Don’t take shortcuts in Guatemala…

So I managed to learn a few tricks of what not to do in Guatemala in the past two weeks.

Sunday morning, sweaty and dirty, I found myself walking 20 minutes late into a church I did not originally plan on attending… I actually had left my house an hour and a half earlier to visit the church right across from the Engineers Without Borders office, but one of the four locks on the front door of my house got stuck. I had already missed a quarter of the service when I got the final lock but thought “better late than never” and started the 15 minute walk. Unfortunately, with it being election day, a bunch of roads were caution-taped off. I saw a dirt road surrounded by two cornfields that would cut my detour in half and decided to take the new shortcut. I was maybe fifty paces or so in when I heard this nasty, aggressive growl from the corn next to me. Suddenly, a pack of seven dogs had strategically surrounded me, growling and barking. With my heart pounding loudly in my ears, I put my bag and Nalgene bottle between the teeth of the closest dog and my body. The dog lunged, and I swung that thick plastic water bottle at its nose like I was in the MLB. Simultaneously, this Guatemalan miraculously stepped out of his back door yelling, causing the dogs (and myself) to sprint off. So I found myself even more late as I finally approached my office and the nearby church when I realized… There was no church. It was just a billboard advertising a church above a random building.

A little beaten down but too stubborn to give up finding a church, I just started walking around La Esperanza by myself for another hour when I heard some peculiar singing a block away. I followed the sound to a sign for another church. I walked in and saw twelve plastic lawn chairs occupied by only four people and a sound system that reflected a rock concert. They all turned around and looked at me shocked. I sat down in the empty back row, and a man leaned over and attempted to “whisper” in English if I was okay and if I needed something. I kept apologizing in Spanish for being late and that I was fine and that I just wanted to go to church. Meanwhile, preacher lady, without missing a beat, was very passionately and quite literally yelling into a microphone hooked up to this insane sound system that may have popped my ear drums. The man finally sat down, and I listened to this woman’s sermon for 40 minutes that was not even in Spanish but in one of the local indigenous languages.

So if I learned anything from church that day, it was to not take unpaved shortcuts because dogs tend to be more aggressive. (Also, yay for online sermons!)

That Sunday evening, Ethan and I headed to Celas Maya, our language immersion school for the week. I loved the school, my host family, and all of the activities the school organized. It was enjoyable but quite exhausting having five hours of 1-on-1 conversation everyday about Guatemalan politics, getting surrounded by dogs, cinnamon ice cream, my life story, grammar lessons, and the technical engineering and political sides of cardamom drying. But I definitely fell in love with the chocolate covered fruit the school sold, especially their chocopiñas.

I was eager to visit the cemetery in Xela as I have always been intrigued by Guatemala’s colorful hills of tombs on my past trips. Some of the structures were what I would consider reasonably unsafe. So here is a picture of Ethan leaning up against a strong pillar with exposed rebar and a few additional metal wires for superb stability.

I attended the cooking class where we made tamalitos de chipilin. I honestly think chipilin smells and tastes like grass, but I guess it is popular here and tastes better with lots of salsa. My host mother, Thelma, invited me to her church one evening which was a much better experience, but the process of getting there was again interesting as it involved getting in a “taxi” which was basically a van with eleven seats and 22 other people crammed in and a few people dangling out the missing or broken doors. Thelma also invited me to her weekly Zumba class, and I asked her if it involved a lot of “caderas” or hips to which she said no. (To which I would now strongly disagree with my host mom.) Our instructor, Robert Carlos, turned on some crazy disco lights and could certainly move his hips in ways most human beings cannot. But I was flattered when he told me I danced like a Guatemalteca and not as thrilled when he pushed me to the front of the small class to lead a dance on the spot for the last song. As seen in the Zumba picture on the left, I always feel tall in Guatemala.

