Far From The Mountain

Home Again

2006-12-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

As of last Sunday, we're home, back in the house, the swell, sweet neighborhood of West Asheville, where at moments it feels like we never left this place, and at others we're washed over by a lifetime of experiences that filled us up this year. What a wild, amazing time.

We’ve been back for a bit over 3 months now, tromping again on U.S. soil, flying up and down from one end of the country to the other visiting family and friends, relearning for ourselves how to mesh and meld in this fast-paced, driven America. We’ve experienced the yell out loud joy of being able to stick your mouth right under the bathroom faucet, swallowing the pure chlorinated water whole, brushing your teeth with big bold strokes without reaching for the bottle of purified water. For the first week one of us would get all tickled about this simple yet satisfying experience and yell, “hey, look at me!”

After 2 months, we stopped shocking our various house hosts with soiled toilet paper in the trash– we’ve now been fully retrained to throw our waste paper in the toilet and flush, and no longer have to stop ourselves from reaching for the wastebasket. Ice cubes, electricity and refrigeration have all become norm again, but for the most part don’t cause us a fuss if any or all are lacking. Other new noticeable traits about ourselves compared to our more civilized comrades is our high personal tolerance for lack of showers, creepy spiders, jumping crickets, or your occasional rat droppings in the house. All these things that years ago might have made you flinch or go on a crazy cleaning spree, now just roll right off us as no big deal.

Instead, it’s the endless choices and crazy high prices at the grocery stores, all the paperwork crap and people you have to talk to and fees you have to pay to set up house again or drive your car. It’s witnessing the frenzy that people go through for Christmas shopping, or the things this society markets at us for what you need to raise a new baby, and in general all the consumer products this country thinks you need to survive, to be happy - it all just blows our minds, and fires us up for a bit. Also the sad realization that one income at a good-paying job, with great benefits, an affordable house and no car payments - may not be enough to freaking survive in this country, it takes so much money to live here that it really is obscene, even when living on a simple budget. Just to give you an example, compared to 3 months living in Central America, we have spent in the same amount of time - 4 times that amount in cash just staying with friends and family and really only buying food, transportation, entertainment, some basic lodging, insurance and health care costs. In Central America we paid for everything, and it went an incredible distance.

You may wonder from my banter if we are actually glad to be home, and the answer is by far a big YES! Our surprise greeting at the airport, our welcome home party, multiple phone calls, belly-pleasing meals, lodging offers, help with job search, health insurance, baby needs, transportation, moving, your smiles, your supportive words, being able to reach out and physically touch your hands, hug your necks - all of these offerings embraced us and gave us something sturdy to lean on when we grew a little overwhelmed or weary.

We have had an amazing time visiting all of you - strolling along chilly Maine beaches, picking apples straight off the tree, stuffing scarecrows, having you rub and sing to my growing belly, sun-kissed and warmed by the swirling Santa Ana winds of Southern California, walking the goat, tromping through copper fall leaves, mesmerized by the giant Sequoias, and charmed by the first snowfall that coaxed us on an early winter magic hike, just the two of us, through perfect, joyful stillness. Perhaps some of the best moments though were just waking up in your homes, hearing your voices stir about in the kitchen or living room, wandering out of our bed to stand in the same space, next to you, being a part of your day in a way that so rarely happens due to time and distance.

And so, as I said, we are back at home, back at the work grind, almost unpacked from boxes and backpacks and trying to find our way, our space again, before our magic gift from Guatemala, our new sweet boy, makes his presence, and rocks our world for another exciting year.

Atitlan warms us back to life.

2006-09-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

The Guatemalan mountains and byways, with flooding rivers and volcanic pointy peaks, look much the way they did in other Central American countries, but I could feel a rush of relief and sparked energy warming my belly as soon as we crossed the border, for the last time. Our ultimate dealings with Customs and Immigration will be with George and Homeland Security. An Orwellian yet reassuring thought.

Funny, in my mind, I was waiting all along to go to El Salvador. It was my secret ambition on this pan geographic trip, the verdant country most recently ravaged by another stupid war, where the bad guys upset by farmers striving for land and social reforms were funded by another stupid American president and Congress to the tune of 6 billion dollars. Alas minimal socialism was held at bay and thousands of innocents and guilty died, and corporate CEOs can sleep at night. Siemens, 3M, Goodyear, they are all there.

Going in it had everything an adventure and cultural whore like myself could ask for in the way of language, culture, and scenic splendor. But the truth is, we did not give it a fair shot, we just could not focus anymore, and now of course we will have to go back on vacation some day in the future. An opportunity lost it seems. One thing that San Salvador did drive home, really continued to drive home for us is this; every one of these capital cities is so incredibly polarized in prosperity. The glissening malls, chain restaurants like Hooters, wide avenues and opulent hillside mansions and neighborhoods match anything we have at home, but only a short distance away, often directly behind in the runoff ditches, disparity pulls your heart cords with communities crafted out of nothing more than cardboard and corrigated metal. Fifty dollar pairs of Adidas and the latest Hollywood smash hit, and people with no means of potable drinking water and sanitation, are separated by only a chipshot and chainlink fence with razorwire at the top. Managua, San Pedro Sula, Guatemala City, and to a lesser extent San Jose.

Anyway, somehow Guatemalan seems like a familiar friend, almost a mom with big arms holding us. We have grown so much in seven months, everything is so much easier now. The language, for one thing, we can actually understand the accents here. Navigating the buses has been a breeze. We are unfazed by hawking vendors and delay. We have retreated back to Lake Atitlan, really where it all began, and we could not be happier. We are in awe of the beauty and power of this spiritual place once again, and seemingly in a better state of being to appreciate it. It`s cool air and waters, and mountains that appear to fall on top of you, exhaust a person`s vocabulary. We have nestled into, by happenstance, the most delightful lodge carved into the side of a mountain, where there is a big sweet akita dog to lay on the floor with, funny and charming new friends from Australia, a clever one year old baby that is learning three languages, and tastey foods filling our bellies. We are happy. I held Heather`s belly in my hands today and felt the New Dickens pat my fingers four times this afternoon. The Maya are everywhere here, this has always been their stronghold and it still is. Their colorful garb and quirky language surround us.

Three more days.

All in a day

2006-09-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

Just a day down here can bring forth such a sensitized mess of emotions. Take a few days ago, maybe a week ago in El Salvador. At this point of our travels we`ve lost a bit of our awed souls, just wanton for home and familiarity and a bit ashamed to admit the lessening of the drop-jaw wonder. We`ve decided to hunker down at the beach again, our consistent refuge from constant travel and unrelenting heat. The beach is an awesome rocky surf beach with long point breaks, big swells and strong currents that amaze but don`t dazzle much for the non-surfer. We stay in a tranquilo place but decide to book up to Guatemala after 2 days.

I awaken in the raw morning light with a hardening of the belly, strong and stiff with one side poking way higher than the other, and then there comes this rolling wave like a bitty bowling ball being released with ease from the hand. It`s wild, it`s weird, it commands every bit of my attention and I just lay there on my back, hands spread wide across my tightening skin and for the first time really feel the growing life, the strength of our baby. I could just lie here like this for hours, smiling, oozing joy. It`s taken me so long to internalize, to accept that this gift is real. Matthew wakes, joining my hands, feeling the earth moving, thumping, kitty-flopping through my belly.

Later that day we grab a bus, and then another to make the 35km journey back to the capital - San Salvador. At home, this might take 20 min, but here 2 hours. But we`ve grown accustomed and the sun is not so hot today, so we sink back for the bumpy ride, space out at the mountainside, sway to the Latin music, and gaze out the window. The bus grumbles up the hills and then comes to a stop. We spot 2 police vehicles, guys with guns, a woman in a white medical coat. I look and immediately wish I had not. A severed, dirt-mucked head of a young man lies on the side of the road. Yes, I said head, nothing else, no accident. My body stiffens, I want to scream, to cry, to get out of here now! I look around the bus, others look shaken, but as we move along they gain their composure, continue their conversations, and I just continue to tremble with this stifling reality of a life so different, so harsh. Or is it just so blatantly in my face here? This was showy El Salvador gang violence, where they leave a reap of their execution for the media to take hold of and shock the world, the onlookers.

Eventually, we roll into town, weary through the vendor thick streets selling watches, plastic bowls, American clothes, baseball caps, tortillas, tamales, mangoes, nike shoes, plumbing parts, live turkeys and chickens, 12 inch thick, smelly, unrefrigerated cheese - really anything you could think of is here. It is like the annual state fair melted with the grandest of flea markets, all packed full of people, lively sounds, pungent smells. And here we are on a decorated school bus, weaving our way through the maze. And later, that day end up in the biggest mega-mall I`ve seen in Central America, snacking on a bloomin onion, later buying apple danishes.

Like I said, all in a day.

Cannon Ball Run from Rivas to Granada

2006-08-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

I am your travel guide today because my wife has already discussed more eloquently my own feelings than I ever could.

The power is out here in Granada, as it is most days. The rumor grinder says it is because the electric, curriente, company is Spanish owned, and Nicaragua nevers pays the bill accrued by governmental offices. Entonces, therefore, no power for the people during the day. It is a nifty story but I do not believe it. I saw this written yesterday on Ometepe: I wanted a bicycle so I prayed to Jesus everyday. Then I realized he doesn`t work that way, so I stole one and asked for forgiveness. The people here are both humble and worldly, and have strong wills that pull towards laughter.

Last week, we drifted down south to the border, frontera, with Costa Rica, and settled into a community of Pacific coast hostels, surf shacks really, and infrequent houses all together called Mahjagual. In between the clear waters and potent surf, the horizen was dotted with sea stacks more akin to the likes of Oregon. No bugs to speak in the way of bad mosquitos, and that`s always a plus.

The first couple of days the olas, waves, were huge and a bit thrilling. Probably in the 10 to 20 feet high range. When they broke and the sun shined through, the aquamarine colors seemed more like the carribean, and the sound as though a building had been leveled. Water temperature was perfect, slightly cool, as Nicaragua is by far the hottest country to ever boil my skin and vital organs. I swam my ass off all the days. Food was bad. I ate hamburgers with fries repeatedly. Eventually, to save a little money with our friend Jen, we rented a little house for two days about a 10 minute walk through pastures and monkey trees inland.

Exhausted by good times, we left and stopped in a close by town called San Juan Del Sur. Here, unfortunately, and soon for Mahjgual, are American and Canadian developers and realtors everywhere. Housing developments completed, under construction and some just a dollar pipe dream are chopping down the rain forest and every hillside. Just south of the border in Costa Rica is Tamarindo Beach. When I went there 13 years ago it was nothing more than a few houses, a good break, and a bunch of old surfing hippies living in pop up trailers. Now there is an international jetport, highrise condos, endless developments, where never a spanish word is spoken between tee times and tea times. Heather and I sneeked into a fancy resort in San Juan, to swim in their infinity pool that was oh so nice, and there were gringos and laptaps spilling into the deep end. Get here now. Think Tamarindo, Nicaragua in 5 years.

We split up with Jen in San Juan, she had to go back to work and could not hang with us slackers, or as my friend Jamie in Asheville calls us Team U. unemployment. Anyway, we caught the ferry on nearby Lake Nicaragua, which is about the size of the state of New York and used to part of the ocean and has fresh water sharks, which never tried to eat us by the way, to the picturesque two volcano island of Ometepe. Thomas Wolfe is eating his heart out after that last run on sentence.

