Xela Guatemala

Where am I?
I am in Xela or Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. It is my kinda town. A lively city with fun nightlife like salsa dance clubs, shops for all your needs and surrounded by mountains. The weather at the moment is pretty consistent. Sun in the morning and rain in the evening. Soon enough though the rain is going to stop and it is going to get really hot. My favourite part of the city though are the friends I have made, both Guatemalans and whites. I’ve been so lucky to fall into such a kind, caring group of people.

So what am I still doing in Guatemala?
Well I am now working for an organisation called the Quetzaltrekkers www.quetzaltrekkers.com. In 1995 two Guatemalans and an Englishman wanted to raise money to help street children. To school them and put a roof over their heads. So they started a hiking company and had volunteers come and stay three months at a time running the hikes and the company. Then they all left and had the volunteers run the whole company. Every three months someone would leave or come and be trained how to run it. Today it is exactly the same, the company is completely run by volunteers. Not only that but it is the most successful hiking company in xela (the city I’m in which has numerous hiking companies) and if you count single companies, it’s the most profitable hiking company in Central America.
So I am now a Quetzaltrekker. There are four other volunteers here right now also, two American girls, a Scot boy and German girl. As well as leading hikes and dealing with customers in the office, we all have a lot of different co-ordinator positions. Promotions, gear maintenance and rental, email coordinator, first aid coordinator, recycling and of coarse financial coordinator. I have been made that last one. I am the youngest volunteer, the rest are in their mid twenties but somehow I got the big girl position. I will basically handle every cent of money that enters and leaves the company- profit and loss, hike money, bills, benefit parties, money from our fair trade shop, the house that we live in, etc.
We generally make between 5 and 20 thousand Quetzals a week in profit for the school, orphanage and medical clinic we support. That money to them is like 20 thousand euro to us so it helps a lot. We 100% fund the orphanage and school.
As far as the hours we keep, we work Tuesday till Friday 930am to 930pm signing up customers, postering the city, putting on benefit parties, checking and repairing gear, playing soccer with the kids at the orphanage, having meetings, doing dishes, preparing food and gear for hikes, cooking dinner for the kids and then whatever our coordinator positions require. Then generally Saturday till Monday at least is spent hiking, some hikes are longer, our longest is six days.
We have a great set up. We have an office at a huge hostel, along with a gear room, store room, kitchen and sitting room and courtyard area for hanging out gear. Then we have a house with seven bedrooms and a bathroom and sitting room. We don’t have a kitchen cause were never home except at night to sleep. And we only pay 100Q 10euro a month in rent.
Everything about this company impresses me and it’s the perfect fit for me.

Doctors visit!
The only reason I have had a chance to write something this long is because I am sick so I have the weekend off. I went looking for a specific health clinic this week to get checked out. However I could not find it so I went into a ‘medical clinic’ and explained to the secretary who could have only been fifteen that I wanted to see a doctor. About fifteen minutes later a man showed up and took me into the office and put on his white jacket. I was looking round for the doctor’s diploma but couldn’t see any. So anyway I explained that I was having pains in my stomach and was pooing soggy and also that I had pain in my chest when I coughed. So he proceeded to examine me by digging his fingers into my stomach and asking me if that hurts, my Spanish was not good enough to reply sarcastically. Then he took out his stet scope (the instrument that you use to listen to your heart) and listen to my lungs…. Down in my lower back, then turned me over and listened to my stomach, I guess he thought he would hear the parasites singing.
Eventually anyway he wrote down where I could go to get my poo tested and charged me 50 quetzals and told me to come back the next day to get the results.
I went to the lab and asked if we could leave the doctor out of everything which the secretary at the lab agreed to, so I just went back there and got my results. Here doctors don’t give prescriptions so I just took the results of my poo test to a pharmacy and he gave me all the tablets I needed, including for my chest infection.
Ha Ha, I learned my lesson.

Border visit!
I can only stay in Guatemala three months at a time on my holiday visa so I had to go to Mexico for three days in order to re enter Guatemala. The problem was, I can’t really take that much time off work, plus I don’t want to be in Mexico by myself for three days. So I went to the border and bribed the border police 200 quetzals to stamp my passport as saying I had left the country and re entered again.
Oh Guatemala

Rubbish!
I got a day off work to go to a clean up project of a local river. The town’s people have no where to put their house waste so they just throw it in the river or down the side of it. A Guatemalan friend of mine was running the project and wanted to try recycle as much as possible and also plant trees. The recycled plastic bottles were then used as insulation for housing. There was myself and three other white people and then about fifteen indigenous women from a similar organisation came to help. We were able to clean the banks of the river but the river itself is still filthy dirty, which is a pity cause it looked like it could be great for Kayaking. I would grade it as a 5 simply because if you capsized you would die from the pollution.

What’s next?
Well I only started here three weeks ago so I have a few more months here with the quetzaltrekers. My flight home is on the 13th of December. Gotta be home for Christmas with the family… wont be great presents cause I am gonna be in debt going home but its just important that I am present

---

---