Experiences
My name is Ben Reeves. I'm 14, and I am on my first trip overseas (unless you count Matamoros, Mexico). I can't say as I'm nervous about the trip, but I am very interested in seeing what is like. I have visions of drug lords, rebel groups, and highway robbers. However, I don't believe that is the way it is. That’s just all I have to go on.
We were up at 8:30 this morning collating and hole punching manuals. We have reached Atlanta and the entire group has met; they all seem like very nice people, but I'm going to have a terrible time remembering everybody's name. Before we boarded the plane for Guatemala, we had a prayer. We're taxiing down the runway, and they just said something in Spanish. I think that it might have been the in-flight safety instructions. This is the first time I've heard it in Spanish.
I just realized that I didn't say why it is that I'm the one keeping this journal. This morning while I was eating breakfast, my dad (Presbyterian Pan American School chaplain Brian Reeves) and Mrs. BeDunnah (the leader of the trip) said they wanted me to write this for the group. They told me that they wanted me to keep this journal because, my dad said, "Normally it's old people with grey hair like me writing these, but we thought it would be interesting to have a 14-year-old write this and lend his perspective to it." I told him, "Sure thing."
March 3, 2004
We're on the bus heading to the village. We spent last night in the Hotel Spring in Guatemala City. It was awesome. It's a yellow stucco building, built in the Mediterranean style with an inner courtyard and rooms on the ground and second floors. Our room was very nice, on the second floor with a window facing the courtyard. This morning I watched Spanish ESPN and had toast and eggs for breakfast. I could have been eating in any American restaurant except that the jelly was really sweet and the orange juice was Tang. While driving through the city, the things that I've noticed the most are the busses, the trees, and the stores. Everyone gets around in private busses; they're all painted in bright colors - red, green, blue, and yellow. The trees are bright pink and purple. What I noticed about the stores are that there are McDonald's and Burger King's next to street vendors selling Pepsi and chips. We have stopped at Hiper Paiz (Hyper Country) to buy water. It’s a large store like Wal-Mart; it even has a Quick Photo. The main differences between it and Wal-Mart are the fences around it and the armed guards patrolling it with shotguns.
We have just arrived in Xela ("schay-la"). The drive here was exciting to say the least. I think the drivers here are nuts. Busses will pass each other on blind curves going uphill in the mountains. I'm amazed that there are not piles of wrecked busses in the valleys. We stopped to eat at a large restaurant called Chichoys. They served the best strawberry pie. We also stopped at a gas station and met with a group of Presbyterian young adult volunteers on another mission trip.
The cities here are very dirty, dusty, and smoky. Everything smells like diesel. During the drive up, I saw a man carrying firewood on his back, and behind him was a little four or five year old boy carrying his own wood. I don't think that I'm going to be able to complain about mowing the lawn any more.
We went to Chajabal late this afternoon to deliver the water tanks and meet the people. The people are wonderful. When we arrived we were surrounded by people, men in wide brimmed hats, boys in western clothes, and the women and girls wearing the beautifully woven traditional dress of the Mayans. The children peeked out from around the buildings, but as soon as we took out a camera to take their pictures, they ran up to us. I've never known anybody to get so excited about a picture.
The restroom in the village is five star. I've even learned some Spanish already. "Como estan los sanitario;" you can probably guess what that means. It consists of a concrete building with a concrete seat and some newspaper. The newspaper was not for reading (and it's not even in English).
Our driver, Martin, is incredible; the road to Chajabal is a one and a half lane road that works its way through a series of switchbacks up the mountain. He even drove the bus down the mountain on that narrow road in the dark.
We're staying at the Hotel Modelo, also in a Mediterranean style, except with only one floor. For dinner my dad (Brian), Bryan, Scott, and I went to eat Italian. I had a 7up, and it came in a glass bottle. Only Americans come to Guatemala and eat Italian food! I'm really tired; it's only 9:30 p.m. but it feels like 1:00 a.m. I'm so dirty; the dust and smoke get on and in everything. My head is so stopped up. Tomorrow we will start putting the water system together and teaching. The final thing that I have discovered today is that the showers have two kinds of water, cold, and not as cold.
March 4, 2004
We have just gotten done eating lunch and teaching the adults. The system team is having some problems with the pump; they think it may be the high altitude. Teaching the adults has been very interesting. We used Moses and the water from the rock as the bible story. We had one of the women come up to play Moses (complete with staff to thump on the ground whenever "Moses" was said) and some young children were the water. Everyone thought that it was very funny and there was always laughter and whispers.
Oh yeah, and we taught them how to wash their hands. We took some special lotion that they each rubbed on their hands. Then after teaching them good hand washing technique, we sent them off to wash. After they were done, we shined a black light over their hands. If any of the lotion was not washed off, it would glow. Then we would send them back to wash again. At this point they would tend to over wash by scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing. It got to be quite funny for all of us (and they did get their hands clean)!
