Date Subject
Feb 1 2000 GlassBlowing
Facotory
Jan 23 2000 Volcano,
Beach, Play
June
16 2000
The
technicians came back out to Jaloa about a week ago and stayed for just over a
week completing the houses. I got a
plane ticket to LA for the 20th June and had some spare time so I
finally made the trek up to see the ruins in Tikal for a few days. The bus ride there from Puerto Barrios took
six hours, but from the return trip I found that it should have only taken four
hours. The police and military stopped
us a few times and the bus had a bad tire that they kept repairing on the way
up. I stayed in Flores, which is a cute
little town on an island in a lake about an hour from the ruins at Tikal. I planned on staying 2 days in Tikal but was
able to see all of the ruins in one day.
My leggs are sore after 2 days from climbing up the temples. There were many temples and other ruins to
explore, one of which was growling, one was being restored, another had a small
cave inside, and the tallest one was not permitted to be climbed because 2
people fell and died. It was fun
walking through the jungle paths to the various temples, climbing the temples,
and enjoying the view from above the trees.
There were plenty of people around but it was far from crowded. The pictures show all the temples and
stuff. There’s and party for the
completion of the houses on the 17 in Jaloa and I’ll go to the capital to get
my plane ticket the next day.
Vemos
temprano
Ed
May17
2000
Leaving Jaloa
It
has taken about 3 weeks to repair the generator, so I’ve been getting to know
the small town folks of Jaloa better.
We’ve been eating together, playing together, and getting sick
together. They like me when I buy them
food and they don’t like me when I don’t.
The technicians are supposed to begin the work on the last two houses on
Monday, and it should take them about a week to finish it. I’m planning on getting a return flight for
around the 20th of June to San Diego. A lady who has a project to rehabilitate turtles is going to live
in Jaloa for about three months patrolling the beach with the military during
the egg laying period to study turtle habits and collect and help protect the
trutle eggs. Hopefully I’ll be able to
work with her for a little while, and learn something about turtles. I posted photos mostly of the Canal Ingles,
which is the canal through the center of Punta Manibique nature reserve and the
most direct route to Jaloa. I didn’t
get any photos of the birds, turtles, or spiders and I haven’t even seen a
crocodile yet but they add to the interest on the canal trips. Thick jungle. The other photo is of animals of Guatemala. Make what you may of the background photo of
one of the bus rides.
Hasta
otra dias mas en el futuro.
Ed
April
16 2000
Puerto Barrios
The
generator broke again for the second time so I came to Puerto Barrios to get it
fixed. The houses are almost finished
and the techs are supposed to be finished next week Wednesday. I’ll probably end up leaving Haloa at that
time, and look for other stuff. My
Spanish is good enough where I should be able to get paid work and maybe do
something. I put photos of Puerto
Barrios and some more photos of Haloa this week. Puerto Barrios is where I get stuck when I leave Haloa. I like the town but it has a major sewer
problem and is dusty with huge trucks carrying fruit for Dole, and I seem to
get a sore throat when I stay here. I
took photos of the office which has bunks in the back yard and there’s a
picture of one of the truck, the new market, and the beautiful river photo
didn’t have the effect I wanted. The
river is black with sewage and runs into the lake and smells really bad. The sewers on the sides of the road don’t
drain and turn green with algae when it rains.
One of the photos is of the new market which is really nice. The other haloa pictures are of some more
Haloans and a large house 2km from the main town which has a beautiful palm
beach, the store, and the bathroom in the swamp. A lady from Chile volunteering for a U.S. company came and
painted the school with the kids for a week.
The save the turtle lady is supposed to be here this week sometime. Nothing new but that.