There were certainly a lot of fascinating people attending the school with us that week, and they all had a lot of great stories. A group of students from University of Virginia actually invited Ethan and I to join them on a trip to Champerico that weekend. Unfortunately, they rented a private van for 15 people and had 14 spots already filled. So Ethan and I shrugged our shoulders and decided to go on the adventure anyway, navigating the public transportation to Champerico. We discovered those very packed van-taxis could take us to a terminal where we could find a chicken bus (named for the people that carry chickens with them on the bus) to take us to Retalhuleu, where we could hop on another chicken bus to Champerico. It sounded like a breeze until we realized the hard part was finding a way the last 40 km around the mountain to the middle of nowhere with no taxis to the house they rented. We learned of a possible “shortcut” by renting kayaks and kayaking 20 km along the coast of Guatemala. Apparently, I did not learn my lesson on taking shortcuts in Guatemala the first time, and it took Ethan way too long to convince me that kayaks were a bad idea, especially for 4+ hours at 5 kph in unknown water, parallel to the strong ocean riptides, waves, and winds while balancing our packs in the dark evening during rainy season when there are thunderstorms almost every evening…

But 15 minutes into our first chicken bus ride, we learned one of the people got sick and decided to stay back. Suddenly, there were two open spots for Ethan and I on the private shuttle. At least the kayaking shortcut was now certainly out of the question, but we still had two hours on our chicken bus. It was not too awful, but I am always amazed at how many people they can cram into vehicles— imagine at least eight people in every single row on a regular size school bus. Also, I have never seen a bus drive on the wrong side of a single-lane highway for so long to pass people while going down a mountain in a blind, no-pass area and alert the other oncoming vehicles by just holding down the horn the entire time. But that still was not that craziest thing to happen that chicken bus trip. Ethan and I were alarmed by a man who started talking to us in perfect English and started explaining his theory of how China and Russia were the Antichrist. Not going to lie, he was a captivating guy who moved to the US when he was 19, lived in the US for 40 years, and just returned home 6 months ago.

We finally got off in Retalhuleu, alive and thriving, and met up with the rest of the group. We drove the last two hours through the craziest torrential storm I have seen in Guatemala yet. When we finally arrived to this house, we were met by ten Guatemalan guards with guns and machetes. I had a strange mixture of comfort and mostly fear by their protection. We got into the house and saw we had an open kitchen and living room area which may have been great in concept but was not the greatest idea considering this extremity of this storm. It actually looked like we had our own water fountain with the way the nonstop rain poured down the concrete steps, and I only saw one guy completely eat it on the tile floor. Fortunately, he did not break anything or lose any teeth. From the shore with my phone, I captured some stunning shots of the lightning hitting the Pacific. I also made sure to be awake to catch the incredible sunrise and sunset.

Overall, the weekend was gorgeous and extremely relaxing. There was a peculiar dynamic that made me uncomfortable as I realized this was the most “touristy” thing I have done in my four trips to Guatemala. I went swimming in our pool and the ocean, set up my hammock, and read almost the entire time. Ethan got punched in the back of the head by a wave and lost his glasses to the depths of the Pacific. I am still laughing a little bit now, and Ethan has been wearing my glasses this past week that have way too strong of a prescription for him.

As always, life is a grand adventure, and I am loving Guatemala. I am taking pictures of every single rooftop doggo I see, and I plan to make a grand collage of all the rooftop doggos at the end of this summer. But I do certainly miss my family, friends, and dog. Thanks for staying in touch by reading these blogs, and thank you for continually praying for me. Here are some other ways to support me in prayer:

• Praise for not getting sick from my plum and praise for starting to feel better after being sick all week from who knows what
• Praise for the invention of sunscreen because my goal is to return looking as if I was not in Central America for three months
• Prayers for Ethan to figure out his prescription to get new glasses here
• Prayers for effective malaria medicine
• Prayers for the manufacturing, delivery, and implementation of the heat exchanger Ethan and I designed (EWB project updates to come)
• Prayers for Guatemala in their final elections in August between Sandra Torres and Alejandro Giammattei and for safety during the political protests in Guatemala City, Xela, and throughout the country