14 de Agosto

Dusk at Monterrico

A month later, I'm back to wrap things up.

I ended up staying in Monterrico for four days, going back to Panajachel for two days, spending a night in Guatemala City, then flying home. My parents and brother picked me up in Atlanta and drove me straight to a family reunion that my dad's side of the family has every year in Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, GA. A lot of people talk about the culture shock of coming back to the States. For me, it just felt strange to move in between two starkly separate spheres of my life within the span of a day. Imagine waking up tomorrow with cold weather and Christmas decorations and Christmas music, minus the time jump.

I’ve described my time in Monterrico as my idea of luxury. I mean that it was totally carefree. No cars, no harsh weather, nothing expensive, just myself, great people, a beautiful place, and time.

I met Heather through the social work program, a sister program through NCSU run by Dr Wallace’s wife. She stayed in Pana for her work, where she found a scene of young, English-speaking backpackers and made some friends, including Adam, recent college graduate from Tennessee, and Tracy, who’s on her gap year from New Zealand. A stroke of luck: the owner of a restaurant we frequented in Pana knows the guy who owned Johnny's, which is probably the most popular backpacker hotel in Monterrico. We got a three nights for the price of one deal with the owner, Tony, the sharp beach-bum Scotsman, so we stayed in a big four-person bungalow with a tall thatched roof, a kitchen, and a small pool in front of it for four nights.

Monterrico is a lazy town with delightfully few tourists during the week, while we were there. I enjoyed walking into town to buy groceries: we’d walk about half a mile down the dark sandy street past shack houses with black sand yards. Hardy weeds grow around fences, pigs lumber around obliviously, chickens keep an eye on you, local men lie shirtless in hammocks in front of fans in the shade. One house was always playing merengue music. Little kids run around barefoot, ride tricycles, carry groceries back to the house. In “town” (on the main road), schoolkids walk around in groups, chattering in mostly Spanish. We went to a restaurant one night where behind a curtain I chanced to see some half-naked family members sitting on a bed watching TV. One favorite of ours was a lady who sold empañadas for Q1 and atol for Q2 (13 and 26 cents). The catch was that she made her own sporadic hours.

The four of us met two Welsh guys named Jones and Tom. They had spent some time working at an iguana research center somewhere, I can’t remember where, somewhere in the Caribbean. Jones juggled and spoke Welsh and sang, and Tom cracked the dry jokes. They were nearing the last legs of their holidays as well. We all had a great time.

Back in Panajachel for my concluding days in Guatemala, I got to stay at the house of one of Adam’s friends whose family moved down here recently but were back in the states for the summer. Adam and I ended up playing music at a coffee shop there where most of this English-speaking crowd hung out and/or worked. We both sang, I played keyboard, he played guitar. Our performance had bad parts, but it had good parts too, and was probably pretty good considering we hadn’t started playing music together until that afternoon. We played covers, mostly stuff that we both knew. Adam and I hit it off well in general; he might be coming to Athens for my 21^st birthday party in 21 days. Come to mention it, Heather and Tracy and Adam and I hit it off well.

My paper is finished, I’ve moved into Athens, and school starts next week. I had to write a “5-7 page typed report (double-spaced) describing the program or internship and its impact on [my] studies and long-term goals,” so if you want to read that, I have attached it here. I would recommend it if you want to know my final thoughts on my time in Guatemala. I'm attaching my final paper as well... read that if you're interested, but it's long.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has been reading. As much as you may / may not have enjoyed it, this blog was something I looked forward to while I was down there. It helped me process everything that was going on. Thanks to those of you who offered advice or encouragement or showed interest.

Until next time,
Daniel

We took a series of chicken buses from Pana to Monterrico. This picture was taken while the bus was in motion: we rode for hours packed in with locals. We made about three exchanges, and running from one bus to the next I would make sure that my backpack (which they strapped to the top) changed with me.

As we descended from the highlands to the coast, the air got thicker and hotter. Vendors squeezed into the already-crowded buses or would make exchanges through windows from the outside.

We took a van for the second to last leg...

...and a barca for the last leg. (L to R: Heather, Tracy, by the way)

local kids on their own barca

Our sweet bungalow.

lightning on the beach at night

One morning a local guy took us on a tour through the mangroves on his barca.

