around the world in 180 days

            Ana and Chona went to Guatemala City today, so we spent the day with the other Americanos at the mission. Ana gave us directions to the church last night and they were simple, but we still had trouble figuring out where to go. We found the church just fine, but the Americanos were another story. We asked a woman who was in the square in front of the church, and she tried to sell us food at here friend´s (or relative´s) business. She was friendly, but she sure gave us the hard sell.

             Everyone here is friendly. When you walk down the street, every one says Hola, or Buenas Dias—everyone is an exaggeration, but it happens often enough that it feels like that.

             This morning, we went on a tour of the mission work with the med students from West Virginia we picked up in Antigua yesterday. Andreas was our guide and he spoke only Spanish. There were two girls with us who were conversational, though, and they translated. Andreas took us to the women´s center the mission is building, which was up in the hills above San Lucas. Construction is very different in Guatemala than the uS, but I´ll get to that more later.

             After the women´s center, we visited the clinic run by the mission. It looked like a nice enough place and the med students were very interested, but it looked pretty normal to me. After that, we saw the reforestation project, where they were growing cypress trees to plant on the hillsides to prevent erosion. They also had a few coffee plants with a few beans on them. The beans are in a fruit that looks something like a small cherry and has a sweet syrup in it if you squeeze it. When the fruit is red, they harvest it, remove the pulp and let it dry in the sun. After that, the outside of the bean is removed, leaving a small green bean. This is aged for several months and then roasted to arrive at what we think of as coffee. I never knew there was so much to it.

             We also saw a resettlement area, where some ethnic Mayans were resettled after a powerful hurricane in 2005 touched off massive mudslides where they lived. The houses all said USAID on the side. It was nice to see that our tax dollars are going for something good.

             One of the girls we spent the day with today, Caroline, is from Michigan and knew quite a bit of Spanish. She´d attended a conference in Guatemala City recently that talked about the civil war and the political situation. Much of the work the mission does is focused on remedying some of the massive social injustices that were the underlying causes of the war. Andreas, our guide, told us that almost everything in Guatemala is controlled by 18 families, and the rest of the people have very little. These people own most of the land and refuse to sell it at a reasonable price. As a result, most people are in sort of sharecropper situation. One of the biggest accomplishments of the mission and Father Greg, is raising $800,000 and donating it to 1200 Mayan families so they could purchase a large plot of land to farm and call their own.

             As messed up as the politics are in the US, they are much worse in Guatemala. During the civil war, Guatemala had a dictator who oversaw massive massacres and ethnic cleansing directed at the Mayan people. This dictator is on trial, but the government is made up of his political party and keeps throwing up roadblocks to slow the trial down. This man is also running for congress, which, if he´s successful, will make him immune to prosecution. He will almost certainly be elected, because in Guatemala, you don´t vote for people, you vote for parties and, as I mentioned, this man is a member of a popular and influential party. He is a front-runner within this party and so will likely never be held accountable for overseeing genocide and mass murder. It makes me sick, and it also shows what can happen if people aren´t held accountable for their actions.

             Whew. Enough politics. In the afternoon, we worked at a construction site, building steel frames used for making rebar. In the US, this would have been done by a machine or in a factory somewhere, but in Guatemala, everything is done by hand. It means that things take much longer to build and it means that they don´t have the mechanical precision of the US, but it also means that each building has the sweat and blood of a Guatemalan in it. It was fun. I´ve enjoyed manual labor since I worked landscaping and it was nice to be out in the sun, sweating and lifting and cutting steel.

             Enough. I have gone on far too long already. There is so much to say, so much to tell about!
 

Goodnight!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.