The Office

By special request, here are some pictures of the office I spend most days in at Defensores de la Naturalez, the NGO that co-administers the Sierra del Lacandon National Park. Plus a special bonus map of my commute from my home in San Miguel to the Defensores office in Santa Elena.


Okay, so here's the office...






I kid! That's el rancho, which is like the outdoor conference room/party gazebo on the office grounds. Here are more photos of the office and people that can be found there.

And here is a google map of the commute from my house to the office, done on foot, boat, and tuk-tuk.

False Alarm

Sorry to have panicked you, it turned out to be a false alarm about the tortilla prices going up. The story goes that that day the woman who sells tortillas door-to-door in Flores charged more than usual because she'd bought the dough pre-made instead of making it herself starting from corn kernels. The next day's prices were back to normal. But it highlights the fact that there is no place to buy freshly made tortillas in Flores. People have to go across the bridge to Santa Elena or buy from the one woman who goes door-to-door in Flores. There are no poor people in Flores, so no one to make tortillas. More on that at a later date.

Dontcha just hate it... ?

When you're abruptly woken up waaaay too early be a coconut falling off a tree and slamming to the ground just outside your bedroom window? And then with all the roosters crowing and pigs oinking, it can be tough to get back to sleep. Yeah...

Dun dun DUNNNNNNNN!!!

The price of tortillas went up today. Yesterday it was 5 tortillas for 1 Quetzal (about $0.13) and today it is 4 tortillas for the same price. Diversion of foodstocks for biofuel production? Couldn't tell you.

Uuuugh!

It took me a little while to figure out what I was seeing last night, but I witnessed a cockroach molting. At first I thought it was a very long white and brown bug, then I thought it was an albino cockroach and a normal cockroach humping (hey, if that's what you're into...), then as the fresh cockroach got a little distance from the shell of its former self, I finally figured it out. It's somewhat less inspiring than watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon, as far as metaphors for transformation go. But the new fella sure looks fresh, doesn't he? I evicted him.

http://picasaweb.google.com/laurelsuter/2007_11_26BugEncounter

A Very Guate Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was coming up and everyone around Memo's household was looking kind of glum (apparently the tax-man stopped by) so I offered to make a Thanksgiving dinner for the family. They have been very generous with me, with free internet, food, and hugs so this was my chance to give something back. I figured since there were turkeys clucking around in many yards I could get us a real country turkey, so I arranged with a guard at the office to bring me one slaughtered and cleaned, though the cleaning was extra. I didn't want to add the additional challenge of de-feathering a bird (please refer to the Paulie Shore movie Son-in-Law). And this may sound cruel, but the other American at the office, José, knew I was making a Thanksgiving dinner since the whole turkey deal went down right in front of him, but I didn't invite him to join us. Based on a conversation I had with Zaira after his drunken tom-foolery, it appears he might have been the one Memo kicked out of their hostel a few months beforehand for bad behavior, and plus I'm just not that keen to spend time with him. The guard wasn't 100% sure he could get the bird, though, since people are already hoarding them in advance for Christmas, but another source told me I could get a frozen one at Maxi-Bodega, the new mega super store on the outskirts of town. So on Wednesday I went to the office not sure if there was a turkey awaiting me or not. I couldn't find the guard when I got there, so I looked in the fridge and didn't see it, but then the other guard told me that, sí, it was there. I'd known better than to expect a pumped-up turkey on steroids like what we have in the US, but I also hadn't expected what appeared to be a large chicken. I knew this wouldn't be enough, so I jumped in a tuk-tuk and we raced off to Maxi-Bodega. Turns out it's Wal-Mart owned. Hmm, I wonder if they're going to put a McDonald's out there too, I don't think there is one in all of Petén. I just asked Zaira if she's ever been to a McDonald's in her life and she says no. Well, I picked up a medium-sized frozen turkey, a Carolina original, and brought it back to Memo's place and he was like, "oh no, we need at least another bird, all of Angelica's relatives from the country-side are coming over for this," so I jumped into another tuk-tuk and raced off again to Maxi-Bodega. And thus began a long afternoon of fast-defrosting two turkeys and cleaning my new place. This morning I came over to their place at 7am and got to work, and without going into too much detail let's just say it's a lot of work to put together a whole Thankgiving oneself, though the kids Reyna and Wilso were invaluable assistants, chopping, peeling, and fetching for me, all very cheerfully and of their own free will. When it became apparent that not as many relatives could make it as had been thought, I took one of the Maxi-turkeys out to make more room in the oven. While I was cooking Memo and Angelica took the opportunity to satisfy their own curiosity and cruise on out to Maxi-Bodega. Loved it. It turns out that I undercooked the country-turkey, maybe because I thought it was so eensy-weensy I thought it'd cook really fast, so we ate pretty much all of one Maxi-turkey and returned the country turkey to the oven, followed but the other Maxi-turkey. So in the end we dined on a pretty typical pilgrim platter: turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, bread, but because of the oven bottleneck my roasted carrots weren't done in time. The only really Guatemalan substitution I had to make was I couldn't find celery for the stuffing so I put in huisquil instead. I'd never handled it before, and fortunately I discovered it needs to be soaked in water before I added it to the stuffing, to get rid of a stinging liquid it produces. Of course I discovered this when my hand became discolored and stinging, followed by a slow chemical peel on the palm. So that was that, every one was happy and it made the tax-man blues go away for at least a little while.