Tracy

Adam

Across the street is Taberna El Pelicano. Here is its namesake. He seriously just hangs out in and around the restaurant.

Notice the pineapple. We cut it into four big pieces.

Jones

Sometimes, the waves would crash right on the shore. Adam didn't make it out of this one.

Tom getting destroyed.

L to R: Tom, Jones

Tracy

We made our own atol: mashed plantains, incaparina, and cinnamon, served hot and thick. Actually, this is pancake batter, but they look similar. Atol is yellower.

They have a nature reserve here. Monterrico is prime nesting ground for sea turtles.

iguanas too

Adam juggles too.

6 de Julio

Allie and Zach at a nice cafe in Santiago

I wrote this entry around July 6 on my laptop, so this is what I was thinking then. A lot has happened in between now and then, and I will write another update in the next few days about Monterrico, etc.

About five or six nights ago, I was suddenly leaving “next Sunday,” and then we saw everything in this light: the last time for her to wash my clothes, the last time I would go to the hot springs with the boys. You could hear it in people's tones of voice. I felt it when I woke up or when I rode a pickup back into town.

All the business to be taken care of made everything kind of unceremonious; I spent less time doing things with my family because I had to finish all my work, go to Pana and Santiago for presentations, etc. It's like man, I've spent most of my summer here. All of the sudden the next school year is upon me, and I've been doing what, eating tortillas and being a stranger? Living with Indians, dude. Maya! Daniel lived with the Mayans last summer! How was it, man?

And then there are my classmates. All of us have our own lives, none of which really coincide, except maybe Erin's and Darja's (who go to the same school and didn't know that they were both coming here). We all treated each other with this “hey lets be best friends for two months” attitude. Which with this group is friendly, generally honest, respectful.

On top of this, I've just made plans to go to the beach with a friend from the social work program and some friends I made in Panajachel. With programs and flights and scheduled things and returning to the States all kind of jumbled together in my brain, there's little room for sentiments. Allie's birthday is tomorrow: she invited those few of us who will still be around to eat a birthday lunch with her and her mom and her aunt in Santiago. I have not even eaten lunch with the mom and the aunt of some of my best friends from home. “So, you're studying anthropology too? And what was your project on? Yeah Allie has been saying the same thing!”

When you make friends with people, do you consider how long you will be able logistically to be friends? College: four years is a long time, enough time to be friends with someone and then go your separate ways, because most friendships that end do so by just dying out instead of because of different flight times back to the U.S.

What it comes down to is that I have my own life with its own roles and regularities. I am a North American, I have a family and a college, I grew up somewhere. I speak certain language, and the Ordoñezes speak another, and we can live next to each other and watch each other and speak through a third-party language. But they have very little idea of my history or of what life is like for me. This is apparent when they ask about my things, my books or my tape recorder or my computer. And it's probably safe to say something similar to me about them, even though I lived in their home for nearly two months.

Today I was leaving, hanging on to my last pickup (perhaps), my backpack heavy on my shoulders, and I was thinking not about how this was my last time to take in this view or see these people (I have given up trying to savor “last times”) but about what this place was like in the 1970's or something. Were there street vendors? Did people go to Panajachel as often? Did they have pieces of U.S. culture sitting around, like rap music and batman shirts? Did nineteen-year-olds read about the Vietnam War and see pictures of white men in green helmets and hippies at rallies?

Catarina making dinner

on the way to Santiago

Dr Wallace before some final Powerpoint presentations

Derek tossing an M&M into his mouth in our hotel room in Pana

L to R: Heather, Tracy, Adam; waiting for the bus on our first leg of the journey t Monterrico

8 de Julio

Hey folks,

I'm now in Monterrico. I left my laptop charger in Panajachel, so I'm without means to write updates (or rather to post the one I wrote the other night) unless I want to pay to write it on an internet cafe computer. And I won't be able to post pictures eaither. We'll see what happens -- I might be able to find a laptop charger here.

But to give it a quick rundown: the program has finished. The last week was very busy for me, putting everything together for my project. Now I'm chilling at Monterrico with some folks that I met in Panajachel, a guy from Tennessee, a girl from Florida, and a girl from New Zealand.

My return flight is next Monday, the 14th. If I don't get anything posted before then, I'll have something by the 16th by the latest.

This feels like an email or a letter, so I will end it like one.

Best,
Daniel

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!)