You can not help but be awed by an area where herding and riding horses is not just still a part of life, but is the predominant way of life. The giant volcanoes overshadow everything, and why I argued last week with my wife that I was going to climb one without a guide, I turned tail pretty quickly once I actually saw them. Other adventurism of note, we went for a bicycle ride down a rocky dirt road, and while I was taking pictures with one hand and steering with the other, I was cut off by an oncomer and promptly flipped over the handlebars. Shaken, sore and dirty I pushed on, until I said I needed to stop and check my groin region because of a particularly stubborn pain. Where upon, my wife screamed because I had blood running through shorts between my legs. Broken superficial vein in my ball sack was my self diagnosis. Everything else intact and we continued on, and Heather is pregnant now already. Anyway, between surviving tyhoid fever, stitching my own leg up, and busting open my testicles open, I should avoid any wimp like heckling this year.

Stillness

2006-08-16T11:45:00.000-07:00

Stillness. Yes, absolute, utter stillness. We´ve had endless amounts of it since leaving the orphanage and I am sure, by now, are both well qualified for holding some sort of metaphysical enlightened seminar in Asheville. To feel the exacting warmth of the breeze, the patterned lapping of the waves- taking notice when they falter or quicken, the rapid rate of growth of my husband´s nose hairs, or the horses splashing their front hooves, cutting into the water, biting at it like some dogs do, and then lunging their bodies sideways into the lake, scratching their backs on underwater rocks, throwing their feet high into the air and then getting up to do the whole routine again. We can now recognize the difference between the calls of the toucan and parrot, are keen and can predict the hours that the howlers will heckle, can free up huge empty spaces of our mind as one´s body gets into the rhythmn of washing all of your clothes by hand against a cement board, and then there are those sweet pleasures of floating in the ocean being graced on your cheek by a robin size blue morph butterfly.

We are lucky, we know it, for all of this time to be mindful, to see, hear, and notice more than the normal being who is always in motion out of necessity and/our rapid culture. But the flip side of all this luxuriant stillness and traveling comes the cravings to hear the Rolling Stones cranked up loud, to sink into a movie at an air conditioned cineplex, to have a piece of dark chocolate or cheddar cheese soaking in your mouth, to lounge on the porch with friends slapping off the mosquitos and being mesmerized by the fireflies. Or hiking up in those sweet Appalachian mountains, skinny dipping in the steal your breath away streams, knowing where you are sleeping for the next few days, cooking a wholesome meal, picking blueberries, hearing Matthew strum and croon away on the guitar, being near to those you love, digging in the red clay soil of the South, giving to others instead of having them wait and serve you, again being part of a community, contributing, feeling whole.

With only 20 some odd days left on this adventure, we are coming home with something a bit of a surprise. Of all our amazing travels and brilliant or gut-wrenching experiences, we have lost a smidgen of that wanderlust for somewhere else, the endless journey, the paradise lost, the more perfect way of life in someone else´s land, someone else´s culture. We have found home and packed deep within us now is a much greater sense of what very little we need to be happy and how most of what we get wound up in a wad about in the states, just doesn´t matter at all. Not at all.

Nicaragua here we come.

2006-07-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

I know I am not really qualified to say this, but for all the scaryness the name seems to conjure in us Americans, Managua does not seem to have much of a bite these days. And probably never had all the meaness that conservative war mongering pundits wanted us believe in the first place. But hey I was only 11 years old and what did I know then and what do I know now, for that matter.

Tree lined avenues. Glistening new malls. Helpful taxi and bus drivers. Passable tourist infrastructure. We only stayed a night and saw just a fraction of this huge city, but it made a nice first impression anyway.

We are quasi living with our friend Jen, in this terriffic colonial home only a few blocks from the central park in Grenada. The house has an inner courtyard with flowers and open to the stars and bats, and that´s where we are sleeping just under the overhanging terracotta eaves. I opened my eyes yesterday morning and focused on a humming bird. The place is mostly unfurnished and I like to run around on the ancient tile floors and pretend I am in the Russian ballet, which after published would again kill any chances for my ever getting elected to public office. Poop. We have a nice hammock and a few chairs, and the beds of course. Jen, who we worked with at the orphanage, is renting this place for just 90 dollars per month from some New Yorker. Our share is $2.50 each per day.

Grenada has all this old and enchanting architecture, with five bold cathedrals and streets lined with the most diverse doorways. Our place, for instance, has five sets of doors, each 12 feet high made from wood, that line the exterior walls to the street from our corner building. Beautiful. And there are tons of these, and I have tried to catch a bit the magic with my camera.

Jen is volunteering here in the schools, and to keep ourselves busy a bit, until Jen can join us on a longer adventure next week, Heather and I have started volunteering for two hours per day at the Hogar de Ancianos. The home of the ancients. Old folks, you get the pictures. Sister Sonja wants me to do some exercise with them, but mostly I have been giving some sweet old ladies arm, hand and back messages, and Heather and I just chat it up with the fellas: the best we can anyway because it´s in Spanish, and they don´t have much teeth and hear poorly for the most part. One of them is 102 years old. Nice. Another told me he has 18 children. I told him Heather is pregnant with my ninth kid, and with my young age that seemed to impress him. Today, Heather was sitting with a woman who was singing the most delightful songs.

Three days ago, we joined two San Franciscans here on vacation and went to Lago De Apoyo for a day, a crater lake surrounded by forest with howler monkeys and with clear water the color of a blind blue eyed Husky dog. Refreshing swimming and ice cold babyruth candy bars.

Tonight, we are meeting some new friends for pizza. Grenada has a decent tourist infrastructure too and lots of decent restaurants, and cheap, three bucks for pizza. We are also going to see some documentary, which hopefully my Spanish will not totally fail me and allow for some bit of understanding and enjoyment. This afternoon, Heather hopefully is going to get another ultrasound. We tried to get one yesterday at another ultrasound clinic, but they told us they were not actually getting an ultrasound machine until next December.

Next week, Jen is going to join us in traveling a short distance to the Pacific, the San Juan Del Sur area, which is only a handfull of kilometers from the Costa Rican border. If it is nice and the waves don´t scare the shit out of us, we will stay for the week, and then return to Grenada for another week.

Vamos a Nicaragua

2006-07-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Before we even get on the bus, I´m reminded that this journey, as all bus rides go, will be memorable. The taxi driver chases down the bus, Matthew scrambles out to see if they have any open seats for us since we don´t want to stand knee-knocked for the next 3 hours. We throw our bags below and hop aboard. The guy collecting the money, isn´t allowed to make change, so the driver is driving while pulling bills out of his pocket, looking for change, navigating the wheel. In less than 15 minutes the money collector pulls out a briefcase and with the bravado of a young minister fires of an infomercial on the attributes of natural medicine, tinctures of avocado and lime to reduce blood pressure, the importance of drinking water, etc. culminating in the sale of a few books to bored passengers.

Later we come to a halt on the side of the road. Women circle the bus singing out ¨mangoes¨, ¨coca¨, ¨agua pura¨. They echo back and forth and people are buying up like kids at a candy rack. More folks pack onto the bus, some standing, but not many, for today, we are on a ¨fancy¨ bus that has a bathroom, solely for peeing (which has us both a little worried).

¨Beep, beep, beep, beep¨ hammers out the driver as we truck along honking at bikes crossing our path, the slow chicken bus that we´re passing, the vacas (cows) scattered across the road that are now running with the herd over the asphalt. There´s a different series of beeps that the driver employs when he spots a friend or fellow driver. Those beeps always are a bit softer, shorter, easier to take. But still, one must work the honks and swerves into one´s slumber if you want to attempt to catch any shut eye. We swerve closely avoiding going off the road. Sudden breaks pull from me a quick anxious look through the front window, often revealing an unsuccessful pass calling upon the quick reflexes of all drivers.

In the middle of nowhere, a man steps upon the bus with a huge basket in his arms selling galletas, tortillas, fried pork skin - all the delicacies to tempt one. I´m always wanting the likes of a sundae vendor, but none yet aboard. And then again, after Matthew´s earlier foray with typhoid, we are wimps when it comes to most street vendors, but everyone else buys up. When they´ve eaten or drank their fill, the windows open wider - the plastic, the styrofoam, napkins, all, are tossed out the window crashing on to the earth, the black tar, or carried to the wind. You would think with this frequency that there would be snowdrifts of trash on the sides of the road, but notsomuch. Having been impressioned by the crying Indian commercial of our youth, our mouths still hang open in shock, wanting to say something, whisper something to a young one, phrases run through my head, one´s I think might not sound so offensive. And then you get the stares back as we crush our trash and bury it in our backpacks rather that throwing it to the wind.

Another guy gets on the bus, pays for a ticket and immediately start selling B-12 vitamin injections. People are taken by his compelling story of healing with this medicine, but once he pulls out the syringe, the method of administration, he loses all takers and they hand back the packages. He does make a few sales of a green skin salve, which is purchased by my fellow passenger and then quickly suggested to me that I use some to rub on my face to help my pimples (gifts of pregnancy), which of course, I willingly do and spread around the green stuff.

So, all this was just yesterday. Today, we awoke at 3:00 a.m., got to the bus station at 4 and left on the bus at 5:00 a.m. By 6:30 we were at a bus stop break, getting coffee, using the bathrooms, and then the bus driver tells us to forget boarding the bus. Seems there is a protest happening today. A demonstration of farmers, townspeople taking the main highway to protest mining that is contaminating the environment. So far, we´ve been here 7 hours. Maybe we´ll be able to leave tonight on the bus, but really no idea. Buses, 18 wheelers, are crowded down the highway as far as you can see. Their occupants rest underneath the riggs, their heads supported by an empty coke bottle. But here I sit, after a bit of walking, having found an internet cafe to pass some time and do one thing I´ve learned best in Central America - to just peacefully wait. At least we have plenty of food, and possibly ice cream.

Healing Up

2006-07-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

I landed in Guatemala with a broken, barely hanging on big toenail. Other parts of me bore similar characteristics, but this one was of the physical type that could be bandaged, buried in a shoe and forgotten about. Wasn't until Rio Dulce, the orphanage, the heat that dragged me to pull off the shoe, the plaster and welcome it to the freeing sandal. Immediately the kids spotted it, pointed, made disgusted faces calling it "feo", ugly. Several showed me their more ripe missing nails, others wanted to know what had happened, my story, but I didn't really know. Now, 6 months later, it's all anew, bright, shiny, bleached out by the sun - healed.

And now we are in Utila, Honduras, the cheap diving isla of the world surrounded by coral reefs and aquamarine sea. The ferry ride over was hairy, making many riders take full use of the plastic barf bags handed out, but not me, in the splashing, gut-wrenching seas I felt right in my glory of the usual nauseated state of my being over the past month and embraced the fact that I was much less green in the face than my husband and most others in the boat. We've rented an apartment on the point where we are surrounded by surf and constant ocean breezes.

Our sublime mountain house in Chajaneb combined with early pregnancy sent me a bit over the edge. Ten days of constant rain, the soaring keeness of my canine nose, the aversion to most food- even Matthew's hot new pizza rolls, the waif of mice droppings between the walls, the ill-plumbed Central American bathrooms that swell the house full of sewer gases, the ever present nausea that made me want to tear through my skin to the outside of my body and just run.

Even now I can barely think about the house in Chajaneb without gripping tight to a saltine. There were sweetened moments wandering in the hillsides up mud-covered paths that twirled between rows of corn and coffee plants. The way the clouds hung low letting your whole being disperse amongst them. Or those crazy rides to town, standing up, holding tight to a single metal bar, packed into the back of a flatbed industrial-size truck full of over 50 men, women, babies, children, chickens, turkeys, baskets of vegetables, tortillas, maize. As we tumbled up and over the rock roads, hillsides, bright green valleys all planted with crops woven in lines and patterns that mesmerize like the Mayan cloth weavings.