Please enjoy photos here.

This morning, however, the day after, I was a bit unwell and while my suspicions were on some tacos I ate the day before yesterday, I thought maybe I had food-poisoned everyone. But fortunately everyone else is fine and I can go back to hatin' on that taco stand. Never again!

Cribs II

I got fed up with not having a kitchen and with being awakened early every morning by the sound of tuk-tuks revving their engines, so I decided to move to the more bucolic San Miguel. It is a short jaunt across the lake from Flores, but it is worlds away as there are trees (Flores is entirely paved), very few vehicles (easily accessible by boat, but driving is the loooong way around), and pigs and chickens browsing about. And now I have a super-pimping pad, it has two bedrooms, a tidily tiled bathroom and kitchen, a living room, furnishings, a roof-top hang out, a lime tree, a smelly little dog who I plan to bathe, and I am surrounded by relatives of the owner so it is secure. Please note that in the aerial photo of Flores posted in Pueblo Pequeño, Infierno Grande San Miguel is the community on the peninsula in the top part of the photo.

In case you're unfamiliar with tuk-tuks, here is a picture of one. They are cheap, ubiquitous, and noisy, and according to Angelica they've only been in the area for the past year or so.

Please en joy photos of my house and new neighborhood.

Breaking news! My adviser in Santa Barbara, David, suggested that I spend a few months there when I come back at Christmas time instead of the few weeks I'd planned. This will be pretty much the first time that all of my committee and myself are in the same country at the same time in about a year, so he thinks we should take advantage of that before I run off to collect my data. Sounds reasonable and I'll enjoy being back in SB. So maybe you'll get to see more of me than you thought you would, because maybe I'll be sleeping on your couch. And before you get your hopes up, most likely Josie won't be joining me, though maybe she can put in a special appearance. We'll see.

Messing about in boats

I accompanied a sausage fest of dudes from various public and private organizations taking water samples from the Pasión River outside where the palm oil processing plant dumps its waste in the river. It was a good time being on the boat, cruising the river, acting covert so palm oil goons wouldn't come out and rough us up. This was a couple of hours south of Flores, not far from the town of Sayaxché, which also is not far from the lake Petexbatún where an acquaintance of mine, Otto, is the manager of a rustic guest lodge only accessible by boat. I took him up on his invitation to stay there and had my water-sampling companions hand me off to him and his 11 year old son Jorge, visiting his papa from Guatemala City. After a delightfully restful evening in the lodge, free of the noise of tuk-tuks racing around the streets that accompanies the life in Flores, we boated to Aguateca. This is a Mayan ruin on the edge of the lake, founded as an offshoot of Tikal (the crown jewel of the Mayan sites) and it is a site that Otto, as one of the archaeologists who worked on its excavation, knows very well. Nice to have an expert as a guide, and I am in love with his son. I have not spent this much time with an 11 year old boy since I was 11, and he is a wonderful kid, thoughtful, sensitive, kind, and funny. A great time, so nice to get away from Flores for a bit. They had to go to Flores to pick up supplies for the lodge so the return home for me was door to door service, involving boating, walking, and driving. Here’s a link to more photos from the river and lake excursions.

