-ease together, we tell more jokes, etc. I still don't know anything about Luis' late wife or the father of the children, and I think I won't ever know. Luis offered to take me to Chichicastenango to buy masks for his shop from the market there. I had work to do; I wish we had planned this earlier. Maybe we'll have another chance to do something like that.

I bought the pants instead of the painting, a purchase I am still happy with. Also, we are still without running water. That makes three weeks I think. Once every few days the boys and I wake up early and take our soap and towels down to the hot springs to bathe there.

My project: I have had several kind of breakthroughs the past couple of days. Carla has said that if you just keep plugging away and learn to deal with rejection then soon enough, things will get rolling. That happened to me more or less on Tuesday, and since then I've been almost overwhelmed with information and ideas. I wish that this had happened earlier, although I feel that I have enough time to do what I need to. What's more, I am excited about my project. Now, instead of longing for days when I have an excuse to go to Panajachel, I'd rather stick around Santa Catarina and do my research.

I have been able to interview a handful of the women street vendors here, thanks largely to Catarina. I met one who climbed Volcan Atitlan, a connection that got us talking for a while. A gringo chatting with a local woman street vendor gets the attention of the rest, and sometimes a few will look over her shoulder while she fills out the questionnaire. Some of them, Catarina included, try to set me up with this certain girl which, like most of this kind of stuff, is probably partly serious, partly to give us both a hard time. They only really do it when she's around: “Daniel, there goes your girlfriend! Don't leave her there by herself!” etc. Neither is this uncommon; other students have run into similar things.

But this goes to show you that I have been more accepted in general. When I walk up the street, they no longer look at me and say, “Buy something.” I have begun to greet most people I pass and now recognize many faces. The kids call me “Dan-yell” or “Dani” or even “Miguel,” and now I've learned to hear “mots',” but they no longer call me “gringo” or “Hey Dude!”

And it looks like my attitude towards the food is on the positive side to stay. At times, a hot tortilla really hits the spot. Last night we had a particularly good dinner: bowls of red beans with small portions of heavily-seasoned pork ribs, avocado, and both tortillas and ta' un, a favorite of mine, but this time instead of the beans being cooked inside tortillas they were mixed in with the cornmeal and cooked inside small corn husks (tamalitos, little tamales). They had bought these in Panajachel, but Catarina recooked them on the stove so that they were a little crunchy on the outside.

Man, this is probably the third-to-last entry. Once I finish my paper, I will post a copy here for those interested to read. Like I said, I am excited as to how it is turning out. I need to give my presentation this Friday. I will wear my traje pants.

After the program ends next Monday, I'm planning to go to head to Quetzaltenango (Xela). I'm trying to get a four-day backpacking thing together through a company there with some friends I've made here. If that falls through, then I will just hang out in Xela. My flight back is on the 14th of July.

A woman swings a tinaja at a dog. In the mornings, everyone fills up for water for the day at the fountain.

I volunteered at a spay/neuter clinic in Panajachel yesterday.

Luis Miguel, Wilson, Bandera, me

Last night´s dinner. The ribs are in the skillet, the ta´un and peppers are cooking around it.

24 de Junio

This caught my eye last night as I was walking back to Santa Catarina from Panajachel. Taken near a bridge by the river that runs through Pana.

“Vamos.” Derek, Zach, the guide and I stepped out of Zach's homestay into the night. 4:00 is still night time. I was expecting to see a car or a van, but there was none: we were literally to walk out the door, up the volcano, and back home.

From my side of the lake, the volcano looks like a wall on the edge of the lake, like part of its southern side. It's not until I look on a map that I see that the volcano is about as far away from the lake as the lake is wide. Also, I didn't think about the horizontal distance to the peak, which is about 4 miles away as the crow flies.

The first three hours are a climb into the highlands around San Lucas. We move quietly through coffee and cornfields by silhouettes of bizarre trees under the steadily-brightening sky. The sunrise brings some great lighting and clouds around the lake, which soon becomes distant. (I hadn't brought my camera because of what I'd heard of theives, but Derek brought his, so I may have some photos much later). At the pass in between volcanoes Toliman and Atitlan are black soil cornfields whose owners walk on foot from San Lucas every day, farmers whose daily commute is a three hours climb and a two and a half hour descent with piles of wood on their backs. We breakfast at a campsite a little above the pass.

