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Published: August 24th 2009
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Santa Anita La Union Coffee Finca
Reference:
www.voiceofamountain.com and
www.santaanitafinca.com.
The first links to their documentary about the Guatemalan civil war, their participation, and their efforts to rebuild for the future of their communities and children. The documentary was shown at the Ventura Film Festival in our very own Ventura, California two weeksago. I love these coincidences.
Heading out to Santa Anita I had too many assumptions about some idyllic communista community working together in harmony towards an ecologically and socially-sound future. During the week I learned that starting out with big expectations is definitely not a way to go about volunteer adventures in Guatemala. Half the time I took part in awesome activities. The rest of my the time was split between analyzing the community´s dynamics and the power plays between the men and women (where the equality of the recent past has quickly been replaced by a social system built on the domestic, hospitality and business skills of the women who work from before sunrise to well after sunset without their husbands) and hanging out with Emily, the only other volunteer on the finca. The area
is absolutely beautiful and when people at the community get to know you, they are very kind and willing to let you in on local gossip and news. In itself, its a very calming and refreshing community to find yourself in. There just isn´t much work to be done between coffee harvesting season and coffee planting season.
When I did work I carried wood on my back using a strap across my forehead like I've seen so many Guatemaltecos do along roadsides in both the cities and in the jungles. I baked banana bread with two women from the community from the bananas grown on the property and traveled the hour and a half back to Xela to sell them (all proceeds went to the finca), and gave the schoolteachers haircuts (including a woman who wanted my hairdo). One day a friend named Chris came to the finca and toured me around. We exchanged ideas about organic gardening in the community and recycling compostable coffee waste to be used in place of firewood. Our conversations remotivated me, and I might return next summer to begin some exciting projects to increase the community's self-sustainability.
When the excessive
simple carbohydrates and saturated fats became too much for us, especially with the expensive cost of the host family meals, Emily and I ate together. We made up creative meals from yogurt, corn flakes, instant oats, carrots, cucumbers and three-day old coffee. When the difficulty of understanding the unique spanish dialect of the hills combined with the odd looks women shot us and the strange treatment we often received, Emily and I cozied up in the living room, drank tea and ate cookies, watched a movie and pretended we were back home. For a couple of hours we got to play pretend-America, and it was a very simple kind of guilty pleasure.
When we left, we were each caught up in a strange mix of feelings, equally jaded and inspired. And then to get back to Xela, I took her on her first Chicken Bus ride.
Guatemalan Transport! Three great ways to travel
I'm still waiting for a Chicken Bus trip to top my first one three weeks ago. There was something about the first time that really stuck out, and I´ve held high expectations for each trip since. I'm not sure if it was
the overcrowding into tiny knee-banging seats, or the decorations, inside and out, ridiculously pimped out and immaculate or the Reggaeton booming out of a stereo system rigged out of those double speaker boomboxes my friends and I all had in our rooms in the 90s. Maybe it was the ayudante (helper), the way he blared the semi-truck-loud horn around all of the turns, sometimes for two minutes at a time, or jumped out of the doors, scaling the sides of the bus, adjusting the luggage strapped to the top, and hoping back through the window or door, while the bus accelerated through the mountains, or maybe the way he danced around while collecting our money, charging me too much, and spun around to high five the driver when he finished. I could hardly stop smiling for the two hours we drove on, flying into blind turns on the wrong side of the road to pass up the slower traffic on the two-way roads. A group from Chicago sat behind me, wearing tight workout tops, baggy jeans and a grip of bling. I completely agreed with their observation: "Shit man, these bros are Gangsta!!"
Microbuses, People pay more for
P1020830
My stencil of Juan Sissay (first one I've ever made) these.
Yesterday I had the funnest microbus ride imaginable. Dona Mary, Chris and I caught it to head back to Santa Anita after a morning of selling our charity banana bread.
Somehow we crammed 33 people into a vehicle the size of a minivan. Imagine this: Driver plus three in the front, one large television set, a baby and 11 people seated inside, one man sitting over
the wheel bump, leaning against my knees and two standing in the limited row space, hovering over the other passengers, head tilted to one side to avoid knocking into the ceiling, three men hanging off of the side of the van with the sliding door open, gripping the roof to keep from slipping off in the turns, an ayudante hanging off of the side miniladder, three men and large bags of cement and maize on the rooftop, and four men hanging off the back, with the hatch open, grasping my seat and the miniside handle to keep from falling off and under the wheels of the diesel construction truck tailgating us.
Everything seemed pretty okay with the 11 inside, the television set, the three off the side, three up top and ayudante
on the middle ladder until we drove up into some hazy fog and rain, and one of the men up top got cold. He decided to climb down the ladder, ayudante still on it and car still making its way through moutain curves, and as the hatch popped open and I turned to see why it had undone itself, the ayudante flung himself to the side, holding onto the ladder by just two fingers and a toe, allowing the passenger to share the miniladder and swing into the back of my seat, with the ayudante joining him,
looking at me and stating matter-of-factly and with a smile.."mucho frio." Then we added three more to the back, including an ice cream man who had to negotiate between keeping his bag of cones intact and staying in the vehicle with four fingers grasping a handle.
We took off to sideroads to avoid police and everyone got used to the situation pretty quickly so I pulled out a book of fairytale in spanish, and got comfortable, with the ice cream man and two working men reading over my shoulder. The trip concluded with the ayudante hanging off the ladder once again
by two fingers and one toe, while he blew the largest and most professional snotrocket I've ever witnessed, and turning to me afterward, as we made eye contact through the window, he threw a quick wink. When we arrived to Colomba to catch our pickup, Dona Mary finally woke up, having slept through the entire mess, and we walked out, all smiles.
But really the only questionable part of the situation was this: with three male laborers thrown up top, why did the television have it's own seat?
Pickups
Pickups can be terrible or fun or both. They're cheap and their timing tends to be completely unreliable. Either way you have to be fine with your butt touching other strangers' butts or if youre tall like me, your butt touching strangers' stomachs. Once my driver had gold stars in the middle of his two front teeth. Once I had to wait for 45 minutes for the pickup to leave and three women and their little girls spent a lot of time talking about me. Then they were shocked when I started speaking Spanish with a man from Santa Anita. That was funny.
This morning I learned:
Bobadas = silly things ; por ejemplo: me dijiste bobadas - you told me silly things
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