around the world in 180 days

            Children are the same everywhere. All children love to play, they all love attention and they all love games. Pablo and David, the sons of Bartola, who is Ana´s sister-in-law, are no different. Anna and I spent the afternoon and much of the evening today playing games with these two and, after dinner, their cousins. We started with cards (war, the easiest game we could think of( and moved to soccer (pelota, espanol for ball( and hide and seek and on and on.
            Bartola´s husband left Guatemala for the US and now lives in LA without papers. He left thinking he´d strike it rich and now Bartola is alone (if you an call it that( with her eight children, the two boys and six girls, making a living selling tortillas and chipitas (??). Bartola is a strong woman, as are all of the women we´ve met here–we saw here carrying a bundle of firewood on her head, and lugging groceries through the market like it was nothing. She speaks no English and we speak poquito espanól, but you can tell that she takes her husband´s absence with a sort of fierce determination. She has her children, and they are enough.

             We went with Bartola and Ana to the market this morning, which was amazing. It was like something out of a movie, people everywhere, small stands selling almost everything under the sun: dried peppers, dried minnows, live crabs, soap, detergent, hand woven cloth, butchered chickens, even street dogs having sex (ok, that wasn´t for sale).

 It was amazing—I only wish I´d brought my minidisk recorder and captured some of the sounds of the market. It was exotic and familiar at the same time. Crowds seem to be the same the world over as well, but perhaps that´s a bit premature.

             Apparently street dogs ae quite a problem in San Lucas ad Guatemala in general. They´re everywhere, eating garbage, pooping in the street, fighting and I guess biting anyone young enough or stupid enough to get too close (read: foreigners). Two years ago, the city of San Lucas Toliman tried to institute a program to poison the dogs, as there´s no money to sterilize them, but the government of Guatemala forbade it when an animal rights group lodged a protest. I guess at first glance, it does seem cruel to poison dogs that live in the street just because they have no owners, but there are literally thousands of them in San Lucas, probably almost as many as there are people. Every one of these dogs craps in the street and every time it rains, their crap is washed down into the lake. This would be disgusting at any rate, but what makes it really awful and unsanitary is that the lake is the town´s water source. That animal rights group was only looking out for the dogs of San Lucas, but in doing so, they ignored the people of San Lucas.

             All the water we drink here is bottled. Every house has a large container, sort of like those coolers you sometimes see in offices (they use the same bottles, but don´t have the fancy bottom part), and everyone drinks out of that. The water from the tap is from the lake, is not clorinated and is unsafe to drink. We wash in it, but that´s it, and after washing, we use hand sanitizer—everyone does.

             We met father Greg today, the head honcho at the mission. He is a very nice older man who is full of stories. I hope we have an opportunity to talk with him some more. He´s a great storyteller.
 

Enough is enough.
 

Goodnight.

Tags: Travel

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