Guatemala Part II.

First of all: I just used the commercial break in the Bachelorette to take out my most urgent trash--an empty box of litter and an empty pizza box. Oy vey, when did I become a sitcom cliche??

Second of all: More travel journal.


If Antigua is reminiscent of a section of EPCOT (with just enough traffic and stray dogs to let you know you aren’t actually in Disneyworld), then Panajachel is like downtown Miami. It isn’t terribly large, but it bustles, especially during the day. When I was mentally composing this blog, I was going to say that I never really got a feel for Pana because I never felt like I stopped moving long enough to soak up the atmosphere of the city, but then I realized that that feel of movement WAS the feel of the city. We stayed off one of the main streets, lined with open air stores full of Mayan and tourist goods, and walking down it was an adventure. I don’t want to say the peddlers were relentless, because they would leave you alone after a few “no, gracias”es (with the exception of one enterprising boy who took my rejection personally and followed me for a while actually kicking the soles of my feet as I walked away), but they were certainly everywhere. I have a vivid mental memory of Cary and I as we wandered along the coast of the lovely Lake Atitlan, enjoying the view of the peaceful morning waters, having to keep moving every fifteen seconds to avoid the sellers stalking our movements. The streets were obstacle courses filled with chicken buses (converted American schoolbuses painted in outrageous colors, roaring to various unplanned stops to pick up people seeking passage up and down the steep mountain roads) and tuk tuks (little red three wheeled vehicles driven by boys who looked about thirteen years old and who shared the tendency to cover their windshields with “transparent” bumper stickers).

Pana has a lot to offer, if you can survive the trip within it. Ginny belongs to a nice gym there, and the shopping really is quite good. Cary and I found a very cute coffee shop run by Americans whose super nice owner made us chocolate lattes and sold Cary authentic Guatemalan coffee (it is difficult to find good coffee in Guatemala, since most of the quality beans are exported almost immediately). In that coffeeshop, not to be outdone by Cary’s Trojan encounter, I met an occupational therapist! She told me about how she and her husband had always done missionary work, and she had moved down here permanently hoping to start a clinic offering occupational therapy but had trouble since no one understood what sort of service that was. Hmph. So much for an international field.

Our hotel was very nice. We knew it was going to be a good place since when we walked in, we were greeted first by three horse-sized, friendly German shepherds, and then, a small puffball. She was definitely one of the cutest puppies I’ve ever seen.

Side note: We later found out the puppy had been found by the owner in a plastic bag on the street. Someone had put her in a box and then in a bag, and left her to suffocate. Now, I am not PETA’s biggest card-carrying member, but let me say how awful that is to, morally speaking. I know that if you do not have enough food to feed yourself or your family, taking care of a dog would not be an option. But what a way to solve the problem?? There are hundreds of street dogs in Guatemala, you could simply turn the dog loose to join their ranks. True, you might be condemning her to eventual death, but still, it seems to give her better odds. Or, if you do feel you simply must be the person to directly end her life, you could do something quick and marginally more merciful. The idea of leaving your puppy to slowly suffocate is just atrocious.

But anyway.

Ginny met us around lunchtime and it was all I could do to not throw my arms around her and say, “never leave us again!!!!” She took us to a café and introduced us to liquados, Guatemalan smoothies made with fruit and either milk, water, or yoghurt. Yum yum yum. As we talked about our plan for the rest of the day (she is the lone Savage who can do without any sort of plan in her day to day life—I’m really more of a “pla” girl, whereas Cary is the sort to have Plan A, B, and C, but Ginny is the easygoing one. Knowing us, tho, she attempted to plan a bit more than I think is her norm), we decided we’d honor her coworkers’ tradition and come cook dinner for them that night up the mountain in Solola.

The rest of the afternoon, then, was spent shopping (another Savage girl favorite). Cary managed to find a purse—after stopping in every little stall, which brought to mind my college experiences following my favorite fashionista Petra around department stores—I miss you, P!!!—and we got to watch Ginny bargain. She is the master of the “run a hand casually through my hair,” mutter, “No too much” (in Spanish of course), and turn away, only to be reluctantly turned around by the new, lowered price. After we did that, we went food shopping. This included an ‘”American” supermarket complete with such staples as funfetti cake mix, a giant Mayan market under a corrugated tin roof, and another grocery store that struck the balance between the two, and gathered our supplies. Hauling it all, we ran our way to catch a chicken bus.