And now on Utila, life and my body feel a bit easier, a little less heavy minus the breasts which could now do a decent plump add for an implant surgeon. At the apartment I can keep all the windows wide open, am constantly wrapped in breezes and when a wave of nausea knocks at me, I can plunge into the tepid water for relief- really all quite nice. It helps, but traveling at this point in pregnancy is a drag and makes one want for the familiarity and comforts of home, but hey island paradise ain't bad. Often I want for Matthew's jumping around lightness and bodily strength, his good humor and ability to stay awake beyond 9 PM. He's been a great sport of it all and I'm ever so thankful for him. Every day he goes snorkeling for hours, finding spotted eagle rays, sandcastles of coral formations in brilliant colors, dog-size puffer fish, and schools of sergent majors surrounding and swimming with him, the big fish. He is in sheer delight and claims he could carry on with days like this for the rest of his life- but for now, it's one more week of island bliss and body recovery for me, then a way too long 17+ hour bus trek to Nicaragua.

Buses, baby and babylon.

2006-07-15T07:04:00.000-07:00

Whether it is an unwarranted sense that I´m tired of writing or just don´t want to be bothered, I can see that our blogs have become fewer and smaller in length. Forgive us, I´d say, because we want to tell you our sappy and happy stories but often just don´t feel like wandering into an internet cafe. It just isn´t or does not jibe or seem appropriate with our general vibe at the time. Expats. Humph.

It is official, we have the plane tickets, and we will be coming home on September 7. We´ll spend two weeks trying to arrange health coverage for heather and the baby in Asheville, that is if the great satin George didn´t axe that program while we were gone. We will hang out and see and mooch off of friends and then, hopefully, do a world wind tour of Maine, Indiana and California and possibly if the pocketbook sees favorably come through North Dakota and Seattle. Ah, money, burn it if you still have it. I will join my comrades in labor at the beginning of November.

After we left those impossibly verdant slopes in Chajaneb, Heather and I reluctantly returned to Guatemala City to do what all good citizens of civilization do, battle with the bureacracy. It seems that visa laws changed on June 1, for what I could only make out was little more than a money making scheme. The hassle, or so we thought, would be waiting three days for them to process the paperwork. But in the end, we found a decent little hotel and spent time seeing the ornate National Palace, fountains and cathedrals. All in a all, it went pretty fast except for the times when Heather´s nausea was overwhelming. She is tough, though, and besides the moments when I´ve already become shamefully jealous of the strength, care and time my new offshoot requires, my beautiful wife fared pretty well.

From Guatemala City, we traveled over five hours by four different buses to Copan, Honduras, a tiny colonial town with cobbled streets, whitewashed walls and tile roofs and if I may say so, a bit like an Epcot Center exhibit. Almost too perfect for Central America. Anyway, all of it in a green valley nestled by miles of corn fields, shadowed by the Rio Copan, and home to Copan Ruins, a 1500 year old Mayan homestead and our reason for traveling, of course, there.

Lodging was fine, 10 dollars for a clean room with two beds and a fan, with a shared bathroom. The food in this town was generally horrible, as it seems the case with all the towns where there will be lots of gringos. Try as they might, you just can´t make three thousand years of corn tortilla technology into a Philly steak and cheese. And you know it will be bad, but you are sick of tortillas and want KFC, and so you sucker in and curse the gods for this bad food after.

The next morning, we walked the two klicks to Copan Ruins, an ambling path past fields pregnant with tall grass and horses. The ruins were not cheap, 10 bucks a person and that didn´t include the price of going into the archeology tunnels or the museum, which we did not do. They were not needed.

We have been to four major Mayan ruins this year, and while yes they are separated by hundreds of miles, thinking about it last year I couldn´t but imagine they would mostly be the same. Stone, carvings, pyramids, same time different burg. How wrong it seems I was. They do look a lot alike, but they all have different pervialing feeling. Hard to explain, really. Chichen Itza, in Mexico, was dominated by a single gigantic and wide pyramid, much like they look in Cairo, and it seemed to affect you in a fatherly, motherly way. Protecting and snuggling you. Tikal seems to rise out of the Guatemalan jungle, like a warrior general and most of the temples, at times, feel like they are pressing down on you. I can´t say I was scared, but I felt uncomfortable. Tulum felt like the Mayan Club Med on the shores of the Carribean. And Copan, was less about structures and location, but the fantastic carvings. Hundreds of faces and hyrogliphics, beneath mountain like Ceiba trees. It was soothing, like a neighborhood. All these ruins had, at times, thousands of people living there but this was the only place it was still obvious after two milleniums.

Yo tengo una familia

2006-06-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

It seems we are most vulnerable to our own bodies and minds. During the last year or so you could sum me up with I'm fine, just don´t ask me any questions.
Fertility planning, clinics, drugs, surgery, two years. Shields up.
Heather probably can´t have a baby. Shields up.
Heather is weepy again, takes another pregancy test. It is positive. Shields up.
Heather returns to the pharmacy to purchase another test. Two lines again, she is pregnant and I walk down the main street shouting at and showing anyone, who turns my way, my two tests with two lines. Shields down.
But there is bleeding and a threat of miscarriage. Shields up.
Two weeks waiting. Five straight days of rain. Shields up.
A few times Heather seems close to a yellow color and nearly vomiting. Ah, me thinks, shields down.
Today waiting at the ultrasound clinic for two plus hours, shields definitely up.
Woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh. That's 12 beats in five seconds, I estimated, or 144 life pumping heart beats in one minute. Oh, yeah, shields down.
What about the blood Doctor? Shields? No blood. No more threat of loosing this baby.
I´m a father. She is a mother. We are a family.

Tenemos piojos y mas

2006-06-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

Yes, we finally got them, those itching wake you up in the middle of the night critters that seem to have the ferocity of a cockroach, piojos (lice). Who knows how we got them, we escaped ¨piojos free¨ from the orphanage with such confidence that we even donated our lightweight industrial comb to the clinic, now we´re groaning over our gracious philanthrophy. But, hey, you can buy anthing at the farmacias here and so every few days Matthew is lathering himself in a toxic foam of the Guatemalan RID equivalent. We´re boiling up our bedsheets over the stove and drying them in the sun. Ahh, the pleasures.

In the midst of all the itch, we have been taking Spanish classes in Chajhaneb, an isolated farming community high up in the twirling hills, splat in the middle of Guatemala. It takes an hour to walk to the closest town of any importance or you can trot about 20 minutes on a bumpy rock path and grab a jalon (lift) from a bus or traveling truck bed. The hills are saturated in green, coffee is everywhere along with blueberry bushes, maize, bananas, red peppers, wildflowers in firered and purple-blue. The air is fresca (fresh) and you can breathe it all in without a stinch of firesmoke or exhaust. The rivers run a Caribean blue green hue and almost every afternoon around siesta time you can count on a rainstorm on an old farmhouse tinroof to lull you to sweet slumber. Finally, we have found peace in Guatemala. It is absolutely sublime here, (of course, I´m ignorning the piojos situation).

We´ve been staying with Libby our gracious, motherly host (who speaks English and spent over 20 years in the US), Laura another student, tono (the parrot), coneja (pregnant perra) who just had new pups Monday, and Osama (yes like, bin laden) the other perro. Some days after class we just wander up into the hills (where the children run out from their homes giggling out of control at us, rubbing their bellies, falling to the ground in sheer delight, and yelling out ¨adios¨ or some Q´iche words till we´re totally out of site), other days we plant seeds in the greenhouse, pick wildflowers, harvest veggies, kick around a soccer ball, or just laze in a hammock and read. If we could, we´d grab this farmhouse up and wish it into the hills of Carolina.

But for now, the farmhouse is ours, for the next 2 weeks. The school is closed, the owners are on holiday, and we have rented the place all to ourselves to relax, wait things out and try to figure out what happens next. Like most of our experience in Guatemala, we´ve been given a surprise, a gift and a struggle, hand in hand. I don´t know what it was, my body breathing in the 200 kids loving me up at the orphanage, the multiple women, crushed up tight next to me in the buses nursing their little ones, or my fingers digging deep into the fertile soil. I don´t know, just like we don´t know why it has taken us close to 2 years, but I´m pregnant. Two pregnancy tests, and an ultrasound confirm it´s real, but we both still sit in a shadow of disbelief and a bit of fear. There is a baby, in a good place, holding strong in my womb, but there´s also a sac of blood, spotting, cramping pain, and a risk of miscarriage. For the most part though, we both are happy, shocked to know that my body can actually get pregnant. Whether I can stay pregant is another story, but I´m used to not being able to control the wills of my body, and so for the last week I´ve followed the doc´s orders and laid around the house. The cramping and bleeding have greatly subsided, and today in over a week I made my first trek into town. I feel great, yet tinged with a want for sleep, I feel strong with a sense of shifting in my body and peaceful floatyness with my husband in my mind and whole being. Whatever happens next, I know we both will be ok and even more hopeful. Next week will be 8 weeks, and we´ll get another ultrasound to see if the blood is gone and if there´s a heartbeat. In the meantime, we´ll bake bread, munch on blueberries, practice our Spanish and read the farmhouse clear of books. All is good.

Water Therapy

2006-06-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

When our young Guatemalan guide turned off his headlamp, to save the batteries, I felt my first real pang of fear. Darkness in a cave is an incomparable black, and with the roar of a 20 foot waterfall only steps away, my danger meter started to rise.

To that point, I thought Heather and I had done surprising well swimming into oblivion with only candles in our out-stretched arms to light the way. Hell, we'd been agonizing over the decision whether or not to do that cave tour for two days. And now, with five others in our party, we had swam under amazing stalagtites and eery formations, squeezed through dark holes, walked blind through a waterfall, and then scaled a rope latter beside it to the top. And man, I was so proud of my wife.

The water was chilly and I was getting cold for sure, and my adrenaline was pumping, and our candles were all extinguished from this underground cascade, but I wasn't scared because I'd seen our guide pack his two cigarette lighters, and of course, he leads people through this liquid labyrinth twice a day. But then he just couldn't make that first lighter do a damn thing, and he was giggling and laughing and talking in Spanish and Q'eqchi, and then the second lighter didn't work either. It was sparking though, and with his headlamp off, the frequent sparks created a spooky stobe light effect. My heart was pumping harder. My fingers got colder. At first I thought he was just putting on a fright gag. He giggled more, and, then after five minutes that probably seemed like ten, it ignited, and people jammed their candles into it. At last we were saved.

Now, of course, he had a rope and his headlamp, and I'm sure he could have safely led us out of that cave without the candles, but it did add a couple of decidely terrifying elements to our tour that we laugh about now.

This week, post orphanage, has been a bit of water therapy. We have been traveling with our friend Jen, a most excellent person and social worker from Seattle that left Casa Guatemala the same day as us, and hitting a few of the spots that are hard to get to in Guatemala but that most people say are truely amazing. I would have to agree, they are mostly breath taking.

First off, we grabbed a fast flatbed truck ride through rolling pastures and along rivers bordering Lago de Izabel, sprinkled with thatched hut villages here and there, and then stopped as planned at Finca Paraiso (paradise farm). On a part of this farm, for 10 quetzals, you can wade across this rushing clear creek, full of boulders and chilly water that make all great creeks great, to huge a waterfall that comes into the creek perpendicularly from a height of 40 feet. And now get this, the cascada is hot geothermal water, beautiful 100 plus degree water that falls and pounds on your tired neck and shoulders and any other parts of your body you could contort upwards. There are fabulous little rocky nooks and crannies all over the face of the falls, created much the way a cave is created by melting limestone, which you can squeeze your body into and catch the water bath. All of this in a setting shaded by junglely plants above. After an hour, we discovered you can actually climb up above the waterfall and sit in placid yet scorching hot pools as well. On the slow bus ride back to our hostel, a rocked jarred me awake and I looked down and saw that an approximately 8 year old girl was sitting next to me and had laid her infant sister asleep in my lap. I fell back asleep myself, and Heather who sitting in the back of the bus with Jen, said she never saw anyone sitting with me. Only my head bobbing around in slumber. The baby was there, I know it.