Ed
April
1 2000
Guess
where I went last week. Right. Guatemala City, Puerto San Jose, Coban, and
Punta Gorda in Belize. My plans were to
go to Puerto Barrios on Sunday and return to Jaloa on Monday, then to go to
Guatemala City, El Salvador or Tikal for the following week. So I arrived in Puerto Barrios on Sunday,
but the guy with the boat didn’t show up on Monday, he showed up on Tuesday but
he wouldn’t wait for me to get my stuff so I had to wait for the next boat
which came on Thursday. I decided not
to return on Thursday because the techs were going to come here on Saturday for
a week and I was already planning a trip for that week. So I set my plans to travel around for a
week with the stuff I brought to stay overnight on Sunday. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my
guidebook. I decided not to go to El
Salvador because the girl with the surf camp was not going to be there until
the following week. So I ended up going
to Guatemala City to meet the techs and look for a surfboard. The phone number the techs gave me didn’t
work, so I went to the area on the pacific coast closest to Guatemala City
which is a town called Puerto San Jose.
There were a few surfers there but no one had a board to sell. I returned to the capital and ran into some
peace corps volunteers who had a hotel room with a TV, and we got to watch
Beavis and Buttheads movie. I couldn’t
get a hold of the techs so I decided to leave the country to renew my
visa. There are some ruins in Honduras
in Copan which are supposed to be interesting and are along to way to Puerto
Barrios, so I decided to visit them on my way to Puerto. This is when the part about not bringing my
guidebook becomes important. I went to
Coban, which is a four-hour bus ride in the opposite direction from Copan, and
is nowhere near a boarder. When I got
there and realized I was not really in Copan and nowhere near where I wanted to
be, I got a Costa Rica flashback of when Brett, Lee and I drove around on
mountain roads for 8 hours and ended up at the same place we started. I didn’t like Coban, and there was only one
crappy hotel in town that had a room so I left. I had to get my passport stamped because it expires on April 7,
so I ended up catching a bus back to Puerto Barrios making my bus trip last
about 12 hours that day. The next day I
caught a boat to Punta Gorda in Belize.
I hear there are some nice places in Belize although It’s expensive
there. Punta Gorda is a small boring
hot town. So I got a hotel room with a
TV and a fan. The pictures are pretty
much the highlight of my trip to Belize for a day. One is the hotel, the other is the TV, and the third is what the
town typically looked like. During that
week there wasn’t much new stuff to take photos of so that’s all there is. I learned that it’s not too bad traveling
without the guidebook, but to bring a map.
Ed
March
19 2000
I
just arrived in Puerto Barrios and finished downloading my second roll of pictures
of Haloa. I tried to take photos of the
people there but they’re camera shy. I
separated the photos into three sections.
The first is of the ride to the town which actually takes about 2 hours
depending on the boat and the wind and the driver. The canal is extremely narrow in places and you need to know when
to lift the motor out of the water so the weeds and logs don’t hit the
prop. The little girl on the front of
the boat in the pictures was a passenger who lives at the store across the river. The water from the chop in the river was
being blown over the side of the boat onto us so she moved to the front to get
dry. They say there are crocodiles in
the river but I haven’t seen any yet. I
have seen monkeys. The technicians
tried to catch one that was swimming across the river. They wanted to eat it. It was a cute little thing and he was very
angry when one of the guys pinned him down in the boat, but he managed to get
away. The canal cuts through the heart
of the Manabique wildlife reserve on the east coast of Guatemala. The town I live in with a soaring population
of about 50 counting children, is the biggest or nearly the biggest of the
towns in the reserve. The canal is a
good shortcut for small boats carrying illegal and legal goods from
Honduras. Which brings me to the story
of a lawyer who was assassinated in Guatemala a few weeks ago. It was very big news here, especially at the
place Fundary which supports the project I am working on. The lawyer and the other person, who was also
shot and had no relation to the assassination except for getting shot, worked
closely with many of the people at Fundary.