I’ve mentioned the chicken bus, but I think it will be impossible to convey the sensation of riding one up the mountains in words. I found it best to imagine I was on a 3D simulator ride (does anyone remember Questor at Busch Gardens? Or the Star Wars ride at Disneyworld?). You cram on a schoolbus bench with tourists and natives alike, cling like hell to the metal bar in front of you and your bag on your lap, attempt to ignore the groaning and grinding of the gears and the moaning of your own stomach as you whirl around the mountain, pray your driver is the kind of genius who can multi task between his cell phone and the constant stopping/starting to pick up/drop off passengers, and try to enjoy the amazing views to the lake that come at every hairpin turn around the narrow road. It is thrilling and terrifying at the same time, and yet, to so many people, it’s their daily commute—it’s the equivalent of getting on the T or driving the Beltway—which to be fair, is pretty terrifying in its own right, and a heck of a lot less scenic to boot.

We arrived safely, which, SPOILER ALERT, we would do with all of our many somewhat alarming modes of our transportation, and went into Ginny’s house. It is a very pretty building, spread over several levels connected by a red tile and iron staircase. We met most of her coworkers/roommates, including her cat Oliver, who is a real lovebug, and headed to the kitchen to start cooking.

I’m not sure I’ve explained what Ginny is doing. She is working for a group called Manna. They send teams of people into disadvantaged communities to attempt to build comprehensive, sustainable programs that better the lives of the inhabitants. Unlike the Peace Corps, the participants select their own programs to implement based on their evaluation of the community. Ginny’s group, which is Manna’s pilot program in Guatemala, does a lot, including teaching English at a local school. It’s a one year commitment for all but one of their leaders, and almost all of her coworkers graduated from Vanderbilt with her last May.

It is was both refreshing and surprising to me how clearly you could tell her coworkers are still college-age kids. There is always this image of “service” as somber, ageing work; if you spend your time confronting hardship and deprivation, and not turning away, but instead facing it and trying to change it, it implies maturity and gravity. And the Manna people are mature. They have seen a lot more of the world and how hard it can be than many of their peers, and in return have offered much more of themselves than many people twice their age. Despite this, though, they have held on to their youth. Although Ginny is of course a saint, ;), the stories she tells of the young American expatriate world play out a bit like Gossip Girl plotlines. They party, they swap love interests, they (maybe unconsciously) carry on the spirit and joie de vive of Vanderbilt social life. It’s really endearing, if I can say that without being TOO patronizing. I really liked and admired the Manna peeps, and at the same time they made me feel really old and boooooring.

It is also refreshing to see how little kids are the same everywhere. We passed by a school, and sure enough, there was one little eight-year-old idiot trying to scale the soccer post. Ginny showed us videos of their students performing for the Mother’s Day tribute, and the goofiness of the fourth grader trying to put on a show is universal. Love it!

Anyway, Solola has water restrictions, and at a certain point during the day, Manna’s house runs out of water. They buy extra water to compensate, but that still means no water comes out of the faucets. No toilets to flush, no sinks to run—makes cooking a bit of a mental challenge. And makes a bona fide shower addict like myself a little nervous. To add to the irony, it started raining, as if to say, “naaah naaah, no water running for you!!”

Because of the rain, we took a taxi cab back down to Pana. Our hotel had a tin roof, and as we attempted to sleep, I smiled as I heard the rain pattering above. One of my strongest memories of summer camp is lying in my top bunk, letting the sound of the rain thumping the roof and breaking the afternoon hit carry me through the enforced hour rest. So at first it was so calming and peaceful, hearing that same sound. Plus, the rain drowned out the persistent drip of the water tower in the yard next door. And then the clouds opened, and the gentle tinkling turned into a full-on roar. My rainy lullaby turned into feeling like a train was rolling over our heads. I had to giggle. So much for rainy romance.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and we managed to sleep. And the next morning we woke up and went to San Pedro.

Adventures in Cleaning

When you’re a kid or a teenager, you think of adulthood with longing and expectations. And in a lot of ways, it is great. Sometimes, though, it’s not so fantastic. Who knew adulthood was so expensive??