http://picasaweb.google.com/laurelsuter/SayaxchPetexbatN

Pueblo pequeño, infierno grande

Living on an island the size of Flores is both a blessing and a curse. There is a saying, “Pueblo pequeño, infierno grande” meaning “Small town, big hell” which is something I experienced today, and unfortunately it was an ugly American (not this one here, a different one) who caused it. When I arrived here, I found out I was not the only gringo in the area with a taste for conservation. There is a young fella from the States named Joseph, locally known as José, who is looking to do a one year professional master’s degree in international development and conservation at Cornell in a few year’s time. One of the requirements for applying for this program is having two years of experience abroad in international development, and through the contacts he made with The Nature Conservancy in the US he landed a spot tagging along with the technicians on community development programs for Defensores de la Naturaleza, the NGO that co-administers the Sierra del Lacandón National Park. From what I understand, he goes with them to communities and sometimes helps with the labor of their various development projects and sometimes lounges in a hammock and reads while the technicians work. As it happens, these technicians of Defensores are also my primary gateway into the communities living and farming in the park, the communities where I am doing my research. Currently, however, I am also actively cultivating other contacts with sway in those communities, such as with the Pastoral Society of the Catholic Church in the area, which behaves as the good cop to Defensores’ bad cop in dealings with the communities and generally serves as a buffer between the two. So the blessing of the small island is that as I was strolling around on Sunday I happened to run into a gentleman from the Pastoral Society as he walked with his lady friend and he invited me to have a beer with them. We ended up having a good discussion of development projects in the area, and the great behemoth that threatens the small-scale subsistence agriculturalists and thus conservation areas, foreign-investor backed land consolidation. In this particular instance, city people with international backers come into what had been primarily a subsistence farming community and with their big money and dirty bargaining methods (apparently a useful phrase when pressuring a reluctant seller is “Sell to me today or I’ll negotiate with your widow tomorrow”), acquire all the land in a community and plant African palm for biodiesel production in place of what had been subsistence corn production. The now landless peasants, with a couple of bucks in their pockets, then go to the places where there is land for the grabbing, conservation reserves. So goes the story. Anyway, this was our topic when José, the ugly American, came into the restaurant by himself and, drunk as a skunk, started hollering “Laurel!” at me and offering to translate. I admit, I probably only understand about 90% of a complex conversation, but I don’t think his Drunklish to Spanish translation would have been a big improvement, and as I was only newly acquainted with these folks myself I wasn’t in a big rush to align myself with José in their eyes. So I told him that we were doing okay and he drifted off. Later, when he thought we were talking about corn fields, he asked if he could join us and I said that if it was okay with him, we’d like to continue our conversation about export-agriculture without him. He drifted off again, but caught our attention when he accidentally stepped on the resident dog’s tail, causing the dog to growl and nip at him and causing him to kick back at the dog in defense/offense. The waitress of the restaurant ran up to José, scolding him with, “That’s not your dog, you can’t kick at him like that!” and José and the dog continued to menace one another around her legs. Apparently José does not have a way with the dogs, as I’d already heard a story about a dog biting José in the leg as he and a field technician were walking by in one of the park communities. He eventually did join our conversation for a while, and said he was a man of corn, which is what Mayans say of themselves, and that he was Nicaraguan, which isn’t true, he’s from New Jersey and not of Nicaraguan origin, though he did learn his Spanish in Nicaragua. Eventually he drifted off again, and when it was time for him to pay his bar tab there was an additional conflict and my colleague from the Pastoral Society said he expected the police to show up at any minute. Anyway, the long and the short of it was because of the small island I had the happy event of running into the gentleman from the Pastoral Society, and he invited me to attend a meeting about water resources with him today, which turned out to be very interesting. And because of the small island I came close to being shamed by a fellow countryman, though in the end my new acquaintances and I just laughed the whole thing off. But something tells me that this is not the last instance of the small island leading to misadventure, whether it involves José or any other of the several hundred people who walk it daily.

Update! I saw José about a week later and he apologized for his behavior and asked me to apologize to my companions for him. Apparently he'd been having a frustrating time. Well...

El Chapo de Sinaloa

Little did I imagine when I saw the advertisements that El Chapo de Sinaloa was coming to town for a show that I would attend it. I had never heard of him before. But yesterday I met with gentlemen who work for the Pastoral Society of the Catholic Church and who help mediate interactions between the organizations that co-administer the Sierra del Lacandon National Park and the people living and farming there. At the end of the meeting some of them invited me to come along with them and I said sure, why not. It turns out we were going to watch the performance from a restaurant that is right next to the stadium where the show took place, since as friends of the owner of the restaurant we were VIPs (their words, they said VIPs and they even pronounced the letters like we do in english, vee-eye-pea, as opposed to how it would be in spanish, vay-ee-pay) and so we got to have a private party on the terrace and enjoy the show. The crowd that had actually bought tickets and were in the stadium really wasn't that large, and according to my companions this was because the last time that a ranchera style concert had been in the stadium it had been extremely full and that some of the men in the audience had fired their guns in the air to show their appreciation for the performance. This frightened the audience, causing everyone to dive to the grown (except Zaira, Memo's sister-in-law, who didn't want to get her clothes dirty), and thus I guess many people decided to put the CD on and drink in their living room. Apparently this ranchera style music attracts the drug-trafficking population of Petén and they like to walk around with this guns in their belt and then show off once they've gotten a bit drunk. Fortunately there were no shots last night, we watched the show placidly from the terrace, and though I had no idea who El Chapo was before the show, I definitely recognized many of his hits from the radio around here. And it was good because I also met some men who work in the Public Ministry on environmental affairs and who are involved in the bureaucratic process of forcibly removing (apparently usually without success) communities illegally settled in the park. Networking!

