Mayan Warriors, Beach Bums, and Outhouses

Another update from the wilds of Guatemala...Last weekend we hit up the majestic Mayan ruins of Tikal. We watched Mel Gibson's Apocalypto the night before just for kicks, hoping to get some good historical context. All we got were a lot of severed heads plummeting down the pyramids. We all rallied for the Tikal sunrise tour, which required waking at 2:30am, but was well worth it to experience the sounds of the jungle as it was waking up. You’ve got to check out the sounds of Tikal in the morning, the howler monkies are having a ball getting out of bed.

We've left San Andres after two weeks of Spanish school (and another vain attempt to master the subjunctive) and a great experience with the community. I was sad to leave my host family, their six rabbits who roamed the house at will, and especially my mama Isabelle who took to calling me “Susita”. The simple life agrees with me, and this was the perfect place to just sink into it, as life here was pretty basic, day-to-day, and uncomplicated. Nobody here had very much and there was certainly a collective struggle to make ends meet, yet somehow that didn't correlate with the quality of life (at least as I would define it). A nice reminder for me that happiness has very little to do with "stuff".

Doña Isabelle and the conejitos

Check out the great views...


Fellow traveler and student Gerry pulled out the poi at our farewell bonfire.


Determined to be beach bums for a spell, we hit Livingston for the weekend, Guatemala’s tiny sliver of Caribbean beachfront. We settled into my friend Rusty's new hostel, a good friend I met years ago in Argentina. Livingston is home to the Garifuna, a completely distinct and fascinating Central American subculture with their own language, customs, etc. They’re descendants of a community of shipwrecked slaves and there’s been very little mixing with the natives. Hence, they’ve preserved their distinctly West African features as well as a lot of the customs/dance/music and I swear I could have been in West Africa at times.

We adopted into our group a couple of fellow travelers, Kieran and Mike, and had a pretty near perfect day at the beach playing volleyball and being lazy, a personal favorite past-time. Also went on a river walk where the original Tarzan movie was filmed.

The bustling streets of downtown Poptun

The past four days we’ve been kicking it in the small rural town of Poptun living with families and volunteering at the local school. Living with a family in this sort of community means all bets are off when it comes to amenities and privacy. My house consisted of a kitchen area, outdoor shower and outhouse (not for the faint of heart...or stomach), and a large living area divided in half by a makeshift wall. My room was a curtained-off corner of the main living area, Nate slept on the hammock in the living area, and the parents and four kids cozied up on the three beds in the walled-off area. How’s that for a reality check when I used to complain about having to share a bedroom with my sister? But my family was so unbelievably amazing and welcoming, it was hard to mind the close quarters.

Our Poptun family

And the food. Oh, the food. The families we lived with took turns hosting us for all our meals for a day and pulled out all the stops. Seriously some of the best Guatemalan food I have ever tasted, they treated us like kings. As you can see from the photo, we’re too busy stuffing our faces to smile for the camera.

Johnny teaching English

We were there volunteering at the local elementary school, which was a community-based initiative started and run and largely financed by the community, as there are not sufficient public schools in the area. Organization for volunteering is not usually stellar for these sorts of things and we’ve found you usually have to make it up as you go along. Our students were amazing, jumping right in with English lessons, some Red Light, Green Light action, and in the absence of a proper playground, Armen served as a human jungle-gym
for most of recess.

Armen the human jungle-gym

Jessica

Yes, there’s been a huge gap in the blog, I just can’t seem to find much unique and interesting to write about from the ‘burbs of Washington DC. Nevertheless, it was a great two months of seeing my wonderful family and friends, and the good folks at Weichert Realtors even give me my desk back for a spell so that I could do my damage at attempting to eek my way over the poverty line and into a respectable tax bracket.

But I made another quick escape and here I am again in Guatemala with a new crop of students for three months traipsing through Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras with LEAPNow. I got my incredible co-leader Nate back and instead of the traveling caravan of 14 like last time, this time we are an intimate family of 6, which creates a very different dynamic…so far a great one. I must confess that at times it feels strange and as though I’m being unfaithful to my first stellar crew of students from last semester, but they have since gone on to other things like working with whales in the Canary Islands, working as a dive master in Australia, a few are traveling together in South America, and several are hitting the books at university. I do miss them and remember them often, but my four new students are rock stars in their own right. Armen, standup comedian from LA; snowboard instructor Amanda from Minnesota; Johnny from LA, future Harvard grad whose parents created the Fresh Prince of Bel-air; and artist Jessica from Colorado who used to have her own talk show on NPR. I think it’s safe to say that my students are way smarter and way cooler than I ever was at 18…or perhaps ever will be.

We’ve just wrapped up a four-day orientation at Finca Ixobel in the jungle Peten region of Guatemala. The landscape here is exactly as you would imagine out of tropical storybook fantasies…lush green splendor everywhere. In between orientation sessions about healthy group dynamics and how to avoid spending the majority of the trip on the toilet, we went caving/swimming through an underground river cave (not a life jacket or hard hat to be found as we traversed some pretty dangerous ground…safety precautions don’t so much exist here), went into town and saw a funky local parade and bought ingredients from the market to whip up our own guacamole, and had a movie night watching Borat, a very culturally relevant and enriching film.

Now we’re in the middle of two weeks of Spanish school in a small, tranquilo village on the banks of Lago Peten. I live in what can accurately be described as a large shack with running water…sometimes. My family has a dog named “Espot” (Spanish for “Spot”) and there are the cutest little rabbits that live on the back patio. I inquired in hushed tones (so that the rabbits wouldn’t hear) if the rabbits were pets or for eating, as the later is usually the case with other housebound wildlife like chickens and pigs. Happily, I will not be enjoying rabbit stew for dinner anytime soon. The same cannot be said for the pig with whom Amanda has been sharing a courtyard at her homestay. She woke up this morning to find it hung neatly (as neat as a carcass can be) on hooks around the house in preparation to go to market, having somehow blissfully slept through the massacre that had just ensued outside her bedroom door. She promptly informed her homestay family that she was a vegetarian (not true).

Nate chilaxing on the boat to San Andres

Armen doing a swan dive...

So apparently George W. and Lady Laura were in Guatemala a few days ago. Had no idea until my homestay family told me, to give you an idea of how isolated I am from current events. We watched the highlights on TV that night, the triumphant entry, Bush kissing Mayan babies, carrying boxes of produce in a factory, the Bushes and the Guatemalan President and his wife walking together in awkward silence as neither speaks the others’ language. The people here like to joke that after his visit, all of Guatemala’s problems will be solved.

We just went to a Guatemalan zoo where a lizard fell on me from a tree and attempted to dive down the front of my shirt and a baby leopard projectile peed on me from inside his cage. Bad karma?

On a happier note, I’ve got a decent base tan going on and I couldn’t tell you what day it is to save my life.