So, where were we?
I have moved schools and moved families. I cannot say enough good things about my new school, Celas Maya. I wish I had been here three weeks ago, but then I wouldn't have met Erin. And if I had been happy at my old school, I never would have known that Celas or Pop Wuj, my next school, existed. So all in all, I have no complaints. But in a word, this school is exactly what I wanted. It is big, but I am on a first name basis with the staff. It is gorgeous and pleasant and homey. It has an internet cafe on site, a tour company on site, a hostel on site, and a volunteer coordinator on site. I have been impressed again and again by the professionalism of the staff and the teachers, who all have degrees in teaching Spanish as a Second Language. We filled out our weekly evaluations today and they asked us to rate every aspect of our experience with the teachers, staff, homestays, properties and Xela, including "Do you feel safe at the school and in the city?"
My homestay is the polar opposite of my first family. I am living with a single woman who has a darling granddaughter and a male relative that lives in the house during the week, because he can't find work in the rural area he lives in and must work in Xela. My room is small but tidy and I have a bedside table and can turn out the overhead light from bed. It's amazing the things I get excited about now. I have a twin bed, which was hard to get used to, but I will only be sleeping in it another few weeks. I also live with a Chihuahua named Boom Boom. Boom Boom pees in the shower, which grosses me out a little bit. But I think that my housemom isn't able to walk him at night because it isn't very safe. Mostly the pee is washed down the drain but sometimes she forgets, and I find it in the morning. Our house is located across the street from the school. So I leave for my 8 o'clock class at 8 o'clock. We live three blocks from Parque Central, which is a perfect location but can get a little loud at night. We don't have near as much interaction as in my first homestay. If I would have let her, A. would have moved into my room with me. It was good to feel like I was part of their family, but I also felt a little smothered, and I always felt rude when I shut my door. The new homestay feels like a hostel in the off season, where the owner has the time to take meals with you. I am happy with it. But the whole concept of homestays in general can be off putting. It is very strange to be an adult guest in a stranger's home and have no control over when you eat, what you eat, if you want a cup of coffee, etc. I really want to come back to Xela to study and work in the future, but I think I will rent an apartment next time. I feel like once you've had the homestay experience there really isn't a good reason to do it again.
Oh! The best part about the new school is Tom. Tom is my Robin. Allow me to explain. In Antigua, MRM lived in a homestay with another student, Robin. Robin was a Southern grandmother on an 3 month layover in Antigua before moving to Honduras for the next three years. We fell in love with her. She was so sweet and so earnest and so inviting and welcoming. And I was sad that I hadn't met my own Robin here in Xela. But my sadness evaporated this week when I met Tom, who is probably in his late 50s and has this wonderful bushy moustache and messy hair and this thick Southern accent. He is lovely. He talks very loudy and is so excited about EVERYTHING and loves to practice his Spanish and refers to everything about his time here as "ex-cel-ahn-te". He went to the womens prison with us today and was asking one of the women if he could buy some earrings and the ladies thought he wanted the earrings for himself and got the biggest kick out of him. I am really happy that in a universe as enormous as the one we live in, Tom and I happened on the same school in the highlands this summer. He really is fantastic.
So, today was a normal class day until break, at which point some of us went to the local womens' detention center for the rest of the morning. We donated money this week to buy them things like toilet paper and soap and sanitary napkins, none of which are supplied by the government. We arrived there and I thought I had never seen a more depressing "office." I am not a huge fan of detention centers, especially in developing countries. The front office was painted this suffocating teal color and it was lit by one naked light bulb and a single flickering fluorescent tube. Both of which unnerved me immediately. There was a desk and a metal filing cabinet and a small TV in the corner playing a squiggly Adam Sandler movie. We had to line up and have our right forearm stamped twice and then we were patted down, a lot, and then allowed to enter into the area where the women live. There were 40 women being detained, for everything from shoplifting to homicide. They remain there while their investigations are ongoing. This can last months, or years. At which point they are either freed, or sent to the maximum security institution in Guat City. They are allowed to have their children there with them if they are babies, but all of the women I talked to had anywhere from 3 to 9 kids that were being raised by relatives. They live in two dorm rooms, and they are locked in those rooms from 6pm to 6am. There is one toilet with no seat and no toilet paper and no sink to wash oneself. The women take classes in English and on the computer when there is someone to teach them. There is a clinic on site that featured one bed, no sheets, and one glass fronted cabinet with no medicines or supplies of any kind in it. I asked them what they do when they get sick, and where do the medicines come from and they said, They don't. The women make small handicrafts and that is their sole source of income. I bought a pair of earrings and a cloth bracelet. After our tour, we just split up and talked to the women and learned their stories. I talked to about 8 women and basically just asked the same 6 questions that I could think of. I heard several Mayan languages for the first time while there, which was really neat. When a woman has misbehaved in some way, she is put in solitary, and the solitary cell put the fear of God in me. The whole experience was interesting and not a little depressing. No one can afford a private attorney. They are there with no idea how long their investigations and trials will take. Many of them had scars from what I imagine was some form of partner abuse, and most of them were illiterate. Our money bought each woman one roll of toilet paper, a toothbrush, a bar of soap and 4 sanitary napkins.
After lunch today my friend Olivia and I headed to the orphanage to see about volunteering. I was expecting a tour, which we got. And then we were put in a room with 12 unsupervised kids, aged 1 to about 4. We spent several hours there, and decided to work there 3 afternoons a week while we are both students here. It was fun and a little harrowing. Most of the kids in the orphanage still have families, but their families are so unsafe that (in a country that isn't known for child advocacy) they are being raised in state custody for their own protection. It was hard for me to imagine a more traumatic environment than the orphanage itself. The youngest child was less than a year old, and he is a true orphan. The older children were in their teens. Olivia and I spent most of our time with the "babies" and I think maybe the hardest thing I have ever done is put the little one in his crib before I left, watched him scream and cry at our departure, and leave the room, knowing that there wasn't anyone to stay and look after them all once we had left. The is a staff of maybe 5 people, who are wonderful, but they are spread so thin and have so much work, that the kids are on their own for a good portion of the time. There was a girl there, I never learned her name, who was a new addition. I don't think I have seen, before now, a child that I would classify as clinically depressed. But she seemed just numb with grief. There was another little boy there who is also a true orphan, who has spent his whole life there, and it just boggles my mind that people grow up in these places. I feel like I want to say a whole lot more about the experience, which was so incredibly exhausting but simultaneously rewarding, but I don't know how to communicate it. I am excited about getting to know these kids better, and at the same time I never want to see them again, because they make my heart ache.
Last night was my graduation dinner at my old school. It was really special, and I wasn't expecting that. It was wonderful to see Joaquin again (who has promised to go see Eclipse with me when it comes out) and be with Erin for one last night, but it ultimately reaffirmed for me that I have made the right decision in leaving the school. I met two other students there who I think will become friends. One is also planning on becoming a midwife and the other is a sexual assault crisis counselor, like me, and is really interested in issues of womens advocacy and reproductive justice. I also met a pediatrician last night and we had a really good talk about maternal health and international practice etc., etc. The night ended with one last evening at the school playing drinking games with the guys and Erin. I don't think it is possible to find guys who are more immature than the ones at my old school. And alcohol only makes them that much more childish. I enjoyed Erin's company tremendously, but was so happy to finally call a taxi and escape to the boring comfort of my new homestay and my bedside table and my books.
