Heading to Nicaragua

So, we´re heading for Nicaragua Sunday. Promise to post some pictures as soon as I get a chance in Nica.

Hope this reads well

The other day, I realized I´ve been using this blog to give my half-baked thoughts on everything here in Guatemala and sharing rumors. I´m sure you, dear reader, have been enthralled with my thoughts of various depth. But I figured I´d try something else.

So, here you go. Tuesday -- Oct. 24 -- I decided to take notes on my day. It was a usual one, full of Spanish and walking. Here´s my account of it. Hope it doesn´t bore you.

8:05 a.m.

I arrived at my Spanish school five minutes late, which is pretty close to on time in Guatemala. It´s not that the pace of life is relaxed here -- people drive like maniacs and rush on their way to anywhere. But nothing gets done fast, and little gets started on time.

I got out of bed about an hour ago. I´m staying in a three-bedroom home with a middle class Guatemalan family made up entirely of women, I think. When I started school three weeks ago, there were three women living in the house --Lydia, her daughtgranddaughteraughter. But relatives keep piling in.This morning there were the original three, plus another granddaughter and two grandnieces (I think) living in the three bedroom house. Each morning I wake at about 6:30 a.m. to the sound of loud, quick Spanish. Then I snooze until my alarm rings. It´s heaven.

Breakfast is usually scrambled eggs, boiled beans and tortillas. It sounds boring, but I like it. But this morning it wabanana bannana crepes, that are just delicious. I´m lucky. Most of the students get this cream-o-wheat concoction called mosh. It´s often unflatteringly compared with snott.

It takes me about ten minutes to walk to school. A long ten minutes. My walk is along a major thoroughfare -- 19 ave. -- packed with smoke-belching buses and taxis. Impeccably dressed men in suits pass me by. They ride motorscooters that look like they should have been retired in the 80´s.

At one intersection, two ambulances were stuck shriekingns shreaking. Not a car moves for them.I pass a long yellow wall. Concrete chunks have fallen off in piles on the street. It used to protect a military installation during the war, but the base was closed with the peace accords. No one has figured out what to do with it, and the monuments to the soldiers who once were housed there have been destroyed.

Not that the soldiers are gone. I walk -- a bit briskly -- by a gacamouflagehe camoflage clad men. They´re climbing into the back of a pickup, off to go look heavily armed and disinterested somewhere else.

A man repacks small bags of potato chips into larger, pink bags. I walk by him every day. It´s unclear what he´s doing, but he apparently needs the protection of the man with a shotgun.

When I arrive at school, I find Isolde checking e-mail at the computer lab. After a good morning kiss, I do the same.

Then it´s Spanish time.

11:00 a.m.

We´re on break. Class ran from 8-ish to 10:30 on the dot. It does everyday. We´re never late to break.

I spent the morning learning with Byron, my instructor for the past three weeks. Byron is a 28-year-old father of two. He´s studying at the university at night. During the day he puts up with me.

We´ve been covering verb tenses. All Spanish, it seems, is verb tenses. Today, I learn the Spanish word for have -- as in ¨I have done¨not ¨I have to pee.¨It´s slightly different than the word for had, but the difference is not as slight as the difference in English. Spanish is verb tenses, and nuance. Lots of nuance.

We´re in an old bedroom of the massive, second-floor apartment that serves as the school house. A steady stream of buses and cars rolls by outside our window. Most of the cars are from thtotaled, where they were totalled and sold for scrap. Byron buys the wrecks every now and then, then fixes and resells them to make money on the side. He has to act as his own collections agent, which is on his mind this morning. Seems the guy who bought a Hyundai -- pronounced Junday -- from him hasn´t made his payments.

The bigger buses shake the place when they pass, but it´s not too distracting.

Isolde and I get together on the break. We hang out on the roof,viewch gives a pretty grand veiw of the city. She tells me her instructor has spent the morning talking about Bill Clinton and Monika. All very fun.

She´s still not used to the coffee down here. Most of it is NesCafe, which is to say it´s water and brown.

We stroll to the Mennonite bakery, about three blocks from school. They might be a bit weird, but the Mennonites make a mean doughnut. Isolde likes the yogurt. And the cookies. We run into a gaggle of Europeans from our school. They seem to find the Mennonite food wonderfully exotic.

