Episode 16: CliffNotes from Guatemala

In February/March 2009 I spent four weeks in Guatemala, and here are some “CliffNotes” from that experience.

I spent two weeks studying Spanish in a small Spanish school in a small village (called La Laguna) up by the Mexican border. To get to La Laguna one has to take a five-hour ride by bus from the Capital (Guatemala City) to Quetzaltenago (also known as Xela – pronounced “shay-lah”), then two chicken buses for five or six more hours to La Laguna. Here is a picture of a chicken bus, which is actually what they are called (in English) by the locals because people often take their chickens on board.
La Laguna is very, very poor. There is just no work there and almost all the men in the village are working in the US illegally. The husband of the family where I lived has been in Florida for 9 years and can't return because he has no papers. Her 20-year-old son is in San Diego where he had to pay about $3,000 to a “coyote” to get into the country illegally. Both are not working full time because of the economic crisis (although I am not sure why unskilled agricultural labor is so affected). It really destroys the health of the community when families are split up like that. Here is a picture of the family I stayed with: Maria the mother, Carmen the daughter, and Trinidad the 15-year-old son.

Trinidad is very bright and I encouraged him to try to be whatever he wanted to be, but what will happen when he finishes school and there is no work? The only profitable work in the area appears to be associated with the narco-traffic across the border with Mexico; a teenager hangs out at the only store in town and calls his father on his cell phone to warn him when the army or police patrols show up in town. The police are not respected at all as there is lots of corruption. Some towns have formed their own vigilante groups to protect their citizens and to get rid of the drug traffickers.

Here is a picture of La Laguna’s main road.

Any relatively substantial buildings like this are paid for by funds sent home by the men working in the US. Notice the rebar poking above the first story on one building. I was never clear exactly why they do this. It could be to support a possible second story if more money becomes available. Is it a sign of hope, wealth? But I saw the same in a cemetery when concrete boxes used for internment have rebar sticking up above the roofline – what is the story here? In any case, when homes have rebar at their corner posts the buildings probably won’t fall down in the next earthquake; but there is usually rebar only on the corners of the buildings so the interior walls might suffer damage; but at least the buildings probably won’t collapse and this will prevent a lot of deaths. The same system is used in India.

There is no hot water in La Laguna, and no running water at all every other day in alternative halves of the village as there is not enough supply to provide the entire village with service every day. However, even when water is running the terrible plumbing wastes a lot of water through dripping faucets. The “shower” in my house was just a plastic pipe sticking out of the wall, but the valve did not work to turn it off so they used a wooden dowel to try and stop the flow (didn’t work). And the bathrooms in general are a bit challenging. One thing I have to admit I find rather disgusting is the fact that the toilets and waste system can’t handle toilet paper so waste baskets are provided for this purpose. One day when I first arrived and did not realize that water was only available every other day I left the faucet on in one of the two bathrooms at my house. The sink was located over the wastebasket and when the water came on the next day the sink’s drain was not water-tight and leaked into the waste basket which then overflowed – well this is more information than you need. In India their sewage system also can’t handle toilet paper but in India most people don’t use toilet paper anyway, using the water and left hand method – again more information than you probably need.

When I first went to Quetzaltenago/Xela I thought it was rather far away and quiet. However, when I returned to Xela after two weeks in La Laguna I thought Xela seemed like Paris. Xela is smaller and has fewer Gringos that Antigua and is a rather pleasant place. It has a very funky (even surreal) little museum where the one room devoted to sports had a display featuring a local hero: there is a letter from the Guinness Book of World Records documenting the effort of Carlos Argueta Lopez for his world record for fastest marathon while skipping rope: 5 hours, 19 minutes, 14 seconds in Los Angeles on March 5, 1995.

Getting back to La Laguna and my study of Spanish, here is a picture of my School, Rio Azul, with the headmaster, Don Abelino.