The new face of licuados?

As I've mentioned, I am friends with a family that runs a hostel here in Flores, and the other day Memo took photos of me and some other gringos enjoying licuados (blended fruit, sugar, ice, and water... a smoothie but with fewer bells and whistles) to promote their sale amongst the internet café crowd. Will the ad campaign have the desired effect?

Election Day

One of the things that I was congratulating myself on before coming to Guatemala was that I would be absent from the US for most of the run-up to our presidential elections, therefore avoiding most of the campaigning, which gets old fast. There's nothing like slipping out of the country to avoid our political skirmishes, I felt equally satisfied when I was in France for the year during the Clinton impeachment and only had a cursory knowledge of the happenings. Little did I realize, though, that I would be stepping into Guatemala right in time for their second round of Presidential elections. Apparently there was something like 14 candidates for the first round around 2 months ago, and two candidates were eligible for the second round, which just took place on Sunday. I was pretty convinced that the candidate promoting himself as "La Mano Dura", the Firm Hand, was going to win. Maybe this was because it was his theme song that was stuck in my mind from the trucks driving around blaring it throughout the day. In fact, one of the best things about being at Lucky's house is that she lives on the outskirts of her town and so there were no promotional trucks tooling around and I got a little respite from the song. It is pretty catchy, though, while I didn't even know what the other candidate's theme song was. Maybe I thought he would win because I spent considerable time around Guatemala City, which turns out to be one of the few areas where he did win, and which is also where the primary newspaper is published. Well, whatever the cause, I thought Mano Dura would win, meaning the return of military power to Guatemala since he was a General. According to my landlady, this meant soldiers would go into villages again and do whatever they wanted such as raping young girls. The election called for tough measures, though, such as the prohibition of the sale of alcohol from the evening before the election until the morning after. I suppose they figure that will increase the voter turn-out, or decrease the possibility of buying votes. And in addition to signing their names when they went to the polling place to avoid people voting twice, everyone also rubbed their index finger in a dark ink to mark themselves as having already voted. Well, in the end, much to my surprise and perhaps to the surprise of the capital dwellers, the other candidate won, the one from the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza party. There were firecrackers in the street, there was hooting and hollering, flag waving, people were happy. It seems like another of case of voting for the less worse candidate, but that can result in a big difference.

My mother was right

I just got back to Flores after a fortnight of zipping around Guatemala. Two weeks ago I went to La Capital for a couple of meetings, and, very exciting, to welcome Esteban as my first visitor. Well, it was a lovely time together, we started out in the colonial jewel of Antigua, and in an attempt to escape the rain headed up to Cobán. Here’re pictures from our trip to Semuc Champey, a limestone bridge on the Cahabon river a few hours from Cobán. Hiking to this overlook point turned out to be the last activity I felt good for, because after this I started to succumb to a general malaise. I guess when I was shivering in bed with multiple blankets despite the fact that according to some “it’s not cold” and I had very little appetite despite being very hungry, it was apparent something was wrong. But after a week together our time came to end and Esteban headed back to UCSB and I went off to Quetzaltenango (Xela) to visit my old Spanish maestra, Lucky, and her 9 month old daughter Montserrat (Moncie). That is when the itchy itchy on my legs and feet began, and let me say that while it felt so good to scratch them, it felt so bad to stop, so I started making up itching rules which I would alternately stick to and then violate. No itching with my hands. Okay, as long as I don’t use my fingernails. Okay, fingernails, but lightly. I can rub my feet on the bed. Okay, I can only rub my foot with the other foot, but no toenails. Okay, just stop completely. Mmm, maybe just with one finger. Despite the times I would be scratching my shins and wanting to cry, I had a nice time with Lucky and Moncie. Moncie is so funny, if she’s awake she is eating and Lucky keeps a constant stream of different foods flowing her way which Moncie demolishes with her two bottom (and only) teeth. She seeks out food too, we were all lying on the bed when she woke up from her nap and I guess she sensed the cake lying in foil that some neighbors had dropped off, because she went for it. Did she smell it? Does she know food comes wrapped in foil? Well, she wrested it from the foil herself, and she does not get kicked out of the bed for making a mess and I admit to having rubbed my legs in the crumbs on the bedspread to get in a surreptitious scratch. While I was visiting there was a special treat, because my first full day in Xela Moncie’s preschool put on a production of Blanca Nieves y los Siete Enenos (Snow White and the Seven Dwarves) , in which Moncie appeared as a little bunny rabbit. So… cute… Ah, and all those who spoke out in outrage will feel satisfied to hear that at one point Lucky casually asked me who else in my family is a redhead. Hear that? Who *else*, as in who in addition to me.




