Pictures of Flores

Flores is a beautiful town.

Dang, moving on

I'm getting to know Flores pretty well. This is my fifth or sixth night here. There are places that feel more comfortable when traveling and this is one of them. I return here because of its proximity to San Jose, the little town where I studied last week, and because it has ready amenities. This coming week I travel again...because I left the school.

I feel really bad leaving, the good-byes were very difficult. I think leaving was the right decision. I told a little lie about why I was leaving and because I wasn't ready to share my concerns and criticisms.

The school seems very young. It is very much part of the social program of Bio-Itza, supporting families taking in students, providing jobs for teachers, engaging the community. This is one of the reasons I came here. My money directly supports the community and is designed so. But this may not be the best way to run a school.

For example, the pool of teachers is limited to the community, a population of 2000. They really have to take who they can get. To improve they must evaluate, criticize and risk firing. And, whoa, if you've lived in a small town you know how this can create animosties and cause problems. But to be succussful there really must be a way to evaluate teachers and train them very well. Such a small place must be superior to other schools to draw enough students and succeed. I was given no such evaluation nor even asked my thoughts, not even when I left.

My teacher, while technically competent in the grammer and clearly proficient in the language, she was unable to answer questions about why. For instance why a certain pronoun was necessary when using reflexive verbs. Her answer was just that the correct way was the correct way and any other way was wrong. I learned on my own it has to do with direct and indirect objects...I think.

So, dissatisfaction caused me to leave. I'm disappointed not to learn more about the program. I never saw the forest reserve. I didn't learn more about their future and how I could help through research in my masters program. I suppose this is something I can still do over e-mail. They are on the verge of a tourist boom. San Jose will have a paved road within the next year. The town anticpates this through some pretty extensive infrastructure development, an acquatic park, a beautiful city park and further development of the waterfront. Bio-Itza could really benefit. The community could really benefit.

So, I'll take my expectations about learning, how quickly the language would come back, to another school after a week of traveling. I've had to scale back what I thought I could learn in two weeks. Kelly, you were right about two weeks not being enough.

Winter down here

From Tuesday of last week:

Day three in the region of Lago de Peten Itza (accent the 'a'). Third day of tremendous monsoon like rains in the afternoon. These suckers come down hard and fast. The joke around the school was that a whale washed down from the mountain and through the streets. Don Reginaldo, the director of Bio-Itza, started it and it spread.

Back home with Florinda and Fausto the cliff they/we live on collapsed in to the back yard of the house below. Fausto and his son, Ismail (Ishmael?) were hard at work redirecting the run off from my roof. I really should get pictures of their repair as it shows the weird combination of ingenuity and backwards thinking that goes for construction.

We really do live on a cliff. Well, my room is flush with a precipitous vertical wall. The rest of the buildings are further back though just as high up. And I was seriously concerned about washing down the mountain in these rains.

So I come home and my fear of coming true. Crazy. And the fix? Catch the water running off my roof and route it around the other side of the building, away from the cliff collapsing on the other side. Eroding the other side is only a matter of time as all vegetation is cut very, very short or pulled up leaving nothing to hold the soil in place.
















A deluge as seen from my bedroom window, facing east, the prevailing direction for weather.















After the storm, still dark but with glowing points of sunlight.

I can learn another language. Riiiiiight.

Today is Thursday, Thursday night. Four days of language school behind me. Here is what I wrote Monday. Still a frustrating experience but I'm getting over it. the joke around the school is that I'm going through an identity crisis, not knowing which language to speak in. Words in both languages escape me. And my comprehension of spoken Spanish is through the roof. I just can't speak. I'm sitting in a room soundproofed to prevent sound from escaping but everything else comes in crystal clear.

Monday, the first day of language school and feeling pretty frustrated. Took an 87 question test to assess my ability. While the teacher looked on I sort of whipped my way through the questions, like I knew the language.

Which I don't, well, not really, well, sort of, kind of. Here is a common conversation with Alcira, my teacher:

Me: I don't know how to conjugate in past imperfect. I'll guess this one.

Alcira: You say you don't know the verb or even how to conjugate it but you know the right answer!

Me: Yeah, I don't know what I know or don't know.

So, right, how does my being able to answer a question on a test help me speak the language. I answered the questions mostly correctly. Many of the words, conjugated verbs in particular looked very familiar. Reading them and speaking them, remembering them to be able to speak them, is a whole different story.

I'm like a child all over again.
"I want"
"I need"
"I see"
"I know"
"I have"

And who needs those pesky pronouns anyway!!

Location, location, location

Screenshots of Lago De Peten Itza, Flores and San Jose taken from Google Earth.

Chicks on bikes

Flores is too small for cars. Walking across the island takes 10 minutes. Walking all streets, less than an hour even stopping to look up each street at the church atop the hill. Before you know it you've mastered the layout and focus changes to seeking new angles for viewing the brightly painted buildings.

Without cars motos and motorized three-wheelers dominate. Men drive the three-wheelers. Almost every moto is driven by a woman. They cruise around sometimes solo, other times with passengers. A three person family just drove by, child straddling the gas tank, mother driving, father behind. And a young couple rides the outer ring road in the gloaming beside the lake arms wrapped around for more than just support.

