Se Termina

It's over. I'm back. However, before I get to the whole being back thing, I think I'll run through my last few weeks. They already feel a bit like distant memories, which is unfortunate in most ways, but might make it easier to write a blogpost that isn't absurdly long. [Forewarning: it didn't make it easier, and I wasn't able to be brief.]

Day In Guate

As I mentioned in a previous post, I bought a ticket to go see Wisin & Yandel, who might be THE biggest Reggaeton act right now. They're also one of my favorites. I decided to make a day of it, and spend the morning in the city with some Guatemalan girls who had been working at Safe Passage and who I'd convinced to give me a mini-tour. So I took a chicken bus from Antigua to Guate, with instructions to get off "where everyone gets off"-- at a place called El Trébol. However, there was no single stop where "everyone" got off, so I stayed on the bus until the bus driver told me his route was over and that we'd already passed el Trébol. So then I called the friend who was supposed to meet me, and talked to her for a second but then the call broke up, and she wouldn't answer when I called back. So, I flagged down another little urban bus--one of the shady rickety red ones that you're not really supposed to ride if you can avoid it-- and asked the driver to tell me when we passed el Trébol. Several minutes later, I asked him how far it was and he said we'd already passed it, and I had to catch another bus in the other direction. The driver was actually nice enough to give me my fare (about 12 US cents) back. I got another shady red bus, and this time the driver actually did let me off at el Trébol. The problem was, the friend who was supposed to meet me still wasn't answering her phone. So, I walked around el Trébol, which is basically a street market. I walked back and forth a few times on the main part. I walked a lap. I walked some more laps. I set deadlines to make a decision and go somewhere else. I set later deadlines. An hour later, I get desperate phone calls. Turns out that while she was talking to me, someone grabbed the phone out of the hand of the girl who was supposed to meet me and ran away. So she had to go back to her house, attacked the internet in search of my phone number, and finally went to a pay-phone to call me. A bit later, we meet up, and boy was my friend relieved to no longer have a gringo roaming Guate on his own, waiting for her. Anyway, after that adventure, the day went smoothly-- we met up with the rest of our posse, saw the sights of downtown Guate, and went to Little Caesar's for lunch (in Guatemala, they're $4 pizzas, down from $5 in the US). Eventually I made my way to the mall (accompanied this time, even though this time, thankfully) where I was to meet the gringo posse and our hired van to go to the concert.

We'd been warned that people would have been lined up overnight for the concert so we got there really early. That wasn't true. There was never a long line. Still, we chilled out in the parking lot and had a good time waiting. Then the concert. It was fun. It was a bit wild. It wasn't quite all I hoped it to be, because the cheap tickets we'd bought were pretty fun back. Still they sounded good and it was a fun time. We jumped back in the van, and arrived back in Antigua (although we were dropped off a bit sooner than we intended to be because we had a price dispute with the driver). It was a good day.

Farewells

Most of my last few weeks was spent saying goodbye to friends (especially since a number of volunteers left in the weeks right before I left) and building up to saying goodbye to my students. When I found myself with free time on weekends, I would reflect on how my Safe Passage experience would seem when I would look back on it, trying to tie things together into a coherent memory. However, each of my last few weeks, I would show up on Monday with this notion of what I was doing that I'd concreted in my mind, just to realize that my mental summary of the experience was totally off-base. It's just a weird set of dynamics: on one (not inherently thrilling) hand-- spending time helping with menial homework assignments, trying to maintain order in a classroom full of rambunctious kids, and sometimes just sitting, planning, and waiting until someone finally has a menial homework assignment that I could help with ; while on the other hand, constantly re-realizing what kind of background the kids come from, noticing the slow but definite strengthening of my relationship with the kids, and appreciating how big my little bits of help really can be for the kids. I'm fairly happy with that summary of what the experience is, but at the same time, I'm not confident that if I went back for a day of work tomorrow my experience would fit with what I just described.

Now that I've tried to tackle what the day-to-day was, that leaves me at the end of the chain, on my last day. My morning with my older class was mostly normal. Helped with some homework, made some kids some logic puzzles (I introduced them to the challenging little grids that I used to spend hours on in elementary school), and chatted with the kids. Then the pizza that I'd ordered as a surprise arrived. From what I'd heard (and my experience as an 8th grader), I thought the kids would be giddy when pizza arrived. The response instead was appreciative, but very...understated. They were a lot less excited than I remember all of my classes being whenever food was brought in at any age (even up to this last year in college, people LOVE surprise free food). Regardless, they thanked me for it, I gave them a big card, they gave me a big card, we took a bunch of pictures, they tried to convince me to stay, then to make definite terms for my return, and it was nice.