Tomorrow, Olivia and I have decided to go to the beach for the weekend. I think another student, Susannah, is coming with us. Susannah is in Boston University´s (my almost alma mater) Master's of Public Health program, and is down here doing an internship working with giardia, which is a nasty little parasite. Also joining us on the beach is Olivia's roommate, Stefan. The plan for the weekend is to do as little as possible, and to do it from a hammock, with a drink in hand. It is baby turtle releasing season, so we are going to try to do that. And we have been told that there is a lovely sunrise tour of the lagoons by boat that is worth getting up in the dark for.
Hope this finds you all well! I will be in touch next week. XOXOXO
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
From Xela with Love & Laziness
If it didn't take 60 seconds for this page to load, count your blessings. There is no bandwidth here today and it is infuriating.
Sorry for my absence. I am beyond exhausted. Have changed schools. Love my new school, but have been really emotional lately nonetheless.
There was a beach trip this weekend but it doesn't look like it will pan out because only 3 people have signed up for it.
So, I have moved and am safe and not sick and enjoying my school and mostly enjoying Xela and the whole concept of a homestay is awkward, even in the best of situations. More later and soon, I promise.
Hope you are all well. XOXO
Sorry for my absence. I am beyond exhausted. Have changed schools. Love my new school, but have been really emotional lately nonetheless.
There was a beach trip this weekend but it doesn't look like it will pan out because only 3 people have signed up for it.
So, I have moved and am safe and not sick and enjoying my school and mostly enjoying Xela and the whole concept of a homestay is awkward, even in the best of situations. More later and soon, I promise.
Hope you are all well. XOXO
Friday, June 4, 2010
Weekend Rambling
I'm at the internet cafe around the corner from my house, and it is possible that the radio is playing a Spanish pop version of U2's "Running to Stand Still" and if that is the case, it makes today one of the greatest days ever.
I apologize if I wasn't clear in my last post about why I am transferring schools. As you all know, the homestay situation was not ideal. It really is luck of the draw here. One of the students at our school is living with a family who has a private, separate apartment with two bedrooms and a living room and dining room and that is where he lives. I am the only student in my school to have gotten as sick as I did, as well as the only student who is living with a family as poor as mine is, ie. no way to safely prepare and store food. Thus, I was eating out for every meal. Besides being expensive and lonely and annoying, it was also a slap in the face to my family, whose hospitality is their livelihood. I discussed the situation with anyone who would listen, and was encouraged to change families, but that felt incredibly uncomfortable to me. I adore them. They are the nicest people on the planet, but I couldn't bear the thought of not being able to eat at home for the next 11 weeks. Cooking for myself would have been fine, but that would have been even more of an insult.
And because I didn't want to insult them, or threaten their livelihood in any way by complaining to the school and asking to change families, I had decided to leave Xela altogether, and pursue studies at the Lake. And then I was strongly requested not to do that for safety reasons. And so that is where I found myself last weekend in Antigua. While I was there, feeling I had no choice but to leave Xela, and not wanting to move to the place I had been asked not to, I began to look for a school in Antigua. Found one, paid a deposit, and got on the bus to Xela thinking I was moving in 2 weeks.
You all know what happened at that point. I realized that I didn't want to leave Xela. That I had unfinished business here. And so I spent last week touring new schools and interviewing students and trying to find a good fit for me. I ended up finding two schools, more on the second one to come. The school I am transferring to on Sunday is much larger than my current school. It is located in a gorgeously restored Colonial house and the classes are held around the tropical garden in the center of it. It looks like the school I had pictured in my mind so many months ago.
So beginning Monday, I will be taking classes in a beautiful garden, sipping fair trade Guatemalan coffee. But it was more than the coffee and the garden that drew me in. The school operates an internet cafe that students have access to, as well as two libraries on campus and numerous quiet and pretty places to study. I have done very little studying so far, and longed for a quiet and comfortable spot I could go that didn't cost money. There are plenty of cafes here, but there was nowhere to study at my current school, and the desk and chair and lamp that was supposedly guaranteed in my homestay never materialized. At the new school, you take a survey each week about your teacher and your homestay family, which I appreciate. In addition, their libraries were incredible, and included a copy of the abridged OED, and I will go ahead and admit that that went a long way in helping me make a decision. The second school I found had "Amores Perros" in their library and is located across the street from a pupuseria and that made me really happy as well.
While I am excited to move, it was an incredibly bittersweet final day of class. I have been on the verge of tears all week at the thought of losing Joaquin as my teacher. You meet some people and know immediately that there is something different about them, and they become instantly dear to you, and that is how I felt about Joaquin. He felt like a sibling to me almost immediately. We have had so much fun together these past two weeks. We work really hard and my brain is exhausted at the end of each day, but we have a blast as well. Today we sang ABBA and Queen most of the day and took our lessons on the road and went in search of americanos and empanadas and parfaits. And because I actually studied for this week's exam, there was much less red pen all over it today. Yay. But for the past three days, I have felt on the verge of tears constantly. I teared up when I told my family I was leaving, and teared up when I told Joaquin I was leaving, and almost teared up again today when our final lesson ended. But I must keep moving forward. And I believe I have made the right decision for me, no matter how dear these people have become to me these past three weeks.
Tomorrow night I am taking my family and Joaquin out to dinner by way of thanks. Eating out is something that people so very rarely do here. So it is something of a big deal. I will try to get pictures uploaded sometime in the near future.
In other news, it is raining here. Because Mother Nature must have thought, "You know what Guatemala really needs right now? More torrential rain." On our way home from the coffee shop, Erin and I were walking through the local river, also know as our street. I don't even want to think about what is in the water that I slosh through each day.
Tomorrow the big agenda is to head up to Zone 3 for an ATM for me, a bus ticket out of here for Erin, and La Democracia, which is a huge 8 city block outdoor and indoor market that sells everything from fresh Mayan produce to dancing goats. Well, maybe not goats. But it is huge and bustling and fun. We are also going to swing by one of the used bookstores in town, to look for a grammar book for me, because it took me way too long yesterday to figure out the difference between direct and indirect objects in Spanish, and which one precedes a verb and which one precedes an adverb. This is the same bookstore that keeps loading me up with kombucha. The guy who brews it was so happy to have found a "true" kombucha lover in me that he gives me several bottles for free every time I stop by to return my empty bottles.
