June 20

Last night was the farewell dinner for Fabian the Spaniard, finally he will be able to reunite with his wife. Why he decided to get married and plow right into months of a long distance relationship I´ll never know.

It was a tearful goodbye for the family I´m with, and I don´t think it´s quite dawned on the younger kids that he´s gone for good.

Today I arrived at the school to find people out of their offices, looking downcast and muttering and asking questions. Someone had climbed in, or broken in, to the school, broken the computer lab window and carried off all 18 laptops. The police came. The employees split up the internet cafes and went around asking if anyone had been asking about laptop prices. There have been no developments.

I spent most of the day going through receipts of purchases from last month, calculating per pound and per unit costs of everything that the restaurant buys. I then asked the ladies in the kitchen for estimates as to how much of each product they use per plate. (They were very reluctant to start weighing palmfuls of lettuce, so I just wrote down their guesses). Tomorrow I´ll do all the math, and see how much profit we are making from each plate, so we can later decide what sort of sales deal we want to kickoff to boost sales.

I finally finished reading False Economy by Alan Beattie, and am now reading History of Ashes--the ugly story of the CIA since its inception.

I played an hour of basketball with the teachers at the local middle school against their team. One of the little pricks scratched a chunk out of my neck, so I made sure to elbow him in the nose on the next play, it started bleeding and he had to leave. Well not really, but I wanted to. It rained for about half the game, and then I plodded back home in the pouring rain on Fabian´s old bicycle, bouncing along the cobbled streets.

I went straight to the little gym. A couple regulars threw in some Eminem and Coolio and Cypress Hill. I took advantage of a rare opportunity to rap along with the songs without gettting shot glares.

To be continued, hold your breath...

Actual Info on my Doings here

Here in Guatemala i´m trying to stay useful. Today I volunteered to
help coach a middle school basketball team at the school I´m
volunteering with. I watched their middle school team play against
another school this afternoon, and I couldn´t help but reminisce of my own glory days. I´m also going to be giving a few
one on one English lessons to the English teacher that I´m helping out. I´m teaching seven
or eight of his middle school English classes a week. Finally,primarily, and most
interestingly to me, I am trying to help out at the restaurant which
is, at least in theory, helping to finance the NGO here. I am helping
them repaint and redecorate a little bit, as well as just helping in
the kitchen or wherever they might need me. But more importantly, I´m
going to be keeping an eye on their finances and trying to keep track
of where their money is going. I just sat down with the president of
this place and I found out that they made 2% profit last month, a
meager $70.

Buses in Guatemala

The streetlights guided us up the short distance to the bus. Once inside, Colin and I chose a seat towards the back; he sat next to the window, I sat in the aisle. Slowly the seats in front of us filled with mothers carrying babies in sacks on their backs, with young children clutching onto dresses that guided them down the aisle, and with solemn teenaged boys. It was four in the morning, and a five hour journey stood between us and Guatemala´s government-owned amusement park. Though the benches around us began to sit three, four, or five, Colin and I sat alone with little space to spare.

Slowly the narrow aisle disappeared as people sat on the edges of seats and sat balanced between them. Fifteen minutes into the journey, the family that had sat in the adjacent bench began to shuffle around. A young woman had allowed a six or seven year old sister and another, younger brother to claim one leg each of her lap. Next to her sat her portly mother, who tried to keep a baby quiet. I could no longer see the teenaged boy that had sat by himself before the family arrived, he was crushed against the window. Altogether they shared the equivalent of school bus bench.

I could hardly deny the young girl the few inches of seat I could squeeze into availability.

I know the exact distance between my bench and the one in front of it: exactly one inch shorter than length between my back and my knees. I pressed my knees into the bench´s back and leaned back, but I lost the feeling in my legs. I tried to rest my head on my legs, but the crown of my head bounced against the seat, and a sudden jolt would probably have snapped my neck. I tried to lean forward, but the girl would take advantage of the adjusted position and allow her head to slide down my back as she nodded off.

Such are the buses in Guatemala. You think they´re at full capacity, and then another four people get on, and then another two, and then another three. By the end, people are seated three or four to a two-seater bench, the aisle is lined with bodies that balance themselves against those that surround it, and people are squeezed into the stairwell. People hang outside the door and sometimes on the window. Needless to say, I didn´t get much reading done.