Two days later, we finally went spent the big bucks, 100 quetzals a piece, about 12 dollars, to hire a fast lancha to take us down the Rio Dulce, through the jungle and ultimately limestone gorge that dumps out into the Carribean, at the Garifuna town of Livingston. The Garifuna are decendants of African slaves and Carrib Indians that were forcibly evacuated from the Grenadine Islands 150 years ago. They speak a creole language of English and Spanish, and their town of Livingston is a little burg by the sea that can only be reached by boat. Our second day there, we hiked 5 kilometers along the Carribean coastline, passing seemingly out of the way cabanas and lodges, past mango and unnameable other fruit trees, to Siete Altares (seven alters). Essentially, another crystaline cold river, that plunges down through waterfalls and natural swimming pools. The limestone, which we have seen countless times now, colors the water and the rocks in such a way that it seems equal to Carribean island waters. Coincidentally, the Carribean water around Livingston, while lovingly warm and salty, is muddy brown from the Rio Dulce pouring into it.

In Livingston, seafoods are the comidas of choice, and Tampado is the queen dish, a coconuty milk broth soup with a whole fish, crab, shrimps, squids and parts of a pulp (octopus). I ate it all heartily, like any good fellow worth his sea salt from New England would have, with only a trace of remorse for the pulpo. (Heather here, I must admit I sipped heavily on the sweet broth but the floating display of creatures was a little over the top. )

The sunrise six a.m. lancha ride the next morning, the fastest boat ride of our lifes in a wailing rain storm to Puerto Barrios, was exhilerating. The dark clouds hanging on hooks over the water, and the spray from the rain made you feel so alive and at that hour, awake. Barrios is just what it sounds like, a port town for shipping out the tons of bananas for your smoothies back in the states, and we jumped on a nice bus out of there as soon as we had arrived. This was a sweet double decker bus, with movies and the works. A bit pricey, but worth it.

I´ll take this moment to talk a little about Gautemalan transportation, which is mostly by bus or mini bus. Around the Rio Dulce and eastern highlands, it´s minibuses all the way. Take your average Toyota Minvan, which probably holds eight Americans at the most, and Guatemalans will put 23 to 26 people in there, smashing four to row, putting rows where there are not rows, and two guys hanging out the window. When someone wants to get out of the back, everybody has to get out. In the western highlands, like near Antigua and Xela, they use old American school buses up there, and put three or four people in each seat, on both sides, with people standing of course in the aisle. Now mind you, there is always the money guy who somehow manages to climb through and over everyone to get their money, because they never collect the dough at the door because of the frequent pickups without really every stopping completely. These buses are everywhere and somehow it all works. The rides, as you might have guessed, comfort wise are miserably hot affairs. And the drivers scare the shit out of you with their driving. I can't explain to you, and don't really want to try, the amount frustration that comes from trying to negotiate directions and then agree on a price with these guys. After much bartering, both parties are usually satisfied that I have talked them down to a price roughly 25 percent more than what the locals pay. Of course, sometimes I'm just mad as hell after.

We rode the fancy bus to the Alta Verapaz region, a mountain range area once dominated by German owned Coffee Fincas, and hard to get to villages of Indigenos. Today the Germans are gone, but the coffee fincas live on with the additional rich man crops of cocoa (chocolate beans) and cardamon trees (spices for the Middle East) crawling up the hillsides, and impossible poor farms working corn ever higher. The peaks here are often hidden in the mist and this is one of the last known habitats of that elusive symbol of Mayan power, the quetzal bird. Beginning Thursday, Heather and I are going to one of these small farms to start Spanish school again. It's a small school, only like six to eight students, and we hope to stay for two weeks if we like it. We got to the area last Friday, spent four days in Lanquin Valley at a cool lodge along another spectacular river, where we did a self guided tour through a cave system, lighted with lightbulbs this time, equal to the splendor of carlsbad caverns with ceilings stretching hundreds of feet above and limestone stalagtites in all shapes and sizes. Really beautiful, and then we went tubing back down the river to the lodge, where hardy meals waited for us.

One day, Heather and I did a hike into the mountains, and the farm workers we met along were incredibly nice. Most of them speak Q'eqchi and Spanish, in that order, and were usually delighted to try and talk with us. Their first questions are always about how many kids do we have, because that is very important in their culture. They just nod when we say we have none, and acknowledge they have nine or ten. Q'eqchi is an impossible and fascinating language. It must have it's roots in the same pool that many of our Native American languages come from. Try saying Pock Mock Took, Mock Shook Took, Took, Took. There you are, your fist Q'eqchi lesson. Those aren't real words, of course, but that's what it sounds like.

Anyway, the hike was peaceful and a good chance to stretch our legs and talk. We are closing in on our fifth wedding aniversary, and through the thick of this year's adventures and two years of trying to have a baby, we keep finding ourselves being grumpy with each other. There are lots of reasons we can say why this is happening, but those always feel like empty answers. A month ago my dad said you need tolerance and patience, and I have been thinking a lot on this. I love my wife, and my wife loves me, then how can we be mean to each other sometimes? I know all her moves. She knows all my moves. It feels like stalemate sometimes. Maybe some other couples can enlighten us on this. I think it is a bad time that is passing, but the moments when they come can snuff out a brilliant moment or day in just a flash. We want to be better, we are trying to better. To love harder. To be more tolerant.

A rough one hour ride over the mountain from Lanquin is Semuc Champey, a bizaare collection of azul pools formed when the mighty and violent Cahabon River suddenly dives underground for half a mile, and the little water that continues on top makes the pools and waterfalls perfect for swimming. Just down stream, where the Cahabon magically reappears in all its ferocity, is where the Las Marias Caves are, and where today's story found it's beginning. The Entrance is at the top of a 100 hundred foot waterfall, cloaked in orchids and vines. At the bottom, where the waterfall cave creek pushes into the the brown rain swollen Cahabon, I watched my beautiful wife ride a rope swing way out of over the river, and when she turned around to come back, I saw a giddy smile that tells me this is still all worth it, that together we are still very much worth it.

Mothers Day with Orphans

2006-05-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

I get such a kick out of watching the new volunteers, usually one or two float in per week, as they make their first walk across the orphanage. Every few feet a new child steps forward and says, Como te llamas? Como te llamas? What´s your name? Again and again, day after day where ever you go, really for the first couple of weeks, and so quickly they learn your name, yelling it out from all over the place and immediately making you feel somehow special.

Of course there´s no way to pick up 250 of their names that fast, and now as Heather and I enter into our third month, I get looks of you must be kidding when I ask them, Como te llamas? (The writer just had a moment here in the internet café – a juggernaut cockroach just ran across his bare foot.) I am beginning to know many of them, for sure, names, faces and personalities.
My personal favorites are the Varones Pequenos, a group of rough and tumble 6 to 9 year old boys, that can have you laughing your ass off and pulling your hair out at the same time. On top of your regular job at the orphanage, which for me is half the day in the clinic and the other teaching agriculture with Heather, all the volunteers are responsible for evening and weekend activities. For whatever reason, be it that others are scared to work with them, they like me, I like them, I usually get these little guys. And some of them have wormed their way into my heart already.

David comes to mind first, a nine year old with an angular body and piercing eyes. His story is not totally clear to me, but I do know that his left arm was broken in an accident here at the orphanage and never healed properly because they didn´t take him to the hospital. It´s partially fixed at the elbow and gives him the look that he might always be making a bicycle hand signal. And it windmills in perfect circles when he runs, otherwise this a beautiful normal looking kid. Smart too, learning more English from me than I Spanish from him. In time, you will all see much of him in the pictures I´ve collected. Heather is crazy about him too, and of course, we have asked the powers whether he is adoptable or not, so many kids here are not, and we have not had any news there.

Last Sunday morning I had the Varones for an hour in the art classroom. It might have been a real challenge, as they´d much rather be fishing, pescando, or playing futbol, but I was ready for them, Heather too, with music and a fistful of surgical masks I stole from the clinic. We painted the masks crazy colors, and then armed with my sutures in my leg, I faked multiple enfermades and let them operate on me repeatedly. A good fast time was had by all.

The other thing that kids yell at you all the time here is, Mira me. Mira me. Mira me. Look at me. Look at me. Young and old, they all want attention here. It´s a hard place to feel special and we all want attention, and the kids is where we focus our energies. This week, in a bizarre sense of reality, the powers decided we should celebrate Mothers Day with orphans. Far out man. The volunteers put up a collective stink, and as usual with anything that doesn´t make sense, something that college educated people with good ideas and solutions might want to contribute to, that we´d like to make a change to, we are quickly reminded that there are always more volunteers coming and the whole lot of us can leave right now, and those new 180 dollar donations are eagerly awaited for.

So we had a festival to celebrate mothers with kids, who for reasons that might be abandonment or death by firing squad in front of their impressionable eyes, do not have mothers. Strange days in deed. I tried to watch one my Varones closely. Oscar is an 8 year old, new to the orphanage just four months prior, after being plucked off the streets of Guatemala City where he had lived on his own for two years. Oscar is beginning to settle down. He doesn´t get into half as many fights as when Heather I first arrived, but he´s still a little bit nuts, and the powers dressed him in a tiger suit and had him parading around in the front of the forty or so mothers that did show up. He was so innocent and sweet that day, dancing and doing cartwheels, and probably happy to know that the tortillas would be made out of harina, flour, instead of corn that special day, instead watching the bizarre skits by Guatemalteco teachers displaying odd scenes of domestic violence, and later, men, drunk with bottles of real rum on the table, shouting out happy thoughts to their mothers. Man I wish my Spanish was better, so maybe I could actually get the symbolism they were working at, or I could maybe better articulate to them, What the Fuck were you thinking?

Yo duermo con los chichitos

2006-05-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

Yo duermo con los chichitos (I sleep with the little ones), at least once or twice a week, packing my bag on those nights with a bedsheet (to prevent my likeliness of picking up lice or scabies from the foursome), my toothbrush, a water bottle, bug spray, my headlamp and a book with the accompanied candle to see me through the night. Lately, the nights have been long, the energy different, the heat has picked up to a point where the body just can´t stop dripping. The chichitos are like little cook-boxes sweating through their clothes, turning their hair into mops, inviting all sorts of nightmares into their slumber that make them cry out in the night or fall out of their beds. It´s never a restful night, especially when you´re thrown into the crash course on being a mother to four, 4-year olds, something I´ve never wanted for but have grown to both love and dread.

Some nights are better than others, but there are always the precious hours between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., when for some reason the earth gives us the slightess lull in moisture, giving our skin a break, allowing our entire being to relax. You can feel it in the air, its like the whole big world just takes a deep big breathe in and sighs out, and we all perfectly sleep.

The chichitos are my motley crew of sweetness, sass, and will. They are fickle. They are the only kids at Casa that do not have to awaken at 4:30 a.m. to begin their chores and continue forward with school and other work into 4 or 5 in the afternoon. In fact, really, they are the only children here that are consistently treated like kids back home - nutured, given plenty of time to play, learn, love, run. They will love you up one minute and the next tell you that they don´t like you, to go away, to never, ever spend the night with them again. Sometimes, I take it all to personally, but then my rationale kicks in, realizing that this is one of their means of control, of protecting themselves. Everyone eventually leaves them - their parents, volunteers, Guatemaltecan workers. All 4 of them remember their parents, their mama. Some get to see them twice a year, others visit them in their dreams and shake them awake at night, while others hide deep in their being having last been seen shot down in front of their ocean big wholesome eyes. Everything here, just tears you open wide.