The next three hours of climbing is intense. The forest grows thick and damp and cool, and the trail goes steeper and straight up instead of having switchbacks. We step and pull our way up roots and dirt as the soil becomes increasingly rocky. Soon, we are into the clouds, and all we can see is white beyond the trees, although at times we catch glimpses of the lake behind us or the highlands around us. After about two hours, the trees give way to scrub. The trail becomes a narrow gully carved into the mountainside, at times as deep as my armpits. Then, the scrub gives way all together, and we dig our way for half-an-hour more until we reach the cima.

The guide says that when it's clear, you can see the lake, of course, and then the altiplano to the east and all the surrounding countryside, even to the Pacific Ocean. We have no such luck, however, although the view isn't the only reward at the summit, where across a field of rocks there are some man-made rock piles to provide shelter from the brutal winds. Exhausted, cold, and wearily giddy, we down our lunches and lie back into one of these rock piles where the volcano emits hot gas and vapor. It is eerily silent up there with the wind whipping fiercely but no trees (or any living things) to make noise, so the only sound is the occasional flat blast of wind against some rocks. Tired and full-bellied and steamy-warm, most of us drifted off to sleep for about half and hour.

The way down is difficult and not at all exciting. Weak legs and loose gravel make falling easy. Once we got to the road, Derek and Luis tried walking backwards to give their quads a break.

So here are the stats:16 miles total, same direction there and back. 12 hours: 6.5 hours up, an hour at the top, 4.5 hours down. I chugged a lot of water beforehand, then I drank about 2 liters of water and a gatorade in transit and ate three PBJs, two bean sandwiches, and one peanut butter and honey sandwich, as well as about two-thirds of a bag of granola, a handful of wild blackberries and raspberries, one of the guide's chips, one of his store-bought cookies, and about and eighth of Derek's Snickers with almond bar. (I shared my food too). And because we chose to hang out with Zach's family and stay up talking instead of going to bed early, the three of us got only three hours of sleep the night before, which came back to bite us about two-thirds of the way back down. I was going a little crazy by the end, like slap-happy minus the happy.

Afterwards, I took a 1.5-hour three-legged trip of pickups and vans back to Santa Catarina. Riding next to San Lucas locals and through towns on the east side of the lake, it seemed as though I was in a whole different country than what I'm used to with Santa Catarina. Everyone was speaking Spanish to one another, and there were many faster-talking middle-aged people and young adults in street or business clothes. I have come to realize that my town is pretty conservative, probably due to the fact that it sits out of the way and only holds 3000 people. I have ridden the pickup from Santa Catarina to Panajachel maybe thirty times, and there is rarely any conversation. Traditionally-dressed women and some men sit straight-faced, and maybe there is the occasional Kaqchikel exchange, but nothing at all in Spanish. Santa Catarina is more cut off, while the route I was taking around the lake passes through more crossroads towns.

There seems to be a gap in age in my town. There are children from toddlers to high-school aged, but after this there's a gap until maybe early thirties, and then a lot more older people. In this gap are a handful of girls who seem to be near my age, most of whom are traditionally-dressed street vendors, but I see very few guys of this age. The ones I do see don't hang around town, but often wear small backpacks and appear to be coming or going. In my travel back to Santa Catarina from Zach's place in San Lucas, I got a small taste of Lake Atitlan culture for young adults.

Last week I followed a sign advertising “fotocopias” into an alleyway off the main road, through some other houses whose residents directed me up some stairs and into a one-room apartment where I was surprised to find a guy about my age playing computer games. He looked like kind of a techie, skinny with glasses, short hair, dressed in a sleeveless shirt and sweatpants, his room full of electronic odds and ends like an old camera and a TV from the 70s. I tried to make conversation but he wasn't interested. As he ran my photocopies on his scanner/printer, I stood awkwardly in his room and wondered what this guy does all day, if he ever leaves his room (which has a nice view of the town and the lake), why he lives in Santa Catarina.

