quick update

I´m taking off tomorrow to spend the weekend checking out Tikal… then heading across the border to Belize to renew my passport and go island hopping down the coast of Belize on a sailboat and hitting up some fishing and snorkeling hotspots with my buddy Mathias. We should be landing in Placencia on Thursday and then looking to try and find our way back to Antigua from there by Friday by way of Southern Belize, Livingston… and chicken buses in time for the Halloween party here in Antigua.

Happy Homecoming to you Dartmouth folks. Wish I could be there.

Cheers,

Chris

a tragic loss… and a few notes

my computer has pretty much kicked the bucket… it was a good 4 years. so that means that i probably won´t be posting as much… and i definitely won´t be able to upload any photos until something changes for the better… which means i´ll probably have to pull a babcock and heist them from someplace else… or a friend or something.

a few quick notes that will hopefully be elaborated on in the future… (apologies in advance for the lack of correct punctuation… the keyboard at the internet cafe is weird… and i´m having  a lot of trouble findingthe the question mark…)

*this week was tehe 10 year anniversary of safe passage (or at least when we´re celebrating it)… it involved, among other things, performing michael jackson´s thriller dance for all of the kids in the main building, clowns,  a documentary (manos de madre)… which was really incredible and helped to put in perspective the work that we are doing down here with Safe Passage (unfortunately, i´ve found that this perspective becomes lost in the day-to-day roune…)

*i´m leaving tomorrow morning to visit Monterrico (beach town on the pacific coast) to catch a quick break from antigund to visit my buddy mathias… and to soak up some rays on the black sand beach… and maybe play with some tortugas (turtles)… mathias is doingsome volunteer work down there for 4 weeks with turtles… (ideally when i return i´ll be able to elaborate on what exactly that means)

*i just read ted´s blog about life in DC and his new apartment… and it made me laugh, out loud… definitely check it out (there´s even a link over there on the right side of this web page)

*my apartment is currently without water… again, BUTI do have electricity (unlike last night… and last sunday)

*i forgot to recharge my cellphone yesterday (on triple saldo day..get 3 minutes for the price of 1) and am now without minutes… sweet

*4 day weekend next weekend… so getting back into traveling and heading to Tikal

*starting to realize that I am goign to be heading to San Francisco in a month and a half… and have no place to live, no potential roommates and no cell phone that functions in the US (i know someone out there is lookgin for a roomate to join them in their beautiful apartment at a reasonable price… send me an e-mail… or leave me  comment or something… really, please)

*dartmouth has been sending an awful lot of e-mails… all of which remind me that homecoming is coming up real soon… and i´m not going to be there. please, dartmouth, just keep sending the reminders.

…i think that there was something else i was going to say, but i can´t remember what it… nevermind, got it… i took a field trip last saturday with my buddy kyle to Pastores and bought a pair of cowboy boots… it was an epic day… and we even chronicled the adventure in spanglish short-hand chicken scratch… so as soon as i can decipher what it was that we wrote, that will be up`here to follow. maybe i can find a picture from someone to steal as well.

that´s all for now… i am going to go see if the water is back on yet… sure could use a shower.

cb

So here’s the deal…

I’ve already touched on why I’m here and how I got down here… albeit a month after the fact. So I suppose it’s time now to go ahead and write a bit about what it is that I’m actually doing down here… I’ve already had my one month anniversary of being here in Antigua.

Entonces… as I think I mentioned in Getting Here I’m volunteering for a NGO called Safe Passage. The program itself was founded by a Bowdoin grad named Hanley Denning 10 years ago (we’re actually celebrating the 10 year anniversary next week) when she was invited by a friend of hers to visit the Guatemala City dump. Motivated by the site of children living and working in the dump Hanley founded this program which works to provide with these kids, the poorest of the poor, with an opportunity at a better life. Initially it began with an annual budget of under $10,000 that rented out space in a local church and aimed simply to provide the children with a place to go rather than to work in the dump alongside their parents or in the streets. Ten years later, however, the annual budget exceeds $2 million and provides an impressively comprehensive that provides its students with educational reinforcement (it’s not a school… school runs 1/2 days here in Guatemala… and they come to us the other 1/2 of the day), meals, showers, financial support (pays for them to attend schools, transportation, materials needed for classes and academic projects, as well as to compensate the families accordingly for the loss of income from kids that would have been working in the dump or elsewhere), it has evolved to include sports and community outreach programs, and a daycare center (the guarderia). There are also educational programs for the mothers as well as one that just recently began to help fathers with becoming literate.

So what do I do here? I work as a teachers assistant… which, aside from being a glorified nanny, entails helping with homework (particularly math), english… basically anything they need. It’s pretty neat and has given me an opportunity to learn a lot along the way. It also gives me an excuse to sit down with a coloring book and color away for a few hours. One thing that has surprised is how tiring and time consuming the work is. Each day is 10 hours… from getting on the bus in Antigua at 7:20 to arriving at the project in the city at 8:30 to work until 4:30 and then arriving back home in Antigua around 5:30… so that’s work, a lot of it. Though I do get weekends off to explore and travel (need to get back after that).