(http://laurel-guatemala.blogspot.com/2007/01/pelirroja-nunca-mas.html)

Anyway, after 3 days I headed back to Guatemala City with the intention of immediately catching another bus back to Flores. It should have been all day and two buses, but I missed the second bus and decided to spend the night in Antigua instead of waiting around in Guatemala City until the night bus. Coincidence is a funny thing, because me and this one guy have it big time, and while at some point he probably counted it as destiny now he might see it as bad luck. When my parents visited me in February, I went with them to Lake Atitlan and while crossing the lake on a boat I met Fernando, a man in the thread business who happened to be reading, of all things, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (http://laurel-guatemala.blogspot.com/2007/01/7-or-8-habits.html). He gave me his business card, and that would have been the end of the story except the day after my parents left I was walking by myself in Antigua and he and I came to the same street corner at the same moment. Thus we went on a date last February, the night before I was leaving to go up to Flores, and while we had a nice time I didn’t feel particularly compelled to continue it over the phone and eventually stopped answering his phone calls. On this recent trip visiting Lucky I even told her this story and she called me a rompe-corazón, a heartbreaker. Well, as destiny or luck would have it, I got a chance to break his heart a second time because on this recent trip which should have been from Xela to GC to Flores in one go, when I decided to spend the night in Antigua instead of attempting to continue on that same day, I got off the Xela to GC bus at a GC McDonald’s to use the bathroom, and who is sitting there in a booth when I walk by? We were both surprised, though I only stood there gaping for a minute before I excused myself to continue on to the bathroom, having just gotten off a bus after 6 hours. When I came back, though, we chatted, and I ended up telling him that I’d stopped answering his phone calls because I’m not much of a phone talker in general, I’m even less of a phone talker in Spanish, and, well, I kind of had the feeling he might have taken our relationship potential a little more seriously than I had. He was like, “well, you know, I live in the moment,” but then he went on to tell me that remembering that I was coming back in September, when September came around he called me repeatedly (I had to buy a new phone chip with a new phone number when I got here, though) and went to Antigua multiple times and looked around in the places where he thought I might hang out in the hopes of seeing me. In my mind I was like, “um, yeah, that’s kind of what I had in mind when I said you took it seriously,” but because I felt bad I invited him to come to Antigua that night and hang out, which we did, though I’d already told him that there was no chance between us. This did not prevent him from feeling a certain hopefulness as we said goodnight, however, which I squashed on the spot and then apparently squashed again the next day when he called me while I was on the bus to Flores and I didn’t answer. I guess after his previous experience with me, this time he’s giving up earlier. And thus I came back to Flores, where I did get the bienvenida from Memo and family, who were all happy to see me and I was happy to see them. He and I were talking and to catch me up he told me that he’d had dengue fever while I was gone and started to list his symptoms and I was like, “Gee, I had pain around my kidneys too… wow, I had a bad headache… shivering you say? Sounds familiar… Rash?” My case apparently was much milder than his, though, because I never asked God to strike me dead nor did I start getting my affairs in order, but it was bad enough. Apparently it has a two week incubation period, so I think a mosquito passed it between us and he and I were sick at the same time, 500 km apart. Well, it feels kind of good to know that I weathered my first tropical disease, and to have a name for it instead of just being some weak-sauce tourist suffering from unfamiliar food. I am practically all better, though I am still occasionally alternating between ecstatic moments of scratching my ankles, followed by a steeling of my resolve to not touch them. And I should have listened to my mother and gone to the doctor when she suggested it instead seizing on her anecdote about the time the doctor told her to take Benedryl to clear up a rash. For her, it worked like a jiffy. For me, it made me sleepy, unable to conjugate Spanish verbs, and didn’t relieve my itchiness, though hopefulness made me try two times.

Josie Tribute

Anyone else missing her? Probably the only ones that can say no to that are my parents. Cherish her!

Cribs

It was a snap to find a place to stay. I looked for signs, asked for leads, and in the end chose a simple room in a 4 room "hotel". Gladys and her husband live below, then they have 4 rooms above and since I am going to be here a long while they arranged it to my liking. 1000Q/month, or $132. It is near the family I hang with, and it is pretty sweet. Just a simple room and a private bathroom, with the "widow maker" type of shower head.




Views from balcony















Pretty much every time I leave either the sheets
are changed or the trash is taken out, but rarely both.











Special guest

Bienvenida?