I’m feeling kind of broke right now. Yes, mostly that is because I have been a somewhat ridiculous person with the traveling lately, but there are always so many bills. Rent, utilities, I have to get my car inspected, the penguin babies are due for their yearly check up (yes, I’ve had them almost a year—who knew?!?!), etc etc. And I lead a relatively expense-free life, because I am very lucky. I’m going to have to become a millionaire before I have children, otherwise I will spend every minute of their young lives agonizing over the cost of very last diaper.

The other recent expense was that I had to buy a vacuum today. My $100 model with the one year warranty gave up the ghost last week, 15 months after it joined the family. Quitter. I was going to try to wait for payday on Friday but the fact is, two black cats and a long-haired brunette, a beige carpet, and no vacuum cleaner is an equation with no happy solution. So I sucked it up and got a new one.

This is going to sound odd, but normally I LOVE to vacuum. It is pretty much tied with doing laundry for my favorite chore. It’s so simple and there are such immediate results!! And being a borderline germaphobe, I love clean things. So after I stopped tearing up over the credit card total, I was very excited to go home and try out my new appliance. Of course there were some minor assembly issues (I wish sometimes I’d taped all my assembly issues, they’d made for good comedy), but I managed to work through those. Then came the cleaning. My neighbors must think I’m crazy—I vacuumed for about an hour. And that was just my living room and 1 of the hallways! Never have I felt more like a dirty slob than I did while emptying the filter for the second time about halfway through the living room. I think maybe the old vacuum stopped working a while before I noticed it stopped working. Whoops. The dust, people, you should have seen the dust!! Horrfiying.

The good news is, my carpet is back to the pretty color I almost forgot it was. Now I just have to do the same with my bedroom, clean the kitchen, and the bathroom, and then I’m all clean!! Woohooo.

Fortunately I am dogsitting this weekend, so I won’t have time to do any of that ☺

Polishing up the rest of the Guatemala blog, will post soon ☺

A week as "mis hermanas", Part One

Just spent a week in Guatemala visiting my sister, Ginny, who lives there full-time. She is working for Manna (check it out on the web) and seems as happy as I've ever seen her, which is nice :) A week in a foreign country gives you a lot to think about; here are some of those endless impressions.

Guatemala City is both bleakly gray and exploding with color at the same time. The endless walls and roads, the barbed wire, the billowing clouds of exhaust, all seem to create a world of inescapable monochromatic monotony, and yet, color pops everywhere, blooming like dandelions in sidewalk cracks: it screams out in the graffiti I'm relatively thankful I can't read, streaks by in the multitude of buses clogging the streets with starts and stops and proud honks of their horns, dots the sidewalks in the bright woven traditional garb the residents with Mayan heritages wear normally on their way to peddle goods to tourists. Rushing through the streets of the city in the "safe" cab (as opposed to the not-safe kind, of which there are many), the feel of the city is that it is closing in on and around you, that outside the thin metal sides of this disreputable little car the world of the capital, poor, busy, overpopulated, vibrant, teeming, is clamoring to claim even this last little bit of space, and you better keep driving unless you'd like to be swallowed whole.

It reminded me a bit of Mexico City, but I don't know if that was just my endlessly-connecting brain searching for an analogy or an actual resemblance.

In the cab, the driver asks Ginny, our fluent fearless leader, about me and Cary, sitting in the backseat and smiling as we pretend to understand their conversation.

"Oh, they're my sisters," she answers.

He looks at us in the rearview mirror, and smiles, and switches to his English just to make sure we hear him. "Ah, how nice, obviously they're your older sisters...."

Cary and I look at each other as he continues the sentence, pouting in unison. Obviously?

Time to buy some wrinkle cream.

*************************************

Our first stop is Antigua, which is claustrophobic in a different way than Guat City. A well-preserved colonial city, it has lovely cobblestoned streets and blocks and blocks of 1 story buildings with brightly colored walls and intricately carved doors. It's laid out in a simply grid system, and it is undeniably pretty and charming. The problem is that everything is pretty and charming in exactly the same way. Walking in Antigua is like holding your breath and swimming across a pool underwater with your eyes open. You know you are making progress, but the walls and water all look the same, so you don't know how MUCH progress until your hand (or in one incident I remember with painful clarity, your nose) hits the wall. There's nothing wrong with a bit of beautiful sameness, especially when you're on a schedule-free vacation, but I never once knew where I was in relationship to anywhere else. Even when we'd stumble on a landmark, I would still try to turn the wrong way thinking it led back to where I thought we were. Thank God Cary has a better sense of direction and location that I do, or I might still be wandering up and down the streets hoping to have our hotel door magically appear like something out of a Narnia novel.

