Our last week at the lake was full of mixed emotions.  We were, of course, excited to see our family and friends back home, and we are both looking forward to the next year.  But we made many amazing friends this year, and had the opportunity to live in one of the most beautiful places either of us has ever seen.  We also were acutely aware of the pace of life — back in the States, we don’t have too many mornings where we can spend an hour and a half sipping coffee on the porch before heading back inside to grab a book.

The rainy season’s full return was brought the bugs back in droves.  We had to put the mosquito netting back up around our bed (it’s been down since December), not because of mosquitoes, but because of giant pellet-shaped red insects, shiny brown beetles, ants with wings, moths, and other fun creatures.  Most of the time the insects were simply annoying, but we did stop for quite awhile to observe the cluster of black, red, and yellow bugs above.  We have absolutely no idea what they are, but they stayed in the same place, arranged in crazy geometric positions, for over a week.

Our final day at the clinic, Kelsey delivered a training for all the women who serve as medical interpreters.  The development of this training will serve as the basis for a paper for school credit on the practical applicability of human rights principles to indigenous interpreting during this coming year, but more importantly, it makes official the role of interpreters at the clinic.  The training includes pieces of the responsibilities of the interpreter, a code of principles, ethics training regarding confidentiality, and coverage of some basic medical topics to enhance interpreters’ ability to actively support doctors and nurses as they treat patients.

Few people use interpreters in their jobs in the United States, and even fewer have ever had to serve — formally or informally — in that capacity, so the difficulty of interpreting well is often underestimated (and so interpreters are undertrained.)  But Kelsey’s work at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia really brought into focus the necessity to have high-quality interpreting, and at Mayan Medical Aid that meant training, both to enhance our interpreting services and to make clear to the interpreters what a valued and essential part of our team they are.

Inspired by Lucy (who gave us the cooking class when the Passmores visited), we cooked up a storm for our goodbye dinner with the clinic staff.  Jimmy spend literally two hours de-leafing cilantro, we hand-squeezed a dozen and a half oranges, Kelsey baked several batches of chocolate chip cookies, and creating the marinade for the chicken was a half-day event.  The final menu was orange/achiote/gin-marinated baked chicken, tostadas with black beans, cilantro pesto, and avocado, sweet corn, and guicoy (a squash — pronounced wee-COY).  It was worth the effort — the dinner was a huge success.  We had eighteen people, our largest group yet: all members of the clinic staff plus assorted husbands and children, and one of Kelsey’s English students who works in the downstairs part of the clinic for the government.  (And yes, I realize it is a problem that we have multiple food prep photos without a “finished product” photo — it was very pretty, by the way — but hey, serving eighteen people is hard work!)

The staff gave us several parting gifts, including a beautiful coffee table book with photos of each town surrounding Lake Atitlan, several hand-woven textiles (including one from an English student of Kelsey’s that includes the words “thank you for my class the Inglish”), a painting, and a poster.  Saying goodbye to all our guests that night was definitely the saddest part of our final week.

We are feeling particularly good about the transition, as our “replacement,” Pete (pictured above with Guadalupe), was there for our final two weeks of work.  We had to winnow down our list of responsibilities — one person could not take over entirely for both of us — but Pete will be covering the essentials of each of our jobs, and is also going to work on expanding the emergency response capabilities of the Emergency Committees in each village.

From left: Guadalupe (nurse practitioner), Lidia (Kelsey’s English student/secretary for government health workers), Nohemi (medical/dental assistant), Martita (medical/dental assistant), Jimmy, Kelsey, Craig (doctor), Carmen (doctor), Carolina (cleaning woman’s daughter), Eliza (nutritional program coordinator), Ester (cleaning woman), Paulina (administrative assistant), Pedro (Paulina’s husband), Jose (dentist).

Kelsey had a particularly rough go of the last week.  She caught a nasty upper respiratory/gastrointestinal one-two punch known locally as the Mal de Mayo (literally, the bad of May — the name given to the first virus that bounces around after the rainy season starts again.)  She was sick, to varying degrees, for nearly the entire last week (which is why you see Jimmy doing the lion’s share of the food prep in the pictures above.)

It is impossible to sum up in a few paragraphs how we feel about our ten months in Guatemala.  This experience has changed our lives and will forever affect the way we view the world and the decisions we make about our place in it.  We also have a connection to Santa Cruz that we expect to be lifelong.  There are lessons we learned that we will try to integrate into our lives back home, lessons about the importance of reflection, about consciously creating room to breathe in all the chaos.  And, of course, we will never forget the people we were so touched by on a daily basis.

In Guatemala, nearly every town has an annual festival.  The festivals are typically held on the saint’s day for the town’s saint — and Santa Cruz’s feria is in mid-May.  The festivities consist of the election of a town queen (a teenage girl who is then the town’s representative for the year), a coronation ceremony attended by the town queens from other villages around the lake and in Guatemala, a parade, live music, a disco (held in the municipal building that houses the police station and the mayor’s office), and lots of fireworks.

Apparently, usually the weather in early May is still beautiful…but this year, the rainy season has not only hit early, but hard.  From the day we returned from our vacation (May 5), it has absolutely poured every day.  This has some unfortunate effects — fungus growing on the walls again, the clothes never quite getting dry, a leak in the middle of the bedroom ceiling, muddy boots and wet jeans on the way home — but it’s also sort of a nice change.  The field-burning-induced haziness of March and April has been swept away; morning are sparkling clear and beautiful again; and, maybe best of all, we have been getting some simply spectacular thunderstorms.

Definitely an unfortunate side of the early, heavy rain was that our trips up to the festivities in town were extremely wet.  We have access to the second-floor balcony at the clinic, so we can generally watch what’s going on without getting too wet, but the hikes to and from the house often include crossing impromptu ankle-deep muddy rivers that crisscross the stone path.  We did make it to the coronation, but we were soaked to the skin by the time we made it home that night.  The parade was more of a success, as it was held in the morning when the skies were sunny and clear.  And given the Guatemalan affinity for serious sound systems, even when we were at home — a 25 minute walk away — we could hear the music loud and clear.