Last week one of the chichitos returned from Guatemala City where 5 months prior she had surgery to correct a cleft palate, one of the many reasons that had driven her parents to abandon her. She is 4, back at the orphanage in Rio Dulce, where now all of the the volunteers are different from when she left. She can talk now and people understand what she wants or needs, which is a huge empowerment for her, but the welling of her grief and struggle are immense. It just flies out of her, some nights kicking her legs, flailing her arms, banging her head hard on the floor as if some other being possessed the child body. Sometimes in my broken spanish I can talk her through it, find her way back, other times she just rages and wears herself out.

But then there are those moments where language and rationalization mean nothing. No one needs words, only instinct, only nature, and it becomes completely clear to me why I must be here, at this moment. As I make my way to her bed in the jungle-thick night, my head grogy, my feet being pulled foward by her cries, body reaching over to lug up the heavy wet weight that now clings tight to my neck, whose legs wrap to my spine, whose head-top nuzzles deep under my chin. I ease into the bathroom, so as not to wake the others, where tile floor in the jungle can still bring a bit of coolness to the bottom of the footpads, reminding you where you are, what you are doing. She shakes and pulls me tight with each sob, her being is so close to mine that I can´t tell what is hers and what is mine, a slow deep wail for mama rises up through the pit of her being and I tremble, something inside shifts, creaks, moves up and out of me. Tears stream down my face, falling heavy, falling deep on her wet head, mixing with hers, down her face, into her skin. Both beings sobbing, both needing each other at that exact moment.

Room to Grow

2006-04-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

There is no need to descend deep underwater when the walking world is making you tremble, unfortunately I realized this 30 feet under the ocean struggling to breathe compressed air. Trembling, I must admit, was the state of our beings as we drifted away from the orphanage, on a lancha, upon multiple buses, an overnight in La Ceiba and a ferry to Roatan, Honduras. For some reason, we thought our escape from the U.S., the work world, the bills, the car, would open up all this time for ourselves, for each other, for more happiness, for healing. But what has happened is struggle, survival, and less time for us as individuals and friends. This realization hits you like an early winter windgust and stays inside you with a sense of disappointment that only you can bring on yourself, hold there, look at it, and eventually free yourself of it.

And so, Roatan, with its perfect powdery beaches, coral fringed edges that hugged the entire island, endless sunshine, and an ocean that brought forth more shades of blue than the assortment found at home depot, was beautiful, tranquilo, everything the guidebooks rave about. The island helped us to sort things out, talk, and come up with possibilities to enjoy ourselves more. Floating, yes, now that is good, and as my dear husband uttered ¨you´re like my grammy - a floating, long-legged creature¨ one balmy day as I floated on the piercing blue water of Roatan, as he struggled to fill his chest up with air to avoid sinking.

Matthew here. It's true, I can`t float and my wife can like a lillypad. Roatan was good to me, for the most part. I finished two books, and spent the remainder of time reading the other novel that is me. I realized where I have been this spring with my marriage and where I need to go. Funny thing, ordinarily, I always think that we are some marvelous organsism, our marriage, doing and being the kind of people I suppose or hope we should be. But suddenly, your person gets squeezed by it`s environment and you kind of sink inside yourself, like an anchor, and wake up to find you`re responding to the most minimal requests of your best friend with only grunts and groaning. How can that happen? Shamefull really.

We will be back at the orphanage this afternoon, with renewed spirits, I think. Without going into all the particulars, we have got to find time to be together other than sleeping. We also have to find time for space for ourselves. This isn`t going to be easy, considering the circumstances.

For me, every time the thought crosses my head that we should pack it in and head back to the states, and believe me I`ve thought about it plenty, I remember some wisdom my friends Tom and Colleen once told me. They spent a year living in west Africa, new cultures and language, struggle here and there, and told us our experience would go something like this. Initial honeymoon, then for three months you grow to hate everything about it, the people the places, every time you have to barter with a guy for a 5 cent piece of fruit.

We are not totally there yet, sometimes I`m close. And then, Tom and Colleen said, things will start to click and your experience will become, in your mind, the rewarding thing you hoped it would all be. We are waiting for the moment when the momentum changes, because we have a lot of love to give to this place and each other and there is so much room for us to grow.

And to shed a positive impression, I (heather) just got back from buying a bagful of fruit and veggies. I was happy, the interactions were all positive, I got smiles and not stares. Maybe I´m at least getting the hang of this.

Yo prefiero the chucharachas

2006-04-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

Yo prefiero the cucharachas. I never imagined I would entertain such contemplation, but the nightly rats in mi casa, racing up through the rafters and chewing through my ropas like a new pup, or the pocito ormigas-ants- crawling up my legs like fire and in seconds flat clutching on to a nice bite of one of my sensitive body parts, or the black, crusty, prehistoric scorpions, geez, just give me the hibby geebies.

Now, I have a great reverence for life, to the point that most critters are nicely air-lifted and escorted out of our room, our house rather than face the death squad. However, the scorpions have made it off this list and are now squash material - all of them. For the spiders and tarantualas, we just leave them alone. They eat the mosquitos and tend to revisit the same spot each night. I just pull my nightly watchman duty, doing a nightly scope of the walls to assess the location of our additional housemates and move on. Now, do not assume we are without fear, each night the mosquito net is wrapped tight around the bed and the sheets shaked out to tossle any scorpions. Then, and only then will we attempt to slumber.

Our slumber and living at the orphanage is accompanied by a symphony of sounds. The over 500 chickens (right next to the house) cluck almost all the time, you will get the roosters going off any time of day as well, the ducks sort of live out in front and like to hang out around the perimeter of our casa. The other day I came home from work to find Matthew serenading a whole flock of ducks that were chilled out to his sweet mountain tunes. The howler monkeys are now feeding off some fruit in the trees above our house and so we get to gaze upon their presence often, yet one must be careful for where there are monkeys above, there is falling monkey shit and pee. We have not been victim yet, but have witnessed a few kids get slammed hard.

What else, ahh, the roar of the generator, my new alarm clock, that kicks on around 4 in the morning and sporadically rises and falls throughout the day, always giving us an excited surprise as to when and where we may be blessed with modern electricity. Then there are the coches, the pigs. I really like going and watching them. We have all sizes here, big pigs, little pigs, new pigs, old pigs, pink pigs, spotted pigs. When they snooze they just climb all on top of each other, and when they feed they do the same thing but with the most piercing bark. Some of the larger pigs will even stand up on their hind legs and balance their front ones on the wall, supporting their tonful bodies. Their heads lifted up in chorus, belting out for food, their ears flare out like dumbo, and yes, they too do this all the time. Yet, all these noises, along with the kids, the shouts of mira, mira (look, look) are all becoming part of us now. It is really only the dawn screches of the solitary pig being slaughtered that still make me flinch from my sleep. Today, here at the hotel run by the orphange I am overwhelmed by the constant noise of radio, jet skis, motor boats, people all day and all night long. Tonight, after working an unpaid 12 hour day, I am out of here and on a lancha back to the casa. Going to pack the bags tomorrow, hug on the necks of a few kids, and bus and ferry our way to some tropical, tranquilo spot in honduras.

Rio Frio

2006-04-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

You just can't imagine how tough the skin is on the bottom of person's foot that doesn't wear shoes. You can lean all your weight on the needle but still have a hard time pushing it through the flesh.

It was late Tuesday night when they found me. I was trudging back to the house to light a candle and take a shower if we had any water pressure, and then climb under the mosquito net and right the day off complete. Always when I least expect it. In Spanish, the kitchen lady says, we need you to look at this kid's foot. Ya, already, like haven't I been through this bandaid on the knee bit enough this week, and I probably gave her one of the looks that my wife says are just evil.

I found him sitting on a bench, a big fat 16 year old who was just visiting the orphange for the week, and wow, there was a lot blood. Immediately, my sweat glands shifted from jungle sticky drive to cascade. Damn, I thought, here it is afterall, I going to have to suture this kid. I'm not ready. No choice. It was an ordeal for both of us. Him, because he was kind of baby, and me, because, well, I needed to close up this six inch gash on the bottom of his foot. Heather, who was spending the night with the chiquitos, the four year olds next door to the clinic, says she watched me for two hours under the candle light, croutched over the kid, pulling the string hard forward, up and around, with 2 adults holding the boy down. In the end, he was ok, but Matthew was drenched in fear sweat and worked off his nerves by helping the kids unload a shipment of supplies that arrived by boat at 11 p.m. Incidentally, the next afternoon a worker wacked his thumb with a machete and Matthew was gathered to sew him back together again.

At last count, I have eight years of university, I have been in charge of half million dollar equipment, spent time covering events in one of largest cities in the world, and I have helped save, now, countless peoples lives. This morning I toiled in cigarette butts and empty beer bottles, scraping gum off a seat and table, and then spent the remainder of the day taking shit from a 17 year old Guatemalan waitress. Yesterday, I washed dishes for five hours. Ah, Guatemala, you just can't always love it.

Heather and I have survived working 26 straight days at the orphanage, and we have stories to tell, both good and bad. But right now it's Santa Semana, Easter week, and instead of cutting us loose, they have kindly moved us to work in the hotel for a few days. The staff there aren't very nice, they're rather rude actually and that really makes it hard to do it for free, when I probably wouldn't do it for 10 bucks an hour. I have told a couple of people to piss off already, but they didn't understand my English so no satisfaction was had here, and of course, in Spanish I have been reprimanded a number of times for things which I still haven't translated yet. Just one more day here, and then we go back to the orphange, collect our backpacks, and head off for 9 days of descansa, rest, in the bay islands of Honduras. Probably Roatan.

Life at the orphange constantly leaves your head spinning. One minute I'm taking in the beauty of the river, watching the monkees, and then the next I'm helping 10 year olds carry 75 pound bags of chicken shit. The children, for the most part, are healthy, loving and a lot of fun.

However, the language barrier continues to be a battle. The kids don't speak English, none of the Guatemalan staff do, and while many of the volunteers, amazingly speak as many as five languages, all the meetings and just general workings of the day are conducted in Spanish. Conversational Spanish does not cut it. We both are working on our skills. I'm three quarters finished reading in Spanish, El Tiburon, which you proably know as Jaws. But while I'm seem to be reading at a 5th grade level, I'm remedial when speaking, and I might just as well have no orejas, ears, at all. The speed, the accents, seem impossible to understand. The language problem has made difficult things, for both of us, harder. Heather has found it particularly difficult sometimes to make a connection with the very young kids, perhaps wanting more. We both have broke down and cried at few times. Me secretly of course. We often say to ourselves, why the hell are we doing this. And then we rationalize with all the same things that got us down here. We will see how long that continues to last.

The food is not as bad as we thought it would be, and then at times it seems much worse. I think I gave a false impression last blog that we were eating well, fruits and vegetables, because there isn't much of that stuff and most goes to feed the pigs and for sale at the store in town. It's most rice and beans with tortillas all meals. We supplement our personal stores, when we got to town once a week, but without a frig stuff spoils in a couple of days. And then, of course, there is the rats in the house. Dig this, though, I actually enjoy powdered milk in cereal now.

Heather taught a sewing and art class last week. Rewarding and challenging.