Back at the school, I check the news from home. I learn the Seattle School District will lose it´s superintendent. Who can blame the guy.

Then it´s back to learning.

5:15 p.m.

Isolde arrives at the school. It´s become our routine to meet forneitherening at the school, since niether of the homes we´re occupying are much good for time passing.

We´d finished our classes hours earlier. Byron, my instructor, and I talked about verbs -- I learned to say has and had in Spanish, which is much harder than it sounds -- and about mines in Guatemala. Environmental problems plaguedysenteryntry. People get sick with disentery and typhoid because the water is undrinkable. No one takes away the trash, and people get sicker. And then there´s the weather.

Byron tells me a village of 12 houses was crushed yesterday in a mudslide. The people had been told that the hill above wasn´t stable and that they should leave the trees there alone. But they cut them for to feed their cooking fires. And, in the rains last night, the hill came down.

People die like this all the time here, caught in some foreseeable and theoretically avoidable accident. Buses go off the road and kill 80 people. They´re still digging people out of last year´s landslides. It´s a country of little disasters.

So Byron and I get talking about the Seattle schools change, and he starts telling me how things are in the states and here. All the teachers do this. None believe there are poor people in the U.S. Most of the Americans they meet here are extremely wealthy -- aside from the doctors and nurses (and Southerners), most of the folks here went to pricey universities. But the whole Americans-do-nothing-but-count-their-money routine starts to wear after a while.

Byron gives me verb homework from an out of date third-year Spanish text. All the examples involve Spain, or going to Spain. I wander across the street to a print shop, the same one I go to most days to make ¨fotocopias¨ of the homework. The guy who runs it is making copies on a hand-crank press, so one of his sons -- who can´t be more than 12 and is always in the shop -- violated copyright for me.

I head home, walking down the same busy street. This time the clowns are out. Three kids with painted faces do handstands and juggle for drivers who are stucksaddestaffic. They are, unintentionally, the sadest clowns in the world.

Back at the house, Lydia makes me two tiny steaks, avocado and thick, little tortillas. It´s delicious. Then it´s nap time.

A few hours later, I finish my homework and head to school.

11:13 p.m.

Bedtime.

After meeting out at the school, Isolde and I wander down to a little taco joint for tortas. I could eat my weight in the little Mexican sandwiches. Unlike the rest of the Guatemalan food, the things actually have a bit of a kick. The little meal loses a bit of its fun when Isolde spots a roach. What are you going to do?

Our next stop is a hot chocolate joint. They may not have much for cofee here, but the hot chocolate is to die for. We meet two other students at the café, and order a round of chocolate goodness. It´s hot cocoa for grown-ups. It tastes a bit bitter, somewhere between Quik and crude oil. Great stuff.

From there, we´re off to a lecuture from a torture victim. This is tourism in Guatemala. Speaking to a crowd of about 30 foriegners, the guy recounts being abducted and beaten by the Civil Self Defense Patrol Services. It was essentially a supersized Neighborhood Watch program gone horribly wrong. People had to join it or be accused of fighting the government, then killed.

The guy talked about the ¨historia de fantasia¨being told to people now. No one, he says, cares about the war or the peace accords that ended it a decade ago. He says the war will return if nothing else changes here. A lot of people are saying that.

Our little group of four leaves the lecture and, passing through Xela´s central park, makes our way toward our respective homes. There´s a garish Greek forum in the center of the park -- a product of a former dictator who liked to call Guatemala ¨the Latin American Athens.¨ He was lain to rest in Xela. Somebody left a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of run in his tomb.

I walk Isolde to her house -- down another dusty street, next to a hospital -- then head back to mine. It´s a 20 minute walk, and a bit scary. I don´t worry about muggers. I´m bigger than most people here, and no one has ever bothered me in the least. But last night I passed a platoon of soldiers. They worry me. But they´d taken their little gun circus somewhere else for the night.

I´m home and I´m sleepy.

An endorsement -- language school

Should you, dear reader, be heading south, I must strongly suggest taking a bit of language school. The benefits are myriad -- learning a new language, speaking said language while traveling. But the greatest is the following :

Language school is summer camp for grown-ups.