I realize how varied the homestays are for the students in this program. Zach lives with a family in a bona-fide house that speaks almost entirely Spanish, and I can honestly say that my Spanish is better after just spending the night at his house (and spending twelve hours with the tour guide and Zach's homestay ''brother-in-law,'' a San Lucas butcher named Luis), hearing how the family members talk to one another, something totally lacking in my homestay. At this point, my Spanish might be better than that of Luis Miguel, the 8-year-old boy. At dinner last night, Catarina asked me in Spanish if I was tired after the volcano. I began to reply and then swallowed my bite to say more about it, but before I could continue Luis had started talking in Kaqchikel again to Catarina. They don't look at each other or use their hands when they talk. At one point I knew Luis was talking about me and about something that had happened to him and me on the way up to the house, so I butted in with a detail that I knew he left out, and he looked at me and laughed and said “Si, si,” and then I heard him repeat what I said in Kaqchikel to Catarina, although Catarina had understood what I'd said. When Luis finished he looked at me and laughed, like “yeah wasn't that funny?”

In other news, there has been no running water for those who live on the hill in Santa Catarina for about a week. During the day, I see groups of women heading down to the lake to fill their jugs with water and bring it back to their houses. The water still works in Luis's galeria down at the street, about a four-minute walk down stairs, so we use that.

I didn't mention this last time, but I finished Invisible Man. It's pretty wild. I like what it says about black-white race relations in the States more than any other book I have read on the subject (Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc). Now I'm kind of reading both The Shining and The Iliad, although I'm not reading nearly as much these days because I'm working more on my project. It's bizarre to think that time is running out.

Remember that stuff I said about Jesus imagery in the last post? Well, a few nights ago, I let Wilson and Luis Miguel draw on Microsoft Paint, and this is the first thing Wilson drew.

The group went on a zipline tour at the Reserve north of Panajachel.

This was taken out the window of the bus on the east side of the lake, on the way to Zach's in San Lucas.
L to R: Derek, Zach
San Lucas

three abandoned puppies in San Lucas. We stood there for about five minutes and contemplated what to do. We resolved to leave them.


Zach´s room

Wilson ''trying on'' some of the traditional traje pants

I, wearing some pants. I think I am going to buy them instead of a painting (and hang them on my wall when I'm not wearing them). They are about as expensive and took 6 months to make. The design has cats, deer, bugs, butterflies, trees, and a lot more (but no dogs!)

21 de Junio

For some reason our tap water has stopped, so Catarina has been washing clothes at the lake, a not-uncommon thing here.

Yesterday I was sitting in the back of Luis's tienda chowing down on some hot tortillas and ham with Catarina and Wilson when they pointed at two packages, one full of canned refried beans and another full of packs of incaparina and mosh, both different kinds of cornmeal/grain meal. They said they got them from the proyecto, this building in town I have seen with its CFCA logo and a cross. I had walked by here earlier and they were yelling names out of a loudspeaker, I guess for the food pickup. The food apparently comes from a partnership they have with a church in the United States. Funny, because growing up at Briarwood Christian School, there were often drives to send food to “third world countries.” Cool to be on the other side of the food donation box for once.

The beans are packed with fat, iron, protein, and especially fiber (53% DV!). We had them last night for dinner and this morning for breakfast, this morning accompanied by a surprise: home-made french fries that were really tasty. I hope it's not going to be beans all the time now.

Incaparina, by the way, is this vitamin-fortified meal (cornmeal?) stuff made by Quaker. Catarina mixes it with cinnamon and sugar to make a hot, thick drink called atol. It tastes remarkably like french toast, quite good. And then there's mosh, also made by Quaker, which is basically oatmeal. They make this with milk and serve it in mugs.

Two days ago, some classmates and I decided to climb Cerro de Oro, the baby volcano around here. It took us about 30 to 40 minutes to get to the top. It was remarkably humid. About a quarter of the way up at a pretty steep part, we moved to the side for a man and a boy to bring down packs of firewood slung over their backs. We also passed some farmland at a milder part. It's hard to imagine this being part of a daily routine. Afterwards some of us went swimming.

Some of us (last I heard: I, Derek, Zach, and Allie) got the crazy idea to climb Volcan Atitlan, the tallest one around the lake; you have seen it in the photos. In order to do this I will spend Sunday night at Zach's place in San Lucas order to begin our climb at 4 a.m. We're going with a guide. I don't know if I should take my camera or not. The volcanoes around here are notorious for being popular with the tourist-robbers (what a brilliant idea, you know? Who's going to catch you coming down a volcano?). In San Pedro, it's now customary (and may even be a law) to have a police escort up and down the volcano. Tune in next week to see what Daniel decides!