This morning, one of those bottles fell off my table and sprayed the entire room in kombucha, which smells like apple cider vinegar. I was really upset about it until I came home for lunch today and almost passed out from the smell. My house mother was frying fish, only it smelled the same way animals do that have died on the beach and are half way dried out. I don't know what kind of fish it was, but it was really bony. And I have an irrational fear of choking on fish bones. So lunch was an exercise in meditative eating in which I tried not to have a panic attack at the thought of dying in Xela from a fish skeleton. Following lunch was a conversation with A.'s father. He loves talking to me and gets really animated and the only thing I have really understood out of his mouth is that he thinks I need to drink more whiskey. I haven't had any whiskey at all in this county, and that is my problem, according to him. In today's conversation I recognized the words for "how many?" "baby" and "bones" and I thought he was asking how many bones humans have at birth vs. adulthood. But he kept saying, "no, no, pequeño" and holding his fingers up with an inch width between them. So I looked up the word for fetus and that still wasn't what he was after. I never did figure it out, but this went on for a while with him gesturing and me alternately nodding and looking very confused.
Very often I feel like the only people I will ever understand in Spanish are the teachers who talk to me so slowly and who are so animated. I know my family slows down their speech for me, but I still am having such a hard time understanding them. And speaking of not understanding people, Joaquin and I have had some hilarious misunderstandings, the worst of which happened today. He asked me what I had for breakfast and then I asked him what he had and he said he had two chicken sandwiches and I asked him why not eggs or something more breakfast-y and he said that eggs are more often eaten for dinner here. So I asked him how he fixes them, and as he was telling me, I thought they sounded really delicious, and so I tried to communicate that, except what I said translates colloquially to "I want your balls." He was laughing so hard he could barely breathe and kept saying, "No, chica, no you don't." It was rather embarrassing.
Last week he had said to me "You want to play hymen?" and my eyes got really big and I said, "COMO?!" He put both hands around his neck by way of an answer and then it clicked, Hangman. Today we were talking about the States and then Las Vegas and he kept talking about a "game over" which I couldn't understand in the context of our conversation until I realized he meant a hangover.
My goodness, this has been a rambling post. Sorry about that. Hope all of you are enjoying a lovely Friday night. I must get home now. I have a date with Harry Potter.
I apologize if I wasn't clear in my last post about why I am transferring schools. As you all know, the homestay situation was not ideal. It really is luck of the draw here. One of the students at our school is living with a family who has a private, separate apartment with two bedrooms and a living room and dining room and that is where he lives. I am the only student in my school to have gotten as sick as I did, as well as the only student who is living with a family as poor as mine is, ie. no way to safely prepare and store food. Thus, I was eating out for every meal. Besides being expensive and lonely and annoying, it was also a slap in the face to my family, whose hospitality is their livelihood. I discussed the situation with anyone who would listen, and was encouraged to change families, but that felt incredibly uncomfortable to me. I adore them. They are the nicest people on the planet, but I couldn't bear the thought of not being able to eat at home for the next 11 weeks. Cooking for myself would have been fine, but that would have been even more of an insult.
And because I didn't want to insult them, or threaten their livelihood in any way by complaining to the school and asking to change families, I had decided to leave Xela altogether, and pursue studies at the Lake. And then I was strongly requested not to do that for safety reasons. And so that is where I found myself last weekend in Antigua. While I was there, feeling I had no choice but to leave Xela, and not wanting to move to the place I had been asked not to, I began to look for a school in Antigua. Found one, paid a deposit, and got on the bus to Xela thinking I was moving in 2 weeks.
You all know what happened at that point. I realized that I didn't want to leave Xela. That I had unfinished business here. And so I spent last week touring new schools and interviewing students and trying to find a good fit for me. I ended up finding two schools, more on the second one to come. The school I am transferring to on Sunday is much larger than my current school. It is located in a gorgeously restored Colonial house and the classes are held around the tropical garden in the center of it. It looks like the school I had pictured in my mind so many months ago.
So beginning Monday, I will be taking classes in a beautiful garden, sipping fair trade Guatemalan coffee. But it was more than the coffee and the garden that drew me in. The school operates an internet cafe that students have access to, as well as two libraries on campus and numerous quiet and pretty places to study. I have done very little studying so far, and longed for a quiet and comfortable spot I could go that didn't cost money. There are plenty of cafes here, but there was nowhere to study at my current school, and the desk and chair and lamp that was supposedly guaranteed in my homestay never materialized. At the new school, you take a survey each week about your teacher and your homestay family, which I appreciate. In addition, their libraries were incredible, and included a copy of the abridged OED, and I will go ahead and admit that that went a long way in helping me make a decision. The second school I found had "Amores Perros" in their library and is located across the street from a pupuseria and that made me really happy as well.
While I am excited to move, it was an incredibly bittersweet final day of class. I have been on the verge of tears all week at the thought of losing Joaquin as my teacher. You meet some people and know immediately that there is something different about them, and they become instantly dear to you, and that is how I felt about Joaquin. He felt like a sibling to me almost immediately. We have had so much fun together these past two weeks. We work really hard and my brain is exhausted at the end of each day, but we have a blast as well. Today we sang ABBA and Queen most of the day and took our lessons on the road and went in search of americanos and empanadas and parfaits. And because I actually studied for this week's exam, there was much less red pen all over it today. Yay. But for the past three days, I have felt on the verge of tears constantly. I teared up when I told my family I was leaving, and teared up when I told Joaquin I was leaving, and almost teared up again today when our final lesson ended. But I must keep moving forward. And I believe I have made the right decision for me, no matter how dear these people have become to me these past three weeks.
Tomorrow night I am taking my family and Joaquin out to dinner by way of thanks. Eating out is something that people so very rarely do here. So it is something of a big deal. I will try to get pictures uploaded sometime in the near future.
In other news, it is raining here. Because Mother Nature must have thought, "You know what Guatemala really needs right now? More torrential rain." On our way home from the coffee shop, Erin and I were walking through the local river, also know as our street. I don't even want to think about what is in the water that I slosh through each day.
Tomorrow the big agenda is to head up to Zone 3 for an ATM for me, a bus ticket out of here for Erin, and La Democracia, which is a huge 8 city block outdoor and indoor market that sells everything from fresh Mayan produce to dancing goats. Well, maybe not goats. But it is huge and bustling and fun. We are also going to swing by one of the used bookstores in town, to look for a grammar book for me, because it took me way too long yesterday to figure out the difference between direct and indirect objects in Spanish, and which one precedes a verb and which one precedes an adverb. This is the same bookstore that keeps loading me up with kombucha. The guy who brews it was so happy to have found a "true" kombucha lover in me that he gives me several bottles for free every time I stop by to return my empty bottles.
This morning, one of those bottles fell off my table and sprayed the entire room in kombucha, which smells like apple cider vinegar. I was really upset about it until I came home for lunch today and almost passed out from the smell. My house mother was frying fish, only it smelled the same way animals do that have died on the beach and are half way dried out. I don't know what kind of fish it was, but it was really bony. And I have an irrational fear of choking on fish bones. So lunch was an exercise in meditative eating in which I tried not to have a panic attack at the thought of dying in Xela from a fish skeleton. Following lunch was a conversation with A.'s father. He loves talking to me and gets really animated and the only thing I have really understood out of his mouth is that he thinks I need to drink more whiskey. I haven't had any whiskey at all in this county, and that is my problem, according to him. In today's conversation I recognized the words for "how many?" "baby" and "bones" and I thought he was asking how many bones humans have at birth vs. adulthood. But he kept saying, "no, no, pequeño" and holding his fingers up with an inch width between them. So I looked up the word for fetus and that still wasn't what he was after. I never did figure it out, but this went on for a while with him gesturing and me alternately nodding and looking very confused.