Don Abelino is a very interesting guy who also is active in local leftist politics, having run for mayor of the area and coming in second last year, which is really good for a Leftist candidate in Guatemala, which is dominated now by the Right. Here is a sign for his political party:

The letters (URNG; MAIZ) stand for Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca,
Movimiento Amplio de Izquierda, more or less: the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity party – movement of the Left. This was a guerrilla movement that emerged in1982. After years of civil war a peace process was brokered by the United Nations and the URGN laid down its arms in 1996 and became a legal political party in 1998. Unfortunately, many of the agreements reached in 1996 have not been implemented, at least in the viewpoint of the Left.

I think the US has a lot to answer for concerning the lingering poverty and the political situation in general. I am not sure what good all the years of Peace Corps volunteers and all the NGOs have done. At one point 3 percent of the population owned 97 percent of the land and controlled all the wealth and I don’t think the situation is very different now. The CIA/United Fruit sponsored coup in 1954 that overthrew a progressive democratically elected government, which was considering land reform, was a huge blow. I knew about this, of course, having studied Political Science at Berkeley where this event was often cited. But to see all this first hand, and to think what might have been if this had not occurred, was very eye opening.

I had sort of moved to the Right after India (because of their disastrous attempt to meddle in the free market and the resulting Permitting Raj that lasted until 1992), and Lithuania (after Soviet, mainly Russian domination, and the current budding of free market capitalism, more or less). But after Guatemala I have moved Leftward again.

Speaking of politics, here is a photo of a blanket I saw in a craft store in Antigua:

Si, se puede

Photos of Travels

After two weeks of school I spent a couple of weeks traveling around the country. Here is a photo of Lake Atitlan by the pretty little town of San Marcos.

There are still remnants of a 1960’s hippy colony here, because of the supposed local good vibrations and energy. For example, there is the Pyramides Meditation Center and the San Marcos Holistic Health Center. When I was walking down the one street in town I saw this young couple walking toward me and I had to literally put my hand over my mouth to stop from laughing, they were such a throw-back to the sixties: he had long dreadlocks unwashed for weeks I imagine, both dressed in baggy Guatemalan type gear, sandals, etc. with completely wasted expressions on their faces.

In a little village not too far from Xela I ran across this shrine to San Simon:

San Simon, or Maximon, is a local favorite. Note the cigarette in his mouth – some how it is kept lit all thevtime. It cost me a few Queztales to enter and a few more to take the picture, not to mention the tip I had to pay a kid who showed me the place.

After visiting my second-cousin-once-removed who is a Peace Corps Volunteer I went to the Mayan site of Tikal. Here are a couple of photos. It reminded me of Anchor Wat since Tikal is still surrounded by jungle and some of the structures are still ensconced in vegetation.



Near by Tikal I stayed in Flores. It was very touristy with lots of T-shirt shops, and hotels, and restaurants along the lakefront. But for some reason I didn’t mind that too much. Maybe this picture is why.


Signs

I don’t have many pictures of signs but I saw some great signs on this trip. On one chicken bus: “Jesus es mi pastor”. OK, not a bad idea on these busses. But also on the same bus (in English) “Emergency exit instructions below”; a fat lot of good that will do. Did I mention that these chicken busses are former US school busses?

Another sign I saw in a few places: “Se Prohibe Orinar En Este Lugar; Multa Q100.00 …La Muni”. Don’t pee in this place or the local municipality might fine you 100 Quetzales.

Well, I do have this picture:

Siempre Jóven

On a microbus (pronounced “Meekroboose” I saw a sign, in rainbow letters: “Siempre Joven”. Besides being a favorite Dylan song, the concept of forever-young appeals to me so much that I envisioned getting these words painted on my truck. But I had some doubts on this trip. I signed on to a little tour of the waterfalls at Semuc champey, with mainly younger people, in their twenties. We had to hike up mountains and I could hardly keep up. One of the few times in my life I had to quit a hike before I got to the top of the hill. Later, when we went into a very moist cave I slipped a couple of times. A French woman in her 40’s (her daughter was an intern in the French Embassy in Guatemala City) asked how old I was and, when I told her, she said that she thought I had done very well that day. I felt like I had not done well at all.