As we enter our final week of work, we’re definitely beginning to feel nostalgic about our time here — and in that way, the rainy afternoons and evenings are nice in that they provide plenty of time for contemplation and make us feel not quite so sad about leaving.  (Of course, the next morning it’s spectacular again…so it’s probably a good thing we’ll be leaving the lake in the afternoon.)  We’re of course excited to get back to the States and to move on to the next step in our professional and personal lives, but it’s also going to be very hard to leave — Santa Cruz is a pretty special place.

The ruins at Copán were simply amazing.  Excavation there began in 1870 and has progressed much further than excavation at Tikal, so part of the appeal is that anthropologists and archaeologists know much more about the ruins then they know about other sites.  Copán lacks the massive central temples of other sites, but the remarkable thing about Copán is the way that the carvings and sculpture are preserved; the level of detail there is not even approached at Tikal or Chichen Itzá.

At Copán, the trees have been cleared (much like at Chichen Itzá), so it is easier to take in several structures at once.  The Great Plaza is filled with stelae, huge carved columns of stone dedicated to the memory of various rulers of Copán.  The front of each stela bears the image of the ruler, and the back is typically covered in hieroglyphic text.  From the Great Plaza, you proceed through the ball court (the second largest yet discovered, but not even close to the size of the ball court at Chichen Itzá, the largest), which is decorated with elaborate scarlet macaw heads (called guacamayas in Spanish.)  This honors the birds that still live all over the park – we saw several wheeling through the open sky across the Great Plaza, red, yellow, and blue wings outstretched, and also saw many of them roosting in trees.

Copán’s most famous attraction is the Hieroglyphic Stairway.  It contains 2,500 glyphs over 72 steps, telling the story of the first seven rules of Copán; a larger statue of each of the rules is interspersed with the text.  While the first fifteen steps were found still in order, archaeologists are still working on deciphering the rest of the text to attempt to put it back in order.  The stairway is covered with a huge tarp to protect it from the elements, but it is still incredibly impressive.

Several more structures with well-preserved carvings are on top of the Acropolis, the raised portion of the ruins.  We bought a guidebook that explained the supposed symbolism of each of the carvings.  The Mayans believed the underworld was watery, so fish and other underwater creatures symbolized the afterlife.  One very interesting feature of the Copán ruins complex is that the Great Plaza could be flooded at will – archaeologists believe this feature was used in ceremonies related to the underworld.  Other common images are dragons, skulls, macaws, and various gods, including the youthful sun god.  Many of the actual sculptures have been replaced with painstaking replicas so that the originals can be preserved in Copán’s sculpture museum.  Also in the sculpture museum is a life-sized replica of the Rosalila, an entire temple found inside the more recent temples.  Because it was buried in this way, Rosalila’s colors were beautifully preserved, and that is why archaeologists are confident that all the temples were originally painted a strong red with green and yellow accents.

From Copán, we took a bus to San Pedro Sula (Honduras’ second largest city), then headed south to Lago de Yojoa.  We stayed at a place called D & D’s, a bed and breakfast and microbrewery run by an Oregonian expatriot.  Our cabin, with its own front porch, was adorable, and we very much enjoyed reading, swimming in the pool, and chatting with fellow travelers at night.  The highlight of the Lago de Yojoa trip was our boat-based birdwatching tour with Malcolm, a British guide who overflowed with information about the birds living in the region.  On our trip – which was a very small group, just the two of us and one other traveler – we were taken by rowboat up a canal and out into a lily pad-filled lake, then along the lake’s shore, where we saw forty-three species of birds, basilisks (Jesus lizards – the ones that run across water), giant blue Morpho butterflies, brilliantly colored dragonflies, a porcupine, and three brilliant green iguanas (Jimmy spotted two of them.)  Among the more interesting sightings were the turquoise-browed and blue-crowned motmots, Muscovy ducks, and green parrots.

Our final stop – and the place we stayed the longest – was Utila, one of the Bay Islands off Honduras’ northern Caribbean coast.  An hourlong ferry ride took us into sparkling turquoise waters and to a charming beach town and diver’s paradise.  Though we didn’t see any of the island’s claim to fame, whale sharks (they apparently have moved on for the year), they were in evidence everyone – on murals, t-shirts, and in the whale shark research station.  We stayed right on the water, where we could watch stunning sunsets over the curve of the bay, and just steps from Utila Dive Centre, where we did our dives.  The diving was fantastic – spectacular reefs, hawksbill turtles, spotted eagle rays, giant Moray eels, schooling queen and French angelfish and grazing stoplight parrotfish.  The diving highlight was a night dive – our guide was Johan, who grew up on the island and has done over three thousand dives on Utila.  He was a spectacular host, showing us tiny mushroom scorpionfish, upside-down jellyfish, cryptic teardrop crabs, giant basket stars, and a giant beaded sea cucumber feeding.  We also saw four Caribbean reef octopi on the dive – Johan found two, and Kelsey and Jimmy each found one.

Life above the surface was also pretty great on Utila: hammocks for lounging and reading, beaches stretching into crystal-clear waters, and fantastic food – it seems like every night we ate somewhere new and were blown away by what $5 could buy, from fresh tuna burgers with French fries to barbecued barracuda to generous portions of taquito-style chicken enchiladas and homemade creamy jalapeño sauce.  For breakfast, our staple was baleadas – fresh flour tortillas filled with scrambled eggs, black beans, cheese, and a touch of sour cream, each about 75 cents.  For $1.50 you could get a super baleada, larger and with crunchy iceberg lettuce and tomatoes.  Nightlife included visiting Treetanic, an amazing, mosaic-like maze of a bar that reminded us of the Magic Garden in Philadelphia, and seeing movies for $2.50 in an adorable 60-seater theater that showed Tom & Jerry cartoons before the feature.  We were sad to leave, and we will definitely be back.

After two twelve-hour days of boat, bus, and shuttle travel, we finally arrived back at the lake on Cinco de Mayo, ready to dive into our last few weeks in Guatemala – and geared up for La Feria, Santa Cruz’s annual city festival.