Very often I feel like the only people I will ever understand in Spanish are the teachers who talk to me so slowly and who are so animated. I know my family slows down their speech for me, but I still am having such a hard time understanding them. And speaking of not understanding people, Joaquin and I have had some hilarious misunderstandings, the worst of which happened today. He asked me what I had for breakfast and then I asked him what he had and he said he had two chicken sandwiches and I asked him why not eggs or something more breakfast-y and he said that eggs are more often eaten for dinner here. So I asked him how he fixes them, and as he was telling me, I thought they sounded really delicious, and so I tried to communicate that, except what I said translates colloquially to "I want your balls." He was laughing so hard he could barely breathe and kept saying, "No, chica, no you don't." It was rather embarrassing.
Last week he had said to me "You want to play hymen?" and my eyes got really big and I said, "COMO?!" He put both hands around his neck by way of an answer and then it clicked, Hangman. Today we were talking about the States and then Las Vegas and he kept talking about a "game over" which I couldn't understand in the context of our conversation until I realized he meant a hangover.
My goodness, this has been a rambling post. Sorry about that. Hope all of you are enjoying a lovely Friday night. I must get home now. I have a date with Harry Potter.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
This is getting old
For the second time this year, I have been alerted by World Vision that one of my sponsor children´s communities might have been affected by a recent act of God.
Would appreciate prayers for Lucia and her family and her home and her community as I wait for more news.
Gracias!
Would appreciate prayers for Lucia and her family and her home and her community as I wait for more news.
Gracias!
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
After Agatha
So. I have been back in Xela for 2 days. And getting home was nothing short of miraculous.
All day Sunday and Monday, I blew up my tour company´s mobile, asking for updated road conditions. I was told everything was fine, and the shuttles were still running, but after hearing about Thy´s boyfriend Ben and the troubles he had getting into Guatemala from El Salvador, I decided to push back my departure by a day. I called them again several times on Monday and was assured that the shuttle that left Xela at 8am had made it, with delays.
I was picked up at 3pm from my hostel and as we pulled out I asked the driver how many people were scheduled for the way home and he said, ¨Solamente tu¨(only you) except I heard ¨Solamente two¨and kept waiting for us to stop for the final passenger. A little slow on the uptake, I am.
It was an absolutely gorgeous day, and once I realized I had scored private transport back to Xela, I stretched out, found The Beatles on my iPod, opened the window and enjoyed the countryside. It didn´t take long to begin to see the effects of Agatha, but for the most part it was a smooth ride in the beginning (isn´t it always?). We were detoured in Chimaltenango, though. All the traffic was diverted down what were basically alleys, but I never saw the damage that necessitated the detour.
After we were out of Chimaltenango, the road opened up to mile after mile of fertile field. The sun was still out and the air felt post-rain clean and at this point it was a very pleasant journey. However, as we began to climb into the highlands, there was more and more evidence that Agatha had raged over western Guatemala. Prior to this summer, I had never had reason to think about the concept of a river of mud, or even a mudslide at all. But the road from Antigua to Xela was absolutely devastated in many places.
From a purely clinical perspective, it was fascinating. Rivers. Of mud. With huge trees. And rocks. Huge rocks. There were places were the road had buckled or collapsed, including bridges. Including bridges we crossed. That was scary. There were houses, actual ¨houses¨and shanty type dwellings, where the mud rivers had just plowed over. There were uprooted trees that had been jammed, branches down, into the earth, so their roots were towering above us, looking like enormous spiders on their backs.
The mud wiped out entire settlements and towns. We passed people wandering around what was once their home, looking for anything of value in the detritus. There was so much trash, too. Tons and tons and tons of trash, accumulated, and then dumped in a great heap with trees and rocks and former houses.
It takes four hours to get home. Nearly four hours of witnessing devastated region after devastated region. I kept thinking, ¨that was someone´s home¨,¨that was someone´s livelihood,¨ ¨there´s no FEMA here.¨ There is really no infrastructure at all. And with that in mind, it is amazing that the road was passable at all, only 48 hours after landfall.
It is true that what was once a four lane highway had been reduced to a single lane in many places. And we slalomed that one lane highway the whole way home. And there were places where we drove uphill through a shallow mud river. And places where we drove through a newly carved out mud mountain that had previously blocked the entire highway. And places where two days earlier there had been mountain, mountain that was now displaced all the heck over the place. But what I found more fascinating than the new landscape, and the miles of destruction, was that we were able to get through at all. Because in four hours there wasn´t a single work crew. Instead, there was a dude here with a shovel. And a few miles later, a few people with a shovel and maybe a wheelbarrow. And that´s how it was the whole way home. One person, maybe two, rarely three, slowly, oh so slowly, but so deliberately tackling this enormous mess.
Like I said earlier, when I left Nashville, Nashville looked worse than it has in 100 years. And in many ways, Nashville was nothing to what I saw here. And that we got through, thanks to the tireless work of ordinary people with few tools, still blows me away.
The higher you climb into the highlands, the greener the landscape. You feel like you´re in Avatar, it is that green. Almost fluorescent. And it gets really foggy, too. You´re driving straight through clouds in many places. To me, this is incredibly beautiful. But as we rose higher, and the landscape looked so different from what it had looked like just days before, I felt like I was riding around on the surface of the moon. In so many ways it was barely recognizable.
I listened to my iPod the entire trip, and had turned on Shuffle. At one point, just when the mist was picking up, the Rolling Stones´ ¨Gimme Shelter¨ came on, and it was one of those very clear, pure moments when I realized that for the rest of my life, when I hear that song, I´ll be carried back to Guatemala and the experience of driving home to Xela and feeling, for the first time, like it actually was home.
And that is the very curious thing that happened on this trip. I had spent the whole weekend in Antigua in a mental funk. As you all know, Xela hasn´t exactly been a four star layover, and I had put many many hours into devising a way out of the mess, and had decided (and felt really good about it, too) to cut my losses, move to the Lake in two weeks, and continue my studies there. Then, arriving in Antigua, I received an email from MRM´s mom, who is not only from Guatemala but has traveled throughout the country a good deal, asking me not to move to the Lake alone. Suddenly, I was facing 11 weeks in a country and no idea how to spend it. I couldn´t stay in Xela, because I had to leave my homestay. At the time it felt less awkward to leave Xela entirely than to simply leave the homestay. I couldn´t go to the Lake, because I had been asked very kindly not to, and the asking was done with my safety in mind. I couldn´t come to Antigua because that wasn´t the original plan, dammit. So, on the inside, and maybe on the outside to those who know me well, I was really really dejected all weekend. I felt cornered, and I felt like I had done it to myself. It´s nothing against Antigua. Antigua is gorgeous. It´s like the Epcot Center version of a Central American city, super beautiful and clean. But almost everyone in Antigua is on vacation, and I didn´t want to be in a vacation city all summer when I wasn´t exactly on vacation. Still, I reasoned, it would be brilliant to be near MRM all summer. So I went about trying to make myself feel like I wasn´t being sentenced there. I researched schools, visited schools, and then found one and made a deposit on it, intending to move back there in two weeks.
