June 08, 2004
Hello there!
This is my somewhat impersonal, but hopefully interesting, update for the last month. As most of you know, I have been in Central America for the last month. Together with my group, I have visited small communities in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador. The following is a collection of observations, stories and mildly humorous anecdotes. I will not be offended if you close this blog now.
We flew into Guatemala City on the 3rd of May and spend only a single night there before heading to Quezeltenango (called Xela or “che-la” for some odd reason). We attended a language school there in the morning and did work on a reforestation project in the afternoons.
The school was in a nice open corridor, which meant that all of us gringos (Spanish slang for westerners) got nice and burnt right away. I learnt a bit in school—I concentrated more on the basics and figured that I would tackle verb conjugation later. The project was little more than dragging dirt to a dirt pile, where we packaged the dirt in bags which we stuffed with seedlings. Not all that flashy by any means. I, at times wonder if we were a bigger hassle than help because they constantly were telling us what to do, and frankly it is hard to bag dirt wrong. Well at least that's what I thought...
We went from Guatemala through El Salvador and Honduras to Nicaragua (the trip planning was quite nonsensical) where we worked on, yes...another reforestation project. Here we dug a bunch of holes and bagged some more dirt.
The small town we stayed in, Nagarote, was very welcoming and even the mayor took us out to dinner. Apparently they don´t get too many visitors in their neck of the woods. The community put on a cultural extravaganza of sorts for us comprised of dancing and singing. Everything was going great until we played a game of musical chairs with the local teenagers. This game was apparently new to them, because I had never seen such vigor put into musical chairs before. Oh well, one of our girls wrestled with a 15 year old boy for the championship. Go Canada!
As we were getting prepared to leave Nicaragua, a huge student protest broke out in the capital city Managua. Apparently the right-wing government, who has recently received 80% debt forgiveness from the World Bank, decided, much to the chagrin of students, that to fund its infrastructure project it would have to cut 10% from university budgets. Protests and riots ensued, and the national guard was activated.
We actually drove past the police headquarters, where we saw upwards of 500 police in riot gear getting suited up. Apparently that day 2 people died in clashes. We, as you can imagine, decided to stay in our hotel and left for El Salvador the next morning at 5am.
El Salvador was home to the best part of our trip—a stay in the community of Los Laureles. This small barrio an hour outside of the capital city was by far the most rustic community I have ever visited. Automobiles were sparse, telephones extremely rare and electricity service was spotty at best. The toilets, well I will just say that they were cockroach infested outhouses. That is pretty much the best description of them. We were lucky enough to not have to bag dirt there, but we did dig a lot and carried it around a lot too. All this dirt dragging is bound to buff me up...or not.
The best part of the community was the children. We had lots of interaction with them via games and soccer and their general intrigue about the weird white people. I did wonder at time whether we were more of a nuisance than help in the community, but I think the community was more interested in showing themselves off to us. The slave gringo labor was just an added bonus. The people of this community were extremely tight knit and as a whole took very good care of us.
Instead of losing weight as I suspected would happen, I am discouraged by the fact that my pants fit tighter. I blame this solely on the fact that Latin American hospitality is too good. To be culturally sensitive I have made a big effort to eat just about anything short of meat that has been put in front of me. The end result is that I have eaten three large meals every day for the last month. The exercise is good, but I am not sure enough to fight off those nasty pounds. Ha ha ha. The servings have gotten increasingly larger as the trip progress too - by the end of the trip I had to eat really fast and get up before they could throw something else down in front of me.
Yesterday was one of the strangest experiences of my trip, and frankly of my life. We went to a professional soccer game. It was a semifinal game between the San Salvador team and somebody else. The game itself had an electric atmosphere with crazy fans jumping around and dancing all over the place.
The two teams fans had to be separated by riot police to ensure that no funny business broke out inside the stadium. The game was exciting and the home team won 3-2 with a golden goal. The real excitement, however, started outside of the stadium. Almost immediately after the game the two teams fans started chirping at each other, and we, as gringos were getting our own fair share of attention.
In Latin America the culture is very mucho—and women, especially western women, get a lot of attention. Anyway, I digress. Our group was swarmed by perhaps 40 drunk yelling Salvadorians who exchanged high fives, winks, slaps on the butt and hey babies with us. Anyway, our girls were creeped out and I was a little nervous myself since bottle were flying and glass was breaking. We jumped in two cabs as quickly as possible, and apparently just in time. As we drove off in the spot we were standing just 15 seconds earlier the fans descended on each other and a full scale riot broke out. The riot police came running past our cab and a three way riot with belts, bottles and billy clubs broke out. Luckily, we got out of there unharmed.
We ended our trip with a couple of day of relaxation in Costa Del Sol on the pacific ocean. There was crazy rough surf but mostly we just chilled out and drank. It was a good way to end off an interesting but trying month.
The rest of the team flew home today and I jumped on a bus to Guatemala City and connected to Antigua, where I have found a nice little hotel and plan to relax for the next couple of days. I start at language school next Monday. That pretty much puts me up to date.
All the best to everyone back home, or wherever you are.
Love and peace,
Dan
Posted by insideoutmag at 05:32 AM | Comments (3971)