Our long-anticipated two weeks of travel started with an overnight bus ride from Guatemala City to Flores, in the northern jungle state of Petén.  Despite splurging on the lujo (luxury) bus, it was far from a restful ride – the air conditioning chilled the bus below any reasonable temperature, a Vin Diesel movie was blasted a full volume beginning at 11:00pm, everyone on the bus had to get off at the fruit inspection station, and around midnight a man on the bus began to have seizures – Jimmy and Kamila (a Mayan Medical Aid student traveling with us for the first two days) helped watch over him while we waited for an ambulance to arrive.  The experience was yet another reminder of the chaos that reigns in Guatemala – repeated calls to the supposed nationwide emergency number yielded no answer.  On about the sixth try, someone responded, and from there it still took a good half hour for the paramedics to show up…at which point, rather than immediately taking the extremely disoriented patient to the nearest hospital, they called his son to discuss the best course of action.  (It was eventually decided to take him to the hospital.)

Despite the long night, we arrived in Flores at about 6:00am, trooped off the bus, found a clean, economic hotel, and were back on a shuttle before 7:00am headed for the ruins, heads spinning.

The ruins at Tikal are largely unexcavated.  Unlike Chichen Itzá in Mexico, which we visited two years ago, Tikal is still jungle: huge, towering trees.  When the city was abandoned, trees, bushes, and grasses grew on every available surface, eventually completely covering the massive pyramids and other structures.  Archeologists found them when they began to dig into these giant mounds of earth in an otherwise flat basin, but it has been slow going, and while the Great Plaza and a few other areas have been cleared, restoration is far from complete.  Those temples that have been excavated, however, are awe-inspiring; the tallest, Temple IV, stands 212 feet, and you can climb it via a reinforced wooden staircase.  From the viewing platform, the tops of several other temples jut above the top of the jungle canopy and the eerie growls of the howler monkeys can be heard from the green below.  The most famous temple at Tikal, El Gran Jaguar (the Great Jaguar), rises 144 feet and dominates the Great Plaza.

Tikal was a great place for wildlife watching.  We saw spider monkeys swinging through the trees (two mothers with babies clinging to their backs!), pacas (a pig-sized jungle rodent), and an impressive array of birds – including keel-billed toucans and oscellated turkeys, both of which we managed to capture in photos.

That evening and the next morning, we had the opportunity to explore Flores, the base from which most visitors go to the ruins.  Flores is an island in Lake Petén Itzá, and had a charming, cozy vibe: a small streetlight-and-bench lined riverwalk and several shoreline restaurants clearly catered mostly to tourists, but there was also a strong community feeling.  After dinner, we ate ice cream sundaes on the central square and watched two local basketball teams battle it out.

The next day, Kamila had to catch and early flight back to Guatemala City to fly home.  We had a lazy morning, drinking fantastic coffee at a cute little café and strolling along the water, before we packed up and boarded a four-hour bus to Río Dulce.  Río Dulce is the town we visited back in October; our sailing trip launched from there.  We stayed at the same hotel as before (El Tortugal), a complex of thatched-roof cabins on stilts above the water, and spent a very relaxing two days.

We used the hotel’s free kayaks the next morning to paddle upriver toward Lake Izabal.  On the lakeshore is the Castillo de San Felipe, a castle built originally to defend against pirate attacks from the Caribbean, an hour downstream.  It was later used as a military base and then a prison, and in recent years has been impressively restored.  We wished our nephew, Aiden, could have come with us, as it really was everything a kid into pirates could hope for: turrets, winding staircases, canons, dark passageways into a cavernous dungeon filled with bats, and a moat (with water in it, Keeley!)  The castle is located in a very nicely maintained, grassy park with a roped-off area for swimming the lake waters, which were the perfect temperature.

Friday morning, we packed up and settled in for a six-hour bus ride (and not on a luxury bus, either; it was no chicken bus, but it was definitely without air conditioning) to the Guatemalan, headed for the town of Copán Ruinas, Honduras.  We arrived without incident and even stumbled into the best meal of our trip thus far: Twisted Tanya’s, which after 6:00pm serves a several course dinner to the tune of $20 per person, from 4:00 to 6:00 has a Backpacker’s Special: fresh soup of the day, a generous bowl of homemade pasta with tomato sauce, and a slice of simply amazing carrot cake, all served on a gorgeous open-air terrace, for $6 per person.  We went to bed happy and ready to explore another set of ruins the next morning.

Wednesday morning dawned clear again, though the wind had calmed and the lake was flat as glass. The seven of us piled into a boat and sped across the middle of the lake to Santiago, a town tucked away in a cove in the midst of the three volcanoes – Tolimán and Atitlán rise up above it, San Pedro is just across the way. Santiago is home to Maximón [Mah-shee-moan], the Tzutijil word for the icon we had up until now known as San Simón, from our two visits with Kelsey’s dad back in August. (Tzutujil [Sue-too-heel], spoken by the villages on the southwest edge of the lake, is a member of the same language family as Kaqchikel [Cock-chee-kel], but differs in important enough ways to be considered a distinct language.)

Santiago was definitely geared up for a party. Everyone was out and about on the streets, and even those going about their daily business – buying and selling fruits, vegetables, beans, and (live) poultry – seemed to be dressed in their finest clothes. The men all wear knee-length striped shorts (some with embroidery), button-up shirts, and wide-brimmed cowboy-style hats. Groups of them were hoisting large poles, wrapped in pine boughs, to form arches across the main street in town; the arches were then hung with pineapples, gourds, and meats, as well as other branches and flowers – in preparation for Maximón’s procession that day, and for Jesus’ procession on Friday (in Santiago, Maximón – an amalgam of a Catholic saint and a pagan deity – and Jesus are apparently friends; Maximón stops to visit Jesus on his way to the town hall.)