So I got on the shuttle feeling really out of sorts and a little depressed that the summer was turning out so far from how I had hoped it would. And then the closer I got to Xela, the more I got this weird feeling of, I am almost home. It freaked me out at first. And then I slowly began to grow accustomed to it. When I arrived, it was raining, of course. Raining really really hard. And my family wasn´t home, which has never happened before. So I arrived to a cold, dark house in the pouring rain, and I could not have been happier. And since then, I don´t know what it is, but I am feeling really content here. And excited to be here. Not only excited, I am feeling incredibly blessed to be able to be here for as long as I get. Who knows how long this feeling will last. But for now, I am totally digging it. Xela is still Xela. Ugly, dirty, so much pollution. But also beautiful and exciting and inviting all of a sudden.
I have spent the past two days touring and interviewing new schools here. In this regard, Agatha has been very, very good to me. Schools that were booked for the whole summer last week now have openings, because some crazy people aren´t keen on spending time in a country that got hit with a volcano eruption and a hurricane in the same weekend. So everywhere I have visited has had openings, including a very coveted opening at a school that Doctors Without Borders uses. I have submitted my application for that slot this afternoon and am anxiously waiting to hear if I have been accepted.
So. The plan is to stay here. Stay here and get over myself and love it and study hard and hopefully do some meaningful volunteer work. Each day I like it a little more. I am finally, three weeks in, beginning to feel about this place the way I had hoped to feel from day one. Better late than never.
All day Sunday and Monday, I blew up my tour company´s mobile, asking for updated road conditions. I was told everything was fine, and the shuttles were still running, but after hearing about Thy´s boyfriend Ben and the troubles he had getting into Guatemala from El Salvador, I decided to push back my departure by a day. I called them again several times on Monday and was assured that the shuttle that left Xela at 8am had made it, with delays.
I was picked up at 3pm from my hostel and as we pulled out I asked the driver how many people were scheduled for the way home and he said, ¨Solamente tu¨(only you) except I heard ¨Solamente two¨and kept waiting for us to stop for the final passenger. A little slow on the uptake, I am.
It was an absolutely gorgeous day, and once I realized I had scored private transport back to Xela, I stretched out, found The Beatles on my iPod, opened the window and enjoyed the countryside. It didn´t take long to begin to see the effects of Agatha, but for the most part it was a smooth ride in the beginning (isn´t it always?). We were detoured in Chimaltenango, though. All the traffic was diverted down what were basically alleys, but I never saw the damage that necessitated the detour.
After we were out of Chimaltenango, the road opened up to mile after mile of fertile field. The sun was still out and the air felt post-rain clean and at this point it was a very pleasant journey. However, as we began to climb into the highlands, there was more and more evidence that Agatha had raged over western Guatemala. Prior to this summer, I had never had reason to think about the concept of a river of mud, or even a mudslide at all. But the road from Antigua to Xela was absolutely devastated in many places.
From a purely clinical perspective, it was fascinating. Rivers. Of mud. With huge trees. And rocks. Huge rocks. There were places were the road had buckled or collapsed, including bridges. Including bridges we crossed. That was scary. There were houses, actual ¨houses¨and shanty type dwellings, where the mud rivers had just plowed over. There were uprooted trees that had been jammed, branches down, into the earth, so their roots were towering above us, looking like enormous spiders on their backs.
The mud wiped out entire settlements and towns. We passed people wandering around what was once their home, looking for anything of value in the detritus. There was so much trash, too. Tons and tons and tons of trash, accumulated, and then dumped in a great heap with trees and rocks and former houses.
It takes four hours to get home. Nearly four hours of witnessing devastated region after devastated region. I kept thinking, ¨that was someone´s home¨,¨that was someone´s livelihood,¨ ¨there´s no FEMA here.¨ There is really no infrastructure at all. And with that in mind, it is amazing that the road was passable at all, only 48 hours after landfall.
It is true that what was once a four lane highway had been reduced to a single lane in many places. And we slalomed that one lane highway the whole way home. And there were places where we drove uphill through a shallow mud river. And places where we drove through a newly carved out mud mountain that had previously blocked the entire highway. And places where two days earlier there had been mountain, mountain that was now displaced all the heck over the place. But what I found more fascinating than the new landscape, and the miles of destruction, was that we were able to get through at all. Because in four hours there wasn´t a single work crew. Instead, there was a dude here with a shovel. And a few miles later, a few people with a shovel and maybe a wheelbarrow. And that´s how it was the whole way home. One person, maybe two, rarely three, slowly, oh so slowly, but so deliberately tackling this enormous mess.
Like I said earlier, when I left Nashville, Nashville looked worse than it has in 100 years. And in many ways, Nashville was nothing to what I saw here. And that we got through, thanks to the tireless work of ordinary people with few tools, still blows me away.
The higher you climb into the highlands, the greener the landscape. You feel like you´re in Avatar, it is that green. Almost fluorescent. And it gets really foggy, too. You´re driving straight through clouds in many places. To me, this is incredibly beautiful. But as we rose higher, and the landscape looked so different from what it had looked like just days before, I felt like I was riding around on the surface of the moon. In so many ways it was barely recognizable.
I listened to my iPod the entire trip, and had turned on Shuffle. At one point, just when the mist was picking up, the Rolling Stones´ ¨Gimme Shelter¨ came on, and it was one of those very clear, pure moments when I realized that for the rest of my life, when I hear that song, I´ll be carried back to Guatemala and the experience of driving home to Xela and feeling, for the first time, like it actually was home.
And that is the very curious thing that happened on this trip. I had spent the whole weekend in Antigua in a mental funk. As you all know, Xela hasn´t exactly been a four star layover, and I had put many many hours into devising a way out of the mess, and had decided (and felt really good about it, too) to cut my losses, move to the Lake in two weeks, and continue my studies there. Then, arriving in Antigua, I received an email from MRM´s mom, who is not only from Guatemala but has traveled throughout the country a good deal, asking me not to move to the Lake alone. Suddenly, I was facing 11 weeks in a country and no idea how to spend it. I couldn´t stay in Xela, because I had to leave my homestay. At the time it felt less awkward to leave Xela entirely than to simply leave the homestay. I couldn´t go to the Lake, because I had been asked very kindly not to, and the asking was done with my safety in mind. I couldn´t come to Antigua because that wasn´t the original plan, dammit. So, on the inside, and maybe on the outside to those who know me well, I was really really dejected all weekend. I felt cornered, and I felt like I had done it to myself. It´s nothing against Antigua. Antigua is gorgeous. It´s like the Epcot Center version of a Central American city, super beautiful and clean. But almost everyone in Antigua is on vacation, and I didn´t want to be in a vacation city all summer when I wasn´t exactly on vacation. Still, I reasoned, it would be brilliant to be near MRM all summer. So I went about trying to make myself feel like I wasn´t being sentenced there. I researched schools, visited schools, and then found one and made a deposit on it, intending to move back there in two weeks.