Women driving motorcycles is atypical for all other places I've seen here. Guatemala City is dominated by men. The highways too are dominated by male drivers. And the driving is crazy. Returning from Chichicastenango my driver sideswiped a moto and the two of them exchanged angry words and glances until my driver reached down as if to grab a gun and the cyclist sped away.

The leisurely pace of Flores is far preferable.

What AM I doing here?

Ok, right, so you've probably guessed I'm in Guatemala. It only takes reading the first two posts to guess that. This is the first time in 4 years to be out of the country, excepting Canada in March. Canada is just not culturally different enough, you know?

But here is the full story: Friday June 30 was my last day at work, at a job I did for over 7 years. In that time I often talked about returning to school, getting a masters of PhD even. As the plan to leave the job progressed so too did applying to graduate school and planning a break. Guatemala is the break.

Guatemala is also thinking, learning and planning time. Two weeks of language school in San Jose doubles for learning about Bio-Itza (accent on the 'a'), a community initiative for economic development, cultural and environmental preservation through eco-tourism. Check out Bio-Itza.

Bio-Itza is a great example of a local initiative attempting to preserve land and culture and use it to support the community. Well, I hope they are. I won't know until living with them and studying their programs. But they have a 36 square kilometer forest preserve, the result of a land distribution exercise through the goverment. Don't confuse this with distributing land to the poor, activities sometimes threatened or enacted by those crazy populist goverments. I really don't know the program that gave them the land. Right now they are lobbying to make their preserve an indigenous preserve, the first such thing in the country.

The Itza are Maya from Peten, the northern part of Guatemala. The town of Flores, where I'm staying for the night and the capital of Peten, is the ancient original city of the Itza. Lest this evoke images of bedding down and dining in old stone structures know that their city was destroyed by the Spanish. The Itza relocated across Lake Peten Itza. The small towns on the north shore are the current homes of the Itza.

Flores itself is an island connected to the mainland by a constructed causeway. This place is absolutely gorgeous! The island rises in the center with narrow spoke roads rising steeply from a ring road. The church, main park, ball courts, and theatre are all on top. This is a central gathering place at night for locals anyway. I was the only tourist when I walked through Saturday evening. Many more people wander the streets taking in the air and generally socializing. This is a place to spend many days just relaxing. It is also a launching point to visit Tikal, an incredible Mayan city. One of many in the area but the easiest to reach.

A bit of the tourist, a bit of not

Wednesday morning I boarded a tourist shuttle to Panajachel and the next morning to Chichicastenango, both heavily touristed but cool places. I struggled with these places and the means of arriving there but had good times all the way. The wow factor comes from the non-touristy thing I saw in Chichi.

Thursday's and Sunday's are market days in Chichi. Hugely popular with tourists but also regular market days for locals. Upon arrival I wandered the town streets before entering the market. The cemetary on a nearby hill attracted my attention for the brightly color tombs and smoke rising from its midst. And, wow, there were two Maya ceremonies happening, a funeral and something that looked like a blessing. Um, yeah, wow. There are no pictures and I didn't hang out long or gawk, these are pretty personal events and blessings and funerals in the US would not be so interesting, you know?

I feel very lucky. Lilian, my host here, feels the same. Here are some pictures of the cemetary and the market. There is a movie also which might be too big to post. Look for that at the slide show in August.











































This is a picture of the small church (?) where the blessing took place. The small orange glow is a fire tended by the man on the left. He would drag a crook, like a shepard's crook, through the fire while chanting in a mixture of Quiche and Spanish. The fabric in the right side is my pant leg. The picture was taken between my legs while sitting on a tomb.

Diesel smells like home

It just does, diesel that is. The fume belched from busses, trucks and carros, not to mention the motorcycles (though I just did), curiously settles and transports me. Occassional wiffs of diesel fumes in the States evoke passing deja vu. Though there is nothing, nothing, quite like miles of struggling, surging motorized street clogging traffic to announce ones location. I am firmly in Guatemala, a surging, struggling place in itself.

The first hint of this place, the thing that tickled my brain's difference mechanism, actually came on the plane when my row mate left his arm touching mine and expressed no discomfort from our legs touching in the narrow space. We Americans are very conscious of personal space, our boundaries are wide. Folks in the countries I've traveled, "developing" countries, "traditional" countries, are much more comfortable with physical closeness. I like it. The physical proximity feels comfortable.

Even the streets are tight and close, stores chock-a-block:





























This is the street one block away from the gated community where Lilian lives. That's her in the bottom picture. Lilian picked me up at the airport in her sister's cute little Toyota. You ain't seen nothing like that little car in the states. It is perfect for these streets and likely for the country which, Lilian tells me uses oil for 80% of its energy needs. The other 20% is hydro. But, yeah, little cars rock these streets.

I'll try to fit the story of Marcelino into a future post. Already stories to tell and I'm here less than 24 hours. The rest of the day looked like eating and driving around. Driving to get the car fixed. Driving to exchange money (cambiar dinero). Driving to get home. Lots of driving. Methinks some walking, outside the city will contrast well with the driving.

But I've had a soft landing with Lilian's help. This week will be my acclimitization week before heading wholly into the remote regions of El Peten, Guatemala's drier, low-land northern area. Gonna get good and immersed in the language and culture up there. Right now, I'M goin' to sleep.

In transit

Michael is on his way South. When he sees this posting, he'll fill you in on the real story.

-KA on behalf of MV