A more successful encounter with a couple of youngsters was near Tikal in a little hotel where the only other guests were Dan, a youngish teacher from England, and Rita a young woman from Germany. They were great and a lot of fun. They had bought a bottle of Rum and invited me to join them (and the hotel owner, Rhoda) in rum and cokes. I don’t really like sweet drinks but I joined them. Their Spanish was not as good as mine so I often had to translate stuff for Rhoda. As the evening wore on I actually had a harder and harder time understanding Dan’s English. About the time we had to start to search this little town for another bottle of Rum Dan and Rita got into a heated discussion about Doner Kebabs, which Rita insisted was an invention of immigrant Turks in Germany. BTW, every other word out of Rita’s mouth was f#*@ing this and f#*@ing that. Dan, who is very familiar with all the Kebab shops in UK, says: “We have to look this up in Wikipedia”. Rita replies: “I don’t f#*@ing have to look in f#*@ing Wikipedia”. As it turns out, the other little hotel in this town that sold rum also had an Internet café. It was about to close but I forked over a couple of Quetzales to get on the web to check out Wikipedia. I am still not too sure but I think that Rita may have a f#*@ing point. I finally crashed about 12:30 but Dan and Rita kept on for over another hour and somehow they made it up for a 5:00 AM tour of Tikal (I had already gone).

Food Adventures

In this same wonderful little town near Tikal (El Ramate), which is much less touristy than Flores, I had dinner at a restaurant that had two things on the menu that I was not sure of. The waitress said, in Spanish, that these two animals lived in the forest: one is venado and she made horns with her fingers, and says “Bambi”. I say, “No, tan triste, no puedo comer Bambi”. The other thing, which I ordered, was Tepezcuintle, which I found out later (thanks to Wikipedia) is a paca.

Other Random Thoughts

It is nice to be in a country where I am taller than most people. But even for me it was hard on the chicken busses, especially when they shoehorn in three people to a seat. And on one ride we hit one of the humps in the road to slow down traffic and when I came down hard something in my back went out of whack, not sure what it was.

I have a “Coca Cola Light Yardstick”. A sort of development index. A town or village shows its degree of development if its little store carries Coke Light (Diet Coke) along with regular Coke.

About the only thing that really bothered me was the way people throw trash out of busses in areas of beautiful scenery. They just don’t seem to value a clean environment. Don Abelino had one theory. It seems that for the Maya garbage symbolizes a type of success, either associated with a thriving small business (all the waste shows one is doing well) or a household (the garbage shows they can afford a lot of goods). Who knows?

Houston, We Have a Problem

My flight out of Guatemala was delayed and I missed my connecting flight in Houston so I was forced to spend the night there. Here area some scenes from Houston:

• By the time I get up the hotel seems to be cleared of all the stranded “refugees” who have left on their early morning flights; the lobby was really crowded the night before with people waiting to get their rooms.
• While watching the news in the lobby I see President Obama giving a press conference on his new Afghanistan policy, and a guy walks in front of the TV in an olive drab Halliburton shirt with an American flag on his sleeve.
• I notice on the way back to George Bush Airport that the name of the road is JFK Boulevard; well that is something, I suppose.
• From the shuttle I spot an obese African American guy in an SUV in the next lane eating fast food from out of a bag. I want to give him some healthy advice, but…..
• When we get to the airport the driver asks what terminal we are going to. A fellow passenger says “C” and I think he says “Si”; time to get back to English.
• A female Asian stew gets on the shuttle (I think she works for Japan Airlines); a few seconds later I hear this very thick southern accent (like Patsy Cline) and I realize that it is the stew and I have made an ethnocentric (if not racist) assumption.

Note: I actually finished this CliffNotes on the ship between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. If that confuses you, think how I feel. See the next chapters of this blog!