I want to talk a bit about depictions of Jesus around here, which I think would have made an interesting paper topic. A few nights ago, Luis Miguel came into my room to show me two framed images of Jesus. I will defer you to the photos for details, but they are both holographic, like Pokemon cards. He pointed out the different components, such as the saints and such in the corners. One time Wilson proudly showed me a plate of stickers that he bought in Pana with all kinds of holy imagery: Mary in a halo, Jesus on a cross in bright colors, stars and mangers and crosses and praying hands and twinkly holographic colors. I have seen them on school supplies and such. Little light painting/print things of Jesus on the cross are hung about the home: one over our dining table, two in my room (one of someone praying to Mary).

My host family doesn't go to church. There are many Evangelical churches and a large Catholic churc in town, all very popular. I mentioned the pictures on my host-mom's desk: two of Jesus on either side of Maximon (see 31 de Mayo entry). I ask about the images, and Luis Miguel will say, “Es hey-soos!” We don't pray before we eat or anything. Luis doesn't like the church's annual festival; he much prefers the town festival on the 26th of November, in honor of Santa Catarina. He seemed a little surprised when I told him that we in the United States have no patron saints for our towns.

But it's not just my family. A huge majority of the transit vehicles you'll see here (pickups, chicken buses, tuk-tuks) are Jesussed-out. A popular decal on the back window of tuk-tuks is “JESUCRISTE VIVE” in cool letters, difficult to read at first. “Dios me Guia” (God guides me) and “Dios es Amor” (guess) are popular banners across the windshields of pickups. I have seen a tuk-tuk with twin decals of Jesus' pained face in a crown of thorns slapped across its mudflaps. The internet place where I am right now sells random household items: mugs, glasses, picture frames, and a clock with Jesus on it and a clock with Mary on it.

I don't have any particular opinion to share about this, but it intrigues me: Jesus and some saints have taken the status of something like a pop-mythology. The plates of stickers remind me of Disney movies, the car decals of sports teams, the little charms I see of happy-meal toys, but unlike all these other things, Jesus is not owned by a company.


My relationships with Catarina and Wilson continue to grow, not so much with Luis and Luis Miguel. I am learning more Kaqchikel, and today I am going to begin trying out Kaqchikel greetings to the locals that I pass by. I wonder how they will take it, especially the old folks (I want to say “elders”). Some of them seem too austere to take it lightly, which is what I feel like I'm doing. Oh well. My host family encourages it.

At the end of every meal, when you finish your plate, you say “Matiosh, ” (which means thank you) to everyone seated at the table. The other night night, I've forgotten why, but I mimicked the way the kids say this to everyone. It's like “'tiosh Mom 'tiosh Dado, ma-tee-osh Dan-yell, 'tiosh Wil-son.” They thought this was pretty funny, so I said some more: “Cha-nin-cha-nin-cha-nin-cha-nin! Cha-nin-nak!” (what I hear Catarina yelling to the boys every morning when she tries to get them out of bed). Already it has become a kind of inside joke, which is fun.

My project is going along okay. Interviews are getting easier because I have made a questionnaire to give out, instead of having to just approach people and say ´´Let´s talk about dogs.´´

Right now I´m sitting in an internet place listening to the kids who live here playing house. What´s interesting is that they talk in Spanish when they are role-playing, but in Kaqchikel when it´s like okay, you be the policeman and other technical stuff.

That´s about all I have for now.

the Jesus images

Luis Miguel´s new marbles

a ´maraton´ celebrating a school´s anniversary, blocking traffic

climbing Cerro de Oro

There´s just no getting around it: if you want good lighting, you have to wake up early. I accompanied Catarina to go clothes-washing yesterday at 6 am and bathed in the hot springs, which was nice. The next 2 photos and the one up top were taken between 6:30 and 7:30 that day.




a street vendor in Santa Catarina


Luis Miguel drying the clothes on the roof.

Catarina with pulike (see previous entry) and cornmeal cooked in corn husks... I forgot the name.

17 de Junio

This is a good picture of the house. Catarina is making pulike at the sink. Behind her is the dining room. In the distance on the left, you see the ``stairs`` that lead up to the building where my bedroom is.

