colorful tapestries

So, after about 4 weeks of living in Guatemala and experiencing all the great things this country has to offer, I have decided someone needs to document their traffic laws. That way any new drivers in Guatemala can have some sort of basis to go off of when learning to drive, and foreign drivers can get accustomed to the cultural differences.
1. honk to tell other drivers to get out of the way
2. honk to let pedestrians know you are coming
3. honk to let other cars know when you are passing them on the shoulder driving on a cliff at 9000 km/hr (we use the metric system here in Guatemala, so you have to learn how to convert from miles - kilometers)
4. honk to say hello to friends you pass along the road
5. honk to let cars in front of you know they aren’t driving fast enough
6. honk when driving through an intersection to let other cars know you are not stopping
7. honk if you get a sudden burst of emotion you can’t contain, ie a song you like comes on the radio
8. lanes are for the weak. As are stop signs, speed limits, and guardrails on the sides of mountains. We do not tolerate the weak here in Guatemala.
9. If you do not hit your head on the ceiling at least 4 times throughout your journey as a result of driving over potholes/boulders/small canyons in the road at extreme speeds, ur doin it wrong.
I think those are the most basic laws, if you follow those you should fit right in.

In other news, the weekend was pretty eventful and the weather even sort of tried to be nice, at least for a bit. On Friday I went with Lupe and Kirsten, a girl from the states who’s been working with AMA for a few months now, to a tiny town in the mountains called Xiabaj (pronounced shia-bock, so much for spanish words being pronounced phonetically). It was destroyed by hurricane stan a few years ago so they were forced to move locations and had their homes rebuilt by some combination of the Guatemalan government, USAID, and hsp teams building homes instead of stoves. Now, HSP is helping the town fundraise so that they can put in some kind of a turf/concrete field at the school for the kids to use. We went to talk to some of the people who run the school about logistics of fundraising, and I talked to them a bit about how putting in a field would affect the kids and help preserve the mayan culture by giving them a place to play traditional mayan games. To fundraise for this town, AMA is putting together a day-long excursion and advertising for it at the spanish schools in Xela. Students can pay to have a day where they go to Xiabaj, learn how to play Maya ball, take a lesson in K’iche, eat a traditional lunch, etc etc. This way the town can get money to put in their fields, which Jessie is designing with her architectural skillz. While we were in Xiabaj, our driver Marvin had gone to another town close by to continue his bombero training and hadn’t returned yet, so we started walking towards the town to meet up with him. The walk took us down a gravel road, through endless amounts of fields through the mountains with the most amazing views I have ever seen. I felt like I was in a scene from the sound of music and sung ‘the hills are alive’ in my head the entire time. This country definitely makes up in beauty what it lacks in functionality of its sewage system. On Saturday Jessie and I went to the community where the mission team has been building stoves all week and met up with the team, Kirsten, Claudia, and Juanita for a lunch/closing ceremony type thing. The name of the town sounded kind of like ‘des-poo-poo-ha’, though I’m willing to bet that’s not how you spell it. We got to eat a great home-cooked meal in one of the women’s homes, hear a presentation from Claudia about Mayan religions, talk with the women, and see some of their hand-made weavings. That night a bunch of the AMA people, Jessie, Tony and I went out to dinner to say goodbye to Tony, who is returning to the states today! The house is going to be much more empty without him. On Sunday, at the crack of dawn, I left Xela with the mission group to go to Panajachel/San Juan for the day. We drove to Pana and took a boat to San Juan, which is another small town on the lake but is much less developed and less touristy than Pana and San Pedro. There we saw a demonstration of how the women make natural dyes and use them to dye their yarn, then use looms to turn them into beautiful hand made shirts/skirts/scarves/etc. It was pretty interesting to see, they grow all their own plants, then heat them up over a gas burner to extract the color from them, then mix it with water and soak the thread in the dye. After we saw that we explored San Juan for a bit, went back to Pana and saw the giant market, then Silvia, one of the women who works at AMA, and I took lots of different forms of transportation to get back to Xela. First we took a minibus, then a chicken bus, then another minibus, then after about have an hour of walking made it back home! Public transportation is fun. This week I’m going to be working on translating all of the sound recordings I have (by all I mean the ones in spanish, I haven’t quite mastered K’iche yet) and then writing up stories of how people’s lives are being affected by the volunteer efforts of AMA/HSP. In other news, I just downloaded google earth so I think I’ll be sufficiently entertained for a while. Or at least maybe until the rain stops!

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Part of trip: Highland Support Project Internship

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