The lawyer sued and exposed the people in the government and businesses
that cut down forests and did other kinds of illegal environmental damaging
projects in Guatemala, so it was no big surprise he was assassinated. He was very unliked by many powerful
people. The other guy was sitting next
to him during the assassination. So
I’ll try not to hang out with important unliked people here. Fundary is a non-governmental organization
that does work with environmental projects in Guatemala. I found this project through AK Tinnimit
which is another organization that does development projects in the Rio Dulce
area, mostly health centers. They put
me in contact with Byron Solares who is the director of the Rotary Club in
Puerto Barrios. The Rotary Club is
funding the house-building project, Fundary is helping with logistics
coordinating and supporting the technicians, and I’m tagging along hoping that
they feed me. It’s very similar to
Peace Corps except something’s getting done.
Enough of tangent for now. The
photos of the canal and boat ride to Haloa don’t do it justice. It’s a nice interesting ride with many birds
and trippy looking jungle boat ride vegetation and scenery. Today on the return trip we stopped because
the Puerto Barrians jet ski was caught on log, and we were suddenly viciously
attacked by a swarm of angry flies. It
was horrifying enough to make a kid that was sitting near the front of the boat
cry. But we soon realized the flies
didn’t really sting but could bite if they sat on your arm for a long enough
amount of time, and that fly teeth are actually quite small and don’t hurt a
lot, then we able to have a good laugh once we got away from their nest and
picked the dead flies from our hair and clothes. The second group of photos is of our hunt for iguanas. These are mainly to show that yes I am
actually eating iguana and iguana eggs and fish that are smaller than their
bones are. There was some
Guatemalan cheese the other day which
is dry and crumbly and strong, but that was a rare encounter. Usually I eat beans. And corn tortillas. Occasionally there is chicken and some eggs
and rice, but mostly beans. And corn
tortillas. I don’t think they know what
fruit is. Iguana is good, it tasted
different form chicken. The fish
usually tasted pretty different from fish also, more like fish bones. They would eat gold fish if they could catch
them. Anyway me and the technicians and
two local kids caught four iguanas on about a five-mile hunt. The locals chase them up a tree then make a
loop of fishing wire on the end of a stick wrap the loop around the tail and
yank them down. The first one fell down
right in front of me, so I got a good action photo there. They have to keep them alive until they’re
ready to eat them because they can’t refrigerate them, so the locals boys wrap
the iguanas arms behind their backs and tie the tendons of their claws
together. We carry them back. The last group of photos was supposed to be
of as many people in town as I could take.
I mostly got some of the family that feeds me and a few kids that were straggling
around at the time, and then ran out of photos. The town is like a large dorm with children. The technicians do almost all of the house
building and there’s not much new to learn now so I’m getting bored and some of
the people in town are driving me nuts, so I’m glad to get away for a few
days. Next week the technicians have a
break and are going to Guatemala City and invited me to go so I’ll probably get
to see some new stuff. A good time for
Tikal is at the end of April( the last week) or later. I haven’t checked for sure the dates for El
Salvador but the people I know there is doing a surf trip soon.
Until
next time. Sueno con angels.
March
2 2000
I
found a project on Gilligans Island, I mean Haloa a very small town on the
Caribbean Sea near the boarder of Honduras.
There’s only about 15 houses in the town, no electricity no running
water, and lots and lots of bugs, a church, and a school. I’m learning how to build manufactured
houses similar to the shed in Dave’s yard, but bigger. No one speaks English so my Spanish is
getting good really fast. The town is
only reachable by boat and the canal to the town is really small. The pictures of Haloa I put up show pretty
much the entire town, there’s a lot of empty beach, and the people are
friendly, and the kids are mostly terrors.
I came in to town for the first time in just less than two weeks mostly
to fix the generator and write this letter, but it’s late and I’m tired so
you’ll have to be satisfied with the photos for the next few weeks until I get
cellular Internet service. Waves look
occasionally good, and the townsfolk like to play soccer on the beach in the
evenings. It’s hot but not
unbearable. We eat mostly beans and
rice, and iguana and some kind of small tiger, with tortillas and coffee. Turtle and rabbit are supposed to round out
our complete diet. There’s also a place
with beer nearby. I’m sure I’ll be
visiting there with the techs soon. See
how to get here in the home page and also there’s some new contact info.