We managed to find Maximón, who is decidedly more “rustic” looking than his highland counterparts in San Andrés Xecul and Zunil. He is not painted at all, but is made of plain, carved wood. He was dressed up in brilliant colors and laid out so visitors could pay their respects; a colorful plastic plate was on his chest, for collecting offerings. We had come too early for the procession, though, and decided that based on our experiences in Antigua we had probably seen all the basic components already. We hopped on a boat for lunch in San Pedro, then headed back to Santa Cruz. The afternoon was so gorgeously, unusually calm – the Xocomil seemed to have taken a day off – that we spent an hour or so swimming in the lake before dinner and more Settlers (the final two games of the week, with Marshall and Suzanne taking home the bragging rights.) These Settlers battles had the added charm, however, of appeals to Maximón for luck – and blaming Maximón when the dice failed to roll the way one wanted. Over the course of the game, Maximón expanded from use solely as a noun to an adjective (“that is so maximón!”) and even a verb (“ooh, you just got maximoned!”)

Thursday, we headed to the Reserva Natural – the same one visited with Joel in August, where we saw the monkeys and coatis – to try out the ziplines the Passmores had so enthusiastically recommended. We were not disappointed. For $20 per person, you get to ride about 10 lines, drifting or zooming (depending on the length and speed of the particular line) over the treetops and coffee plants, with gorgeous views of the lake (though the lake, at this point, had turned back hazy and the weather was thick and sticky.) The monkeys also put on quite a show for us, impressively swinging from branch to branch and hanging from their tails. (The “impressive” moniker cannot, unfortunately, be put to the butterfly garden, which was beautiful, but in which we saw, literally, two butterflies.)

After some intensive souvenir shopping in Panajachel (fabric, coffee, tiny woven baby booties, a hammock, matching Gallo shirts for the boys) to add to the paintings purchased the day before in Santiago, we headed back for dinner (pizza) and Trivial Pursuit at the Iguana.

Friday morning, after breakfast, we hiked to Jaibalito and to Ven Acá, the pool/restaurant/lounge Kelsey visited with Kay, Joshua, and Nataly while Mark and Jimmy did the Big Hike a few weeks ago. The weather was perfect – warm, with a slight breeze – and the clouds held off long enough for us to swim, eat, lounge, and sample a few delicious drinks (the highlight: mojitos made with hibiscus and purple basil.) We spent our last afternoon hanging out at our house (and trying a pineapple dessert we’ve learned to make as a snack) before heading to an 8:00 farewell dinner at Jacaranda. Since our guests were leaving at 5:30am the next morning, we said goodnight on Friday.

We had a wonderful time with all our guests, and want to thank everyone who visited for being adventurous enough to join us down here – it was amazing to see so many of the people we have been missing. But we are breathing a little sigh of relief to be done with the hosting duties – fifteen guests in less than two months (and only two weeks without guests over that same period) is a pretty big number, and we’re feeling like we’ve earned our just-the-two-of-us adventure – in just a week! – in the Petén jungle and Honduras.

In Guatemala, Holy Week – the week from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday – is a nationwide spring break. Kids don’t have school, and most adults have, at the very least, a four-day weekend beginning Jueves Santo (Holy Thursday). As we have noted in previous blog posts, since the beginning of the Nazareno there have been processional days in Antigua and other cities around Guatemala. However, beginning with the Friday before Palm Sunday, the processions ramp up until there are many each day.

The biggest day is Good Friday, when most towns have their largest processions and parties. In Antigua, at 3:00 in the morning men on black horses gallop through the streets announcing the crucifixion. Special stores open, devoted exclusively to selling the royal purple and white robes and head coverings worn by processors. The whole thing is a strange mixture of true religious devotion and spectacle; as you stand watching the processions, enveloped in clouds of incense and sage, you can buy cotton candy in any color, or even one of those obnoxious foam lizards on a wire Kelsey used to bug her dad for at the fair.

Holy Week is the biggest week for tourists in most of Central America, but in particular in Guatemala. It draws many visitors from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, as usual, but it is also a time that Central Americans travel. Mexicans and Salvadorans come to the lake and Antigua; Guatemalans head south to the beaches of El Salvador. While most of the travelers are ladinos, entire indigenous villages also rent chicken buses for the day and head to the lake or the beach by the dozens.

We had five visitors for Holy Week. The first to arrive, Jodi, was Kelsey’s co-GED and ESL instructor at Congreso, in Philadelphia, the first year we lived there. After waiting literally two hours for her shuttle bus to force its way through the procession-packed streets of Antigua, she arrived in Panajachel on Friday night. We spent a relatively quiet Saturday, then the three of us headed to Antigua on Sunday to pick up Keeley and Jason (Kelsey’s sister and her husband), arriving around noon, and Marshall and Suzanne (Jimmy’s medical school classmate and his wife), arriving late that night.

The processions themselves, while very interesting at first, turned out to be quite repetitive; each procession features the same two large floats, with an additional saint or two on his or her own pedestal thrown into the mix. The alfombras (the sawdust/flower/pine needle carpets) are best observed as they are being constructed, as the procession naturally completely destroys them, and as the processions are followed immediately by a crew of men with brooms and a truck for carting the debris away.

Monday afternoon, after a delicious breakfast in the courtyard of Café Condesa and a trip to the jade museum, we headed back to the lake. Monday night, we dined on empanadas at the Iguana (where all five of our guests were staying), then took a walk to look for fireflies. That evening, a surprisingly strong wind whipped up, not quite like the El Norte of December to February, but stronger than anything we had seen since. By Tuesday morning, it had blown the haze away to reveal crystal-clear volcano views – something we had thought would not happen during Holy Week. We spent most of the day at the house, eating banana pancakes, catching up, and playing a game of Settlers (victor: Marshall.) In the afternoon, Kelsey took the crew up the hill for a visit to Catarina’s workshop (everyone placed a textile order) and a tour of the clinic and the town, then everyone headed back down the hill for dinner, drinks, and a movie (Jimmy managed to cobble together a very respectable theater set-up in our dining room – no small feat, with seven viewers and only a computer screen.)

More soon in a second Holy Week post…maybe later today, internet speed permitting.