So I got on the shuttle feeling really out of sorts and a little depressed that the summer was turning out so far from how I had hoped it would. And then the closer I got to Xela, the more I got this weird feeling of, I am almost home. It freaked me out at first. And then I slowly began to grow accustomed to it. When I arrived, it was raining, of course. Raining really really hard. And my family wasn´t home, which has never happened before. So I arrived to a cold, dark house in the pouring rain, and I could not have been happier. And since then, I don´t know what it is, but I am feeling really content here. And excited to be here. Not only excited, I am feeling incredibly blessed to be able to be here for as long as I get. Who knows how long this feeling will last. But for now, I am totally digging it. Xela is still Xela. Ugly, dirty, so much pollution. But also beautiful and exciting and inviting all of a sudden.
I have spent the past two days touring and interviewing new schools here. In this regard, Agatha has been very, very good to me. Schools that were booked for the whole summer last week now have openings, because some crazy people aren´t keen on spending time in a country that got hit with a volcano eruption and a hurricane in the same weekend. So everywhere I have visited has had openings, including a very coveted opening at a school that Doctors Without Borders uses. I have submitted my application for that slot this afternoon and am anxiously waiting to hear if I have been accepted.
So. The plan is to stay here. Stay here and get over myself and love it and study hard and hopefully do some meaningful volunteer work. Each day I like it a little more. I am finally, three weeks in, beginning to feel about this place the way I had hoped to feel from day one. Better late than never.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Home Again
Arrived safely in Xela this evening. The devastation from Agatha is unlike anything I have ever seen or imagined, and this includes the horrific flooding in Nashville that I fled a few weeks ago. It was an incredibly sobering trip home. More to come.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
La Tormenta
Greetings from now-lovely Antigua!
It has been quite the weekend. When I found out about the eruption of Pacaya on Friday morning, I feared I wouldn't be able to get into Antigua since the roads from Antigua into Guatemala were bad. But the tour agency assured me they were monitoring the situation and believed it was safe. So at 3pm on Friday, I was picked up and soon learned it was a full shuttle. There were 11 of us, plus the driver, crammed into a small, 4 bench Toyota van. All the other travelers were heading into Antigua in order to try to catch a bus to El Salvador, where the international flights were being diverted since the airport in Guat City was closed due to Pacaya.
I rode next to a very kind guy named Nathan, who had been volunteering in Xela for the past three months. Behind us were a hippie couple, complete with their ukelele, which I feared they would play during the whole trip. The couple in front of me had a laptop and DVDs of "Big Love" and "Entourage." They had Spanish subtitles turned on, so while were were careening through the mountains in the pouring rain, whizzing past tiny pueblos and mountain shacks, I watched HBO programming.
It poured rain the whole trip, and no one wanted their gear on the roof, even if it was tarped up. BUt since the shuttle was full, there was nowhere else for it to go. I had packed light, and had only a daypack with me, so my stuff remained dry in my lap. Yay. The last two members of our group to be picked up were two older women. One of them, a plump lady in her mid 60s, demanded the passenger seat from the guy who was in it. He refused, citing he got carsick and she said that she got sick as well, was a woman, and was older than him, and therefore she deserved the seat more than him. He wouldn't budge and they got into a heated argument in the rain, at the end of which she called him the P word, which made the rest of us crack up. She didn't win the fight, and ended up riding on the middle jump seat of the front row, in between him and the driver.
We rolled into the Tig around 6pm, and the rain was coming down really hard. Nathan, my shuttle buddy, decided to stay at the same hostel as Ali had booked for us, which turned out to be good because the guy who checked us in didn't speak any English and Nathan was able to translate for me. We expected MRM to be there, but she wasn't when I arrived, and for some reason my phone, which should have had over 100 minutes on it, was not making outgoing calls. So Nathan and I set out to find the internet, because I needed to reach MRM and he needed to try to get a bus ride to El Salvador. We tried to reload my phone 4 times, but each time it wouldn't take, even though the minutes were going "somewhere" and I still was charged for them.
Right before we left to find the internet, I realized I needed tampons, too. And I had left a huge sack of them in Xela thinking I didn't need them :( Problem was, I had no idea how to say tampons in Spanish, and the rain was coming down so hard it was painful to walk under, so I leveled with Nathan and explained my situation, and he luckily knew the word in Spanish and was so kind, running with me from tienda to tienda looking for them and translating for me. We finally found them at a 24 hour farmacia a few blocks from the hostel.
We got in touch with MRM and headed to a bar for drinks and food because everyone was kind of having a crap day, what with the volcano eruption and the weather and no one being able to get where they needed to go, and also MRM discovered on Friday that someone with access to her homestay relieved her of $300 bucks. So a drink was in order, even if we did arrive looking like a pack of drowned cats.
On Saturday, we reconvened at Cafe Barista which is a coffee shop on the corner at the Parque Central that MRM and I have nicknamed "Coffee, Coffeemaker." MRM's roommate Robin came, who I was so very happy to see. She is a missionary who was supposed to head to Honduras yesterday, but between Pacaya and Agatha, she isn't going anywhere soon, which has been a really frustrating and anticlimatic end to her three months here. Ali had left the hostel earlier to try to work out her Cuban travel visa, and Nathan had left that morning for El Salvador to try to make it home for his sister's graduation, so it was just me and MRM and Robin and MRM's friend Elisa at Coffee, Coffeemaker.
We ended up waiting for Ali for several hours, but she never showed up. At this point, the streets were beginning to flood in places, and the rain just came and came and came. We had no desire to head out into it again, but were sick of being at Coffee Coffeemaker, so we moved to MRM's homestay to regroup.
Regrouping consisted of laying in bed and watching several episodes of "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" while the water kept rising. At certain points the rain was coming down so hard we had to pause the DVD because we could no longer hear the dialogue. The rain also came at a 90 degree angle on several occasions, just plinging straight against the window while the wind, literally, howled outside. And speaking of howling... MRM has a witch who lives next door. We think. There we were, minding our own business, when this shrieking starts that is half Spanish, half something I have never heard. I gave MRM a "what the..." look and she exclaimed, "It's the witch! She does this all the time." So we slipped into our rain jackets and crept out onto the balcony to look over into the mini shantytown next door. I couldn't really see the woman but she kept yelling and cursing in this horrible, creepy way. While on the balcony we discovered that half the shantytown was completely under several feet of water, and some of the habitations, which had been constructed out of cardboard, had been abandoned. Soon, we realized it was because the roof of MRM's homestay was totally flooded, and the spiggot drained right into the shantytown cardboard house's "yard."