They gave us a snack at about 11:30 a.m. It consisted of very sweet, thin cream of wheat to drink and some small round sweet rolls. At first we thought that was lunch, but around 1:00 p.m. we got a real lunch - soup, corn tamales, spicy salsa. It was all very good. I felt bad eating it. The people can't really afford to feed us, but they will get offended if we try to pay them.
Paul and Liz Demotte joined us this morning. They both have just decided to become permanent missionaries here in Guatemala. Mr. Demotte always has a story to tell. One was a joke about a plane that crashes in the mountains, and the authorities find an old Mayan man and ask him if he has seen any "great iron birds". He tells them that no, he hasn't, but that he has seen the occasional 757.
This morning Bryan Anderson and I went to buy some Clorox and five gallons of water. We ended up spending most of the money on "cheeps" (chips.) This is the only place I've been where you can spend 200 on chips and peanuts (granted it's Quetzales.) The teller had to get Bryan's name when we got the water and we couldn't quite get "Bryan" spelled properly. We finally decided Brayan was close enough. (This is now known as the Mayan spelling of Bryan.) It was better than Braw and Baw.
March 6, 2004
I've missed a day and a half of writing due to events out of my control (more later). I'll just start where I left off. We taught the children on the afternoon of the fourth. There were probably 50 kids ranging from 4-10 years old. We started off with some clapping games and the bible story. Then we taught them about germs and how to wash their hands. Finally they got to make play-doh germs and hand prints. The germs that they made were incredible; they included multiple arms, eyes, and horns. We then gave all the children a piece of candy and sent them on their way. At least that was how it was supposed to work, but, alas, the candy was stuffed in a plastic container and had to be pulled out one piece at a time. Because of this, we had a minor mob while we tried to pull the candy out. All in all, though, the day went well. When we got back to Xela we went to a French restaurant with the Demotte's and Melanie the nurse. My father and I had a pork dish while Mr. Demotte had chicken, Mrs. Demotte had a BLT, and Melanie had a vegetable sandwich. It was about this time that events got out of control. You see, under-cooked or contaminated meat does strange things to a person's digestion. We had about 45 minutes before we started getting sick. During that time, we went to an internet cafe that was above a bar. (Melanie didn't get sick, as she was quick to point out, because she was vegetarian).
By seven o'clock in the morning on Friday my dad and I had gotten close to no sleep, but we had to go back to Chajabal to finish the teaching. It turned out that instead of teaching a completely different group of people, we had ten or twelve of the same women that we had the day before. We ended up just having a question and answer conversation which was very enjoyable. The teaching the day before has definitely worked. The local matriarch (as far as we can tell) came again today, and she understood perfectly. If she understands, then the rest of the women will, too. At the end of our conversation, the women asked us for our addresses and phone numbers. Of the women that we had today three or four of them were very old (we didn't ask their ages) and the rest were between the ages of 15 and 21. They thought that it was really funny when I, the stupid tall gringo, bumped his head on the doorway. Everyone here is really short, all the doorways are low, and the tile overhang from the roof is deadly if you are six feet tall!
We were served a traditional lunch of rice meat and a potato cooked in gravy. It looked really good, but I didn't feel like eating.
After lunch we taught the children again, the same group as the day before. It went very well. John Heart ("Juan Corazone") taught them "Jesus Loves Me" in Spanish. We went over hand washing again and then gave them some candy. The candy went much better this time as I had started taking it out of the container about ten o'clock. We also gave candy to the women, twice, and we found out the reason why candy is such a big deal. It's simply because they never ever get any.
When we got back to Xela, my dad, Bryan, Scott, Melanie, the Demotte's and I went to La Luna Cafe for dinner. After dinner my dad and I decided to walk around the central square. It looked as though there was some kind of party going on and in a way there was. Here in Guatemala you see people out on the street wearing black and purple cloaks, carrying sticks with nails in them. They stop people and cars and threaten them until they pay them some money, often thousands of Quetzales. The people are supposed to be students, though you don't really know, and the money is supposed to pay for a really big party every year. This is tolerated by the government because it’s a "tradition." Anyway they had a rally going on in the square. They had a band and were singing, dancing and waving around black flags with skulls on them. Eventually things started getting wild with them setting off firecrackers and calling out the names of their supporters. At this point, we decided to go through the Catholic cathedral. The inside was very ornate, full of old Spanish silver. Down the center aisle were various depictions of the virgin Mary and the crucifix. Some of them were covered in glitter, others with neon. My father said they were most likely there for Lent. We went through the market afterwards. It's a combination of carnival, flea market, arcade, and farmers' market. There we saw a carousel, video games, food, leather goods, and even a pirated copy of "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King". We were both really tired by now so we went back to the hotel.