Well, our epic spring of hosting has come to a close.  This morning, Keeley (Kelsey’s sister), Jason (her husband), Marshall, Suzanne, and Jodi (friends from Philadelphia) left Santa Cruz at 5:30am on their way to the airport in Guatemala City.  A post on our week with them will follow this one, hopefully later in the week.  For now, we’re backtracking to late March, when we were joined by Kelsey’s aunt, uncle, and two cousins — Kay, Mark, Joshua, and Nataly Passmore — for a weeklong visit.

This was a particularly special visit because both Joshua and Nataly are adopted from Guatemala.  They are now 10 and 8, and this trip marked their first visit back since leaving as babies.  Kay and Mark made arrangements to spend time in Guatemala City and Antigua — where they met with their caseworker, Joshua’s foster mother, and Joshua’s birth mother — before coming to the lake on Wednesday afternoon.

We had a great week.  The Passmores entertained themselves the days they had to work — one day at a weaving class with our friend Catarina, who you may remember from previous blog posts; another at the Natural Reserve seeing monkeys and zooming on ziplines.  The highlight of the week was probably the Sunday morning we spent playing soccer (and basketball, with soccer balls) with a bunch of  local kids.  The girls in particular really reached out to include Nataly in their games of baskbetball and tag, and Joshua had a great time playing soccer with the boys.

After the games (and once we were good and sweaty), we headed down the hill to the Passmores’ rental house, where we hosted six of the boys for lunch.  (The original plan was to host three, but the three boys who had been playing with the others lay on their bellies on the lawn, observing us from afar — Kay didn’t have the heart to let them stay there.)  The guests liked the corn chips and pineapple, but were pretty skeptical of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Most of them never eat bread — it’s strictly tortillas at home — and have likely never tasted peanut butter before.  The boys were amazed at Joshua’s age (he was bigger than all of them, including the 13-year-old) and fascinated by the tour of the rental house.  They also brough along a liter soda bottle full of water and tadpoles, and crab (wrapped in a wet baseball cap), and a very small puppy named Bobby.  Between the animals, the woven porch swings, and the bamboo stick swordfights, the language barrier mattered much less to the kids than we thought it would.

Jimmy and Mark also took a day to do the big loop through all the villages of Santa Cruz — up through Tzununa to Pajomel, Chuitzanchaj, and Laguna Seca, before descending back to Santa Cruz.  Kay, Kelsey, and the kids took the decidedly more relaxing tour, hiking to Jaibalito and spending a couple of hours relaxing by the pool at Ven Aca, a new restaurant/lounge.  In the afternoons, we went swimming in the lake, took walks, and taught Joshua how to play Settlers of Catan — which he picked up impressively quickly, winning a fierce afternoon battle only the second time he played.

On the Passmores’ final night, we hired Lucy — formerly the chef at our favorite restaurant in Santa Cruz — to teach us a cooking class.  We were not disappointed: the menu included roast chicken in a fresh orange juice/achiote/gin sauce; tostadas topped with “mashed black beans” (as Nataly calls them), a cilantro/toasted pepiatoria pesto, avocado, and tomato; a medley of squash (guicoye), sweet corn, and potatoes; pineapple and mango sauteed in butter, molasses, and cinnamon; and accompanying drinks made of fresh lime, sugar, hibiscus (called rosa de jamaica here), and gin.  We’re uncertain we can actually duplicate the more complicated portions of the dinner (Jimmy and Kelsey furiously scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad the whole time, but Lucy’s instructions were full of cryptic responses to questions like “how much of that spice?” — for example, “these herbs are very good friends, just put as much as you want.”  Easy for her to say.)

We were sorry to say goodbye to the Passmores, but as we were ramping up enrollment to full student capacity, it was good to have a few days without visitors to get caught up at work before taking Holy Week off.  (It was also good to have the week off when we are actually at full capacity; Holy Week was crazy enough as vacationers.)  More in the next week on our visits the first week of April, Holy Week processions, visiting Maximon (San Simon’s lakeside iteration), ziplines, monkeys, and more.

We topped off Karen’s visit with a weekend in Antigua and our second trek up Pacaya Volcano.  We had really enjoyed our hike with Jed in August, and hoped to repeat the experience with Kelsey’s mom — hopefully with the addition of flowing lava.  The trip stacked up to the first hike unfavorably in many respects.  We slogged up an ashy service road rather than through an official park entrance onto a clear trail; the views of the volcanoes across the valley below were hazy; we were piled into a chicken bus with a group of 60 rather than onto a shuttle with a group of 15.  However, when we finally came over the crest onto the stretch of black pumice, the view was just as surreal and spectacular — more so, actually, as the top of the volcano was spewing clouds of ash and smoke.  And as the sun set, the haziness cleared and we were treated to a clear view of the towering volcanoes Agua, Acatenango, and Fuego.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any flowing lava, and even more unfortunately, we missed the flow by hours; by the time the Sunday morning groups went hiking, a wide new river had opened up.  When we finally made our way back to Antigua, we were extremely grateful for Karen’s decision to treat us to a much cushier hotel and for the awesome delivered-to-the-room pizza while we watched Batman Begins on TV.

Though we were sorry to say goodbye to Karen, her departure marked a date we were also looking forward to.  We starting counting down to the week of March 8 in the fall — not only because we were going to see our friends Kevin and Erica from Philadelphia, or because it was spring break for Kelsey’s law school colleagues we suspected we’d get to see some of them too (in the end, three: Amy, Eric, and Marsha), but also because it would be a full week of vacation.  While we certainly enjoyed our weeks at home over the holiday, our one week of vacation here — the ill-fated sailing trip — had been something of a disappointment, and certainly was not as full of fun and relaxation as we had hoped.  We had some great times with Joel and Jed in the spring, but they were a bit tainted by the stress of the search for a new clinic, and while we also loved having Karen visit, out days of vacation with her were full of interpreting (Kelsey) and medical school personal statements and scheduling (Jimmy).  So we were thrilled to reach a week of true vacation when Erica and Kevin arrived Sunday, March 8, in Antigua.