Yesterday, Tim (Dr Wallace) and Carla came here to Santa Catarina for my two-on-one session. We went to the hotel in the middle of town which, as I have told one classmate, is so nice that I hadn't even looked in there too long. We lazily moved across the courtyard admiring the bizarre flora and sat at one of the tables with a flower floating in water in a glass vase in the center, where I took it all in (see the two photos below). The waiter served us individual butter wrapped in what I took to be small corn husks. Dr Wallace sipped the coffee and guessed correctly that the coffee was from Mike at Crossroads Cafe in Panajachel (see 28 de Mayo entry). I got a mango licuado, which is basically a smoothie except that it's not necessarily cold: the thickness comes from the fruit. They served it in a tall blue glass. It was weird to think that I was not 150 yards away from Luis's gallery, where 3 hours later I was to sit on a dirty floor and eat a lukewarm chuchito for lunch.

This meeting was kind of a progress report on my assignments and classroom performance and a check-up on my project. Dr Wallace got really into the methodology, probing into my approaches and the structure of my project, asking questions of its validity, some of which I was not prepared to answer.

Apart from that, we talked about the experience in general. I shared some unresolved frustrations that I've had (elaborated upon in the infamous 9 de Junio entry), and they commended my introspection and then cautioned that too much introspection can lead to a kind of paralysis. I said something in response about how that's at least one reason the program was good for me, forcing me to act in spite of unresolved frustrations.

“Well see, there you go again,” Dr Wallace replied.

On Sunday we went to Chichicastenango, renown for its Sunday market. We climbed a pine-covered hill outside of town to observe a worship service, a bizarre mix of Mayan and Christian practices; I had to wait around for a while before they would let me take photos. I talked with one worshipper who had spent some time in the U.S. He told me that this was his first time to this service and that he wanted to thank the gods for granting him safe travel to and from the U.S.

For the rest of my time in Chichi, I swam through the market crowds and visited the churches. One church had hundreds of candles lit all around the sanctuary.

I am about halfway through Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It's a trip. It`s about a black guy about my age who moves from the south up to Harlem. It`s like a mixture of The Matrix and Forrest Gump.

My relationships with my homestay family continue to deepen, especially with Luis and Catarina, and especially with Catarina. I find her affable and it seems we have similar senses of humor.

A good example: a dog named Chasso, who is not technically theirs but who hangs around the house enough to be, still doesn't really know what to do with me. He barks at me like I'm a threat, but then I see him following me out of the corner of my eye when I walk by him, and he'll start to bark or run away if I look at him again.

Well sometimes, just to amuse myself, I will jolt at Chasso to spook him. This makes him run around and start barking like crazy, like “look look everyone he is bad news!” Now, I think this is totally hilarious, but I don't laugh about it because I'm being Dan-yell (which if you don't know is the perpetually self-conscious alter-ego that I assume when I'm living in Santa Catarina; once again, see the 9 de Junio entry). So, while Luis would just look at this and say something like, “Yes, Chasso is very scared,” Catarina laughs genuinely, even when she knows that I don't know she's watching. Por eso ella me gusta.

The night before last, Catarina and I were walking back up to the house from the shop, and she asked me about my day, and we talked and I asked her about hers. Not only does this show a basic friendliness, but it is also a vote of confidence towards my Spanish, because she's initiating a normal conversation, assuming that I will be able to “chat.”

Walking up the stairs, I had just come from an especially-awkward interview with a group of more “modern” folks who own a restaurant by the lake. We passed an old woman traditionally-dressed carrying something on her head, and she and Catarina exchanged a Kaqchikel greeting. I thought, “Now that is someone whom I would love to interview,” imagining what the age-old folks around here think about the dogs. This was the first time I have ever humored the thought of interviewing an old woman, and I realized that it was because I was walking with Catarina. I suddenly felt closer to the old lady, as if she were moving out of complete strangerhood into a network of friends. If Catarina becomes more comfortable with me, then maybe some of the locals will too.

Although now I remember waiting for a pickup to San Antonio directly across the road from where Catarina was hanging out with a bunch of local women cackling and gossiping, and it seems that I am very far away from talking seriously with any of them. I especially want to interview some of the women street vendors, seeing as the do their business in the street, where dogs “do their business,” so they are probably pretty opinionated.