My afternoon class, the 5th graders, didn't have homework that day, so the day ended up being quite festive. Much of the class was spent making cards for me, which the teacher distributed supplies for when I stepped out. However, I wasn't supposed to know, so the kids were all trying to keep me from seeing their cards. One kid fooled me at first and told me it was an assignment for art class, but then I caught on once he started grinning at me every time I looked at him, and constantly moving his pencil case to block my line of sight to his card. Festivities started at the end of English class, when a couple of the girls wrote me a message on the board and translated it into English with help from the English teacher. They kept telling me not to look, and the whole thing was precious. Right after English, the pizza I'd ordered for the afternoon class arrived. This class showed more enthusiasm than the other, although they almost seemed more baffled by the pizza than thrilled by it. After eating pizza, I gave the kids the big card I'd made them, and the kids presented me with cards, well-wishes, hugs, a bracelet I'm supposed to keep on until I come back, and three boys even sang me their well wishes as a trio, spastically throwing their bodies around the whole time out of some type of nervousness. I then played some Heads Up Seven Up with some kids (I showed it to them a couple days before when I suddenly found myself alone with a big group of kids without homework) as others crowded around the computer to watch a soccer game. When the day was done, I said a last goodbye and gave a last hug to each kid, and carried my big stack of cards to the volunteer bus for my last ride back to Antigua.

Lake Atitlan

Lake Atitlan was the one place I'd been determined to visit that I hadn't gone to yet. When I found out that there was a well-regarded scuba school there that does 4 day certification classes at half the price I would pay in the US, I decided it would be a nice way to spend my last few days in Guatemala. Most of my friends who'd gone had paid to take a shuttle, but I'd been getting flyers for a coach bus that cost less than half the price. So, 6:30 in the morning I head out to catch the bus, and when I'm two blocks away from where the leaflet said the bus could be found, a man stops me and tries to point me two blocks in another direction where he says there's a chicken bus (refitted school bus) leaving for the lake. Since it's neither the type of bus nor the departure location advertised, I figure the guys just trying to get me onto his bus instead. 10 minutes of wandering later, I realize he wasn't and the leaflet was both wrong and misleading. I jump on the bus right as it's leaving, and 2.5 hours and some very tight turns later, I'm in Panajachel on Lake Atitlan. I wandered the town a little bit to try to orient myself, but managed to walk to the next town before I succeeded in figuring out where I was. After eating a scrumptious meal as the only customer in a touristy balcony restaurant overlooking the lake, I wandered Pana a little more, then jumped on a public lancha (little motor boat) took off for Santa Cruz de la Laguna, where my diving school and hostel are located. My hostel, La Iguana Perdida was a really lovely place. Set right behind the dock, it was a little wooded escape from everything, complete with tasty food, a slightly hippyish vibe, and hammocks. During the mornings, I would be in the water with my British dive instructor, then the afternoons I would laze/wander around and also study for my scuba class. At night, there's a communal dinner where I met a lot of cool people who I would usually end up hanging out with until everyone was about to fall asleep in their chairs. It was a nice place to be, and where I spent the large majority of my time. However, I left a day and a half for other adventures.

Because of scuba scheduling, I didn't realize which day was my going to be my free day until 10 PM the night before, so I didn't really make any concrete plans. My two thoughts were to go to Santiago de Atitlan to buy some Mayan weaving, and to go to San Lucas Toliman, because I know people who've been there, and knew that when I got back, a guy from there would be staying at my house for a bit. I woke up absurdly early for no apparent reason, went down to the docks to catch the sunrise, and then realized there was no good reason for me to wait for two hours to eat breakfast at the hostel. So I decided I would set off in the direction of San Lucas Toliman, stopping for breakfast in Panajachel, and from there pass through Santiago and however many other towns I could in doing a clockwise lap around the lake using lanchas and whatever other transportation I came across. when the next lancha arrived, off I went.

As I ate my breakfast, I used my trusty Lonely Planet to figure out how to get to San Lucas. There are buses that run, but I didn't want to wait the two hours for the next one, so I decided I would take the public pick-up that passes through Santa Catarina Palopo (the village where some girls I bought a bracelet from in Antigua were from) to get San Antonio Palopo, from where I could catch a market-day lancha to San Lucas. The pick-up driver told me that it might be hard to get a lancha at that time of day, because it was already 9:30 and everyone who goes to San Lucas for the market goes early. The driver was right. Once I got to the dock in San Antonio, I asked some of the boat captains if there'd be more boats to San Lucas and they said of course. 30 minutes later I asked another captain and this one scolded me for not having flagged down a boat that had circled 30 yards out from the dock 10 minutes before. I'd assumed that a boat running a route would stop at the dock to see if people came. I was wrong. Oops. The captain assured me that another boat would come. Another 1.5 hours later, the first boat came back from San Lucas, and told me that boats were now coming back to San Antonio but no one would be heading to San Lucas. Fortunately I enjoyed my 2 hours of futile waiting. Right behind the dock there was a playground with some benches, so I spent the bulk of the time sitting and talking to the kids who came to swing and play on the jungle gym. They were cute and sweet, and since San Antonio isn't a major tourist stop at all, even the couple of kids who were trying to sell me things clearly weren't used to talking to a foreigner so I had a good time. Anyway, there happened to be a lancha that had been privately hired for a lake tour waiting for a family who was wandering San Antonio, and I talked the captain into letting me hop on for their next leg which was to Santiago Atitlan.