We did a walking tour and discovered the real pleasure of Antigua was in looking beyond. Heading down the street there would be a break in a thick wall and you'd catch a glimpse of a courtyard, lush and dimly lit and coolly tiled, often with a babbling fountain. After a day and a half of passing by La Merced, a church with a solid, yellow gingerbread house exterior, we paid 3Q (about 60 cents!) to go inside and wandered upon its famous fountain, shaped in the curving lines of a calla lily, large and stone and framed by bright bouganvilla vining over the brick walled enclosure. In our hotel, there was a hidden garden of sorts, a courtyard entered through a narrow doorway behind a blue fountain built to drain the endless rains of the rainy season (which, lucky us, starts in May). We sat there in the afternoon, sharing the space with a group of Christians finishing their year of international service and taking turns "testifying" about how their time in places like Uganda and Cambodia had taught them God's will through humility and love. The Christian mission is alive and pervasive in Guatemala; Ginny tells me they come not only to do good works but to gather the tradition-clinging Mayan population into the strongly Catholic fold of the Spanish population. I have thoughts about missionary work that might be suited for a different blog, but, for now, let me just say we encountered more Christians in Guatemala than I really expected.

In more secular news, we met a Trojan that evening, drinking in a Mexican-inspired bar. An alum of the USC dental school, he was there on a Doctors-without-Borders-style trip, wearing a proud cardinal and gold tshirt. He bought us Moza and had met Cary's sister-in-law's future family while living out in CA. Even without the internet's assistance, the world is a small place.

We spent that full day in Antigua without Ginny, who had to work. Back when I was an education minor, I never understood the argument for English-only education, and this one day confirmed those long-formed (and forgotten) beliefs. Immersion is effective, but it is also terrifying. I have no talent for languages. Ok, that's not true; I've taken Latin, German, and Italian, and each time got to the point where I could read and understand them with relative ease. When it came to speaking them, however, I was literally tongue-tied. My pronunciation was horrible and it made me self-conscious, and I got nervous, and lost all control of grammar and accent. I had to take speech therapy for three years to learn how to speak ENGLISH properly, for pete's sake, I don't know what I expected with non-native languages. Cary has a singer's ear and a good knowledge of French, so she could fake restaurant-level Spanish, and Ginny is really talented with languages, although she won't admit it. Certainly they would be the immigrant children chattering in English on the second day of their new school. I, on the other hand, would be the one who sat in the back and stuttered when called on. Obviously it's important to learn the language of the country you live in, and being bilingual is a tremendous gift, but throwing a child into a situation where they don't understand a single word seems to me a bit unnecessarily cruel and demanding. I wanted to be in the bilingual classroom of Antigua that day, is what I'm saying. And I think it only fair we ease children into their new culture; it puts more pressure on the educators to know when to raise the safety net and when to take it away, but the pressure should be on the educators rather than the children, in my opinion. ANYWAY, not knowing Spanish in Guatemala is definitely the challenge I suspected it would be.

**************

We took a shuttle bus from Antigua to Panajachel, which lies on Lake Atitlan. The guidebooks warn of highway robberies, but I never fet unsafe. The roads are steep and sinuous, and occasionally cross the normal divide to become 2 lanes with only one orange cone for a warning because of unrepaired landslides, but our driver was very cautious with his driving, and no vigilantes pulled up besides us with machine guns (people with overactive imaginations shouldn't read security warnings before traveling). When I was lucky enough to travel through Europe by bus after high school, I spent the whole trip staring out the windows, enthralled by the quaint villages and the occasional hidden castle nestled in a green mountainside like something out of a fairytale. In Guatemala, the same activity made me sad rather than fascinated. The landscape is steep and green and quite scenic, but all I could see was the gatherings of corrugated metal homes popping up on the horizon like a group of mushrooms in an off-season soccer field, the children pulling heavily laden and emaciated mules along nearly vertical hillside farms, and half-demolished storefronts lining the more commercial stretches of the roads. This kind of scenery made me sad, and being sad made me feel like a patronizing, entitled snob, and no one likes feeling like that, so I stopped looking. In some ways I'd be a terrible cultural anthropologist.

