August 16th - 31st, 2004

August 16th, 2004

We eat out and are not surprised when there are only three options: chicken soup, fried chicken, and fried beef. It’s been this way since we entered Guatemala. In the afternoon we ask a campesino how to get to San Andres Itzapa and are directed down a washed out dirt road leading through cornfields and poor neighborhoods. We arrive in Itzapa at the same time as the rain and huddle under an overhanging roof waiting for the buckets to stop falling. Two men in a truck pull up and talk to us. They think my name is Lucy. It’s Mario the director and Cezar the president of Maya Pedal. We pop the bikes in the back and head up the hill to the Maya Pedal offices. We are introduced to Carlos the engineer, Edwin the worker, and some amazing cornbread made by Cezar’s wife from green maize. A few minutes later two girls arrive. They’re Lucy and Amy and have biked from Texas, quite a coincidence that they should arrive on the same day as us for the same two weeks of volunteering.

For some reason the group; dynamic goes sour over time and our communal living turns into the coexistance of two groups who seem to disagree or not get along. Their group includes the volunteer Erika who is here for six months. We assume that this change is due to the other volunteers disliking or disagreeing with something about the way we choose to live our lives, but it’s hard to say exactly what goes wrong. At the end of our stay a dispute occurs that has the possibility of bringing some communication to the situation but in the end does not.

Besides this unfortunate circumstance we did manage to enjoy ourselves somewhat. We fix a few bikes up (maybe ten between the two of us) and I get the chance to help out a little bit with the construction of a bike machine. In the second week we make visits to five different grassroots groups or families who are supported by Maya Pedal and use bike machines such as mills, water pumps, and tile makers. These groups receive us into their homes with open arms, for example we try to buy a duck from one group and they end up insisting on giving it to us for free. Our visits show us how pedal power can be used and how small businesses can be se up to provide a sustainable independent income for poor Mayan campesinos. However most of the examples are still only potential examples. We’ll wee where they are in a couple of years.

We cook the duck and the duck becomes a rubber ducky that squeaks around in our mouths like your favorite bathroom playmate.

San Andres Itzapa is a town of 25,000 and nonetheless everybody is open and friendly, saying hello to us in the street. The tortillerias here consist of women shaping tortillas by hand with a clapping sound that follows us down the street. Many horses and donkeys laden with wood, enormous bundles of leaves or grass, or whatever else passed in front of the workshop during the day. There are crazy amounts of kids here, they are constantly running in and out of the shop and playing games in the street. After one of our visits outside of town we stop by the Saint Simon temple. This place is not recognized by any church and yet hundreds of people come by every day to ask Ma Simon for favors. They do so in person in front of the life size doll sitting in a chair or outside the temple with numerous rites including smoking cigars, drinking and spitting alcohol and burning mini fires with strange incantations and spitting crucifixes. Very interesting, we can’t help but notice that the place attracts a lot of societies less appreciated such as prostitutes, trans-gender people, alcoholics, and so on. It’s hard to say why…

Sunday August 30th

We will soon be moving on so Mario (MP director) invites us to his mom’s house for dinner. We enjoy a wonderfull roast chicken and salads and are then blessed (all five foreigners) in Kakchikel by a Mayan priest in training Orlando. Afterwards Johanne and I sit with Orlando in the living room and talk about the recuperation of Mayan religion. As the others head home we walk through the silent stone paved streets with him and his dad to their home. Orlando consults his books to find out what day we were born in the Mayan calendar and tells us who we are. This is under what nahual (entity) and level of energy we were conceived and born as well as what nahuals influence our personal abilities in life and which one affects our future. All of this was very interesting and showed some surprising parallels with our personalities. But the whole operation has many similarities to any fortune telling or astrology and as such many characteristics that supposedly belonged to us seem to be way off the mark.

August 31st

We say goodbye to the other volunteers Lucy and Amy who don’t bother getting up to shake a hand or what have you, and take a bus to Panajachel about an hour or so away. The road approaching town winds down an insanely steep mountainside overlooking the deep blue Lake Atitlan. Mountains ring the water and the conical forms of a few volcanoes are visible across the blue. We walk to the docks and take a boat across the lake to San Juan de la Laguna. A fellow passenger walks us up the cobblestone street to his cousin’s hotel. Before leaving he tells us it costs fifteen Quetzals a night each. When the owner shows up he offers us a room for Q50 each but lowers the price without a blink when we tell him what his cousin told us and in a flash we pay less for two nights than we would have for one. We feel a little bad about this, it should cost more than $5.00 US for a hotel room.

Women carry everything on their heads here, on our way out to eat we cross a girl carrying a can of pop balanced on her head. After dinner we walk through vegetable gardens of all sorts beside the lake under a rumbling sky. We get to Cristalines beach and enjoy a swim in the cool clear water. When we jump up and down in the water the ground vibrates as if we were on a drum.
We relax all the next day limiting our strenuous activities to a short walk to the next town. Everything is beautiful, the lake, the mountains, the sky. It’s hard to decide what to stare at.