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