We’ll need to take a vote on this. While this certainly qualifies as an interesting small world coincidence, I don’t know that it really meets the requirement of randomly running into someone that I knew before I left on this trip. But it’s close.

Last week as I was walking into my old school to pay my rent I passed a vaguely familiar looking guy that said ‘hi.’ Being the nice person that I am, I said ‘hi’ back, even though I didn’t think I knew this person. He said he couldn’t remember my name. I told him, and admitted that I couldn’t remember his name either, hoping that this might trigger my memory. No luck, but by this time he was definitely looking more familiar. Probably just someone I ran into somewhere. No big deal, happens all the time.

But as I was walking away, I heard him tell his teacher that we met in the states. Whoa, hang on. I went back and apologetically asked how I knew him. Turns out this is the guy that sat next to me on the train for the 30-some-odd hours from Chicago to Flagstaff on my trip west to mom and dad’s. I knew he was headed to Mexico, he knew I was headed to Guatemala, but no more. How about that?

The House Is Done!

Mark putting the finishing touches on the front door

Most of you know that a big part of my coming here was to work with Habitat for Humanity. I kept putting off starting with them because the schedule of my studies turned out to be more intense and tiring that I had thought it would be, but finally the week after my last dispatch I started spending my mornings with them.

All the houses here are made out of blocks and concrete, as big trees are not in abundance and cement is really cheap. I’ve worked with Habitat in the states a few times, and helped a few friends with their houses, but I’ve never built with concrete before—only wood. It turns out that building with concrete involves carrying a whole lot more heavy things. The Guatemalan workers really like letting the gringos carry the heavier things, and put things up high (which makes sense, since they’re all pretty short). And they love to let us mix the concrete. Mixing concrete by hand, in a ring of gravel on the ground, after you’ve carried the sand and gravel down the hill by hand, is perhaps the very definition of backbreaking work. I've gotten pretty good with a trowel and pallete though, and can throw cement into a small crack with the best of them now.

It took just under one month, start to finish. The house is simple: a small living room and kitchen (no plumbing into the kitchen, but that’s not so out of the ordinary here), two tiny bedrooms, and a small bathroom where you can just about shower, use the toilet, and brush your teeth in the sink at the same time. The bathroom is attached to the house, but outside of the back door—but that’s typical here as well. Four people will live there. Probably if that many people lived in that small of a house in the states, Habitat would build them a new house. But for here it’s pretty average, and certainly better than the falling down, partially enclosed scrap wood house the family is living in now.

I was a bit humbled the other day while I was waiting in the office for them to take me to a new project. Every day, dozens of people make the journey there to make their monthly or every-other-month payments. Habitat is not a charity per se: the people that are helped are required to help build their own houses and a few others, and have to make regular payments. The advantage is that the costs are low—most of the houses cost about Q12,000 (about US$1500) to build, and the loans are interest-free. The humbling part was that I as I watched over two dozen people come in to make their payments, I didn’t hear a single payment more than Q250—a little more than US$30. That’s just about all the more most of these people can afford. Like a Sally Struthers commercial, it’s less than fifty cents a day. Most of us spend more on a good night out than they can afford in two months time for their house. It was an awakening.

Habitat has built over 15,000 houses in Guatemala, and provided comfortable, decent housing for something like 70,000 people. All with volunteer labor, all with donated seed money.

Midnight Moonlight

Xela and Santa Maria from my old house

Hey folks, guess what. Central America is made of volcanoes! Who would have thunk it? One of the more impressive volcanoes in the chain that makes up the southern bit of Guatemala towers over Xela to the south, El Volcan Santa Maria. You can climb it any time you want, but the best time to go is on the night of a full moon to watch the sunrise from the summit.

My friend Renee and I decided to give it a go last Saturday. It’s a tough climb. The trail gets steeper as you go until it’s a nearly vertical scramble up the last bit. Every step of the way you’re walking or crawling over loose volcanic soil. It’s only about 6 kilometers from trailhead to summit, but it took the nine of us and our guide from 1:30am until 5:45. We arrived on top just as the horizon was beginning to turn rosy. It was so unbelievably cold that we had to remind ourselves nearly continuously that we are in Guatemala. Somehow the wind manages to blow from every direction at once, making it impossible to escape from not only the bone chilling cold, but also smoke from the fires of all the people camped on top. I already mentioned that there isn’t much wood here. There is plenty of plastic and paper though, and they burn it all. Ick.

But the sunrise was worth every step of the trip. From up there, you can see almost all of Xela, the beach on a clear day, and all the way to the Lago Atitlan (where I was living in the first part of the last dispatch). You can also look down into the caldera of Volcan Santiaguito, which is active and erupts about every 5 minutes. Maybe sometime I’ll go climb that one.

Soup Night

We didn’t make it back from the volcano hike until nearly 11am. This left barely enough time to take a nap, hang out with my roommate for a while, and make it back to the house in time for our weekly tradition, Soup Night. Every Sunday we fill our kitchen with our seemingly ever-expanding group of expatriate friends and devour an enormous pot of soup. This week Renee had volunteered to cook, which meant that her nap was probably even shorter than mine. Usually there are about fourteen people, which is probably way too many for our kitchen and is certainly more than the number of spoons and bowls we have. This week we decided to do the whole affair by candlelight.

My contribution this week was…drumroll please…homemade ice cream. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve slowly assembled the things I needed to build a freezer—for the record, in case you’re ever trapped in a place without decent ice cream, you’ll need an unused paint can, a large bucket, a spatula, and lots of patience. Just be careful about the cream, the cream here has a bit of a funny aftertaste. Fortunately I mostly covered it up with the last of the good Hershey’s chocolate I had. I know I’ve done better, but for a first attempt with a clandestine freezer, it wasn’t too bad. Everyone else seemed pretty impressed. Next week: strawberry.

Time To Go

This will be my last update from Xela, and possibly my last from Guatemala, for a while at least. I haven’t been studying much, and have been a little frustrated with the volunteer work—it not a problem with any of the organizations, just the slightly too laid back (and this is ultra laid-back Tim(!) talking) and general disorganization you find all over here that makes it difficult sometimes. I’ve been more or less stationary in Xela for three months though, it’s definitely past time to start seeing some things.

So in about two weeks time, I’m off to Mexico to meet my parents and then do some traveling with a friend of mine. As much as I like the cold, it will be nice to see someplace a bit warmer for a bit. And the cache of imported goods the folks are bringing—delicacies like peanut butter and chocolate that are hard to find here—will be much appreciated. From there, I don’t know where I’m headed. I’m sure that Honduras will be high on the list, then I’ll probably turn south and see where I end up.

In any case, the stories should get a whole lot more interesting from here on out.

Until next time—
-Tim(!)

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