Ed
Feb
16 2000
I
just left the town of Antigua and am in a hotel in Guatemala City. I’m going to Rio Dulce area tomorrow to find
the water project I wrote about in the Wedding letter. I went to Antigua for a couple of days. Antigua is a town where there are many
Spanish schools, and I almost went there instead of to Xela when I was first
considering this trip. I posted photos
of Antigua and as you can see there are many old buildings in Antigua. Antigua is an old town. That’s why they call it Antigua. Antigua means old or antique. Get it?
The town used to be the capital of Central America, which is why there
are so many old buildings there. Most
of the buildings have been restored from the many earthquakes they’ve had here
every 60 years or so. I took the photos
of all the old buildings in about twenty minutes while I was waiting for my
laundry to get finished. Antigua was a
nice town (clean, warmer than Xela) but
it’s very touristy, more expensive, and caters to a higher class of tourist
than Xela. With all the tourists there
it would be more difficult to learn Spanish.
The town has a good nightlife and is more mellow than Xela, especially
the amount of traffic. There are some
captions on some of the photos, but most of them are just of old buildings and
I don’t know what they are. I found
some more information about stuff to do here for the next couple months, and am
going to look for a development project on the Caribbean coast where It’s
supposed to be warm and tropical with lots of poor people. So until the next pics hasta la bye bye.
Ed
Feb
7 2000
I
went to the wedding of the brothers of one of the teachers at the school last
weekend in San Marcos. It was in a town
about half the size of this town, was about an hour and a half bus ride from
here. It was a Christian wedding and
not much different from the ones back home, except that they had a drummer as
part of the religious singing group during the wedding ceremony. I’ve never been to a wedding with a
drummer. The other significant
difference was that they didn’t serve alcohol at the reception. The strange part about going to the wedding
was that the town was typical middle class Guatemala. My teacher lived in the suburbs of a cool quiet town where we
spent the night before the wedding unsuccessfully looking for something to do,
though we did succeed in getting the groom drunk. The wedding was during the day and the next night we were unable
to get a ride into town and it was too cold to be outside, so we spent our time
sitting on the concrete kitchen floor with the younger folks, while the parents
sang Christian songs in the living room.
I remember similar times in a place called Newbury Marcos I think or
something like San Bury Park, I can’t remember exactly what the differences
are. But the wedding went well, Libardo
my teacher, and his family were fun to meet and the wedding and reception were
worth going to. Sunday we got to watch
soccer games until about 3 in the afternoon.
Today is the 14 of February and I’m
staying in hotel Andina in town. I
haven’t taken any photos yet. I was
staying at another hotel for a few days but I had some problems getting in the
entrance at night so I moved. It was
also much colder there. I’m going to
look at a project where they’re building a school in a nearby town tomorrow and
will probably leave Xela for Antigua the day after tomorrow to see about a
water project near the Caribbean coast.
Feb
3 2000
I
have a little free time and am able to describe some more about the town and
activities here.
I’ve
been living in this town for a month now and the time has passes very
rapidly. The town is similar to Nakuru
in Kenya and San Miguel in El Salvador.