As I mentioned previously I moved into a homestay when I got here (good times). I spent about 6 days there before finding myself an apartment on Avenida Primera… right across the street from the famous Cafe No Se. It’s a pretty solid place, 2 bedrooms (my roommate is another volunteer from Germany… where she was a police officer… pretty interesting) and works out well. We’ve also got a rooftop terrace that looks across the street at Cafe Sky (can read all about it in your Lonely Planet guidebook if you’re curious… great place to watch the sunset and whatnot) and has an incredible view of Volcan Agua (I’ve been meaning to take a picture… I’ll see if I can make that happen and update this post with it when it does). Also, rent is cheap… we each pay 1500Q per month… plus another 50Q or so each for utilities and trash… which works out to a shade under $200/month… moving to San Francisco in January is going to be quite a shock to the system. So this frees up enough extra cash to eat out when I don’t feel like cooking… which is most evenings. There’s a little place across the street called La Fondita owned by this guy named Luis who moved down here after 30 years of living in LA… serves up a great 15Q breakfast special (that’s about $2) and an even better dinner special that’s 25Q… tough to beat dinner for $3… life’s been good.

So that’s all for now it’s Friday night and some other volunteers are in town looking to have  a food time… time to shower, shave, grab dinner and hang out.

Hope everyone is well. More later… hopefully on the sooner side… but we’ll see. Life just tends to happen down here.

Chris

Getting Here

So I figured I’d use this next post to explain what exactly it is that I’m doing down here in Guatemala for 3 months. I’ve gotten a couple of questions form people asking if I’ve ditched my job, or if my job ditched me. I assure you, however, that neither of these happens to be the case… or at least not that I am aware of. As it stands, I’m going to begin working for Bain & Co. out in San Francisco in January. Because of my delayed start date, Bain encouraged me to look into either volunteer work or language immersion options to do something worthwhile with my time off. Since spending a term in college in Spain my sophomore year, I’ve been interested in getting back to Spanish and brushing up on it a bit, but the idea of sitting in a classroom for several hours a day when I could be out doing something real and helping people didn’t seem all that appealing… so I decided to combine the two aspects and volunteer in a Spanish speaking country where I would be able to practice/pick up Spanish just in day-to-day life.

Thus I was left looking for a 501(c)3 organization (in order to qualify for a stipend to defray some costs) that would involve working a minimum of 30 hours per week (another requirement) in a Spanish speaking country. As it happens my mom read an article in the Portland newspaper about an organization called Safe Passage (referred to as Camino Seguro here in Guatemala) that just happened to fit all of the above requirements. Thus a match was born and a few recommendations (thank you again Topher and Prof. Heck) and applications later I was looking for flights to Guatemala City for early September.

As I sat in the Boston airport in the early afternoon on September 4^th enjoying my last Sam Adams for the next 3 months, I really had no idea what to expect down here in Guate, though I did have a sneaking suspicion that $20 was going to get me a lot further than an airport Caesar salad and an overpriced, though delicious, beer… at least I didn’t drop all $20 on a margarita like the lady next to me did. When I stepped off the plane in Guatemala City and exited out into the surprisingly night crisp air that I have now become familiar with, it finally dawned on me that I was going to be in a Spanish speaking country for 3 months relying on my mediocre and remarkably rusty Spanish (you’d be surprised at the number of differences between the Spanish in Spain and the Spanish here…). Up until this point I think I had largely brushed this reality under the table by telling myself that I was going to be working with a US-based organization with volunteers from all over the world (primarily from the US and northern Europe). It might have been was that the driver that met me at the airport spoke only a few words of English… and then the ensuing 45 minute car ride with him over the winding mountain highway between Guatemala City and Antigua, swerving in between overstuffed chicken buses (the primary form of public transportation around here… they’re old school buses that have been tricked out with absurd paint jobs and horns and where you will inevitably end up sitting in between two people with your knees wedged in against the seat while still others hang on to the rack on the back of the bus as it careens around the turns) and antiquated cars belching clouds of black smoke as they struggled up the hills (and being swerved around by the occasional new luxury sedan… which hinted at the marked disparity in wealth between the rich and poor that is present in this country) that served to quickly correct the errors in my thinking.

I arrived at the door of my homestay in the middle of the night and the situation couldn’t help but remind me of 2 and a half years earlier when I met my host family in Spain for the first time… where my primary form of communication was smiling and nodding and responding with the word “si” in varying tones to anything that was said to me. In fact, they were more similar than I would have liked.

To be continued…

Photos

You may or may not be happy to learn that I have FINALLY gotten myself together enough to upload my photos from my first 3 weeks down here on Facebook.

Additionally, facebook assures me that I can:

Share this album with anyone by sending them this public link:http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2088187&id=509383&l=cd3269963b

If anyone would be interested in verifying this for me that would be great… and would save the trouble of trying to upload photos to multiple places and whatnot.

I will, however, try to include a few choice photos in my posts in the future to make them a bit more entertaining.

