Sugar crisis

One of my favorite things about Xela is that everyone else is as crazy about sweets as I am. Ice cream, donuts, chocobananas, and my personal favorite, churros stuffed with condensed milk. Delicious.

But this is all in danger! Some kind of deal was made with the trade unionists in Mexico that has resulted in the sugar price there rising dramatically. Clever speculators in Guatemala have bought up all of the sugar here and are taking it north where they can demand a higher price. Everyone is afraid that sugar will stop being available or the price will rise here, too, so are buying up sugar as fast as they can. My bakery hung up a sign that they will only sell 1 pound of sugar per customer. What is going to happen to all of my favorite snacks?!?

Note: I am not blaming the Mexican trade unions for this situation, I am sure they are still paid far below what they deserve.

Chilifest and beyond

It has been a busy week, so I am back from neglecting this blog. We are now in Quetzaltenango, Guatmela's second biggest city and the cultural capital of the country. This is definitely my favorite place we have been--lots of music, cool bars, big festivals for the soccer team, and more interesting travelers than we have met in other cities.

I am volunteering at TRAMA Textiles a woman-owend cooperative in the western highlands. The association was formed after the civil war to try and create a form of income for women, most of whom had their families killed by one side or the other during the war. There is a shop here in Xela, a weaving school, and they export their weavings to stores in the US, Canada and Europe. I work with Ampara and Oralia, the president and VP respectively, at the office here in Xela. Their work is totally beautiful and this week I started my own (far less impressive) weaving project. If anyone is looking for a shoddily made scarf please let me know.

Since the previous volunteer coordinator left on Friday and I speak the best Spanish of the volunteers I have become the default volunteer coordinator for the next few weeks. I am writing a newsletter, organizing the women's trip to the US for a conference next month, and trying to connect with more stores and organizations. It's pretty hard for them to get big orders, maybe because they are competing with a zillion other textile coops throughout the Americas that do fairly similar work. They also don't have Internet in the office, which makes it annoying and complicated to communicate with anyone outside of the country. On Thursday night we had a Chilifest benefit dinner at a really cool new bar to raise some money towards Internet and other infrastructure needs. People really liked it and it was nice to get to cook for a big crowd.

For the next few weeks I will be at TRAMA, Eli will be in Spanish classes, and hopefully we will go on lots of pretty weekend trips. I really like it here and wish I could stay for longer. We shall see...

Learning in San Pedro

This week we are in San Pedro la Laguna, a bigger town also on Lake Atitlan. Eli and I are taking classes at Cooperative Escuela de Espanol and staying with a very nice family. It´s good to have some structure after a week of wandering around. I am, again, struggling along with the subjunctive but feel like I may finally figure it out. My teacher is super interesting and involved in lots of community projects. On my first day of class we talked for a long time about recycling and environmental problems around the lake. The mayor has been taking steps recently to try and improve the water quality, including prohibiting people from removing sand from the lake (they would use the sand for construction, but the sand is needed to filter contamination in the water). He also ordered that new construction projects must leave 10 meters of public lake access in front of their building. This rule came about after local people objected that all of the beach was taken up by hotels and restaurants. Last year, a hotel wanted to build right up to the water. People were angry, and so tore down the construction. The owner rebuilt, the people tore it down, the owner rebuilt, the people tore it down....finally he got the point and left the beachfront open.

The family we are staying with is super interesting. They have hosted students almost constantly for the last 9 years. Rosa, the mother of the family, is very proud that the money they earn through hosting has let them put their kids through private school and the eldest has finished school and now is a nurse. Her husband Domingo used to work in the fields but now has a post with the municipality, on a commission to improve the city. He has big plans for the next two years of his position--to build more roads, expand access to electricity, and maybe even to build a larger market.

Down the hill, through the enchanted forest, past the holistic center....

These were the directions from a cheerful 7 year old as we arrived in San Marcos la Laguna and attempted to make our way to the hostel. We had a dreadful trip from Antigua to San Marcos. Lessons learned--when you ask someone if the bus goes to San Marcos and they say yes, they actually mean the bus goes to a town where you will switch to another bus, then ride on the back of a truck, then take a pick-up to get there. The best part of the day was when I heard our last driver gave me a price and then whispered a cheaper price to a little kid in the car. Busted.