It’s dusty and crowded and dirty, it’s central to many other towns, and
it’s main use is for supplying the outlying farmers. The town is quite a bit more interesting than the other towns I
lived in because of the architecture and narrow streets, and because of the
tourism it attracts. The town lies in a
valley in the very cold Guatemalan highlands surrounded by volcanoes. There are some intricately detailed grand
old buildings and churches which are accompanied by narrow streets which give
the town it’s character. The towns many
Spanish schools attract enough foreign students to make strange accented
gringos part of the daily events in the local shops, and to provide substance
for foreigner based restaurants, shops, and services. The foreigners here are diverse and vary from typical Costa Rican
type tourists because they come from a variety of countries and stay in Xela
usually for a month or more, and are accustomed to the lifestyle and activities
of the town. The town is small enough
to run into the same people time and again in the center of town where the
fancy buildings and touristy center is, and is large enough to support modern
computer facilities and a variety of restaurants and activities. The Guatemalans seem well educated polite
and friendly. I’ve seen few street kids
and have only encountered 3 or 4 obnoxious drunks so far, and the streets feel
pretty safe. I enjoy doing activities
with the teachers at my school. There
is a large minority indigenous population in town wearing traditional clothes
and carrying their load on their heads, however, it’s extremely rare to see
them in the expensive tourist places.
It’s not uncommon to see Guatemalans in the touristy places and have
been interesting and friendly, however, few attempt to or are able to speak
English, which is a good thing for a Spanish school. The school home stay and Spanish lessons are a good deal and the
school also provides a place for learning of activities, and is a good place to
get familiarized with the country. The
other students are typically from the US, however, currently there is a large
group from Denmark in the school, two German students, a Japonese student and
three other US students. In the past
month there were three other US students and a French student. The home stay is good for eating and
practicing Spanish, but it’s cold and there are no heaters here. Hopefully I’ll find a warmer place to stay
for the next few months.
Ed
Feb
1 2000
Glass Blowing
Factory
I
went to a glass blowing factory today which I took some pictures of mostly to
make Josh jealous. Unfortunately Josh
doesn’t have access to these pictures so if anyone sees them and sees Josh then
let him know they’re here. The picture
in the center shows the whole warehouse and the rest are pics of the students
and teachers and glass blowers. The
place was a coop that some organization owned and donated the facility to the
glass blowers and donated to the community nearby and most importantly they
donated a car to the local volunteer fire department. The glass they used was Coke bottles, and they said they used a
diesel engine to fire the furnace, but I think they used gas. The place was only moderately interesting
considering the glass blowers didn’t mind a bunch of clueless Spanish school
people walking through the middle of the factory while they were working. They also allowed a girl Alex in our class
to blow a mold. It seemed like a good
break from the monotony of the assembly line type work.
The other thing we did, which I
posted some photos of, was a trip to lake Atitlan where we stayed in the town
of Panajachel the first weekend I was here.
The lake is very scenic and the town is warm and comfortable. We were able to swim in the cool lake and
brows endless shops of tourist goods.
We stayed two days and didn’t get a chance to take a boat to some of the
towns along the opposite shore of the lake.
The pictures show some of my friends from the school and some of the
teachers from the school. Got a wedding
to go to this weekend and I’ll probably leave Xela to find some voluntary work
early next week.
Ed
Jan
23 2000
Volcano, Beach, Play
Too
many events have been happening in these first two weeks, and I’m way behind in
my letters. I haven’t been able to
explain some of the pictures I put up a week ago, so I’m going to summarize and
explain a bit. One of the after school
activities was to go to the hot baths, which are about a ten minute bus ride
from town. My advice for these is don’t
go there. You pay some money and go
into a building where a guy fills up a small dirty concrete basin with hot
water in which you sit for an hour. I
was lucky enough to go with a bunch of Dutch students where I sat around and
stared at the walls listening to them speak Dutch. I was luck that they at least sold beer there. We hiked the volcano Santa Maria one day
last week. I explained to the teachers
that many of the mountains that we climb in the U.S. have an easy rout that
goes around the back of the mountain or that have a path which serpentines
allowing you to walk on a flat path for a while. The views from the top were pretty spectacular, although I didn’t
join the group of Christians praying at the top. I don’t think they’ll sell many stair masters here, however,
there is a market for women’s hiking boots.
Some of the women in the Christian group were wearing what looked like
their Sunday shoes. The hike took about
6 hours.