Guatemala in Third Person (for dramatic effect)

After several minutes of pacing back in forth of crowds he began to speak to himself. "Hmmm...I thought for sure that he said he was going to be waiting for me at the airport...
But I don´t ... see him in the throngs of people waiting here... No I don´t need a taxi, again. Well this could be kinda tricky if...Oh!" He spotted a white sign that allowed him to droop his shoulders in relief,

STVE
RENACIMIENTO

and he hurried over to shake the one of the hands that held it, lettting out a chuckle through his nose.

Miguel is the director of Associacion Renacimiento, which he founded when Steve was two years old. Warm and charismatic, he noticed his networking ability very quickly when they pulled into the office headquarters of Burger King a few minutes after driving away from the airport. Steve proceeded to sit through a brief, informal and gracious meeting between Miguel and a woman who worked in the plain, semi-vacant office building. Clearly he was receiving some sort of donation for the children in his school, whose names were printed on sheets of paper that made their way across the desk. (Later in Patzun, when Steve needed to exchange some money at the local bank, the pair waltzed to the front of a line of forty or fifty people and was immediately accommodated. Steve was acutely aware that this had nothing to do with his foreign face or wallet, but everything to do with the smiling man that walked slightly ahead of him. He also noticed that he always seemed to be the tallest person in the room.)

He wondered silently why Burger King would go to the effort of hiring foreign representatives, building the restaurants, establishing the legal framework for the franchise, and generally enduring the hassle of starting a business overseas to be able to cater to the relatively puny market that Guatemala City has to offer.

The two hour drive to Patzun was pleasant, any anxiety seemed to fade away as Guatemala quickly began to resemble rural Brazil. Steve asked about Honduras and Chavez and politics in Guatemala. His tentative, awkwardly phrased questions took some time to formulate and his responses were simple and short.

He would stay at a the humble hotel of a young family. Cesar and Reina have four children. Eulisa, Estuardo, Esraul, and Angelica range in age from nine to two years old; they all have cheerful dispositions and are affectionate and energetic. Cesar and Reina are trying hard to make ends meet between their small street front shop, simple and small restaurant, and their recently completed motel rooms. Reina is always smiling, and behaves with a mixture of maternal care and gracious hospitality. Cesar carries the weight of their financial situation in his eyes and delights in his children. After dinner Steve agreed to a price of $150 for the month, including breakfast and dinners. He also assured Cesar, upon request, that he would make any recommendations that might be fitting or helpful in improving their struggling establishment.

There are three other foreign volunteers in Pazun, all males.

Colin works for the Peace Corps, and is almost midway through his two year tour of Guatemala. His specialty, which he acquired while in Guatemala, is agricultural reform. He speaks hurriedly and passionately about organic agrictulture in his fully functional yet distinctly American Spanish. In his element, he´ll offer to teach lessons of basic agriculture techniques of sustainability and healthy growing to friends and associates of people he meets. He speaks with ease while jumping between topics of rabbit meat markets, brocolli prices, international certification standards, and overly theoretical and impractical solutions offered by international groups. He is twenty three and a native of Columbus, Ohio. He majored in economic development at USC.

Fabian is Spanish, as quickly becomes apparent when trying to comprehend him speak with his Castellano accent. His interest is psychology, but he has been working with the students at Renacimiento primarily as an activity instructor. He married a Peruvian woman three weeks ago. She lives in Spain, and he met her in Peru to have their ceremony and celebration but promptly returned to his volunteer work in Guatemala.

Max is nineteen, and has a background as confusing and mixed as Steve. Most of his life has been spent in Spain, but his parents are from Argentina and New Zealand. He is finishing his gap year in Patzun before beginning his freshman year at Hunter College in New York City.

Miguel suggested that Steve spend his first days assisting and traveling with the medical team that leaves every morning to offer their free services to neighboring mountain town populations. The small team returns to the Renacimiento headquarters in the afternoon to serve the needs of Patzun. After that, he might try assisting the English teacher in the position that Max will vacate.

The Guatemalan people are warm and welcoming. Their curiosity in Steve, when expressed, is polite and respectful. He could not help but contrast the dynamics of his situation with those of his trip to India. Here he was greeted, not harassed. The feeling of independence strongly contrasted his time in India, where he was always babysaty by drivers and tour guides. His costs would be less than his food costs alone would be in the US, a welcomed break from 100 dollars a day.

After his second day, a month seemed neither too short, nor too long.
(to be continued...)