When I first got to Flores and was reunited with the family I stayed with last time, Memo (a gringo who's been living here for 4 years), his Guatemalan wife Angelica, her kids Reyna (10) and Wilso (8), their kid Paralee (1.5), and Angelica's sister Zaira (freshly 18), I was a little disappointed. I'd stayed here for 3 weeks 6 months ago, but the kids didn't really seem to remember me. Even Zaira, who I thought I'd had plenty of girl-time with, was like, "where are you from?" I guess it was partly because in the 6 months I was away they'd turned their place into a hostel, and so a parade of gringas has come through here. But everyone warmed up again pretty quickly and it is comfortable again. I've arranged to eat many of my meals with them when I'm in town, and I've hunkered down in their internet cafe with my own laptop. And last night I felt things really turned a corner with the little kids, when they remembered completely on the own that I had taught them the robot dance last time I was here.

Anyway, this is a nice arrangement because I can cook occasional things in their kitchen and I don't have to sit alone in a restaurant whenever I want a real meal, which gets old fast. I just have to be on guard against tickle attacks, but if I get my back into a corner I can usually hold the two of them off pretty well.

It's becoming routine

I actually shocked myself in the shower again last night, though this time it was not so much of a surprise, I knew I was running a risk. I was trying to adjust something on the shower head, when I felt the tingle. The part I was touching appeared all plastic, though, so I am not sure what parts are safely touchable and which are not. Perhaps I need a more advanced tutorial.

And it has been pointed out to me by Stacy that I mis-wrote the code for dialing out of the US when I posted my phone number. My number here is 011-502-5185-5624, not 001-etc. as I had originally posted.

Anyway, last Friday I went into the big bad city and had some meetings with folks involved in the park management. All turned out well, I kind of just crashed their gap analysis workshop, talked to the folks I needed to talk to, then skedaddled. On the way back to Antigua, the very full bus I was on suddenly and completely conked out. I've never witnessed a faster death of an automobile. It was like we coasted to a stop and then all the electricity failed. Maybe it's the new electro-magnetism I am carrying around with me since my shower incident. Batteries fail, hard drives erase... it's a mess. Anyway, it was dark, and they tried to clutch-start the bus by letting it roll backwards downhill. I put my head down on my arms, braced in crash position, but fortunately that did not happen, but nor did the engine start. In the end, all the passengers got off and we got into whichever buses stopped for us, little by little. A long trip!

Yesterday, Sunday, I left Antigua and came to Flores, the biggish urban area closest to where I am going to be doing my research. I'm starting out with the family that I stayed with last time, though since then they have converted the huge room I had all to myself into a dormitory style hostel. So I need to find something new, with more more privacy and room to spread out. I also want it to have cable TV. Let me know if you hear of anything.

It finally happened

It was just a matter of time, amazing that I escaped it those 3 months when I was here before, but today I finally did what I knew would happen one day. I electrocuted myself in the shower. It wasn't extremely painful, it was a really strange feeling. It was like I'd stubbed my finger really hard and then waves were radiating through my arm. This photo is of a pretty typical shower head here in Guatemala, though not the actual one with which I had my encounter. It's an electric water heater and most visitors who come here need a tutorial on how to use them. A high water flow means the water will be too cool, but with a low flow the electric heater is sufficient for heating it up and you have a nice shower. Kat and Jude taught me that when I came the first time last December, as well as warning me not to touch it. Mid-shower I was stretching my back, arms above my head, when zzzztttt!!! I don't even know which part I touched, but it got me good. I don't recommend it, but if you're interested to experiment with electrocution I guess this is the way to do it. Fortunately they do 110 volts here, but anyway. Yow.

Since I got here a few days ago, I've kind of just been waiting around for a meeting I'm supposed to have in Guatemala City before I make the 8 hour bus ride up north. I decided to hunker down in Antigua while I'm waiting since here, in comparison to Guatemala City, the ratio of cheap to safe for accommodations is more even. At first I had pretty sharp nostalgia for when I was here with my parents (see photo, taken last February), but that has subsided somewhat. I hadn't been talking to too many people since I got here, so in the interest of working the kinks out of my spanish conversation and also just to talk to someone I had a 4 hour lesson at one of the language schools here. We just gabbed the whole time, it was exactly as I'd hoped. At any rate, I am filling my time with my regular work and little incidentals, like I had to get a new chip for my cell phone. And thus my phone number is now 5185-5624 (add 011 and 502 to the front of that if you're calling from the US).

Tomorrow, exciting meetings in the city!

Who wants to be a millionaire... of amoebas?