Because the roof was flooded, MRM had a leak that was dripping on her bed. So we moved her bed, and soon, two new leaks were dripping onto the bed's newest location. So we took all the electronics and anything that could be ruined by water, and tucked them into the shelf cubbies. Then we began to get really concerned about my stuff back at the hostel, which was stored in a wooden, ground floor locker. We decided to head out to check on my stuff, but not before Robin came in, looking like she had very literally been blown in by the wind. She was soaked and said, "Don't go anywhere! We need to talk! It's a Tropical Storm!" And that is when we learned that this really nasty weather we were living through was in fact a landfalling hurricane, not 24 hours after the volcano eruption. I swear, Guatemala...
We were going to check on my stuff and then go to dinner and a movie, but Elisa texted to let us know that the place we were working our way towards was closed because of the storm, and that stores along the road side were beginning to flood. So we headed straight for my hostel, where I was relieved to find my stuff still dry. But by the time we got there, we were soaked to the bone, despite rain jackets and scarves and umbrellas. Also at the hostel we found Ali, and her friend Thy, who had had a rubbish sort of day with the nasty woman at the travel agency who treated Ali like crap. They were eating canned beans and playing games on Thy's iPod, having given up all hope of heading out again into the weather. Almost as soon as we got there, the power went out in the city, and since we were still really hungry, we figured we had better hoof it out of there and try to find some food before everything was boarded up for the night.
We wandered down the main drag, looking for anything. But in the few minutes that the power had been out, places had shut themselves up. We finally saw some candles flickering in an alcove down an indoor hallway, and were happy to find an open restaurant serving amazing pizza and cold beer. We had a lovely candlelit dinner and before we headed home, the power had come back on, which was a relief because the city was very eery in the pitch black and fierce rain.
So Ali and I made an early night at the hostel, and then were awakened by our new roommate whose snores woke the entire room up. Ali kept asking him to roll over, which he did, and then he immediately began snoring very loudly again. By 2:30am I had decided I either needed to smother him, or find somewhere else to sleep. So I grabbed my pillow and blanket and moved to the couch in the main living area. It turned out to be really cozy, and the rain quickly lulled me to sleep and was loud enough to drown out Mr. Snore. When I awoke at daybreak, thanks to the church bells at La Merced, I noticed another two of our roommates had moved out of the room and into recliners. We complained to the owner who said that the snorer would not be back tonight.
So I was supposed to leave for Xela today at three, but as the news has been coming in, we began to realize how bad "la tormenta" was and Ali and I decided to stay in Antigua for another night, so the crews would have more time to clean the roads of mudslides. Getting to Xela is straight up and straight down on windy mountain roads, and nowhere you want to be if the roads aren't cleared. I had called my tour company to see if they were still running the route, and they said they were, but after I talked it over with the girls, we deciced Ali and I would stay put for another night as the mess gets cleaned up.
The country has really been hammered. Thy's boyfriend, who has been traveling for two days, saw some of the worst of it. He was rerouted to El Salvador, and his bus got across the border bridge shortly before it collapsed. Then, about 1am, their bus went into a ditch, in water that was waist high, and the passengers had to push the bus uphill for a half of a mile to dry the engine out. Once they had done that, the driver decided to remain the night in whatever little pueblo they were stranded in. He said the bus was full of "vegetation" from all the water that had been in it, and sent Thy a text message this morning that described his woes, ending it with, "We're taking the long route. An apparantly crucial bridge has collapsed. The whole country is f'ed." For whatever reason, probably because we're all a little delirious from sleep loss, this struck us as one of the funniest things anyone has ever said, and we laughed until tears were running down our faces.
And so, having weathered the first tropical storm of the season, we kicked off the morning with in-house roasted coffee surrounding a lovely garden at Fernando's. I have since learned that Xela was hit pretty hard as well. My friend Erin said they were stuck inside for two days because the flooding was so bad, and according to the paper today, Zona 2 has been declared "uninhabitable." Luckily, I live in Zona 1 and have talked to my housemother and my family there is safe.
So I will miss class tomorrow and the Monday afternoon movie, which is a disappointment, because we are watching "Che: Part 1" and one cannot get enough of Benicio del Toro.
So, to wrap up: we are all safe. Spent the weekend really cold and wet, wondering if this was the end of the world, but it was still enjoyable. Today has been gorg. We have wandered around and snapped photos and eaten fresh mango and wandered through markets. It was such a wonderful surprise to see the volcanoes again this morning. Usually, they are in sight from anywhere in Antigua, but the rain came down so hard all weekend, that visibility was terrible. It felt like we lived inside a claustrophobic dome.
Ali is wrapping up her Skype, so I will wrap this up as well and let you all know when I have made it safely home to Xela.
It has been quite the weekend. When I found out about the eruption of Pacaya on Friday morning, I feared I wouldn't be able to get into Antigua since the roads from Antigua into Guatemala were bad. But the tour agency assured me they were monitoring the situation and believed it was safe. So at 3pm on Friday, I was picked up and soon learned it was a full shuttle. There were 11 of us, plus the driver, crammed into a small, 4 bench Toyota van. All the other travelers were heading into Antigua in order to try to catch a bus to El Salvador, where the international flights were being diverted since the airport in Guat City was closed due to Pacaya.
I rode next to a very kind guy named Nathan, who had been volunteering in Xela for the past three months. Behind us were a hippie couple, complete with their ukelele, which I feared they would play during the whole trip. The couple in front of me had a laptop and DVDs of "Big Love" and "Entourage." They had Spanish subtitles turned on, so while were were careening through the mountains in the pouring rain, whizzing past tiny pueblos and mountain shacks, I watched HBO programming.
It poured rain the whole trip, and no one wanted their gear on the roof, even if it was tarped up. BUt since the shuttle was full, there was nowhere else for it to go. I had packed light, and had only a daypack with me, so my stuff remained dry in my lap. Yay. The last two members of our group to be picked up were two older women. One of them, a plump lady in her mid 60s, demanded the passenger seat from the guy who was in it. He refused, citing he got carsick and she said that she got sick as well, was a woman, and was older than him, and therefore she deserved the seat more than him. He wouldn't budge and they got into a heated argument in the rain, at the end of which she called him the P word, which made the rest of us crack up. She didn't win the fight, and ended up riding on the middle jump seat of the front row, in between him and the driver.
We rolled into the Tig around 6pm, and the rain was coming down really hard. Nathan, my shuttle buddy, decided to stay at the same hostel as Ali had booked for us, which turned out to be good because the guy who checked us in didn't speak any English and Nathan was able to translate for me. We expected MRM to be there, but she wasn't when I arrived, and for some reason my phone, which should have had over 100 minutes on it, was not making outgoing calls. So Nathan and I set out to find the internet, because I needed to reach MRM and he needed to try to get a bus ride to El Salvador. We tried to reload my phone 4 times, but each time it wouldn't take, even though the minutes were going "somewhere" and I still was charged for them.
Right before we left to find the internet, I realized I needed tampons, too. And I had left a huge sack of them in Xela thinking I didn't need them :( Problem was, I had no idea how to say tampons in Spanish, and the rain was coming down so hard it was painful to walk under, so I leveled with Nathan and explained my situation, and he luckily knew the word in Spanish and was so kind, running with me from tienda to tienda looking for them and translating for me. We finally found them at a 24 hour farmacia a few blocks from the hostel.