Not college students taking a ¨break¨ for six months. Honest to God grown ups.

In the past month, we´ve met several soon to be doctors in the last throws of med school, three nurses (including two ER nurses, which was both soothing and intense), a Swiss banker and a New York City principal. And several of Australians who don´t seem to be employed at all, as is apparently the custom Down Under.

Like me, they all seem thrilled to be learning without being graded. And there are little activities that add to the whole camp vibe. And school buses. Lots of crazy painted school buses.

Mostly though, it´s that we´re all enthralled by the immediate gratification of learning to talk to people. It´s really great for those with short attention spans.

Oh, and you get to drink with people who don´t speak English to well to begin with. So they don´t get long-winded, and don´t understand when you do. It´s fantastic.

As an aside, for the single gentleman the language school has an additional perk. Hardly any other men. Not that it matters for me. Beluga and I are very much enjoying eachother, as I´ve signified for you now by using a cute nickname for her which does not relate to the weight or the paleness usually associated with the whale. I´m just saying. Lotta of unwed lady doctors out there looking for someone to spend money on. Could be you.

A small world, afterall

I had a couple of conversations today that got me thinking a bit about the country I´m a visitor in.

The thing to know about Guatemala is that, taken in a certain light, it resembles what the United States could look like if (1) the U.S. was much, much poorer and (2) the conservatives got everything they wanted.

My right-leaning friends should know I really don´t mean that as a political dig. I´m pleanty liberal, but I don´t think the Republicans want to stop me from flushing my toilet paper or print orange money (two of Guatemala´s more endearing quirks) . It´s simply true that, in this country, government has nearly ceased to exist. At least in that ¨We´re here to provide services¨way.

Here are some highlights:

- Education -

Most of the schools are run by evangelical Christian churches. The state-run universities are so crowded, only a fraction of students who are enrolled -- I´m told about 20 percent -- stay ahead of the curve enough to remain enrolled and ultimately graduate.

- Infrastructure -

Mass trasportation -- the old chicken buses and the smaller vans that act as mass taxis between popular spots -- is handled by private contractors, usually individuals or small firms. When the roads break, residents essentially have to fix them themselves as someone seems to have misplaced the second half of public works here. Water and electricity are both privately supplied, as is the gas that most city dwellers cook with. A Mexican company provides most of the phone service; it replaced a Guatemalan monopoly that refused to connect new phone lines because of the potential cost.

- Health Care -

Health insurance is unheard of, and people get by because most medicines are available over the counter for pennies -- without a prescription. Many of the kids here are losing their teeth because they´re well meaning parents treat everything with Cipro or other antibiotics. The drugs kill the mellow mouth germs that keep teeth happy. I currently have a little cold, and the Guatemalans I meet can´t get over the fact that I´m not taking drugs designed to kill anthrax for it.


As for the rest, there really isn´t much. There are no social services here, except for the private ones that Guatemalans seem more apt to put their faith in. And I don´t just mean free-condoms-for-kids or free-food-for-the-starving kind of social services. I mean the kind we in the states really -- honest-to-God really, not polite-conversation really -- take for granted. As it turns out, the dogs do not catch themselves.

And neither do the criminals.

Security is a private matter in Guatemala. Extremely serious men with shotguns guard almost everything. Banks, stereo stores and schools usually have one posted out front. I even saw one guy watching out for thieves at a feed store. The dude riding shotgun with the water delivery man actually has a shotgun. It´s great, especially when one of the guys offers directions by pointing his pistol-grip equiped little friend in the direction of the next ATM.

John Q. Public also gets his chance to play Johnny Law. While Isolde and I were hanging out at weird San Marcos de la Lagoona, a possie of locals wandered by brandishing machettes. Apparently, a suspected thief had been spotted in the area, and they were off to dispense a bit of justice. My favorite was the woman -- a menacing 5 feet tall who weighed in at about 90 pounds -- who put down here toddling child and picked up a yard-long machette to join the chase. They didn´t catch the guy.