I plucked a chicken last week. I helped the workers insert telephone like poles into the river to make a foundation for a chool addition. No cranes. You swim around, use pullies and small boats to raise them, then four guys climb to the top and pound it into the mud by hand. Amazing. They didn't let me climb the thing.

There was no class on Tuesday, the suture day, and we volunteers took about 50 kids for the day to Rio Frio, a clear cool creek for swimming about an hour and half away. I think everybody had a great time. Lots of cow pastures and thatched huts along the way. I carried a five year old named Selbin most of the way back. He was sweet, so I was tired but happy.

El Campo

2006-04-01T20:17:00.000-08:00

Well, Heather can now add Enchargeadora de Los Tortillas to her resume. We are slowing falling into the rhthym of the jungle, myself, I suppose, more so than her, as she has been constantly pulled off one project to another, but such is the itinerant nature of the all volunteer work force. Some folks book it after a week, others eight months, newbees arrive all the time, but someone is always sick, or just too tired, fedup, or hungover to wake up and do it again.

I sort of flipped out for a day or two, but I am fine in my roles now. Basically, I work a few hours on the agricultural Campo, farm, in the morning doing mostly manual labor and then in the clinic in the afternoons. Sometimes Heather joins me on the farm when she can. So far, I have been helping getting this experimental crop going in one of the greenhouses. Collard greens, bok choy and swiss chard. Definitely not staples on the farm or in the guatemalan diet, but more on that later. Anyway, I do a lot digging and pushing the wheelbarrow. Not highbrow stuff but I like it. By the way, heather and I busted our asses digging this one hole for what we thought was a compost pile, but they promptly came and dumped basura, trash with plastics in it. Basura hole.

Heather has worked as a teachers aid, the tortilla lady which is an important gig here, on the farm, and will be teaching sewing next week and assiting with the chiquitas.

The main part of the Campo is run by Don Matteo and his beefy son Don Manual. I pass Don Matteo all the time. Hola Don Matteo, I will say. Hola Voluntario, he will say. Don Matteo has blue eyes, are a rarity for Gautemalans. Don Matteo has 14 children. Not really a rarity. On the farm, we have big water towers and crops of buckwheat, yucca, cumcumbers, melons, plantains and bananas por suspuesto, or course, and pineapples and tomatoes. But many of the vegetables are not for human consumption, they feed the pigs with that. And the pigs sell for big dinero in town and that helps support the orphanage. In fact someone sleeps with pigs each night so nobody steals them. I like the pigs much but will not sleep with them.

By the way, we have a water filtration system, sand and chlorine and bacteria that eats bacteria thing, that gives us the unthinkable, drinkable water. I am not kiding, we are drinking it. Ten days now and have not died from dysentery yet. Some volunteers have been imbibing this stuff for a year without ill affects.

We have 170 children here that sleep and eat during the week, and another 50 or so that come from the nearby aldeas, villages, like the one called Brisas. An amazing collection of families that live in bamboo sided homes with thatched roofs, surrounded by the jungle, river and moutains. Just like on Tv, only it takes ten minutes to walk there. Anyway, the kids have decent living quarters, get up around 430 a.m., do chores, breakfast and then hit the books, English, math, art and music, etc. And play time of course. Futbal, soccer nuts everyone and I am getting a little of the action. But I basically suck. There is also lots of activities and the volunteers are expected to help with these. They are usually fun. On the weekends, many of the kids go home, and only about 70 fulltime orphans remain with us.

Food is not too bad. Always beans and rice with tortillas, of course, but usually a small salad or something too. I eat cereal with powered milk at our house in the morning.

As far as the clinic goes, it really could not be a better situation. It is very well stocked. right now we have another nurse, from Canada, and a doctor for a short two week stay. I am diagnosing and prescribing meds, playing doctor, and I have not killed anyone yet. Mostly fungal and bacterial infections. One case of malaria.

We saw our friend from Asheville, Dennis, last week. He looks like Ernest Hemingway and sounds like Gandhi. Me gusto mucho. He told us about his adventures to Utila, an island in Honduras in the Carribean, and I think we will head there for our first break in two weeks.

Adios

No entiendo.

2006-03-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

Spanish 101: Lo siento pero no entiendo. Affectionately, I´m sorry but I do not understand you. Necessary terminology for our lives at Casa Guatemala where everything is more than we hoped and desired, though the language gap has widened somewhat, and we became slapped in the face with our thirty-something state of being. Their´s a shitload of young folks here, and along with that comes amazing 20 year old linguists with the energy and stamina of an everlasting gobstopper, and of course, the drama of the typical reality tv show. Welcome to our island.

We got off the boat first to find that we weren´t tucked way back into the thick of the jungle. But yes, we´re in the jungle non the less, where our nightly dinner bell is the howler monkey, our walk home in the dark accompanied by the largest fireflis in life- yes, the size of the usual american hummingbird. And yet, from the orphanage dock you can see others anchored, a few thatch grande homes, the whispering reed grass, the smoky mountains in the horizon, and still only a 10 minute launcha to town.

So, our new home, our cuarto is a coveted spot. Only 4 couple rooms total in the whole place and by the ill fate of a relationship we bequethed the room. It´s decent in size, we have some shelves, floorspace and a bed. There´s a kitchen, bathroom, shower. The only thing we want for is light. Though the house appears wired with bulbs in a few sockets, nothing was ever hooked up and so it is merely a tease. Candlelight is a delight, yet a full day of children and the flickering light sirens one to sleep way early. Now, if we were in the main volunteer house with over 35 volunteers, things would be different.

We´re the only married folks. Figure that.

Funny, only our first day at the orphange and already we find ourselves embroiled in controversy. Normally, new volunteers work at the back packer hostel for the first week, before being moved to the island, but there is a surplus of volunteers presently and the wait is longer. We`ll they granted us a quick pass because they need another nurse, and so that ruffled some feathers. Additonally, most volunteers at the orphanage live in this one overcrowded house sleeping on singlewide bunkbeds. Thirty five altogether. The other place to stay is a couples joint, which has four private rooms but nobody gets into there forever. Well the morning we arrived a couple became splitsville and they gave us the room but the others had moved their stuff out. Needless to say, we were making friends fast.

Anyway, we love our new digs and our new mosquito nets, though to be honest, the bugs have not been bad yet. It is the dry season after all, like it has only rained 48 hours straight, but hey, it was sunny when we got here. And so far our new roomates do not mind shacking with us long in the tooth folks.

Overall, the orphanage is overflowing with beautiful children that want to come up to you and hug you, hold you. We are still figuring out our place, our job and duties, but we think we are going to like it and maybe even love it.

The wellspring

2006-03-20T19:43:00.000-08:00

The dining room of the Hotel Posada Belen is something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel - it seems to stradle that line between the real and unreal in a setting that could only come from old magic. Outside in the 500-year-old streets of Guatemala City the air is loud and carcinogenicly choked on bus fumes, but behind the walls lies this tranquilo garden with three gregarious hombres cooking us up dinner, singing and laughing, oregano and candlelight filling the air and it feels like you could just sit here in their home, in time, forever. The house is full of paintings, weavings, artifacts that would delight the carbon dater. Handmade tiles lie underfoot and curved adobe archways rest above. All is good here.

I attempted to write a blog before we left Lago Atitlan, and in the last sentence all power was lost to the wind. Seems to be the theme here - throwing it all to the wind and seeing what comes your way. There is something about this country that gets at you, that strikes the core. It makes you shiver with delight and fear, it makes you feel vulnerable yet full, and, like we wanted, it makes you feel alive. Since coming to Guatemala my emotions lie right under the skin. All it takes is the right sound, smell, sight or tree branch to scratch through the epidermis, and I'm gone. The emotions just flow. I'm getting used to it, it's my new shadow, but some days I just want it to take a rest. I'm reading this book about Rigoberta Menchu and all the horrendous violence exerted against the Mayans. It's all so recent - in my lifetime, the sorrow, the rage, the struggle, you can feel it in the people, the earth here. And yet, everyday I am greeted with wide smiles.

The other trigger for me here, that's held it's hand steady on me is all the people, the children, the women with their fullsome bellies, the swollen tits of the stray dogs, the sweet smell of the watered earth. They've all made me wanton. And so as I scrunch on a chicken bus between 2 women cluching children on their laps, or I pull myself up a mountain trail being passed by a young woman with a babe swadled to her back, or when I bask in the sun on the rocks that balance above the rim of the lake - I stare down at my tight abdomen, my ribs poking through the skin, the small new scar that leads out from my womb and ponder my journey, the unknown that somehow makes my womaness seem so separate from theirs. I am not like them, my body doesn't bring forth life. And yes, my rational side soon kicks in, soothing me that it all is possible, that I have so many choices and opportunities than most of these women. I cope, I grab my composure. But it doesn't burn out the want and sometimes I'm just wrung dry. It's all around me. I'm soaked in it. And tomorrow, we leave for the orphangae. Welcome to our wellspring.

2006-03-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

Well, the last few days have been more tranquilo, since we decided to enjoy the geological splendor of the surrounding hillsides, cliffs and, of course the lake, and stopped worrying about from where or when the next hussler will pop out of the brambles. We also did a fair amount of meditation and soul searching, trying to think about why we came here in the first place, and remind ourselves of the few lessons already learned.

Yesterday, with nearly empty pockets and a liter of agua, Heather and I set off in a easterly direction along a dirt road that, ultimately, turns to a narrow foot path. We winded along the steep hillsides, high above the waterline, past modest homes and farms with wicked views of the volcanos. And the ever present, or under construction, gringo houses that seem to defy gravity, multitired and glued to the sides of cliffs with what usually appears like a splendid little bay all to themselves. As we´ve said before, the disparity between the haves and have nots really are exagerated in the vacations spots, and stand out even more in a country like Guatemala.

The first new village we came to, forgive me but I think it was called Tzunia or something, was nestled into the notch of a canyon, sitting a few hundred feet above the water, with stark and steep cliffs stretching probably another thousand feet above that. The women dress differently there compared to San Marcos, most with a black skirt and simple embroidered red blouse, topped off with a colorful head rap. We made our way up into the village and were gazed upon by the entire community. Heather tried a few Holas here, but it seemed like most people did not speak Spanish. By the lake, there were a few fisherman in their dugout canoes, and some women washing their clothes on the rocks, as is common here, flushing the soap out into the lake.

The trail climbed vigorously from here, at times just a foot wide, and one could easily have slid down the hillside a halfmile. Needless to say, there were more stunning vistas and high moutain farms. It was somewhere along here that an idigenous woman and her little girl caught up to us and asked Heather for a quetzal. Now, my friend Derek might have said fuck off right there, but when the lady has a machete in her hand resting on her head and isn´t taking no for an answer, the simplest thing to do was for me to smile and fork over the quetzal, which I´d been saving for precisely that situation. They smiled and moved on, and believe it, we looked at each other and actually smiled too, thinking maybe this is more like a toll.

Eventually, about a half mile from the village of our destination, Heather finally succombed to the heat, and we had to sit down in the shade for a while. We´d already run out of water, so she was bit washed out. She recovered nicely in the breeze, and then we made our way to the tiny village of Jabalito. It was amazing the place was still standing. There were signs of the tremendous mudslides and flooding from November´s hurricanes, the open remains of a church lay in the gulley pit of rocks. But of course, the town seemed be going about their usual business. With business including women carrying 60lb rocks on their backs with a small carrying strap pressed against their foreheads. Just a little to the east of the village we found Casa de Dos Mundos, the fancy hotel perched miraculously on the side of the cliff, built by people from Alaska. We finally settled down here for some great nachos and water. And then, eventually, sauntered to one of the cozy nooks by the lake where we rested from our journey and contemplated a swim in the choppy water.