I finally set foot in the place I'm going to do my research, the Sierra del Lacandon National Park (SLNP), which is co-administered by an NGO, Defensores de la Naturaleza (FDN), and the federal agency for protected areas (CONAP) . Yesterday I went there with two fellows from FDN, a community outreach technician named Carlos and the driver named Rigoberto. The first community we visited, Manantialito, does not have a road connecting it so Carlos and I hiked an hour to reach it. En route, I was questioning Carlos about the kind of crops they grow, which is mainly corn, with some squash and beans as well. This is the golden three of agricultural production for nutrition and soil conservation, so I was asking if with this diet there was much mal-nutrition and Carlos said of course there is because the people in the village are millionaires... of amoebas. One of the goals is to get this place at least a minimum health post to treat these chronic parasite problems. Carlos went to the community that day for a meeting to discuss replacing the school teacher who took off mid-Februrary without warning. The community was like, 'when are we going to get a new school teacher?' and Carlos was like, 'well, you need to form a committee to organize to find one, with a president and a treasurer and a secretary and some additional members and then open a bank account and then submit an application...' and they were like, "when are we going to get our frickin' school teacher?!?!' And at a point in the meeting I got to take the floor and tell them what I was hoping to do, with their permission. Some of them remembered with my advisor David had been there in 1998-1999, so that was fun. We then visited 3 other communites, all with road access, though sometimes extremely rough, and all more developed than the first community. No meetings held in those other towns, but I introduced myself to some of the "mayors" in the towns, or failing that, their brother. This Saturday or so I'll probably go on a multi-day trip to this community with in the park but closer to the upper border with Mexico. You can refer to this map!

http://www.nature.org/aboutus/travel/ecotourism/travel/art996.html





School house in Manantialito, post-meeting.





Crazy cucharacha







Carlos on the trail from Manantialito

Final dentally themed entry

I'm now in Flores, Peten, the capital city of the northernmost 'wild-west' (but north) department of Guatemala. I happened upon a family here composed of an American man named Memo, originally from a Texas oil family but who came here to stay 3 years ago, by way of dot-coming in California, and his wife, Angelica, from the nearby town of San Benito. She has two kids from her previous marriage, Wilson (7) and Reina (10), and they have a daughter together, Paralee (11 months). They have a big place with lots of space, and Memo offered me a place to stay for free, and it's pretty sweet, t.v. and internet, if you can believe it. Such luxury is usually only to be had in zona 9 of GC.




Wilson and his friend Julian, who are twins with their missing front teeth.




Before I'd moved in, Memo loaned me a little bag so I wouldn't have to take my whole back-pack on our functional ATM search, nor carry my nude bank card in my hand since I lacked pockets. Later on back at my hotel I discovered I'd accidentally kept his bag, and also that he had failed to clean out the old dental bridge that he'd left in one of the pockets. I returned the whole thing to him today, and suggested that he'd probably want to get those teeth under his pillow asap for the tooth fairy.

As an aside, several family members are eating this kind of sweet potato that helps with de-worming. Memo just takes a veterinarian prescribed remedy every 6 months, but Angelica has to do a more mild treatment since she's still breast-feeding.

The Hairy Elite

Today I had my final dentist appointment in Guatemala, in which Mr. Ex-Vice President Luis Flores Asturias did the “build up” for the crown I’ll have done when I’m back in the U.S. I’d actually like to have it done here because it’d be cheaper, but because there is a lab procedure, the amount of time I plan to be in GC again is insufficient. Francisco, the root-canal specialist (endodontista), who did my root canal almost two weeks ago and then did the permanent filling yesterday, became a friend of mine and told me all about how the Flores Asturiases, as one of the elite families of Guatemala, can trace their roots back to the original Spaniards. And as Dr. Flores Asturias had his hands in my mouth, I recalled a conversation I’d had with my teacher and friend Lucky months ago. Her parents were both born in Guatemala, she considers herself 100% guatemalteca, but three out of four of her grandparents are from Italy. It pains her that her sole ancestor from Latin America, one of her grandmothers, is from Mexico. And Lucky told me that when a child is born in her family, the other grandmother would come to look at the baby and be satisfied if she could tell that the baby would be hairy. I don’t know how you can tell this about a baby, but this is what she wanted to see, because hairiness is an attribute of European ancestry while a lack of body hair is an attribute of the indigenous. So while Flores Asturias had his hands in my mouth, and I was looking at his arms, I knew that if Enki were there she would make her usual pronouncement for men like him, that he is “like a monkey.” His arms and his chest are extremely hairy, the only place there is a marked lack of hair is on top of his head, thus giving him the look of the ruling class.