Santiago is in a narrow extension of the lake and you have to pass through reeds full of snorkel-wearing harpoon fisherman to get there. Santiago itself was a nice town, and happened to be very busy since it was market day. I haggled hard, made some nice purchases, ate well and cheaply at a nice litte restaurant for locals, forgot to take pictures, then jumped on a lancha for San Pedro.

San Pedro is know for its crowds of tourists and huge amounts of drugs. By the time I got there, I was exhausted and dehydrated, and since the docks we arrived at are far from the town, I jumped in a tuk-tuk (three wheeled cart that takes 1-4+ people wherever they need to go) and decided just to do a drive-thru of San Pedro to go straight for San Juan. I don't know if its just because I was in a bad state, but I thought San Pedro was the nastiest place I'd been as we passed through. Then my tuk-tuk got a flat tire on the way to San Juan, and I had to walk the rest of the way. Fortunately it was only 10 minutes downhill, because in my state of exhaustion I would not have been up for a hike.

The walk energized me a bit, and enchanting little San Juan (as well as getting some hydration) brought me back to a normal, rational state. San Juan is basically the kind of place every village on the lake would like to have turned into. All of its tourist industry is operated through local collectives, including a huge number of weaving collectives who give demonstrations and sell their handwoven crafts that they make using cloth they make themselves from their own cotton and dye using only natural colorings. On top of that, they have bus stops and trashcans that are frequent and functional (other than Antigua which the government makes sure to keep very tourist friendly, every other place I'd been in Guatemala either had no trash cans, or had no trash cans that hadn't been vandalized). They also had murals of traditional scenes painted all over town, and had a gorgeous church that was being restored. At this point I had some tuk-tuk confusion (the plus side was that I got to enjoy more tuk-tuk decoration) , but eventually made my way back to San Pedro where I caught a lancha that stopped at San Marcos, Jaibalitos, and one other town (it was the last boat of the day so I didn't get to visit these towns) before dropping me back in Santa Cruz.

I made one other outing, back to San Juan to use its ATM and buy some of its nice crafts. This time, I was in a better mood and I decided to give San Pedro another chance. I decided I actually liked it-- it has a really nice central park, a funky busy downtown, and a weird touristy strip which had everything from a Buddha Bar to a Chabad House (Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera on this outing).

After that, I made my way back to Antigua where I said final goodbyes to the few people still in town at a rooftop bar overlooking some ruins. Then in the morning, I was awoken by a pounding on my door because my alarm hadn't gone off and my airport shuttle was there, on-time at 4:45. I managed to get out the door in 3 minutes, and only forgot a couple of little things. My flights back were smooth, and soon enough I was hugging my mom and sister outside the Pittsburgh airport.

Being Home

Within a few hours of being back in the US, I realized how used to I'd gotten quite used to certain cultural differences. I felt uncomfortable drinking tap water and had forgotten that water fountains exist, I looked around for a trashcan by the toilet before realizing I could throw the paper in the bowl, I was confused for a moment when my first purchase (Sesame Chicken of course, as American as it gets) ended up costing more because of sales tax, and I was shocked by how much skin people (especially girls) show here. All the same it hasn't been a hard adjustment. It's been nice seeing a lot of my friends, and hanging out. And I haven't even had to miss Spanish yet because we have a guy from Guatemala who's here on a professional exchange living with us. Now I'm going up to New England to be with my sisters for a bit, then heading back to school and back to real life (although college isn't exactly real life either, but it's the realest part of my life). I'm happy with where I am and the steps I'm going, and I'm happy that my path had me pass through Guatemala and Safe Passage.

[If you are interested in supporting safe passage, you can volunteer if you can commit to spending 5 weeks there, or you can go for one week as part of a support time. If you want to support them financially, they have all kinds of cool sponsorship programs, including one option that makes you one child's padrino (literally, god-parent)-- they'll send you cards, and you're encouraged to send them cards and gifts. All this information and more can be found at safepassage.org ]