Thanksgiving

This past weekend was the first real holiday out of the States. Although it could have been somewhat sad and lonely it turned out to be very enjoyable. All of us studying language here in Guatemala were invited to spend the holiday with the other career missionaries in a vacation house on Lago Atitlan. There were several families there so in all there were about 30 people. It was about as close to family as we could get from an ocean away. There was turkey and every kind of casserole you can think of. We played a little soccer and football in the yard and spent hours walking around the city of Panajachel where there were quite a few shops to look at. We ate dinner one night at a beautiful place that overlooked the lake. The lake itself is quite beautiful but dying. It has been one of the most popular tourist spots for years but due to extreme contamination it is now a sickly green-brown color covering most of the blue underneath. Not somewhere to go swimming. It's extremely unfortunate that this is happening to the lake, especially because so many of the locals in the area depend on tourists for their livelyhood. But despite the contamination it's still a beautiful sight.

One day we went across the lake by boat to a small pueblo called Santiago del Atitlan. The main sight there was a local god that is moved from house to house each year. Although many would claim it as a saint and it is carried during Semana Santa (Holy Week), it has pagan heritage (as does nearly everything in Latin American Catholicism). The locals call it Maximon. We visited it and it looks very much like a normal Catholic altar to a saint but with some odd twists that mark it out as having pagan origins. In fact, the Catholic side of this god/saint is Saint Simon. However, in the local dialect "ma" is an honorific prefix for a person and the "x" sound becomes "s" in spanish. Thus, Saint Simon and Maximon are the same thing. This is a perfect example of syncretism... where the Catholic church came in an forcibly converted the local mayan population but the people only converted on the surface. Actually they merged their previous pagan beliefs into the ones the Catholic church handed down to them. For that reason, Semana Santa is really a hand-me-down of the old mayan religion and the "adoration" of Saint Simon is really worship of a mayan god. Look up "maximon" on wikipedia if you want a more in-depth but simple explanation.

To end the weekend there was some excitement in a nearby town called Solola. We had to drive through this town to get to and from Panajachel, which was right on the lake. Solola is in the mountains overlooking the lake. The excitement had to do with a riot of the locals against the police and some alleged criminals. To make a long story short, there have been many killings of public bus drivers in Guatemala lately. The perpetrators have been extorting the drivers to pay a monthly "tax" and in return they won't be harmed. Some have refused to pay and have been murdered. The police had captured 3 of these people although who knows for sure it is they were actually responsible. The criminals were held in the Solola police headquarters but some people wanted more. They wanted to kill the criminals then and there. There are various stories about how it all started but some say that a mob led by a friend of a murdered bus driver started out by blocking the police caravan. What is for sure is that several police vehicles were burned and the police station gutted and burned. The alleged perps were beaten, doused with gas, and burned alive. Thankfully this didn't effect us at all. But it shows the true state of politics here underneath all the calm. The problem is that there's a general feeling among the people that the police can't be trusted and that in the past they have let the criminals go free for bribes. In this case however, people were just fed up with normal working people being killed and no one being held responsible. So once someone was caught they wanted blood. Here's a link to a short story on it with some pictures. But I'll warn you...one picture is fairly graphic. http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/guatemala-mob-kills-burns-216572.html

Road Trip

Last weekend most of our group here went on a three-day two-night road trip to visit some of the more famous areas of Guatemala. I'll try to give a good breakdown of the trip. We started at 4am Friday morning when we left Antigua. We ate breakfast on the way and our first real stop was Castillo San Felipe on Rio Dulce.

The castle is a fort that was built by the Spanish in an effort to stop pirate raids from the Caribbean. It reminded me a bit of Charleston, SC and Forts Sumter and Moultrie. While we were there we also got to swim in the Rio Dulce and have a picnic lunch. The next stop after that was Flores for dinner. Flores is an island in a lake in northern Guatemala. It's quite tranquil and relaxing as it has not yet developed as a tourist area as much as some of the other places we visited. We had a very nice dinner with a great view of the water.

Our final stop for the night, after about 12 hours of driving, was the hotel. The hotel was quite nice and on the water as well. There wasn't too much time to enjoy it though, as we woke up at 5am the next morning to go visit Tikal.

Tikal was at one time a capital of the Mayan civilization and is still one of the most famous ruins in the world. I won't bore everyone with the history, but there's just nothing like the view over the forest canopy from the top of a 176ft ancient temple. And because we got there so early in the morning we were able to eat a picnic breakfast there and have the park largely to ourselves. The most amazing part of the park is the sheer amount of work it must have taken to construct the complex. The temple areas themselves are on raised foundations some 20-40ft high. Imagine an artificially constructed hill that has been leveled to provide a flat area for building construction. But after all the work to create the complexes, they were nearly completely covered when the Spanish arrived. This is because the buildings were all constructed out of limestone. Limestone contains the right conditions for for plants to grow on it...and so after only hundreds of years a temple will be a rather oddly-placed mound in the middle of the jungle. So when the Spanish arrived all they could find of this amazing sight was the very tops o a few temples. There are still hundreds of unexcavated mounds today.

After leaving Tikal that morning we headed back down to the hotel for a quick swim and then lunch. The next stop was Rio Dulce with our ultimate destination being Livingston. Livingston is a bit abnormal in Guatemala in that it's about the only place with black people. It's an Afro-caribbean community with a culture and language all its own. However despite not being an island it is only accessible by boat from Rio Dulce. I've not yet found an adequate explanation of why but there are no roads that run to Livingston from the rest of Guatemala. And so to get there we took a very fast 15-person speed boat at night for about an hour. Needless to say this would not be legal in the States, but apparently they feel it is pretty safe as long as the driver has a lookout in the front with a flashlight to spot the shore or obstructions in the water.

We arrived safely at an eco-lodge with thatched roofs, mosquito nets, and barely running water. It turns out we had no need of the mostquito nets but we did have a mouse running around in the rafters all night.

Dinner was a short boat ride away in Livingston itself. We had a nice dinner and walked down to the Caribbean. The next day we took the boat to a place called 7 Altares. This is a series of natural waterfalls which in some places create pools deep enough to dive and swim in. The biggest one (and due to lack of rain the only one currently deep enough) was about 12 meters deep. After leaving there we took the boat back to collect our bags, then returned again by boat (thankfully in daylight this time), and started the drive home by van. All in all it was a great trip and extremely cheap for all the things we did. All in all it cost less than $300US for transportation, accomodation, food, and all the various activities.

Week 4

Well...I'm now one third of the way through language school. Finally starting to feel like I'm making some progress and I can talk in the past tenses without tying my brain into knots. We also had the opportunity to go to a children's daycare last Tuesday and do a Bible story and craft. I told the creation story in Spanish and then the kids colored each day of creation on a coffee filter. We're gonna do a new story, craft, and game each week so now comes the task of planning out exactly which stories to cover. This is actually quite important...because I want to give them a good overview of the whole Bible...but it's crucial that the stories target some of the Catholic tradition they're already being taught. We have an awesome opportunity to show them how the Bible directly contradicts some things they will be taught...things they're already being taught. For example...stories that show Mary as just another person used by God and not holy...stories that show the power of faith for salvation and not works...stories that emphasize our direct relationship to Jesus. I've never set out to do this before so it'll be interesting to say the least.