Monday, July 27, 2009

Mujeres Mam

Hey everyone! We are back in Xela to clean up and take care of some business. We really needed a nice hot shower, lol.
First off, I feel it is a little unfortunate that I have not been including my thoughts and discoveries in this blog, only our whereabouts and doings. There is much that I can´t describe through these posts, not only without enough time and without being able to upload pictures, but also in a cognitive beyond. I am trying to record some of my thoughts on paper and hopefully will have time to write some true posts in here. I´m not regretting it though, because this is travel of course and is of no surprise. I just want to share a lot more with all of you and I´ll probably do so when I see you again. My only worry is about forgetting all I wanted to say! The fact that I can use my camera again (thanks to a fellow friendly traveler lending me his camera lens and another fellow traveler helping to store some of my photos since my card is full) will certainly help bring back the moments to memory. You know how I love to take photos!

This past week we worked with a man named Rony, who is essentially a Guatemalan hippy with a wealth of knowledge on the surrounding flora, permaculture, politics, and other insights that I was able to relate to. Very nice guy. I found his contact online and set up for us to volunteer at the permaculture projects he has going at San Lucas Toliman off of Lago de Atitlan. He does run on ¨Guatemalan time¨ but he certainly came through with putting us to work. The first two days were spent working with the IJATZ, an association that is switching from coffee farming to ecotourism and has a plot of land designed to alleviate the flooding and sediment problems in San Lucas. Rony wants to work more with land used for producing food for the people of the village and so does not want to deal with IJATZ´s coffee production (as coffee is a cash crop and the king of these parts). So we weeded their medicinal herb garden, husked red beans, cleaned rabbit cages (the rabbits are food for the people) and so on. We also make tortillas with the women´s cooperative cooking group that is associated with IJATZ. Very exciting, but difficult for us gringos! I´ll have to practice.
On Friday, Rony took us down to the ¨costa¨out of the mountain highlands, to a pueblo near Reu. There we worked on a blitz project with a women´s cooperative that also has a Mayan weaving school. We fixed up their garden and helped them build a water system. It was an awesome experience working with the women, who had such community in their little pueblo. They spoke a dialect of Mam (Mayan) that was so neat to listen to. I couldn´t understand them much and they hardly understood me, but it was easy to work side by side with them and respect each other.
After working on the project, Rony and his friends showed us an archaeological park with Mayan ruins set in the jungle. It was so beautiful, I was beaming! Yeah, imagine me running around with my camera. Rony and his friends helped translate what the guide was saying and helped explain the significance of the stones. The spiritual presence was felt.

Ah! OK I must go! Tomorrow we leave to work on the organic coffee co-operative farm and then back to Lago for a music and art festival that Rony´s friend Rene is performing in.

love!

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Elisa´s Post: Mangroves Musings

Yesterday we took a early morning boat through a mangrove forest and it was just amazing, beautifull birds of all shapes and sizes living in the contorted passages between trees and roots and plants and black murkey water. The water passages wound through miles of unknown with little houses and villages scattered inbetween, boat people living like the birds, in the small patches of earth. It was incredible to see this hidden world from the inside of a rickety collection of boards known as a lancha.

Tortugas Marinas

I´m writing from Monterrico, a little beach town on the pacific coast of Guatemala. We have been here for a week now and will be leaving today for Antigua. There we will hang out, maybe hike another volcano, for 2 days and then we are off to Lago de Atitlan. At ¨the Lake,¨ we will be working with a women´s cooperative and mayan weaving school on a permaculture project. We plan on checking out the rest of the lake, which sits among three volcanoes surrounding. I´m very excited to check it out! I want to avoid the touristy parts where there is a supposed gringo culture has risen. In just this past week I have lost much of my Spanish just from hanging out with gringos! Aye! lol.

