Ex. Guerrilla Coffee in the Mountains

Santa Anita is a beautiful coffee finca, tucked away on a bumpy dirt road accessible only by a packed pickup, babies and baskets of produce balanced on its sides. Like the other rural towns, Santa Anita had a little school, slanted grass used for football and little open houses with dirt floor, wood burning stoves, and plastic lawn chairs as the main furniture. The special thing about Santa Anita, though, is that all of its 40 families were members of the Guerrillas during the civil war in Guatemala, many of them exiled to Mexico for a portion of the children's lives. After exile the community banded together and decided to make their own paradise in their home, Guatemala, and bought an abandoned coffee farm. Now producing organic fair trade coffee and bananas the community has learned to grow coffee, working communally to run their community.

They also have a small eco tourism operation, which is how we were there. We got to live in the old plantation owners house, and Ari and Sasha worked during the mornings with members of the community filling little bags of dirt for planting the newly donated better producing coffee seeds in to grow baby trees. I got to teach English in the school, working one hour in all three of the different age groups, playing games about colors or running pretend fruit stands. I even taught the kids "Hi, my name is Joe" for those of you that know that silly song.

Each of us got to eat with a different family, Sasha spent her nights hiding under beds playing hide and go seek with the little big eyed scragamuffins that lived in her house, Ari got in political discussions with her house father, and I mostly sat around, admiring the beauty of my house mother and how she joked with her three little boys, and never seemed to stop smiling.

We had to leave Santa Anita too early--we all felt like we could stay there for months (and a lot of people do) and set off for a music festival that the Guatemalan hippies of last week invited us too. Yesterday we arrived in Panahachel (or gringo-tenango as people here call it) full of flowey yoga pants, yogurt, and hand made earrings. The town is set on the lake and is beautiful, we are already dreaming about renting kayaks, eating lots of things that aren't eggs and beans, and all the presents that we can buy. The festival was not really what we imagined it to be, but i think that it will be hard for us to flag down a brightly colored bus and bump up the mountain to a new location, even though we know we must leave soon.

The pressing time constraint is me and my future job teaching English in Central America. I cant write any more yet, because i am not sure, but i think that i will have a decision very soon, and be able to drop the elephant of concern and nervousness into the lake and head off on a new adventure.

Hasta luego,
Elisa