It is the time of the Nazareno in Guatemala, full of processions depicting Jesus’s trip, crown of thorns on his head and cross on his back, to the top of Golgotha.  (It seems odd to us that this happens before Palm Sunday, but I think the explanation is practical; there are just too many separate churches in Antigua to squeeze all their processions into Holy Week.)  Before Erica and Kevin’s arrival, we spent Sunday morning wandering around and watching people create Antigua’s famous alfombras — elaborate carpets of colored sawdust and ash, with real flowers integrated into the pattern.

After dinner, we wandered out to the Parque Central, where a procession of purple-robed men and women were carrying pots of incense alongside a huge float of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, proceeding toward the steps of the church, where hundreds of people sat holding lit candles.  The rising smoke and the three steps forward/one step back marching pattern lent the whole parade a surreal, serious air.

Monday, we headed back to the lake, and spent the next four days in Santa Cruz, Panajachel, and San Pedro.  On Tuesday, Amy and Eric arrived from Coban (where our friend Marsha spent two years in the Peace Corps.)  The week flew by, filled with visits to Catarina’s in town to learn about weaving, a tour of the town of Santa Cruz, dinner at the Iguana and our house, marathon games of Settlers of Catan (for those of you who haven’t played, Kevin calls it a cross between Risk and Civilization), an ill-fated adventure on a pontoon boat, discovery of brand-new flavors (“oakanut!”), and a lazy afternoon spent at La Piscina (“The Pool”) in San Pedro, where we emerged with a shockingly low tab after many hours.

Of particular note were Thursday afternoon and evening.  We hiked from the Iguana to Jaibalito, a nearby village, stopping on the way back for Guatemala’s best licuados (fresh fruit smoothies); then we made our way back to our apartment, where Jimmy fired up the lakeside sauna and we alternated between dips in the cool lake and sitting in our own little sweat lodge.  We topped the night off with dinner at Jacaranda, where Chef Lucy prepared us a special meal — priced at less than $10 per person — that included drinks.  We feasted on baked chicken in orange/achiote/pumpkin seed sauce and served on a bed of cilantro sauce, arugula/orange salad, and a dish of roasted squash, peas, and potatoes.  The highlight of the meal, though, was the drink — a refreshing and unique concoction of jamaica (hibiscus flowers boiled in water), gin, cardamom, and lime.

We said goodbye to our guests — including Marsha, who met up with back in Antigua — on Saturday morning, after a Friday night of Veracruz jazz and Italian food.  Antigua is absolutely beautiful right now, given the constant sunshine and the groves of blooming purple jacaranda trees.  And Saturday night, just the two of us, an easy dinner of grilled tuna sandwiches and then vegging out to Forgetting Sarah Marshall was just the thing after such a packed week.

This week, Kelsey is back at clinic while Jimmy spends a week of 6-hour days at Jabel Tinamit, the Spanish school where Karen had such a great experience.  Next week we’ll both be back at the clinic, welcoming both three new students and (on Wednesday) Kelsey’s aunt, uncle, and two cousins.

A week ago, we put Kelsey’s mom on a plane back to the States, and received our first Philadelphia-based visitors — Kevin and Erica — a few hours later.  Later in the week, they were joined by Kelsey’s law school friends, Amy, Eric, and Marsha.  Yesterday, Kevin, Erica, Amy, and Marsha headed back to Pennsylvania, while Eric went to spend his 27th birthday weekend atop Volcan Pacaya and exploring the Copan ruins in Honduras (happy birthday, Eric!); we returned to the lake, and to the inevitable piling-up of mundane chores that a month of visitors brings.

As we warned, updates may be few & far between for the last few months of our time here…this particular one details the beginning of our months of mostly-vacation before we head home.  In a post later this week, once we’ve sorted through photos, we’ll update you on hiking Pacaya with Kelsey’s mother (a distinctly less put-together experience than our first attempt on the volcano, in August, but still worthwhile), and on our adventures with the folks from Philly.  For now, we’re backtracking several weeks to the second half of Karen’s visit.

Karen continued studying Spanish for her second week, commuting by boat to Panajachel, but she spent the evenings in Mayan Medical Aid’s student house, a 10-minute walk from our place.  During her second week, we had drinks and appetizers at the newly-opened Laguna Lodge, next door (it is a decidedly “small plates” place, but the atmosphere, complete with vaulted wooden ceilings and stone fireplace, is lovely), and were treated to pulique — the official dish of Santa Cruz — as concocted by Kelsey’s English students.  Pulique is a chicken stew made with potatoes, carrots, guisquil (a squash with a consistency somewhat like a melon), onions, cilantro, and achiote (Jimmy’s new favorite spice, a flavoring made from a tropical American tree with pink flowers and red fruit.)

Saturday, we took a tour of the lake on a local pontoon boat operated by Lee, an ex-pat who drove the boat down to Guatemala all the way from Texas.  Jose, Karen’s roommate and our new dentist at the clinic (he is completing a practicum through October, a requirement in your final year of dental school here in Guatemala), joined us.  The tour was lovely.  We had flat, glassy water in the morning, and so could enjoy our tour of the sprawling lakeside homes on the opposite shore.  We made stops in Cerro de Oro and Santa Catarina, two villages we had not yet visited, and swam in cool waters punctuated by natural steaming geothermal jets at the aguas calientes (hot springs — literally, “hot waters.”)

Sunday, we made the return to Chichicastenango, the highland market we visited in the fall with our friend Jake.  We hoped for better weather than that particular visit (we were poured on), but it actually sprinkled a bit and so all the stalls were still covered with tarps.  The market is quite a sight.  It is stuffed with the handicrafts tourists can buy everywhere, but is also a bustling hub for locals — they buy material, thread, fruits, vegetables, toothbrushes, t-shirts, and dishes.

At the center of the market is an old church, la Iglesia de Santo Tomas, which dates to the mid-1500s.  It is a fascinating place because it was built on top of an old Mayan sacred site — deliberately, by the Catholic church, in order to discourage practice of the traditional religion.  Inside the church, however, trap doors in the floor have been constructed in order to allow access to the ground below.  The parishioners light candles and pray, not just to Jesus and Mary in the front of the church, but also to their ancestors below.  The church’s crumbling stone steps are covered with people praying, lighting incense, and selling flowers and candles to those entering the church.