Two hours later, we took our last 20 quetzals and caught a tricky, wet boat ride back, which was probably over capacity by at least 10 passengers. Never a dull moment here.

Learning how to grow up again.

2006-03-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

The situation is this: you´ve have just sat down on the edge of the lake and divided your only sandwich into two, and handed half to your charming wife. Then, amazingly, out of nowhere a rough unkempt looking indigenous fellow-- but not skinny or anything, suddenly appears, standing over you. He asks if he can borrow a cigarette, in broken Spanish we say we don´t smoke, and we can´t anticipate what happens next even though we know the encounter is not over. He sits down uncomfortably close, comments on how beautiful the lake is and then demands some of my half sandwich. Mind you there are probably a dozen people, half grinos and the rest mayans on the same beach. I´m unepectedly perturbed and just say no, and we stare each other for a couple of minutes, at which point he says something to me in K´iche, we can assume something not nice, and then goes a few feet away to talk to some local ladies.

For the next hour I find myself royally pissed off, and don´t eat my sandwich at all. I sit there fuming, talking, mumbling to myself about how inconsiderate some of these people are, constantly coming up to me for money, trying to hussle me, to the point were I´m constantly on guard. And consequently, working myself to the point till I´m not much fun to be around. This was building in me for a few days, until I realized that maybe the problem is more with my perception of right and wrong and not with them. Even though I´ve been to Latin America several times, never have I been here to live, and it feels different then being a total turista. I need to except their culture, learn to understand and grow from it, instead of them excepting mine, which is generally the case in most heavily touristed places like Costa Rica.

Really, what did I gain by not giving this guy my sandwich. We both went hungry over a 2 dollar sandwich, which isn´t any money to me at all. The mayans sense of space is very different than ours. They are constantly very near to you, all around your stuff, all around the door of your room for instance. And being that my wife is an avowed peaceful person, and never had one playground fist fight, and rumors swirl constantly around here about people being robbed, I had become overly paranoid about our stuff, our safety.

Stupid. When you do get hassled, most of the time, you can get off by given them 5 quetzals, that´s about 70 cents. And look at me, blond, curly hair with glasses, which by the way no one has except rich people like me, and my dumb 8 dollar watch from K Mart that every Guatemalan man seems to think is a rolex and wants to stop and talk to me about it, and how much it costs. I have stopped wearing the watch. Can not do much about the glasses. I now keep a few quetzals in my pocket, to give to people, and not much else. I´ve have calmed down a lot. I expect them to start burning trash outside my window at 6 a.m. I expect them to show up in the dark and check the waterline to my room. I expect to hear the nightly church service with singing broadcasted out to the village, which is beautiful by the way. I expect to have a hard time bargaining with the lady who has the only tienda, grocery store in San Marcos -- the tienda ladies are much friendlier in San Pedro because there is lots of them. Economies of scale of course. These are reasonable things here.

The truth is, I´m looking forward to making our way to the orphange in the jungle next week. For sure, it will be harder there. But there, I hope, I can be part of something instead of being a spectator. For those of you who plan to travel to guatemala, this is a weird place to vacation. Give us an email, let me know if I´m crazy.

matthew

God drinks beer and smokes cigs

2006-03-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

With all my vital organs back to hunky dorey after 10 days of Cipro, thank you Bayer Corporation, Heather and I are ready again to contemplate our wiley adventures. We slipped out of Xela on Tuesday morning by hitching a ride with a our new friends, John and Harriet from Houston, Texas, in their camper van. They were gracious enough to lend a hand to Heather and her invalid husband, saddled as we were under the weight of backpacks and such, and me without much strength. I´m learning to like Texans again, and the fat splendor of a mobile home. We four along with their sweet dog Brindle inched out of the city and up to a tiny hidden hamlet - San Andreas, backing the wide load into a corner that stared out into the Xela and at this magnificent whimsical church painted yellow decorated with somersalting fairy persons. John then tracked down Saint Simon and we had a personal visit with the great mayan god. He was dressed in Texas style with a hat, bandana, an open can of cerveza, and a lit cigarette fuming from his mouth. He listened to our prayers, but didn´t indicate if a milagro was possible or not. But from where things stand today, I believe in the dear god. After we embarked to Lake Atitlan with the possibility of riding with Harriet and John on their wagon train to El Salvador.

Anyway, we drove for the first night to a camping spot, they were checking out for the second issue of their book on RVing in Central America, a decent area that sat right on the waters edge of Lago de Atitlan. A huge natural lake, that is situated in one of the deepest volcanic craters in the world, surrouded by three sentinal dormant volcanoes that tower over the place. A nice vista to say the least. And best of all, as far as Heather and I felt, about three thousand feet lower than Xela and consequently much warmer.

We had a nice night with John and Harriet, and as I was still feeling a bit dodgey, we decided to part ways with them and hunker down here for a while and rest. We have rented a crazy yet beautiful room carved out of a cliff in the tiny village of San Marcos. We have are own bathroom and shared access to a cocina, kitchen, a necessity of course with a my delicate innards. You can only get to his place by a half hour boat ride, as the village is tucked into the side of a mountain, with the Mayan section of town higher up, and the quasi-hippy come lately section taking the low road, where we are of course.

Our amazing accomodations, complete with gigantic views of the lake and volcanoes, was crafted by a German fella, I´m learning to like Germans again too, utilizing adobe and recycled trash contruction (plastic bottles filled with trash) and composting toilets. He is also a genius with stained glass mosaics, they are everywhere in this place, covering windows, tables and doorways. Each is its own work of art, really. And to top it off there are no roads in this place, only foot paths between bannana plants, rotting oranges, massage huts, hustling juveniles, and many, many dogs. Today, we rented the room for a week and decided to use this peaceful spot to get back on track with our studies, sneak in a massage and head off to the orphange in about 10 days. And did we tell you, today, we actually got to eat a stone fired pizza with tempeh and pineapple. Thank you Saint Simon.

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2006-03-06T15:40:00.000-08:00

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Originally uploaded by dickensmatthew.

Heather and Ruth, one of the beautiful kids I told you about.

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2006-03-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

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Originally uploaded by dickensmatthew.

Volcan Santiagito Erupts.

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2006-03-06T15:29:00.000-08:00

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Originally uploaded by dickensmatthew.

Volcan de Agua, Antigua

Not for the weak

2006-03-05T13:27:00.000-08:00

Guatemala is not for the weak, or the asthmatic or bronchial-challenged. It is a country soaked in suffering and survival charmed with volcanoes and beautiful people. Xela (where we are now) in the Western Highlands is a town waving in heards of tourists longing to speak Spanish and whispering upon them all sorts of fatigue. Unlike most tourist destinations, where you spark up a conversation of the best beach, best hike, adventure or place to eat - Xela draws comradery with stories of shared sickness, good antibiotics and where to find a good, clean meal. Of course, there is more to this land of beautiful people and intrigue, but this week, we got a first hand dose of the crap, and so we´re reveling in it a bit.

After 3 weeks here, mi esposo´s body let go to a wave of vulnerability that hit him up with a soupfull of sickness. He´s on the mend now, after 3 doctors visits, multiple antibiotics, mucho weakness, and crazy night fevers. Our spanglish has either left him with the diagnosis of samonella, infection of the gut, or typhoid fever. We´re cheering for samonella, and he goes again to the doctor tomorrow to double check on his recovery. I´ve been using up all of my positive thinking trying to heal him, and he´s been taking heavy doses of antibiotics, so we´ll see.

If we get a thumbs up from the doctor, we´ll motor out of Xela. In a frantic night fever Matthew begged me not to let him die in this bed in Xela and to take him to warmer, better-breathing ground. And so we go without looking back or feeling bad about it. It´s all part of the adventure, all part of learning, all part of being alive-good and bad. We´ve met 2 motor-homing folks in their 60s that offered us a ride to Lake Atitlan and the beaches in El Salvador. Jumping aboard the gas-guzziling motor home with an oil engineer doesn´t seem so demonic at the moment, and much more like rolling into the arms of mom and pop. And so, if my husband can rise to the occassion and surmount the forces of natural selection, we´ll blow off spanish school this week and take some time to heal, clear up the lungs, and warm up the bones.

Matthew, here, folks. I just thought you all might want to hear from the accursed himself. I´m alive, and this isn´t an elaborate life insurance scam my wife cooked up to off me. She loves me well. I don´t know how it happened but it happened. We came here to eventually go and help the needy and sick. I knew we, too, we´re going to garner our share of the plagues, but I just didn´t think I´d catch something horrible before we had time to exit the airport terminal. This is my fifth trip to Central America, and I suppose I thought, idiotically, I was immune to what wipes out armies. Dude, I´m dumb, but also on the mend, and I think Poncho from Chips, my doctor, is up to the task. It seems the los Dioses (gods) still want me around after all.

Soy Emferma

2006-03-01T16:25:00.000-08:00

In Guatemala, when a person goes to the bathroom they say, ´´Salud George Bush.¨ Which is to say, to his health, when you drop an undesirable in the toilet or roadside ditch. These have been a trying four days for us and the State of Our Bowels Address is as such:

Our enemies, the Amebas, have lauched a decisive and victorious attack. Casualties have been heavy for the good guys. Heather has withstood multiple running bombs for six days, and she is the better of the two. Matthew, after a couple of small flanking victories, has secumbed to a massive intestinal infection and a case of the amebas, to boot. Yikes, GOD or O Dios. Mamamia.

Let me just say, while I never have experienced the indignity of what my lady friends go through during a gynecological exam, I now have a obtained a new level of embarassment. Our Spanish instructors accompanied us, Heather and I, on a field trip if you will, to the laboratory where we gave the stool samples for analysis. The results of which were negative across the board. But the el doctor, after hearing our story, and poking and prodding my gut, seeing my fever, and just general acknowledgement from the pain of the alien trying to come out of stomach, wrote out the scripts. Cipro and one of the zoles.

Of course, in my stupor, I got totally hosed at the pharmacy, over charged by about 40 dollars American, and this got my wife, instructors and fellow classmates in an uproar. Which in turn, in my delicate state, made me fly into a rage at them, shaming myself and everyone involved. Not a good day.

Hoy, today, my stomach doesn´t hurt hardly at all and the diarrhea has stopped, but I´m still running fevers and just feel totally like shit. And on top of all that, the air in Xela is horrible, and now I have a cold. The honeymoon is over and this is our blog, our chance to bitch a little.

Meanwhile, mi esposa Heather is tired of being cold all the time, and has been having a somewhat difficult transition to memorizing a couple of thousand new las palabras, words, in just five days. She´s also trying tea tree oil in place of the prescription drugs and it seems to be working for her more vital state of vigor.

First off, the elevation here is about 8,000 feet, and nobody has heat. Period. Not in your house, school, etc. Insulation, forget it. Many do not have walls. Fear not, we have walls. People only burn things like wood, if they´re poor or traditional, to cook their food, and trash, because everybody does and there´s so much of it. For instance, for those of you who have never traveled to lands this far south, you don´t throw the waste paper in the el inodoro, toilet, you save it and burn it. We have not tried this yet, but I´m mulling the idea. Anyway, it´s about 35 degrees during the night and warms to about 55 or 65 in the sun, in the afternoon with no humidity. In truth, we are cold almost all the time. Heather, in her ingenius, homey sort of way, has bought us a bunch of candles, and we are now using these to try and heat up the cuatro de dormir, bedroom.