Some of the pictures I put on this
site are from a play the teachers put on last Friday. It was about the temple of Maximon which I wrote about in the
Guatemala Arrival letter. They made fun
of the strange worship activities as well as the students and themselves. I was one of the two students chosen from
the audience, who were involved in the climactic end of the play which was to
break huevos over our heads. The eggs
were fake. Look closely at the croch of
Maximon in the photos and you’ll get a little Spanish lesson about huevos. The cold weather really gets to us here at
times and gets depressing, especially for me because I’m not from an area that
is currently 7 below zero. So this past
weekend we visited a small town on the coast.
It’s always warm or hot at the coast and it was a welcome relief. The town was a dirty non touristy sleepy
little place, and hotels were overpriced (same price as the nice hotel in the
resort town in Panajachel $3 per person per night). Some of the other students really didn’t like the town, but I was
extremely happy to find a town with restaurants on the water, a hotel within
walking distance to the beach, surfboards available for rent, a fun little
beach break, and soccer on the beach in the evening. What else could I ask for?
Now I’m refreshed and ready to take on the rest of the program here in
Xela. I forgot to write about the lake
in Panachal that we visited the weekend before last. Well, something for next time.
Adios.
Ed
Jan
18 2000
I arrived in
Guatemala on the 7th and everything went very smooth. I was picked up at the airport and stayed at
the house of friends of the school for a night, then took a three and a half
hour bus ride to the Xela the next day.
A guy from the school picked me up and showed me the school then took me
to the house I’m staying at. My room
was decorated for X mas when I first arrived with some pictures and lights and
tinsel and stuff in one of the corners of the room. They removed that stuff and recently built a partition for
another room which a German girl moved into today. The house is a bit strange.
You enter into a large open garage area and there’s a bathroom and
bedroom in the front to the right, which is where I stay. Near the end of the garage you turn the
corner and there’s a kitchen and dining room and another bedroom near the
kitchen. My room is where the living
room typically is. The neighbor’s
houses are attached and there is a two story house of the son attached at the
rear of the garage. I do some
studying and computer stuff in my room at night otherwise I don’t spend much
time at the house. The schools about a
15 minute walk from the house. I go to
classes from 8a.m. until 1p.m. then there’s a break for lunch and I return for
an activity at around 3. The activities
are usually interesting and allow us to see some of the country and of the
typical lifestyle of the Guatamaltecos.
So far we have gone to a town with three churches. It was about a 15 minute bus ride from
town. The first church was a large
Catholic church which was pretty impressive with typical Catholic church stuff
such as high ceilings, altars, elaborate decorations of gold and silver, and
confession booths. The second was an
altar of Mashymon (phonetically spelled) which look stupid because it was a
small hut with a bunch of candles and a stuffed dummy with a cigarette in a
rocking chair where they charged the tourists about a buck to take a picture of
the room. Not a very impressive altar,
however, it does have some interesting rituals. Here’s what I understood of the Spanish explanations of the
church. Maximon is a Mayan religion
and the Mayans are a colorfully dressed indigenous group who accept Christian
religion but the Christians don’t accept the Mayan religion. Apparently there is a real Maximon person
who sits in the char at times and he’s like the leader in the pueblo. There are some candles of different colors
which you can buy and light at the altar.
The blue candles are for money, the red for love, the white for peace,
and the black for revenge. The altar is
a concrete floor with candles and small statues and empty bottles of
liquor. While we were there some Mayans
came in and poured a couple of shots of wiskey into the dummys mouth and
chanted some prayers and rocked his chair.
I guess their religious principles are not as idealistic as the
Catholics. The third church we visited
was a cantina where we split some beers and were entertained by a drunk while
we waited for the return bus. Well that
should be enough of interest to absorb in one letter. I’ll write more about the other activities in the pages to
come. Send me questions and comments
and some good jokes that will translate into spanish. Hasta la tiempo que viene.
Ed
Dec
27 1999
Xmas 99
I
went home for christmas and had a good time.