We took advantage of Karen’s visit as a way to make our own souvenir purchases.  From Catarina, the local woman who gave us the weaving workshop, we purchased a Santa Cruz huipil (the traditional top garment for Mayan women), which we plan to hang on our wall with a bamboo rod.  We also ordered a table runner and table cloth, which Catarina is still working on.  In Chichi, we picked out fabrics we liked for future use as accent cloths, placemats, and napkins, and also purchased three masks like those we saw displayed in the textile museum in Guatemala City.  The masks, of a cow, monkey, and devil, are related to a traditional Mayan dance.

Our trip to Chichi was also full of animal-related attractions.  Karen was aggressively pursued by a woman who wanted to sell her a turkey, and we saw a man stuff a 100-plus pound hog, alive, into a grain sack, wait for it to stop struggling, and haul it with him onto the chicken bus.  Perhaps the oddest sight, however, were the crates of Ash Wednesday chicks, dyed neon colors (we tried to figure out how, and every theory we came up with seems irrevocably toxic) and sold to children in plastic bags.

On March 1, we made our first return to Xela since things we moved to the lake in September.  Kelsey’s mother, a journalist for the Eugene Register-Guard, did research for several articles while she was here (apparently to  be published in an upcoming Guatemala package of stories and web-based video; we’ll be sure to post the link when it runs.)  The first involved the trek back to Quetzaltenango.  INEPAS, which is the school Jimmy and Joel attended for three weeks in August, is a social justice organization with a variety of projects in the western highlands.  One of these projects is to install computer labs — dozens of them so far — in local public schools.  The computers are donated by a Eugene recycling organization, NextStep, and the labs are set up and maintained through the collaboration of parents, teachers, students, and local government.

Kelsey and Karen visited three labs with Maria Antonieta, the director of INEPAS — one in suburban neighborhood (well, perhaps better-termed semi-urban; suburbs as such don’t really exist in Guatemala except in the capital and Antigua), one in a very rural area, and one for low-income children housed in the public library in the center of Quetzaltenango.

Karen’s second story focused on the Cascade Medical Team, a group of doctors, nurses, and medical support staff who have been coming to Guatemala for years to deliver essential short-term health services.  The group this year was larger than 100.  They work out of a clinic at the Universidad del Valle, in buildings that used to be an army barracks.  Each morning, hundreds of prospective patients line up outside the gates, eager to receive medical care — ob/gyn visits, hernia surgery, fillings and root canals, plastic surgery, eye care — in a setting where they are not discriminated against.  Gaining access to health care is very difficult for indigenous people here due to systemic discrmination and financial barriers.

One bonus of the Team’s presence in Solola, which is just up the hill from Panajachel, was that we were able to refer five patients from Santa Cruz to their services.  Karen focused her reporting on Fidelito, an 11-year-old boy who has suffered from a painful hernia since he was at least 6.  When Fidelito is not in school, he helps his father, a lancha driver, by loading and unloading items.  As you can imagine, this only exacerbates the hernia.  He was very excited about the surgery, and when we checked up on him this past week he was recovering at home — following, according his father, strict doctor’s orders not to lift anything or exert himself in any way while the cut heals.

In other clinic-related news, Jimmy has spearheaded an attempt to deworm the kids in Santa Cruz and the surrounding villages.  Parasitic infections take kids out of school and inhibit cognitive and physical growth, only adding to the problems created by general malnutrition.  Albendazole, a chewable pill, can be taken every 6 months prophylactically, avoiding many of these issues.  However, efforts to deworm the population stalled several years ago when distribution coincided with a change in the weather — and with a spike in respiratory illness.  The then-mayor, an unstable and cutthroat leader, spread the rumor that our nurse practitioner, Guadalupe, was attempting to poison the children with the albendazole, and most parents refused the treatment.

In collaboration with the new mayor, the school, and another non-profit in town, Amigos de Santa Cruz, we are now ready to try again.  Jimmy’s parents have generously offered to fund one administration (the pills are about seven cents each, but that does add up, as we have more than a thousand children in the town and surrounding villages), and we just received a donation of 2,000 pills, so we will be able to complete the deworming this year.  Part of the plan is an educational campaign aimed at both the children and their parents, which was missing from the prior deworming attempt, and we hope that will contribute to a better success rate this time around.

We apologize for the radio silence the last few weeks. We were in San Pedro, land of the poorly maintained computer equipment, two weeks ago, and this past week, Kelsey went to the capital and back to pick her mother up while Jimmy attended a wedding here in Santa Cruz. As a result, we’ve been remiss in updates…and we can’t really promise we will be better for the next couple of months.

To backtrack, the week before we went to San Pedro we were without power for five days. While this made for some lovely evenings reading by candlelight, it also meant we had to throw out everything in the refrigerator and forego showering (though our water is heated by gas, it is pumped by electricity.) The reason for the power outage was a particularly vicious days-long El Norte, the wind that sweeps in from the north and is funneled through the volcano valley of Lake Atitlán. It rips corrugated metal roofs off houses, fells banana trees and bamboo, and – in this case – blew the transformer that connects our bay of Paxanax to the main power supply in Santa Cruz in a spectacular midnight fireworks display.

So Saturday morning (February 7^th) we hopped on a boat and headed to San Pedro, excited to finally hike the towering volcano we see out our window each morning. San Pedro is a bit of a party town, and as a result it’s pretty grungy – but it has some nice restaurants and pretty gardens. We stayed at a place worth mentioning only because of the cost – 25 quetzales (or about $3) per person per night. Joining us on this adventure were our friend Becky, a former Mayan Medical Aid student/volunteer now spending three months across the lake at Hospitalito in Santiago, and Maribeth, a current Mayan Medical Aid student who just completed her nursing degree and lives about a mile from our old apartment in Philadelphia.