Without a bunch going on this afternoon, I think I might switch locations and work on a post of some more substance.

-Chris

Picking up with the here and now

So life in Guate has officially made the switch from slow to busy… somehow I always end up with less free time than I initially anticipate. Hopefully I’ll have some downtime this weekend to jump back in time to cover what’s already happened. For the time being, I’m going to pick up with this weekend so that I don’t become even further behind.

This past weekend I traveled from Antigua to the small hippie community of San Marcos on the Lago de Atitlan with a few other folks from Safe Passage to enjoy our 4 day weekend (Tuesday, September 15th, was Guatemalan Independence Day and we got Monday off as an added bonus). The four of us piled into a little red volkswagon around noon on Sunday to embark on our adventure away from Antigua. The drive up was an experience in itself as we passed incredible landscapes… along the sides of mountains, through valleys, across ridges. The road itself was quite nice as well as it had just finished being widened into a 2 lane highway.

Some hours later we arrived in Panajachel (Pana) where we caught a ferry/water taxi to San Marcos where we spent two nights at Aaculaax (http://www.aaculaax.com/) which was just cool… there’s really no other way to put it. Each of the rooms had a slightly different theme with beautiful glasswork and other paintings throughout the entire place. I could have spent hours puttering around with my camera–though I tried to refrain from being that guy (I’ll include some photos later).

The first night there we stumbled upon a nice little language school/restaurant/hotel called Paco Real where we enjoyed a nice dinner, some live music and a few locals beers.

On Sunday we woke up to sunshine and a nice breakfast at the patio restaurant Las Mananitas (I went for the Desayuno Typical… nothing like eggs, fried plantains, frijoles and a large cup of coffee to start your day). From there, after stretching breakfast out to occupy a couple of hours, we went swimming in the Lake, which had the most incredible aqua-marine-blue water, and cliff jumping off of the nearby cliffs. In the distance we could see the volcanos rising steeply out of the water and a few small towns, villages and compounds (belonging to some rich Guatemalans) nestled in amongst the hillside.

From there we grabbed a late lunch at another restaurant/hotel/language center called La Paz recommended to us by this Italian guy we met at the cliffs… who happened the work there. Being in holistic healing hippie central I thought it would be a good call to track down a massage–which it was–and far less expensive than in the US at a little place down the street. We then all reconvened at the sweat lodge-style sauna at La Paz and spent another hour or so sweating out all the evil from the previous days and nights followed soon by showers and another dinner of curry at Paco Real with some live music.

We hit the hay relatively early that (Sunday) night and woke up relatively early to yet another sunny morning, which followed roughly the same course as the day before as far as breakfast was concerned. Unfortunately, we ran out of money… and no one in San Marcos really seems to accept credit cards… so we rented some kayaks and kayaked across the Lake to San Pedro–a slightly larger town that has an ATM as well a a number of interesting bars and restaurants. It felt like a bit more of a party town than San Marcos, although everything’s relative.

After hitting up the ATM and having a crazy (?) old local lady call me Maximon (or San Simon), a tobacco smoking, rum drinking pagan god, we grabbed some lunch at a little restaurant overlooking the deck. About half way through the trip back across the lake the wind really started to pick up and the clouds started rolling in… awesome… and then the lightning started. Luckily the wind was blowing us more or less in the direction we had to go anyway… we tried to surf some of the waves that the wind was kicking up… though they weren’t actually that big. For the most part, however, we just got soaked between the rain and the waves that were splashing over us.

Wrapping things up, we took the ferry back over to Pana hopped in the car and zoomed home dodging parades of kids running with torches (Independence Day tradition) and other kids that were throwing water balloons and buckets of water at them as they ran by (another Independence Day Tradition).

On Tuesday (yesterday) I spent the day in Antigua trying to catch up with life and enjoying all of the school marching bands that paraded through the streets to the Parque Central for the ceremonies and the singing of the national anthem.

Today, Wednesday, was back to work. After 4 days off I almost forgot where to catch the bus in the morning. The kids are still great though. More on work at Safe Passage, what Safe Passage is, and my first week in Guate to be filled in retroactively as time permits.

Hope all are well.

Chris

ps. mom and dad, sorry I didn’t call back tonight like I said I would. I spent 2 hours wandering around the grocery store (La Bodegona) here trying to make my first attempt at buying food for the apartment. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Empezamos

Alrighty, so after a week or so of trying to slide into life here in Antigua I’ve finally found both the time, energy and means to get this bad-boy up and going. I’m  not exactly sure what kind of consistency, if any, I’m going to be able to maintain with this, but I’m going to try and do my best to keep track of work, travels, food, fun, etc.

The next couple of posts will probably be more along the lines of catching up on what I’ve done so far, trying to figure out the ins and out of this business and wrestling with my computer to try and upload a few choice photos if possible.

This weekend I’m headed to visit the town of San Marcos on the Lago de Atitlan for a little rest and relaxation after my first week of volunteering–more on this when I get back.

Cheers,

Chris