Viajes con amigos en Guatemala
Buenos dias de Guatemala! Ben is with me now, and we finished up an awesome week of traveling with my mother, and of course, the adventures keep on coming.
Children´s Village... Ben is in language school in Rio Dulce this week, so I decided to occupy my time by volunteering at an orphanage-school. I spend most of my time doing, you guessed it, arts and crafts (once a Crafty, always a Crafty). Kids have crafts hour aka manualidades a few times a week during their school day, and the highlight for me was making masks out of leaves.
The orphanage operates on a really innovative model, and I would recommend anyone interested in volunteering in orphanages to check out the website. The Children´s Village is home to about 250 children, and about 130 live there full time. The school is impressively sensitive to the needs of families and their children, and really seems to have children´s best interests at the core of all of their operative decisions. Some children come from extremely poor families who cannot afford to support them, and so the children live in the orphanage during the week and go home on weekends. Others are parentless or come from abusive homes, and live at the orphanage full time. Others come from the neighboring village of Las Brisas, which does not have adequate schooling. In the school, children participate in daily sustainable agriculture projects on the farm which generates some of the food for the orphanage as well as some revenue. Short term volunteers such as myself are usually put in charge of English classes, arts and crafts classes, library reading hour, and physical education. Once the children graduate from primary school education, around age 16, the school supports them to find job training positions or to pursue higher education.
Ben and I are staying at a ´´hotel´´ that generates profit and serves as a skills training ground for the orphanage that is, as my guide book would say, ¨A bit rustic.´´ Long term volunteers who are with Casa Guatemala for three months or more live in the children´s village in even more ´´rustic´´ accomodations, without electricity, in netted in, walless buildings that occasionally suffer rat infestations. I´m not sure if I´m willing to get that rustic.
Corruption is pretty much everywhere in Guatemala, and the orphanage is unfortunately not exempt. The woman who runs the orphanage, Angie, looks almost like Michael Jackson because she´s had so much plastic surgery (no doubt skimming off the cream of the orphanage money). To top it off, she has a yappy white pedigree pooch.
Class Warfare... In Guatemala, just as I imagine in most low income nations, the gap between rich and poor is always vivid. I learned from my guide book, for example, that even though Guatemala is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it has the most helicopters per capita. Here are a few examples where I´ve seen the differences between rich and poor (in addition to Angie and her orphans). Our tour guide in the grand Mayan ruins of Tikal turned our tour into an anti-oppression lecture about how the wealthy people and religion control the masses. He managed to sum up all of civilization into system of oppression based on three short phrases. ´´Knowledge is power, power is control. Easy.´´ He made sure we understood that there has always been a ruling class, in Tikal and today, that has kept the masses under control by refusing to educate them. He also told us the timeless recipe for maintaining control with fear, and essentialized religion as a way to control people by instilling fear. He also said that people have always eaten bugs, and if us North Americans manage to live for another 200 years, we´ll be eating bugs too.
In San Marcos on Lago Atitlan, I saw class warfare in a different way. Lago Atitlan has become really popular with ex-patriates because of the fantastic views, climate, and cheap living, and as a result, much of the lake front has been bought by foreigners for their own homes or for tourism. The locals, who have lived on the lake for hundreds of years and whose villages each have a very unique culture, have been pushed further and further away from the lake, which is a source of water and daily activities like clothes washing. As a result, in many of the towns, there is some very unfortunate hostility towards foreigners. It seemed like a lot of the hotels in San Marcos also had community development projects, but relations are rough.
I haven´t felt this hostility towards foreigners in most other places. for instance, we stayed by another lakeside town called El Remate which basically developed to support the tourism of nearby Tikal. I guess because the tourism hasn´t pushed out other people, and also because so many people in the town are employed through tourism, this area was extremely safe for tourists.
Crazy travelers...Traveling for awhile sometimes brings out the best and worst of people. Fatigue from constantly moving, never having a solid place to stay, lack of decent sleep, lack of strong connections with other people, etc can make people have pretty raw emotions or act out in pretty weird ways. Maybe it´s a sense of not needing to be responsible, not needing to impress anyone, or maybe showing your true personality that you usually hide because you think it will make a bad impression. For me it definitely comes out in the way I dress. I think I hit my truest crazy traveler moment when Ben and I departed with my mother and began our travels together one on one. Ben had sat on my glasses, so they were broken, and I was wearing them by tying string around the bridge of the glasses, which then cut across my lens and wrapped around the back of my head. I wore a very perky sombrero that´s from Mexico but I bought in a highlands outdoor market, where many men dress as rancheros. The final touch was my midriff cardigan, an awesome number that I found in a second hand shop in Xela for my fancy nights out- made up of hundreds of silver square sequins, it casts a disco ball effect whenever I walk in a place with light. I think I probably looked pretty crazy. Ben´s crazy traveler moment occurred when I convinced him to get a haircut at a barber shop, and he got a handle bar moustache, shaved with hair gel applied to his face and a dull straight razor...gross. My mom´s crazy traveler moment was when we stayed at a hotel and she insisted on getting a fruit plate for every meal, never finished it, and then demanded that Ben and I eat fruit.