Speaking of ulterior motives for becoming friends with Catarina, it seems that as I show more interest in food (e.g., torilla-making), she shows more interest in cooking good things for me to try. Two nights ago for dinner she made her favorite dish, pulike. I watched her make it: it's basically a tomato-based soup with masa (a kind of cornmeal) to thicken it up along with onions, cilantro (which they grow in a little garden that I had never seen before), salt, consume de pollo (which I guess is like dried chicken broth; I don't know anything about cooking) and a kind of meat like chicken, although we ate it with mushrooms. It's been raining a lot so there are a lot of mushrooms. It was pretty tasty. We had it again for lunch today because it is Luis Miguel's 8^th birthday. I bought him some marbles, which are all the rage here. Wilson said to him, “That's nothing. I've got a lot more.” And went inside and got his box of marbles and rattled it in the left, left, left right left rhythm. Luis Miguel told me that he would win Wilson's marbles. The showdown is taking place right outside my door right now. I hope my birthday present for Luis Miguel doesn't turn into an early birthday present for Wilson.

Back to my project: interviews with people are going okay. I'm yet to hit a rhythm or get on a roll: each interview is its own painstaking, awkward animal. Two days ago at an appointment interview I was met by a group of people who didn't speak very good Spanish (and wouldn't admit it). I would ask a question, and the woman would look at her friends in stifled laughter, talking in Kaqchikel, not making eye contact with me or answering me. That was frustrating. The interview was saved by one of their guy friends, and he actually had a lot to say so it ended up okay.

And by the way, if you've ever been uncomfortable approaching a stranger to help you out with some kind of cause, try doing it in a language that you (and sometimes the person you're talking to) don't totally know. When things go bad, it's beyond awkwardness, literally, because awkwardness implies some kind of common social tolerance threshold, which doesn't exist between an American and a Catarineco. Granted, you feel less embarrassed because you're not competing for social status in a society where you don't belong, but the frustration is more intense. And social status happens to be something that I do need to worry about, if only for my grade's sake! If I gain a reputation in this small town as Dan-yell, that insensitive American blockhead, then I won't be able to interview anyone.

Dr Wallace told us the story of an anthropologist who worked in a society in which when someone is not present, you refer to him or her with one of a number of set relational names, like “brother of long-arms” or “mother of light-foot.” The people had no respect for the anthropologist, and they decided it would be funny to make up indirectly-insulting names to refer to other people, like “brother of fat-cheeks,” so that the anthropologist unknowingly passed these insults along when he interviewed more and more people. Well, he didn't pick up on this for quite a while, but when he finally did, he found that his months of social data-gathering made nothing but a web of fake people.

To end today, let's talk about fruit. When Luis returns from Panajachel, he sometimes brings bizarre new fruits for me to try. My favorite so far is this thing called mango de leche. It's mango, but it's grown differently or something with some kind of milk or suger, I didn't really understand, but it is deliciously sweet and has a slight milky taste, like coconut milk. It's really really fibrous; I had stuff stuck in my teeth for a day (I had no floss). Then there is this little purple fruit which seems to be exactly in between a plum and a cherry. Most recently, he brought back one melon-shaped fruit with a shell so hard it was almost wooden. He broke it open to reveal slimy fuchsia-orange meat with a giant, shiny, sunflower-seed shaped pit. I could barely finish my half because it was so sweet. Imagine the texture as a cross between a kiwi and an avocado (more slimy than juicy) with the taste of an ultra-sweet breakfast melon, especially the gooey-stringy part of the melon towards the middle that ends up on the edges of your slices.

This reminds me of a passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls in which a half-credible clairvoyant woman is describing the smell of someone who is about to die. She says it's a mixture of three smells (this is missing a lot of details and I'm probably getting some of it wrong because I don't have the book on me): one from a particular kind of brass under a porthole of a boat, one from discarded soil in a particular alleyway in Spain in early spring after it rains, and one you can only get by kissing one of the slightly-mustached old women who walks out of a particular town to put flowers on a certain grave or something. If that sounds overly-dramatic, then good, because the guy she's telling this thinks it's BS too, and then later she confides in him that she's all smoke and mirrors. I just don't want you to get the wrong impression of the book. That doesn't really spoil anything, by the way.

the hotel in Santa Catarina where I had my meeting.

Chichicastenango: A libation of Coca-Cola for the gods. On top of the stone on the left is the severed head of a sacrificed chicken.

The colored sugar represents different things (like green for wealth, white for prosperity, etc., I don`t remembe which is which), as well as the four cardinal directions, as indicated by the crosses. On the pile are candles, bread, cigars, and I don`t remember what else.

walking back to Chichicastenango

Chichicastenango Market

Sarah is always the first target of the street vendors.

The indoor part of the Chichi Market

on the way up to my house

Town Square thing in Santa Catarina