Our week was pleasant, with weather just the opposite from what we experienced at the mountain school. Here, it has not rained and the heat forces you into the bath-temperature ocean at least once a day. The only condition that still exists, and boy does it, would be the insects. I have mucho mosquito bites, plus sand flea bites to top it off. One of the British girls here has every inch of her foot covered in bites. You do get used to it, but it is the only unpleasant thing about this place. I don´t take too well to heat. Truly, the ocean is a pleasure. I will miss it. The next shore trip will be on the Carribean side in Belize.

So we have been working with ARCAS, a sea turtle conservation group with a hatchery at their park. We arrived at the beginning of the season, so all week we helped patrol the shore at night without a single turtle sighting. Other found turtles, but not us... until our last night! Elisa and I were patrolling at 9pm, having some conversation while shining our red lights on the sand (when searching for turtles, we use red lights since white light is too bright and scares the momma turtle). Then we saw a commotion next to a hotel and lo and behold, a turtle was scampering up on shore with a crowd of tourists looking on. Unfortunately, turtle eggs are not illegal to poach in Guatemala and the locals depend on selling the eggs in the capital. To help save at least some the turtles, hatcheries have a cooperation with the poachers for them to donate at leats 12 eggs from each next they find. Our job was to collect this egg donation and in turn give them a slip which they need in order to legally transport the other eggs. Here, we had a unique situation where a bunch of tourists were looking on. So we announced to them that they can try to buy the eggs from the poacher and we will take the eggs back to the hatchery we they can survive. One man argued with the poacher for about 20 minutes and came out with buying 3 dozen eggs to donate to us. Since he sponsored those eggs, ARCAS will send photos and updates of the eggs and when they hacth and make their journey to sea. Yay! We had tortuga eggs! We took them back to the park and buried them in the hatchery. They will hatch in 45 to 60 days! Our babies!!! It was also awesome to see the momma do her thing. They lay eggs for about half an hour, clearing the spot, digging, laying the egss and then covering them back up. The poacher digs a hole next to hers to take they eggs as she lays them. The momma also does some camoflauging afterwards, shuffling around in other places on the beach to confuse the whereabouts of her nest. Then she b-lines it back to water and takes off. These are Olive Ridley turtles, by the way.

So that was an awesome experience! Last night we also have fun with the other volunteers, having dinner in town and going out dancing to the bars on the beach.

Next time, I´ll be writing from the lake. I miss you all!
-Ari

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Xela y Esculea de la Montaña

¡Hola! I don´t have much time to write because I´ll be playing in a futbol game in the next half hour, but I´m here and I´m well!

Last I wrote from San Cristobol in Mexico. The next day was crazy trying to get to the mountain school. We figured out that we took about 6 different type of transportation that day. In Mexico, we were taking charter buses, but none existed once we entered Guatemala. That morning, we took a microbus to the small city at the border, then a taxi across, a cart on a motorcycle to the bus, a ¨chicken bus¨ to Huehuetenango, another chicken bus to Xela, then another bus to the mountain school. Chicken buses are the yellow school buses that have been put out of comission after use in the US. Owners paint them and decorate them to their liking and then illegally cram tons of occupants in them to make more money. We were squished in a bus with the locals... a bus that was made to carry a fewer amount of people of child size. The buses ride the curvy mountain roads and stop anywhere a person is hailing it down.

I´ve been studying spanish with a crazy local named Tito and I´m eating every meal with a family in the nearby pueblo. The mother of the family I eat with this week makes amazing food! And their daughter loves to read so I bring books from the school´s library for every dinner. It rains every afternoon here since it is the rainy season. The school has a field of coffee plants and a medicinal plant garden. They are building a small futbol field for the children of the pueblo. Sasha, Elisa, and I have been helping the groundskeeper transplant the grass.

I´ve been meeting awesome people at the school, other travelers with similar interests. One girl came with the three of us to climb Santa Maria, a volcano near Xela, this past weekend. That was an intense hike! I got a little bit of altitude sickness but all is well. It was beautiful and there were cows living on the top! You could see an active volcano from there as well. I was truly happy that I could have a real conversation with our guide in Spanish.

Next time, I´ll write more! I miss you guys! love, Ari