Believe it or not, there are police here. They just don´t care to fight much crime, or do much else except cruise around in Japanese mini trucks and look menacing. The national cops have even been suplimented by regular Guatemalan Army soldiers -- following on a campaign promise by the country´s righty president. So now they can both do nothing together.

We´ll, almost nothing. One of my little language school budies got stopped by a foursome of these guys last night when he was walking home drunk from a bar. One cop and three machine-gun toting soldiers. They shook him down pretty well. He said they lost interest when they figured out he didn´t have any cash on him.

(As an aside, the soldiers all seem to have different guns. And that disturbs me to no end. I don´t know why, but I feel it would be better if they´d all stick to the same assault riffle. Couldn´t we sell them a complete set?)

So that was my first conversation.

My second was with a Guatemalan friend who explained what the government here does seem to do quite well -- patronage. As he explained it, well-to-do Guatemalans who would like to do a bit better donate to political campaigns.

About $3,000 gets you a nice cushy government job, from which you can then extort or skim enough money to make back your principal and earn a bit of revenue. Assuming your guy wins. Otherwise you´re SOL, at least until the next go around.

So, credit where credit´s due I guess. The Guatemalans may not have an effective government, but at least they´ve their leaders stay bought.

PS: I couldn´t spell check this, so forgife mi.

Xela what?

Here´s the travelers pun in the city I´m living in at present.

Xela who?

It´s a riff on the city´s Mayan moniker -- Xelaju. The proper Spanish name of the city is Quetzaltenango. No one calls it that. Or Xelaju, for that matter. People call it Xela. Pronounce it Shay-la. Like a Sha-na-nas knockoff.

As it turns out, Xela is the pretty name for an ugly city. Outside the city center -- which is charming in a disembodied faux Greek kind of way --most of the streets are fronted by 8-foot-high cracking concrete walls and heavy metal doors. In places, the city feels like a giant strip mall.

You wouldn´t know it, but there are a handful of beautiful homes behind some of the walls. I happen to be staying in one while enrolled in the language school. Lydia, my host, has a single-story, three-bedroom home with a hot water shower. Much of the house has pretty familiar feel, aside from the concrete walls that get a cold dampness wood would never abide. The exception is the kitchen. Like most Guatemalan homes I´ve had cause to visit, the kitchen and the yard seem to merge. Think of it as a shop where food is prepared. It has a massive concrete sink with two basins and a counter space. The gas range has six burners, the middle row of which heats a cast iron griddle.

Elsewhere in the city, away from the center, people live much more simply. Without rhyme or reason, the city fades away into the ring of hills that surround it. City blocks melt into corn fields, concrete tile streets into asphalt roads then dirt tracks. Out there, people live in shacks built of concrete blocks and plastic sheeting.

The feeling I get, though, is that most Quetzaltecos live somewhere inbetween. Most families rent a room or pair of rooms in a house. Those with two rooms tend to cook in one and sleep in the other. There aren´t really many apartment buildings to speak of, and most are luxurious.

During the day, Xela´s streets are crowded with cars, tiny motorcycles and old school buses. If you´re not careful, you can step right into an tar black cloud of exhaust from one of the latter. Not pleasant.

At night, the city seems to curl into a ball and cry its self to sleep. People go to bed early in Guatemala. I can walk for blocks at 6:30 p.m. without seeing a soul. Not that it´s particularly menacing. Just when I get a little nervy, some Mayan lady with a basket of bread balanced on her head will wander past.

The city does have it´s charms. The people are friendly in a closed way, and not overly interested in foriegners. Folks are happy to talk about the innocous -- weather, soccer, weather. There´s plenty of entertainment, and even a few places that serve decent coffee. You can make a lot of the fact that, though it grows some of the world´s best coffee, Guatemala sends almost all of its best beans abroad and serves NesCafe at home.

So next time you hoist a decent cup, think of me, staring down into my full cup, reading the writing on the bottom through the tan brew.

P.S.: Things are actually going really well here. It´s a very interesting place, and the school is wonderful. But I´m beginning to see why Xela´s not Wild On E.

School´s in for winter

So, after a week of Spanish classes I´m beginning to believe I´ll actually learn this language. Who´d have thunk it.

The deal with Spanish is this. People like to say that it -- unlike the King´s English -- makes sense. It´s logically constructed, they say. Like Latin.

