Guatemala-Tuesday

My group started out at the country house mixing cement. But we got done early, so we switched over and helped mix cement at house number two.
Tuesday was supposed to be the hottest day in history for that date so our leader decided that we would take the afternoon off. So, we took two vans and went up to LA Advanzada. It was up in the mountains and therefore much cooler. We looked at the community center that had been built by some other churches then went for a stroll around the village. It was an incredibly poor community that had been devastated in the past year by an earthquake that had killed something like six people out of the 600 that lived there. The houses were made out of cement block or clay bricks. The bricks were the mud/horse manure/hay mixture that you see on National Geographic shows. It was incredible.
The other big story from that day was one of the patients that the doctor treated. It was a thirteen-year-old girl. She had a baby. And was pregnant. Again.

Soccer field. Hate to be the team that has to retrieve a ball from that goal.

Bricks drying in the sun

Community Center

Views on the way up the mountain

Tuesday dinner. The touch of fancy on the left is actually ketchup.

Guatemala-Monday

First day of work. General confusion at the buses ends up with my group, which was supposed to go to the house with shade, ending up at the house with absolutely no shade. On a day that it reached the nineties. In the shade. Whatever. I didn't know the difference so I just went along with it.
My first job was to help scrape sand off the floor to make it even so the guys doing the actual cement work could... well... do the actual cement work. When that was done, I took turns with my father, Marc and Joe mixing the cement. They apparently do have cement mixers in that country, we saw one in Guatemala City, the folks we were helping out were just to poor to afford them. Which, you know, makes sense 'cause otherwise we wouldn't be down there.
It was freakin' hot but we retired to the local Lutheran school to eat lunch. The first day it was hot dogs and soda with chips. I don't think I've eaten a hot dog in at least a year or so until then. But I was hungry, so it worked out well.
After lunch, our group stuck around at the school to help get a wireless connection set up from the pastor's house to the office. The way the school is laid out is on a hill so it's kind of three tiers with the offices on the first tier, the school on the second, and the pastor's house at the top of the hill. Well, the guys were having trouble yelling from the first to the third tiers so I wandered to the second tier to be the go-between.
The second I walked into the gates, I was mobbed. At least six kids were hugging me. It was pretty awesome. I kept saying "Hola! Hola!" as I speak no Spanish whatsoever. They noticed my name tag and one kid said "Dessica" and I said "Yes, my name is Jessica" so they all started shouting, "Dessica! Dessica!"
One of the kids asked me a question and I replied (and forgive my spelling, all of my Spanish thus far has been from CDs and podcasts only), "Lo siento, no habla Espanol." To which they all roared with laughter. Yes, I suppose that it is funny that I told them that I can't speak Spanish... in Spanish. Well, then I remembered one thing, "Hold on, hold on, I know one thing in Spanish. Okay...okay, Tengo un hermano, ce llama Josh" (I have one brother, his name is Josh). They once again thought that this was hilarious and started repeating, "Dosh! Dosh!" Then it was time for them to go back to class so I reluctantly waved goodbye.
The internet mission was a success. I also got to sit in on Pastor Luis and his wife Nancy's English lessons which was pretty cool. They were boning up on their English and I got to pick up some more Spanish words.
After work at the hotel was pretty fun. We just all sat around and talked about one "good thing" and one "bad thing" that happened that day. The hotel owners, I think, were a little at a loss on how to deal with us. They set us up some benches in the street and just let us run amok until about 10 when we all finally made it to bed.

Sunrise from my balconyHanging from the van's mirror, loosely translated:
God is my guide, but I'm the driver

Working at the "country house"
Work Jessi! Work!
Mix that cement!

Finding relief in the only shade around


A group photo of the folks at the "city house"
The girl in front is actually the daughter of the folks who owned the hotel
Marilyn was awesome. She came out to volunteer and helped
translate and was really a part of the group. She's going to school to become
a chef and cooked quite a few of the desserts while we were there.
They... were... a


General confusion in the morning. Not an uncommon scene as the days went past.