Vulcan Pacaya... My mother and I hiked Vulcan Pacaya, an active molten lava flowing volcano between Antigua and Guatemala City. My mom and I joined a tour with about 10 other people, and the very cute tour guide named my mother the ¨´La Madre de los Halcones.´ Several different groups climbed the mountain at once, and identified themselves with different team names- we were the hawks. I didn´t know this before climbing the mountain, but magma can have different mineral compositions, and the magma compostion at Pacaya makes it incredibly viscous, and therefore relatively safe to come close to the magma, although I´ve heard that the fumes are extremely carcinogenic. That´s ok though because I´m young and think that I´ll live forever. If anyone has more geologic knowledge about magma, I´d love to learn more.
Anyways, the hike was pretty rough because the final ascent involved climbing up essentially a sand-rock 45-degree pile of volcanic rock that was incredibly sharp. For every step we walked up, we almost certainly slid back half a step, and on the occasion of falling down, almost certainly scratched on the sharp rock. On the way down it was preferable to slide down the sandlike parts of the hill, pressing in with the sides of your feet, kind of like snowboarding. Except it was rock boarding on recently erupted volcanic rock. At the top of the volcano, it was incredibly windy, and my mom remarked that Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, was whisking at us to try to get us away from a place where we did not belong. I stayed long enough to take a few pictures and roast a few marshmallows.
Aaculaax... If you want to go to the most beautiful volcanic lake in the world called Lago Atitlan, stay at this hotel. It´s an awesome eco hotel made of recycled goods to create awesome stained glass windows and other architectural feats, with awesome views. My mom and I spent our time here going on boat rides, swimming on rocks, and daily yoga classes and massages. Que bueno el descanso.
Eating international food in Guatemala... As one might expect, international cuisines are available in Guatemala, especially in more touristy towns, but authenticity can hardly be expected. I´ve had Greek, Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, and French style cooking here. The most inauthentic food moment had to be when I had what I´ll call Look Alike Miso Soup. Usually miso soup is an opaque broth green onions floating on top and tofu lurking on the bottom. This soup looked miso enough, but upon eating it, I realized that I was eating green beans and potatoes instead of green onions and tofu. I appreciate the Look Alike effort, but I just couldn´t bring myself to call it miso soup.
I hope you all have enjoyed this latest installation of my epic. The next email will probably be sent from California!
Children´s Village... Ben is in language school in Rio Dulce this week, so I decided to occupy my time by volunteering at an orphanage-school. I spend most of my time doing, you guessed it, arts and crafts (once a Crafty, always a Crafty). Kids have crafts hour aka manualidades a few times a week during their school day, and the highlight for me was making masks out of leaves.
The orphanage operates on a really innovative model, and I would recommend anyone interested in volunteering in orphanages to check out the website. The Children´s Village is home to about 250 children, and about 130 live there full time. The school is impressively sensitive to the needs of families and their children, and really seems to have children´s best interests at the core of all of their operative decisions. Some children come from extremely poor families who cannot afford to support them, and so the children live in the orphanage during the week and go home on weekends. Others are parentless or come from abusive homes, and live at the orphanage full time. Others come from the neighboring village of Las Brisas, which does not have adequate schooling. In the school, children participate in daily sustainable agriculture projects on the farm which generates some of the food for the orphanage as well as some revenue. Short term volunteers such as myself are usually put in charge of English classes, arts and crafts classes, library reading hour, and physical education. Once the children graduate from primary school education, around age 16, the school supports them to find job training positions or to pursue higher education.
Ben and I are staying at a ´´hotel´´ that generates profit and serves as a skills training ground for the orphanage that is, as my guide book would say, ¨A bit rustic.´´ Long term volunteers who are with Casa Guatemala for three months or more live in the children´s village in even more ´´rustic´´ accomodations, without electricity, in netted in, walless buildings that occasionally suffer rat infestations. I´m not sure if I´m willing to get that rustic.
Corruption is pretty much everywhere in Guatemala, and the orphanage is unfortunately not exempt. The woman who runs the orphanage, Angie, looks almost like Michael Jackson because she´s had so much plastic surgery (no doubt skimming off the cream of the orphanage money). To top it off, she has a yappy white pedigree pooch.
Class Warfare... In Guatemala, just as I imagine in most low income nations, the gap between rich and poor is always vivid. I learned from my guide book, for example, that even though Guatemala is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it has the most helicopters per capita. Here are a few examples where I´ve seen the differences between rich and poor (in addition to Angie and her orphans). Our tour guide in the grand Mayan ruins of Tikal turned our tour into an anti-oppression lecture about how the wealthy people and religion control the masses. He managed to sum up all of civilization into system of oppression based on three short phrases. ´´Knowledge is power, power is control. Easy.´´ He made sure we understood that there has always been a ruling class, in Tikal and today, that has kept the masses under control by refusing to educate them. He also told us the timeless recipe for maintaining control with fear, and essentialized religion as a way to control people by instilling fear. He also said that people have always eaten bugs, and if us North Americans manage to live for another 200 years, we´ll be eating bugs too.