The day before the hike was lovely. We ate lunch at Zoola, an Israeli restaurant with delicious food and licuados (liquefied fruit drinks somewhere between juices and smoothies.) Zoola serves food in a large, airy palapa – you sit on the ground by low tables, lounging on pillows, while you wait (and wait…the food was good, but not fast) for your food to be ready. After lunch, we booked our hike for the next day, then spent the rest of the afternoon at the San Pedro pool, a very ordinary chlorinated turquoise box that hit the spot perfectly. After early dinner at the Buddha, a San Pedro staple we discovered on our first visit to the lake with Kelsey’s dad, we headed home to get some sleep before dragging ourselves out of bed at the crack of dawn.

The hike was beautiful, though quite strenuous. We wound up out of town into the San Pedro national park, through cornfields and coffee groves, before emerging on a hillside to spectacular views of the lake in the morning sunlight. We then headed into deeper woods, our guide telling us there would be no more views until we summitted. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see those views in person, as Kelsey had a bit of scary exercise-induced asthma (we think) and we had to turn around just 30 minutes shy of the summit. (Our climbing companions later told us that those 30 minutes felt like hours, so we think turning back was the right decision given Kelsey’s breathing issues.) The blow of turning around so close to the top was softened a bit by a yummy lunch and the return of electricity when we made our way back to Santa Cruz.

Kelsey’s mom arrived on Valentine’s Day, and as mentioned, Kelsey made the trek all the way to Guatemala City to pick her up. While this made for a long day’s journey, it had the benefit of some quality catching-up time in the van. Karen’s trip was uneventful, just long. She highly recommends bringing a blow-up swimming pool air mattress for napping during early-morning layovers when you fly the red-eye. We spent Sunday eating banana pancakes for breakfast, swimming off our dock, hiking up to and around town, having late-afternoon drinks and quesadillas at our new favorite spot in town, Jacaranda, and finally eating dinner and playing rummy at our apartment (which is still, by the way, the lower/larger apartment – we’re not sure our landlord is ever actually going to make us move, and we’re not complaining.)

We also had two weddings this last weekend. The first, for people we had only met once, was a Mayan marriage ceremony for an Israeli couple. The guest list was short, but we had a lovely time feasting on pita, hummus, and baba ghanouj while asking the Mayan shaman about Kaqchikel traditions. Saturday, while Kelsey went to the capital, Jimmy attended the wedding ceremony for Paulina, one of our coworkers at the clinic (who actually no longer works there) and Pedro, Jimmy’s former Spanish instructor. The entire group met at Paulina’s house to process with the bride and groom to the church, then proceeded, after the ceremony, to the groom’s house for the reception.

Monday morning Karen headed off to language school in Panajachel, and we settled in for a week with no students. (Note to former students who may be reading this blog – it’s not that we don’t love you, but it sure is quieter without you here!) This meant time for some extras, like celebrating Martita’s birthday Wednesday during lunch, and finally sitting down with our two favorite kids here, José Andrés and Jorge, to play with the Play-Doh Fun Factory Jimmy’s parents sent down as a gift.

Karen’s language school experience has been great so far.  She really enjoyed her time with her instructor, and we are both impressed with her vocabulary after one week of study.  She is learning a lot of conversational building blocks and is enthusiastically willing to try her Spanish out on those she meets.  That’s not to say that she isn’t feel frustrated — trying to cram the basics of a completely new language into two or three weeks of study is an inherently infuriating task sometimes.  But she is studying hard, drilling herself on flashcards, and it was fun to practice a bit over dinner last night.

Karen’s homestay was something of a mixed bag — in addition to some hard-to-adjust to differences like getting water for flushing the toilet from a big container of water in the courtyard, the family had a sick infant, and the parents and son were in the baby’s room (which they kept incredibly warm by heating various herbs) basically all the time.  This meant Karen was on her own, in a room without windows or adequate reading light, after about 8:30pm each night.  There were upsides to the homestay — some delicious meals of beans, fresh tortillas, and ripe local avocados (along with some strange ones, like runny cream of wheat topped with cocoa puffs and condensed milk!), and she was able to attend a festival at the six-year-old’s school honoring the indigenous people of Guatemala, where all the children dressed up in gorgeous traditional costumes.  However, in the end she decided to continue her language study as a commuter student, which we’re happy about — it seemed very strange to have her so close, and yet not see her all week.  She will be staying all nights this week at the student house in Santa Cruz, rooming with our new dentist, Jose, and another long-term volunteer, Stephanie.

(The host father is absent from this photo — pictured are the mother, Aura, the 6-year-old son, Juan Carlitos, and the baby, Merilyn, along with Aura’s sister, who kindly took Karen out for dancing and margaritas her last night in Panajachel.  She was so excited to stay up past 9:00pm!)

One unsettling part of Karen’s experience with the family was the fact that they had a 14-year-old indigenous maid who washed their clothes and cleaned.  She works half-time, attending school in the afternoons, and probably provides much-needed additional income for her family, but it was still a jarring reminder of the sharp division between the social classes here.  This division is all the more upsetting because it is based on ethnic constructions — Guatemala is 60% indigenous on paper, but nearly all ladinos have a mixture of European and indigenous blood.  In a very real sense, all Guatemalans are Mayan — but there are very real walls between the traditional Mayan communities and the Mayans that have assimilated.

(In this picture are Angelica, the girl who works as a maid in Karen’s host family’s house, as well as one of Juan Carlitos’ cousins.)

Now, with respect to our failure to promise to be better about blog updates: Karen’s arrival marked the beginning of Vacation Season for us. Over our last thirteen weeks in Guatemala, we will be taking five weeks’ worth of vacation, both to host guests and to do some of our own adventuring in the Petén jungle of Guatemala and Honduras. In fact, our guest list keeps getting longer – Jodi is now joining us for Holy Week, and Eric is coming for Penn’s spring break. That brings our total guest count for the year to 20 (unfortunately, our friend Katrina had to cancel her trip), with 5 visiting the week of March 9, 4 the week of March 25, and 7 the week of April 6. We’ll update when we can, but the days of regular weekly posts are probably in the past.