We got in touch with MRM and headed to a bar for drinks and food because everyone was kind of having a crap day, what with the volcano eruption and the weather and no one being able to get where they needed to go, and also MRM discovered on Friday that someone with access to her homestay relieved her of $300 bucks. So a drink was in order, even if we did arrive looking like a pack of drowned cats.
On Saturday, we reconvened at Cafe Barista which is a coffee shop on the corner at the Parque Central that MRM and I have nicknamed "Coffee, Coffeemaker." MRM's roommate Robin came, who I was so very happy to see. She is a missionary who was supposed to head to Honduras yesterday, but between Pacaya and Agatha, she isn't going anywhere soon, which has been a really frustrating and anticlimatic end to her three months here. Ali had left the hostel earlier to try to work out her Cuban travel visa, and Nathan had left that morning for El Salvador to try to make it home for his sister's graduation, so it was just me and MRM and Robin and MRM's friend Elisa at Coffee, Coffeemaker.
We ended up waiting for Ali for several hours, but she never showed up. At this point, the streets were beginning to flood in places, and the rain just came and came and came. We had no desire to head out into it again, but were sick of being at Coffee Coffeemaker, so we moved to MRM's homestay to regroup.
Regrouping consisted of laying in bed and watching several episodes of "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" while the water kept rising. At certain points the rain was coming down so hard we had to pause the DVD because we could no longer hear the dialogue. The rain also came at a 90 degree angle on several occasions, just plinging straight against the window while the wind, literally, howled outside. And speaking of howling... MRM has a witch who lives next door. We think. There we were, minding our own business, when this shrieking starts that is half Spanish, half something I have never heard. I gave MRM a "what the..." look and she exclaimed, "It's the witch! She does this all the time." So we slipped into our rain jackets and crept out onto the balcony to look over into the mini shantytown next door. I couldn't really see the woman but she kept yelling and cursing in this horrible, creepy way. While on the balcony we discovered that half the shantytown was completely under several feet of water, and some of the habitations, which had been constructed out of cardboard, had been abandoned. Soon, we realized it was because the roof of MRM's homestay was totally flooded, and the spiggot drained right into the shantytown cardboard house's "yard."
Because the roof was flooded, MRM had a leak that was dripping on her bed. So we moved her bed, and soon, two new leaks were dripping onto the bed's newest location. So we took all the electronics and anything that could be ruined by water, and tucked them into the shelf cubbies. Then we began to get really concerned about my stuff back at the hostel, which was stored in a wooden, ground floor locker. We decided to head out to check on my stuff, but not before Robin came in, looking like she had very literally been blown in by the wind. She was soaked and said, "Don't go anywhere! We need to talk! It's a Tropical Storm!" And that is when we learned that this really nasty weather we were living through was in fact a landfalling hurricane, not 24 hours after the volcano eruption. I swear, Guatemala...
We were going to check on my stuff and then go to dinner and a movie, but Elisa texted to let us know that the place we were working our way towards was closed because of the storm, and that stores along the road side were beginning to flood. So we headed straight for my hostel, where I was relieved to find my stuff still dry. But by the time we got there, we were soaked to the bone, despite rain jackets and scarves and umbrellas. Also at the hostel we found Ali, and her friend Thy, who had had a rubbish sort of day with the nasty woman at the travel agency who treated Ali like crap. They were eating canned beans and playing games on Thy's iPod, having given up all hope of heading out again into the weather. Almost as soon as we got there, the power went out in the city, and since we were still really hungry, we figured we had better hoof it out of there and try to find some food before everything was boarded up for the night.
We wandered down the main drag, looking for anything. But in the few minutes that the power had been out, places had shut themselves up. We finally saw some candles flickering in an alcove down an indoor hallway, and were happy to find an open restaurant serving amazing pizza and cold beer. We had a lovely candlelit dinner and before we headed home, the power had come back on, which was a relief because the city was very eery in the pitch black and fierce rain.
So Ali and I made an early night at the hostel, and then were awakened by our new roommate whose snores woke the entire room up. Ali kept asking him to roll over, which he did, and then he immediately began snoring very loudly again. By 2:30am I had decided I either needed to smother him, or find somewhere else to sleep. So I grabbed my pillow and blanket and moved to the couch in the main living area. It turned out to be really cozy, and the rain quickly lulled me to sleep and was loud enough to drown out Mr. Snore. When I awoke at daybreak, thanks to the church bells at La Merced, I noticed another two of our roommates had moved out of the room and into recliners. We complained to the owner who said that the snorer would not be back tonight.
So I was supposed to leave for Xela today at three, but as the news has been coming in, we began to realize how bad "la tormenta" was and Ali and I decided to stay in Antigua for another night, so the crews would have more time to clean the roads of mudslides. Getting to Xela is straight up and straight down on windy mountain roads, and nowhere you want to be if the roads aren't cleared. I had called my tour company to see if they were still running the route, and they said they were, but after I talked it over with the girls, we deciced Ali and I would stay put for another night as the mess gets cleaned up.
The country has really been hammered. Thy's boyfriend, who has been traveling for two days, saw some of the worst of it. He was rerouted to El Salvador, and his bus got across the border bridge shortly before it collapsed. Then, about 1am, their bus went into a ditch, in water that was waist high, and the passengers had to push the bus uphill for a half of a mile to dry the engine out. Once they had done that, the driver decided to remain the night in whatever little pueblo they were stranded in. He said the bus was full of "vegetation" from all the water that had been in it, and sent Thy a text message this morning that described his woes, ending it with, "We're taking the long route. An apparantly crucial bridge has collapsed. The whole country is f'ed." For whatever reason, probably because we're all a little delirious from sleep loss, this struck us as one of the funniest things anyone has ever said, and we laughed until tears were running down our faces.
And so, having weathered the first tropical storm of the season, we kicked off the morning with in-house roasted coffee surrounding a lovely garden at Fernando's. I have since learned that Xela was hit pretty hard as well. My friend Erin said they were stuck inside for two days because the flooding was so bad, and according to the paper today, Zona 2 has been declared "uninhabitable." Luckily, I live in Zona 1 and have talked to my housemother and my family there is safe.
So I will miss class tomorrow and the Monday afternoon movie, which is a disappointment, because we are watching "Che: Part 1" and one cannot get enough of Benicio del Toro.
So, to wrap up: we are all safe. Spent the weekend really cold and wet, wondering if this was the end of the world, but it was still enjoyable. Today has been gorg. We have wandered around and snapped photos and eaten fresh mango and wandered through markets. It was such a wonderful surprise to see the volcanoes again this morning. Usually, they are in sight from anywhere in Antigua, but the rain came down so hard all weekend, that visibility was terrible. It felt like we lived inside a claustrophobic dome.
Ali is wrapping up her Skype, so I will wrap this up as well and let you all know when I have made it safely home to Xela.
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