San Marcos is kind of a hippy commune built onto the edge of beautiful Lake Atitlan. At some point someone decided it has a special spiritual energy, and so has become a center of classes and opportunities for meditation, yoga, and falafel. I went to a talk one afternoon by the owner of the hostel on Mayan cosmovision and learned that my next Mayan birthday is April 16 and I was conceived on a day with lots of creative energy. There is a complete separation between this touristy area and the Guatemalan town farther up on the hill. Eli and I generally ate our meals in town, and people seemed surprised and a little confused to find us there. Not really my scene, but the swimming and views of the lake were spectacular. Other highlights include teaching the caretaker at the hotel how to play Uno, watching some workers cut down a tree with a machete, and a delicious chicken dinner.

Nos llegamos en Guatemala!

After a busy and rainy week in Florida, finally the day of departure came. We arrived in Guatemala City on Tuesday afternoon--the flight in was beautiful, over incredibly green plains and tons of mountains. We hightailed it out of the city and came to Antigua, our destination for the last few days.

Antigua is the old colonial capital and is a clean, quaint town with a big central park and pretty colorful houses. The city has been rocked by 4 or 5 major earthquakes in the last two hundred years, the result of which was the government getting tired of rebuilding and so eventually moving the capital to Guatemala City. There are awesome ruins all over town of churches that have been destroyed and rebuilt over the centuries. Pictures will come later when I find a faster internet connection.

Antigua is surrounded by a bunch of volcanoes. Yesterday we hiked up Volcan Pakaya, an active volcanoe about an hour from the city. Pakaya is a plant that used to be all over the volcanoe and had some kind of medicinal property. It´s pretty much gone now. The hike was straight up hill for a mile or so, and the last part was over lava rock from an eruption five years ago. As we kept hiking, suddenly it became extremely hot under my feet. Arturo, our guide, cheerfully announced that was the hot lava flowing! Thanks to the lack of regulations in the Guatemalan tourist industry, as we reached the top we got to stand directly next to hot, flowing lava. Awesome. Some Israelis had purchased bags of marshmallows from kids at the bottom of the volcanoe and roasted them over the lava. The sunset and then we hiked back down in the dark. One guy from our group wandered onto the wrong path and came down on a different side of the volcanoe. But don´t worry, he´s in the Army and boasted that he has excellent night vision.Today we wandered through the ruins of the Church of San Francisco, much of which is dedicated to Brother Pedro Betancourt, a Franciscan monk who opened a school and hospital for the poor. People still pray to him and leave offerings to ask or give thanks for better health.

It feels great to be somewhere new and surrounded by Spanish. Tomorrow we leave for Lake Atitlan for some days of beach and then a week of Spanish classes. Hasta luego!

Son of a gun/I'm gonna have some fun/On the bayou

Thank you, Hank Williams. Last Thursday we made our way to New Orleans. We went through the Delta on the way there, home of good music and lots of crosses on the side of the road.

The last time I was in New Orleans was my senior year of high school on a band trip to play in the half time show of the Sugar Bowl. The highlight of that trip was the all-band dance, when a kid in the percussion section was dancing on stage with a girl from some other school. He danced so vigorously that he pushed her off the stage, in front of approximately five hundred people.

This time was more fun. We drove into the city over a bridge spanning Lake Ponchartrain at possibly it's longest point. The bridge goes from a random city on the north side to slightly outside of New Orleans on the south side—not logical places connected by a bridge. Eli told me that this was a project of the famous Huey Long. The longer the bridge, the more jobs you create, the happier are your constituents! I can appreciate that kind of politics.

The city reminds me a lot of Cyprus; parts are beautiful, colorful buildings with wrought-iron fences and citrus trees out front, and then you come across an absolutely desolate area where it seems little progress has been made since the hurricane. It's like you can be in two different cities and have no idea what's going on in the other one.

We stayed in the spacious and lovely Avodah house. The Avodahniks seem far less neurotic than our New York bunch and are doing some really neat work. We joined them at an awesome show at Le Bon Temps Roule. We saw the Soul Rebels Brass Band, who play there every Thursday. It was every music cliché that you could want—everyone was dancing, a totally mixed crowd, an hour and a half long set without stopping for a break. I could do this every week.

And, I have a new favorite sandwich! I had many po'boys (the best of which were at Domilise's, where a table is hard to come by even at 2pm, see picture below) but the king of all bread and meat delights is for sure the muffaletta. I would like to take this salty-squishy-briney sandwich on a picnic to the beach one day.