Just a little more about the houses here. Most are simple one-story, cement block affairs, with corrugated or flat cement los techos, roofs. Most of the outer walls touch the house next to yours, and if your are lucky enough to have a courtyard or something, it is enclosed in either a cement wall or iron fence with razor wire, or crushed glass lining the top, much the same you see in the old fancy houses in Charleston, S.C. Funny thing is, occassionally the gate is open and might get a glimpse of somewhat pleasant garden or courtyard. Some of the houses, of course, have two stories, and all have the infrastructure, giant rusty rebar sticking up everywhere, like bug antennas, just in case you have the dinero to go higher.

more to come, adios,
matthew and heather

2006-02-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

Today I feel like I swallowed a gallon of dust, my eyes and nose burn, my throat feels like I´ve sucked on way too many cigarettes, and I just long for a big clean mountaintop breath and a roll in soft green grass.

But then we tramp down to the parque calvario, the street is full of women in their colorful garb selling lilies and rue, daisies and ferny asparagus. We run our fingers through the asparagus and tell one of the women that our grandmother´s name is Rue. The traveling vendors have set up rows of wares for the upcoming lent celebration - you can get everything from pink colored popcorn to pizza and Guatemala´s version of a funnel cake. The festiva has rides too and as we weave through the web of them we´re certain that Guatemala not only has a direct connection to purchasing the U.S.Â´s used up schoolbuses, they also deal in ancient fair rides - one´s strung and teetering together in a way that would rouse the likes of those drawn to adventure sports and multiple injury lawyers.

So, today and yesterday we had school off and I can´t impress our need for Friday. Our brains resembled taffy and our sponge ablility was nada. On Saturday morning we pulled ourselves from slumber and walked in moonlight through the streets to meet up with 3 other students to climb Volcan Santa Maria. We rode in the back of an open pickup truck, freezing our rears and ears off and got dropped off at a small town at the base of the volcano. The temp was 5 degrees Celsius, you can do the math. The owners of the Spanish school, Nora and Rolanda led us up the mountainside in early morning twilight. As we climbed you could see down into the lights of Xela; low clouds hovered over the City and with each step we made our escape. No cars, no music, no exploding firecrackers or other gringos, just rocks and earth, trees, farms full of cabbages, onions, stick-woven walls, patches of lilies and foxglove (el corazon de Jesus) known for it´s natural ability to slow the heart down. And another tree called chichicastes that supposedly you can make a salve from to help with burns, and an orange invasive parastic vine, that we have in Carolina as well, that Guatemaltecos use to combat cancer. Up and up we went, with our motley crew being passed by Mayans on their pilgrimage to the summit. Their limbs and legs, deprived of 3 days of food or water, moved effortlessly and with certainty, leaving us in the dust.

The morning made for multiple moments of lost in translation. Since the school owners led the hike, most of the explanations and descriptions were in Spanish. Our first confusion came with the description of the Mayans and a simultaneous discussion about serpent bites. Seems Matthew thought they told us that if any of the women summitting the volcan failed to honor the fast, they´d be brought down off the mountain, have their hand cut off and immediately cauterized in a fire. It seems Rolando was talking more about the snake bite. This made for mucho belly rolling with our leaders.

The next surprise was that we learned that we weren´t hiking to the summit - instead we were walking a third of the way up volcan Santa Maria and around it to view active Volcan Santiaguito. How we learned, however, was when nora yelled, ´´Eruption,´ and we saw a huge billowing cloud rising over the la colina, hill. Now Matthew, inheriting his wanderlust for exploding volcanoes from his father, just nearly fainted and set his mind quickly to determining how long we had before our lungs began to singe, and firey mud, wind and trees came whirling at us. But, hey, no one else seemed to be nervous, and nora said it erupts about every 20 or 30 minutes, so we continued to plod towards the crater. Eventually, we stopped about a half mile from what looked like moonscape, and froze our asses off in the shadow of Santa Maria until her fiesty son gave a hell of a show -- rumbling sounds, steam and likely toxic sulfa and chlorine gas, flying towards the sky like what can one only describe as a mushroom clould like on tv or in your picture books. Needless to say, we were all in awe, and we watched it blow four more times before we scampered off. Somewhere out in the distance, Rolando said, was el mar, the sea, but for all the haze from buring trash and kitchen stoves we never saw it.

Amazing

2006-02-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

"CURIASIDADES Y NOVEDADES PRODUCTOS AMERICANOS," says the silly sign on the store next to our Xela home. I´m still too ashamed to look in the window and see what we americans are up to. Heather peeked and told me they are miniature horse figurines.

Anyway, what an amazing couple of days, couple of hours we´ve had. Heather and I, together with a very small group of other students and instructors, just had our rich world rocked in la Stopia, a cluster of neighborhoods made out of corrigated metal, cardboard, bits of cement block, and, at one point, a wall made from various car parts, hoods, roofs, chasis, etc. Our school sponsors a small project -- basically bringing bags of fresh food, vegetables and bread, to four small hovels, where many children live with just a couple of women.

We entered their encampment by crossing a drainage ditch, where dead birds and various bits of Dupont basura, trash, lay scattered about. When I gandered over the side, a kid was picking a cellphone out of the grey water and putting it to his ear. The children are ages, say, two to ten, and they immediately swarmed us all, grabbing our hands and hugging us, and taking us back to an inner courtyard of little pigs, scruffy dogs and, of course, more trash.

Needless to say, our senses were peaking. The food was given out, about ten grocery bags worth, plus lots of individual pieces of bread to roughly 25 children. Let me just say now, these are beautiful kids, healthy looking for the most part, and soon as I figure out how to put pictures on this thing I´ll show you.

Eventually, we went into some of the one-room lean-tos, where there were gapping holes in the walls and creosote on everything from the cocinas, cooking areas in the same room. Inside, Heather and I met Wilson, an 8-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, and his mom, Isabel. Wilson, Isabel told us, is always sick from the cold. He does an impressive impression of a gallo, rooster. He laughed constantly while we were in there, and I did the token tourist thing and took his and my picture. And then showed it to him. He has a nice smile.

Then we took all the kids up to a dry, grass playing field, and helped them with their homework. I had Ruth and Danny. You may have noticed that many Guatemaltecos have very Gringo names. I don´t know the story on this yet, as my Spanish still sounds much like a radio dial changing channels every second. Anyway, Ruth, who is six, had an assignment to draw pictures of palabras, words, that begin with A. I only know six words in Spanish that begin with the letter A, and it took an hour to think of them.

Eventually, the kids stopped caring about the tarea, homework, and everybody started playing games. We did some ring around the rosey, jump rope, and of course, futbol. I was no match for these kids and was immediately relegated to the goalie postion. I couldn´t understand how they said it in Spanish, they just smiled and pushed me between two would-be goal posts. Rocks.
In the end, they all hugged us. It was fantastic, and Heather and I are still smiling at each other even though we are exhausted.

In other Xela news: the city trash workers went on strike this week, and believe me, this is a disaster. There is trash everywhere in Xela already, I can only imagine what happens now. Also, it seems that it is a Gauatemalen tradition to light off a brick of firecrackers, outside the door of any home where someone has a birthday or something to celebrate, between four and five in the morning. Apparently, we were the victims of infilade fire yesterday morning, because I don´t think anyone in our home had a birthday. And finally in the news, I had finally had my first bowel movement after five days, the last two of which were miserable, and Heather, I believe, is still shit-spray.

On Saturday, we plan to hike around the dormant cone of Volcan de Santa Maria, and already around the square, people are setting up booths for Carnival next week. Again, amazing.

2006-02-21T16:09:00.000-08:00

As Antigua is to Santa Fe, Xela is to the Meadowlands-come-Back Bay of Boston. A dirty, smoggy centerfuge of animals, people, dustbowls and machines amongst tight colonial streets, that I´m growing to love.

The walk to school is pleasant enough, as sort of frogger experience: hurdle crippled dogs, elude the jousting bicycles, weave through the cars that don´t care to see you, and still take time to notice the women balancing firewood and baked goods on their heads. But there´s no time to act numb, as they are serious about learning, ugh, at the language school.

The instructors are decent enough, though at times it seems like our non existent Spanish is better than their English. No matter, after just two five hour classes I already know more than two years of high school and another college gave me. Perhaps we are paying more attention, or rather, we are showing up for class and wanton for communication with more than gringos.

The east coast flair doesn´t hold up in Xela, pronounced shay la, when it comes to the climate. Northern California all the way. Mornings smoke the breath from you and the day scalds your scalp, by 5 though we´re sporting our wool hats and crawling under piles of covers for slumber. It´s the dry season now, so dry in fact our eyelids hurt to close.
Our Guatemalan family is awesome, more than we ever expected and at this point, we´d be happy living here for the next year. We have our own room, bathroom and the insistent love of an ancient Rotweiller named Dolly. Malda cooks us up three massive Guatemalan meals a day, we don't cook or clean, and if she sees us studying after lunch she orders us to take a siesta- perfecto!

450 pounds of luggage

2006-02-17T17:20:00.000-08:00

hi, everyone, we made it all safe and sound, and we didn't even lose our luggage or most of our minds. you grammarians should start getting use to irregular punctuation from us because we already can't figure out these keyboards and the hazy screen is making me want for bifocals. ah, just the beginning of frustration.

so far, guatemala, or guate, is treating us very well. the sky is blue and the volcanos are huge. we are staying in antigua, this amazing collection of colonial buildings, cobblestone streets and gardens and ornate churches previously felled by earthquakes. Today we went to Convent Cappachino and in the interior basement was a circluar room for chanting. Matthew crooned out a quirky home tune and the sound just moved all around you, reverberating up, circling you and escaping out into the free open air. And to think this was built in the 1500s

the bus ride, or chicken bus as they are called, into Antigua was an exciting adventure, and so far we've only been greviously overcharged by the taxi from the airport. what can you do when you are standing there with 450 pounds of stuff.

We´'re here until Sunday and then we will attempt to grab a bus to Xela where we will be studying Spanish. One thing travel does to you in a land of foreign sounds is humble and stumble you right away. We're doing ok and Antigua is completely manageable, but can't wait to start conversing beyond a single noun and verb combination.

So far it's not as cold as we thought it would be, but at night we did grab out wool hats. The day kissed us with a sweet sunburn today and we're headed out now for a mojito and a cuba libre. The town is quite hopping at night. Hopefully, I won't need to use my earplugs for a sweet slumber.

Hasta luego!
Matthew and Heather

Amtrak to Guatemala via Florida?

2006-02-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

We are jobless, that's about the best thing I can say about this week. Who needs the grind of working for the man when you can grind yourself to death, trying to get those quintesential things of American life in order, like a job, mortgage, healthcare spending accounts, 1040 A's, and battling Bank of America to get access to your own money.

It doesn't matter now, for tonight, when we climb aboard the cozy confines of the Silver Star, leaving Raliegh and bound for Tampa, we are officially under way on this adventure. Smash a champagne bottle on the bow. Everybody wants to know how excited we are about going to live in another culture, and so far, all we can say is we are excited about getting out of this place. It's time sit on the beach in Venice, Florida, for four days, and count antifungal creams, mosquito nets and figure out what the exchange rate from dollars to quetzals is.

We fly to Guatemala City in 5 days. We have klonopin. We are on autopilot.

Our mid life crisis begins now

2005-11-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

My wife and I are certainly not technology people, and creating this blog almost wiped me out. But how else to share about two otherwise normal middle-class folks quitting their jobs, dropping everything and migrating to stranger environs. Our family thinks we're wacky. We may be wacky, but we don't care. This is a love story about not selling our dreams short, about going thousands of miles out of our way to grow and blossom into something more complete, more giving than we can imagine now. Why else would anyone rent their house, sell the only reliable car they have, flipoff desireable jobs in a town, Asheville, N.C., where desireable jobs don't exist, and move in with 150 children in the swelter of the Guatemalan jungle. Yeah, we're wacky.