Well, my smug, English-bashing friends, there are a couple kinks in this little theory. First, I´d ask for a show of hands. How many of ya´ll habla the Latin? What was that? Oh, it died? Must have been pretty great.

Secondly, Spanish has more exceptions than the tax code. You may know that words are either masculine or feminine in Spanish, as in your preciouso Latin. But did you know how you tell the man words from the lady words? I´ll bet you thought you did. I´ll bet you just though something like, ¨Masculine words end in el, o or other manly sounds. Feminine words end in la, a or something else wombish. Levi is a crank.¨

Don´t believe the hype.

The difference between the masculine words and the feminine words is this: Masculine words are masculine, feminine words are feminine. That´s it. Nada mas.

Then there are the verbos. In Spanish there are what the quaintly refer to as the regular verbs and the irregular verbs. Sure, there are many, many more irregular verbs than regular ones. And the importante verbs are all irregular. But it gives that facade of reason on which the Spanish-world seems to hold so dear.

That said, I´ve been having a great time at Pop Wuj. The school´s online at http://www.pop-wuj.org should anyone wish to view it´s web site. Unlike my traveling companion, I´ve been extremely pleased with my teacher, Byron, who´s show unbelievable patience with this slow American.

He´s also taken my word for it that I too have no idea why my country decided to mettle in Latin American politics or overthow the Guatemalan government. And he -- unlike Isolde´s maestro -- doesn´t feel the need to lecture me on the excesses of Western living. He has told me a bit about himself -- as much as my busted Spanish will allow anyway. He´s an extremely hard working guy. He teaches about eight hours of Spanish a day, then takes night classes at the public university. He hopes to own a business someday. In Guatemala, working for someone else is kind of like volunteering for serfdom.

So, you want to go to Central America?

Should you choose to travel to Latin America, dear reader, I have some advice.

Don't be Isolde.

Having been in the country for all of two weeks, unfortunate Isolde has (1) been pick-pocketed on a chicken bus, (2) gotten a lecture from her Spanish instructor on the ills of American foreign policy -- the guy hauled out a photo of G.W. -- and now (3) has come down with dysentery. That's right. Dysentery.

I know what you're thinking. Dysentery -- like slavery and Presidential box seats at the theatre -- disappeared shortly after the Civil War. But no. Dysentery's still alive and kicking. He's just moved on to a warmer clime, where life and property is cheap and hands go unwashed.

A little refresher for those of you unfamiliar with Isolde's new traveling companion. Dysentery is the drunken, knife-fighting cousin of your old acquaintance diarrhea. Remember him from that long bus ride you spent together in elementary school? Well, dysentery is him with blood. Sorry for sharing.

Lucky for us, our language school is attached to a clinic where the medical Spanish students volunteer their time. So Isolde got a free visit with el doctor and free Cipro. She's also having some lab work done. For about $4, Isolde got to provide the laboratory a ... er ... sample in an old Nescafe jar. Not the "world's most popular coffee" anymore. We're hopping she doesn't have amoebas, which are a bit tougher to treat than bacteria that the Cipro would kill.

Other than all of this, we're doing great. The Spanish is coming along well, aside from the flashbacks to my Junior year of high school.

Learnin´ again

We arrived in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala on Sunday, in time to celebrate her birthday at a hotel with real, made-in-a-hot-water-heater hot water. Most Guatemalan warm water involves an electric heater coil in the shower head -- which is nearly as risky as it sounds. So real hot water was a bit of a treat.

The hotel we stayed in overlooking the city plaza. Quetzaltenango, better known as Xela, is Guatemala´s second largest city at about 130,000 residents. The plaza our hotel was near serves as the city center. Classical columns rise in the center of the park, a relic from a previous Guatemalan president´s fascination with the Minerva, the Roman goddess of crafts and wisdom.
When we arrived, the roads ringing the plaza were full of vendors and festival goers celebrating a better-loved icon -- the Virgin Mary. She´s pretty huge here, it turns out. The fair was a blast, and proof that fair food the world around are deliciously unhealthy.

We started Spanish school Monday. Thus far, it´s a reminder why I didn´t take third year of the language in high school. But more on that later.