Saturday
Since we had finished teaching the day before, we got to spend the day in the city. We started by going into what was called a book store; however, they didn't have anything other than notebooks and binders, no maps like we wanted. Xela is full of these paper stores, but only one store that actually has books. We wanted to spend some more time in the cathedral so we went down to the square again. In the cathedral the statues in the aisle were gone, and there were fewer people. We went around the inside wall trying to identify the people in the icons.
There are no signs of what went on last night here in the square. We continued through the city until we came to a large classical building that had been built by the government in 1871. Since then is has been converted into a kind of community center with classrooms, a basketball court, and a cafeteria. The colonial buildings are spectacular, built in the classical Roman style. We continued into the large Mercado (market) where all the locals shop. The market is made up of stalls and vendors along the sides of the road. It's like one big flea market and farmers' market combined. There were fruits for sale that I had never seen, much less heard of, and stalls devoted completely to hats or plastic goods. Sandy went to one of these (Plastic Land) and bought fifty, five gallon water containers for the people in Chajabal. We arrived at the square where the other Catholic cathedral is. This cathedral is much more modern, and less ornate than the other one. Inside there are very few icons, almost no silver, and the altar isn't fenced off like in the other church. This cathedral actually felt like a church to me, unlike the other one.
We have been having problems cashing travelers checks since we arrived. The money changer in the airport and the first bank we went to wouldn't cash them at all, and it took us half an hour in the second bank. I'm pretty sure the banker called in the numbers on our checks. There must be some kind of travelers check racket around here. Today we finally found a bank that would take our checks without any problems. We were in and out in ten minutes. The only way you could tell you weren't in the States was the fact that there were two guards with submachine guns. We went back to the hotel for a nap before lunch.
My dad is the chaplain of the Presbyterian Pan American School, and we met the mother of one of his students for lunch. Ms. Aida Pacheco didn't speak any English, so I didn’t catch much of the conversation. Afterwards however, Ms. Pacheco and her brother Jorge offered to show us around the surrounding countryside. We accepted and had a wonderful time. They started by taking us up a mountain that is also a public park called the Baul (a sea trunk.) By the time we got up to the top we were as high as Chajabal (about 8000 ft), except that we could see all of Xela. Next we drove out into the country. The farther out we went into the country, the greener it got until we came into a valley covered in farms and gardens. It’s a green carpet here; they call it the nation's vegetable garden. We follow a stream along the road until we reach a Mayan village called Zunil, which was… well, prosperous. This was the first place I've been where you could tell the people had surplus income. We went to a women's cooperative where they sold woven goods. Earlier today my dad bought a blouse for my mom from a Mayan woman for 400Q. We probably could have bargained the price down to under 300Q, but we didn't want to because that woman and her family could live off the sale of it for a month.
There is a lot of volcanic action around Xela. We have been seeing puffs of smoke coming from the volcanoes all week. Today we went to a thermal electric plant that powers all of Xela and the surrounding country side. We went to dinner with the entire group tonight at Pollo Albamar. It was a very nice restaurant; we even had a band.
Sunday
We got up early so that we could decorate the water building before the church service. However, when we arrived, we discovered that the building had already been decorated with paper chains the children had made the day before. There were also pine garlands hung all over the building. There were pine needles on the ground to keep the dust down (the service was going to be outside since they were rebuilding the church to make it larger.) The service was wonderful and the villagers like the water. When they started giving out water, everybody wanted some, and they kept going back for more. People made sure everybody got some, bringing cups to their friends outside. We had to leave right after the service so that we could get to Guatemala City. We went to McDonald's for lunch. It tasted like any other McDonald's except for no pickles. I had a pina (pineapple) pie there instead of the usual apple.
When we stopped for gas on the way to Guatemala City, Bryan and I went to look at a wrecked bus. It had been totaled. The front end had ripped off and the doors crushed together so that there wasn't room between its sides. All the glass was broken, the seats had been ripped out of the floor, and there was blood on it. The first thing that I noticed when we got back to the States was how safe the driving was. When we got to the Hotel Spring, we ordered Domino's pizza for dinner (delivered by a fellow on a dirt-bike with a big box on its back; you can also get McDonald's that way.)
Monday
We got up early to get to our flight at 9:30. Everything went quickly and we ended up with an hour and a half of free time, so I went into some of the stores. I finally found a map at a book store there. The flight was uneventful. The group parted ways in Atlanta. My father, Mrs. Bedunnah, David, Bryan, and I continued on to San Antonio together.
All in all, this trip has been a great experience. It was safer than I thought it would be. I only got stuck up once, when Scott snuck up behind my dad and I on the way to dinner with his finger in our backs. Our group was awesome, very dedicated. I'm glad we got to help the people of Guatemala. I was struck by how much nicer the people were than here. I'm going to miss it there. I hope I get to go back.
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