Monday dinner. Chicken with sauce

Guatemala-Sunday

Woke up on Sunday and had brunch at the hotel. It was SO GOOD (yes, I have to shout). Well, okay, most of it was pretty bad but the tamales were awesome. The rest of the Immanuel group flew in from Chicago and landed around 7. They picked us up just over 45 minutes later. We started off on the trip to Gualan.
Driving through Guatemala was really, really interesting. There was evidence of incredible poverty: houses everywhere were made with scrap metal. There was also a lot of measures to keep people out. Alot of the shops had bars over them. Many of the larger houses had high walls with electrified barbed wire or glass shards embedded at the top.
Outside of the city, we passed through mountains and fields. Lots of crops including watermelons, cantelopes and soemthing that we're defining as honeydews. There were also lots of cows but I couldn't get a good picture. I really wanted to bring one back because they were so different.
For lunch, we stopped in a small town that I can't remember the name of. There were fifteen of us to feed for lunch. Then the two people stationed as missionaries joined us, then the pastor and his family. This poor restaurant was not prepared for us and lunch ended up being about three hours. Luckily, they had quite a stash of the local beer, Gallo (The rooster) and that kept our group pretty happy.
When we got to Gualan, we stopped off at the hotel, which was gorgeous, and then headed off to see our projects. The first stop were the two houses where the doctor and the dentist were going to be working. This was out in Los Limones. It was on the outskirts of town. Fairly rural, houses spread further apart. There must have been some sort of signal because within fifteen minutes of our arrival a whole slew of kids appeared. It's not like you see a lot of white people in this town, it's not exactly a tourist location, so we were like a circus show. It was pretty interesting.
Apparently the land titles in this area are not really clear. The government has sort of let people take portions of land but they haven't said that the land belongs to the people or not for sure. So, more or less, these people are squatting, buliding houses, putting in electricity, trying to cobble a life together but with the knowledge that the government could come in at any time and take their houses away.

Guatemala-arrival

On Saturday morning I woke up and wandered around the gated community for awhile until Susan's grandma picked me up for breakfast. We went to a Cuban restaurant in a part of town that "my mother would kill her for bringing me to." It was delicious and Grandma Byrnes' friends were AWESOME. They've been going to this place for the last twenty years after their workout class.
She dropped me off at the Tampa airport, where I was sent to the body scanner but they let my half-full water bottle through. Whatever.
I met Jane and we chatted until it was time to get on the plane and we went to Miami. Had a nice dinner there. Then we got on the plane to leave the country. It took less time to get to Guatemala than it did to get from Denver to Tampa. We went to a fairly nice hotel and went to sleep. Well, tried to, the alarm in the room next door kept going off all night. Then, there were some... people... in the room next door. They were making noises... at 1 in the morning. Jane interpreted the noises as children screaming. My mind... went another route. Just saying... it was a little awkward the next morning when she wanted to confront two kids at the elevator but, Thank GOD, they got off on a floor other than ours.

Guatemala

I've been really remiss in recording what went on a couple of weeks ago when I went down to Guatemala. I left work on Thursday night and spent the night at the Holiday Inn in Belgrade. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Didn't have to drive at three o'clock in the morning (I had bumped a deer on that Tuesday, I think it lived and no damage to my car but still very startling) and it was going to cost upwards of $50 to park my car anyway so, what the heck? Yeah. The "heck" was the fact that the guy in the room above me had something going on with him so he was walking back and forth all frickin' night and kept flushing the toilet and the g-darn pipes were right behind my headboard. If I have to do this again, I'm requesting a room on the top floor. I didn't sleep very much and the one o'clock phone call from mother didn't help. At five I was on the bus to the airport. The flight from Bozeman to Denver was pretty good but the flight from Denver to Tampa was hell. The two kids in front of me were screechers and for three-plus hours their mother alternately yelled things like, "DO YOU WANT ME TO KILL YOU?" and "DO YOU WANT ME TO RIP OUT YOUR TONGUE?" and their father slept across the aisle. Blergh.
I was staying with my friend Susan in Tampa. Well, at her house anyway. She was gone and her roommate had to work so I was on my own. I ate some really good food at a French restaurant and, after going to one wrong gated community, finally found her house and went to sleep.