Speaking of, cultural music appreciation is definitely not my strong point. In honor of Mother's day, the shuttle's radio station was playing Mama-love music. One song was 9 or 10 minutes long, repeated the same 4 notes throughout, and contained not only a rap section but a good 4minute interval in which the artist literally cried into the microphone as he sobbed about his love and gratitude to his beautiful, devoted mother. It reminded me of a third-grade Mother's day project. And they played it THREE times in the 2 hour shuttle ride. Never have I wished for a heavy metal playlist on my Ipod more than I did by time number 2. I had to settle for BLASTING ADELE (yes, I am cliche--such a good CD!!) and trying to find my happy place.

All for now...soon: Panajachel and San Pedro.

TGFIO

Thank God Friday Is Over.

Somedays are just shit. Or, at least, they remind you the world can be shit.

You listen as a coworker learns, over the phone, that her mother-in-law, ill for years with cancer, had her liver fail her this afternoon. You watch said coworker, normally the most stoic person in the world, cry and even accept a hug as she makes plans to drive to North Carolina with her husband quite possibly to watch this loved one pass tonight.

Your patient is taken to a doctor at the cancer center in the morning because--surprise!! to her!! she might have cancer. She spends her session with you 1), telling you it's hard to be around her fiance because he thinks she is the same person she was before the stroke and she knows she isn't and may never be again, 2), crying when you try to straighten her fingers to put her rubber isolation gloves on, and 3), throwing up from her medication.

You hear your patient who has had a massive brain injury secondary to drug use recount the story of her teenage only daughter's death in a drunk driving accident 7 times.

Your patient refuses to participate in therapy because, troubled both by the fact that one of her two casted legs may have re-broken and by the endless phone calls to her grandmother whose son is trying to steal her money, has had a panic attack and she simply can't stand to be awake right now.

Your coworker who has proven her excellence at her job for multiple years tells you she may lose that job due to a corporate decision that mandates she suddenly have a professional license that she does not.

And so on, and so forth.

The world can really suck. What can you do about it?

Eat too many cookies.

Go home and dance like an idiot around your living room. Recommended playlist:

My Life Would Suck Without You, Kelly Clarkson
Love Don't Live Here Anymore and Looking for a Good Time, Lady Antebellum
Let it Rock, Kevin Rudolf and Little Wayne
Bad Romance, Lady Gaga.

Rub cat bellies.

Go out and drink massive margaritas with friends.

And finally, be glad TGFIO and hope next week's day is better.

xoxo.

New York State of Mind

Weekend in Manhattan and attached musings...

--Pretentious stuff out of the way first. Riding through the streets of New York on my way from the airport, I was struck by how many different types of beauty there are. One of my favorite things about Charlottesville is the scenery, the hills, the open space, the trees, the green...

I'm an east coaster from the burbs, and I've always found this landscape just lovely. And yet, while I am far from a natural New Yorker, there is something that strikes me about urban beauty as well. Tall buildings, architectural contrast, the glint of the sun off the glass windows..

The world is full of different places and different views and it's just kind of lucky that so many of them are beautiful in their own ways.

--Philosophy stuff out of the way too. While flying out of Laguardia, we got stopped in a traffic jam on the runway. About ten planes lined up, waiting for the turn to take off.

We can create thousands of machines that fly us 3,000 feet in the air, but we can't figure out how not to run them into each other on the ground. Makes you wonder how much we really know about all the cool stuff we're doing. All the progress with technology, medicine, etc, and we don't really have any idea of the consequences or how we manage these great advances. I'm not saying that means we shouldn't continue to make them--what's the alternative? But it makes you wonder how much more conscious we need to of the things we'll dealing with.

--Lighter stuff. The flight attendant on the flight up called me "Miss." I remember the first time I was a ma'am--I was sixteen and walking out of the Ritz Carlton. The hair had grown out from the unfortunate Afro and the big blue specked glasses had changed to small wire rimmed ones. I was ready to be a "ma'am." Now I feel a bit aged when I get it. On the other hand, having the flight attendant call me "Miss" was a bit deflating. Do I look that young? That unprofessional? That much like a UVA student? Shudder. He got some dagger eyes from me all during the flight. And then, as I disembarked, he smiled at the lady in her 60's right in front of me and said, "Thank you Miss, have a good day."

Dignity restored.

Finally, they may not be hunters, but they have other uses:

Laundry anyone?