In San Marcos on Lago Atitlan, I saw class warfare in a different way. Lago Atitlan has become really popular with ex-patriates because of the fantastic views, climate, and cheap living, and as a result, much of the lake front has been bought by foreigners for their own homes or for tourism. The locals, who have lived on the lake for hundreds of years and whose villages each have a very unique culture, have been pushed further and further away from the lake, which is a source of water and daily activities like clothes washing. As a result, in many of the towns, there is some very unfortunate hostility towards foreigners. It seemed like a lot of the hotels in San Marcos also had community development projects, but relations are rough.
I haven´t felt this hostility towards foreigners in most other places. for instance, we stayed by another lakeside town called El Remate which basically developed to support the tourism of nearby Tikal. I guess because the tourism hasn´t pushed out other people, and also because so many people in the town are employed through tourism, this area was extremely safe for tourists.
Crazy travelers...Traveling for awhile sometimes brings out the best and worst of people. Fatigue from constantly moving, never having a solid place to stay, lack of decent sleep, lack of strong connections with other people, etc can make people have pretty raw emotions or act out in pretty weird ways. Maybe it´s a sense of not needing to be responsible, not needing to impress anyone, or maybe showing your true personality that you usually hide because you think it will make a bad impression. For me it definitely comes out in the way I dress. I think I hit my truest crazy traveler moment when Ben and I departed with my mother and began our travels together one on one. Ben had sat on my glasses, so they were broken, and I was wearing them by tying string around the bridge of the glasses, which then cut across my lens and wrapped around the back of my head. I wore a very perky sombrero that´s from Mexico but I bought in a highlands outdoor market, where many men dress as rancheros. The final touch was my midriff cardigan, an awesome number that I found in a second hand shop in Xela for my fancy nights out- made up of hundreds of silver square sequins, it casts a disco ball effect whenever I walk in a place with light. I think I probably looked pretty crazy. Ben´s crazy traveler moment occurred when I convinced him to get a haircut at a barber shop, and he got a handle bar moustache, shaved with hair gel applied to his face and a dull straight razor...gross. My mom´s crazy traveler moment was when we stayed at a hotel and she insisted on getting a fruit plate for every meal, never finished it, and then demanded that Ben and I eat fruit.
Vulcan Pacaya... My mother and I hiked Vulcan Pacaya, an active molten lava flowing volcano between Antigua and Guatemala City. My mom and I joined a tour with about 10 other people, and the very cute tour guide named my mother the ¨´La Madre de los Halcones.´ Several different groups climbed the mountain at once, and identified themselves with different team names- we were the hawks. I didn´t know this before climbing the mountain, but magma can have different mineral compositions, and the magma compostion at Pacaya makes it incredibly viscous, and therefore relatively safe to come close to the magma, although I´ve heard that the fumes are extremely carcinogenic. That´s ok though because I´m young and think that I´ll live forever. If anyone has more geologic knowledge about magma, I´d love to learn more.
Anyways, the hike was pretty rough because the final ascent involved climbing up essentially a sand-rock 45-degree pile of volcanic rock that was incredibly sharp. For every step we walked up, we almost certainly slid back half a step, and on the occasion of falling down, almost certainly scratched on the sharp rock. On the way down it was preferable to slide down the sandlike parts of the hill, pressing in with the sides of your feet, kind of like snowboarding. Except it was rock boarding on recently erupted volcanic rock. At the top of the volcano, it was incredibly windy, and my mom remarked that Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, was whisking at us to try to get us away from a place where we did not belong. I stayed long enough to take a few pictures and roast a few marshmallows.
Aaculaax... If you want to go to the most beautiful volcanic lake in the world called Lago Atitlan, stay at this hotel. It´s an awesome eco hotel made of recycled goods to create awesome stained glass windows and other architectural feats, with awesome views. My mom and I spent our time here going on boat rides, swimming on rocks, and daily yoga classes and massages. Que bueno el descanso.
Eating international food in Guatemala... As one might expect, international cuisines are available in Guatemala, especially in more touristy towns, but authenticity can hardly be expected. I´ve had Greek, Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, and French style cooking here. The most inauthentic food moment had to be when I had what I´ll call Look Alike Miso Soup. Usually miso soup is an opaque broth green onions floating on top and tofu lurking on the bottom. This soup looked miso enough, but upon eating it, I realized that I was eating green beans and potatoes instead of green onions and tofu. I appreciate the Look Alike effort, but I just couldn´t bring myself to call it miso soup.
I hope you all have enjoyed this latest installation of my epic. The next email will probably be sent from California!