Personal Security

Back around the time of my original visits to the dental office, I became aware of the ubiquitous presence of bodyguards in this town. As I was sitting outside a café in a swanky area of GC with Francisco the endodontista, he clued me into the fact that the woman walking down the street, being trailed at 15 feet by two men in suits, was a well-to-do woman and her two bodyguards, and that the 4 or 5 men always lingering in the parking lot of the dental office are Flores Asturias’ bodyguards. I had greeted those men in my comings and goings from the office, but never really questioned their purpose. Apparently there is something like three kidnappings per day in GC for ransom money, so the rich, whether they are important politically or not, are always accompanied by guards. The man outside the house across the street from the dental office is the guard left to watch the house of the disgraced CEO of one of the recently folded banks, Banco de Café, now living in Australia to avoid prosecution for his role in the shady dealings leading to the collapse. Because so many people in GC are gun-toting, some years back Francisco bought himself a gun for protection, and would go to the shooting range with Flores Asturias’ bodyguards to practice. He fancied himself a good shot until the went to the shooting range one day and saw dozens of bodyguards practicing, all much much better shots than him. At that point he knew it was useless to try to protect himself with a gun, since bodyguards are actually the perpetrators of many of the organized bank robberies and kidnappings in the city. When those bodyguards aren’t protecting that woman from abduction, they’re kidnapping other people for ransom or probably one day will participate in the abduction of their own client. I’m leaving tomorrow to go to Petén, an area with an even higher prevalence of people just moseying around with guns stuck out of their belts, and according to Francisco the first way men up there will try to impress me will be with their guns. As such, he thought he should take me to a shooting range and teach me how to load and shoot a gun, to demystify the process so I wouldn’t be so easily impressed when I was in the Petén. Well, there wasn’t much risk of that anyway, but I went along with the plan and yesterday afternoon we drove out of GC and went to the shooting range. He was asking me, wasn’t I scared to learn how to shoot a gun? And I was like, uh, well I’m not going to have to shoot at someone, will I? Of course not, but then I told him about an article I’d read in a magazine a while ago, about how in Cambodia you can go to a shooting range and they’ll let anyone with money shoot machine guns, throw hand grenades, and if you pay enough you can use those things on living targets like goats. I think the most expensive option is to use a rocket launcher on a cow. In the end, this shooting range we went to was in such an isolated place near a sand quarry, I think we could have used a goat as a target if it’d just happened to walk across the range. I don’t know what kind of gun it was, but the bullets were 9mm and they loaded into a cartridge that was shoved in the butt of the gun, like in Magnum P.I. So now I have loaded and shot a gun, not well, but I know a little bit about basic gunmanship. And today Francisco is selling his gun, since he realizes that with pros like the bodyguards he has no chance of protecting himself with the gun, and with other regular gun owners like himself a gun is more likely to escalate the regular road rage confrontations into something that gets out of hand. And thus concludes my dental adventures in Guatemala, which in addition to providing much needed relief from pain, has been overall a pretty incredible glimpse into this place.

Partying with mis padres

For the past week I was tooling around Guatemala with my parents, so no time for extensive internet use. We had a great time, and I´m not just saying that because my mother is the most dedicated reader of my blog. I've included some of the photos my dad took here, but you can see all of them posted at
http://picasaweb.google.com/ljsuter/Gautelama?authkey=2Z9Rah3dQZY . I met them at the airport last Saturday in the wee hours of the morning, and from there we spent 3 nights at a beautiful hotel in Antigua, a former monastery called Casa Santo Domingo. Their first full day in Guatemala, we took a day trip to Tikal, the ruins of the Mayan city in the Petén. A shuttle picked us up at 4am and took us to the Guatemala City airport, then a few hours later we were walking amongst the ruins in various stages of repair with our tour guide Antonio. Not missing a chance to make a dig at the Mexicans, according to Antonio the Mayan ruins in Mexico that look so impressive like Chichen Itza or Palenque look that good because the Mexicans will use all new stone blocks and just rebuild the whole dang thing, while the Guatemalans use the original stones when available and fill in the rest with smaller stones, so it's obvious what is original and what's not. Tikal definitely seemed less reconstructed than Palenque did when I went there with Marion in 2001, but that could be in part because Tikal is so huge. I'd say it's at least as big as the Aztec city Teotihuacan near Mexico City (el D.F., yo), if that gives you an idea. After that blow-out day trip, we spent the next day chillin' in Antigua, then went to lake Atitlan for 3 nights. We stayed at the lauded Casa del Mundo, which all my peeps with experience in Guatemala said should not be missed. And they're right, it is a really special place, off by itself on the lake edge, with its own private dock, then the rooms are in various different small buildings built along a steep hill and connected with stone steps. At night, a delicious 3 course dinner is served family style, where we chatted with fellow guests. During the days we hung out in some of the other lakeside towns, San Pedro, San Marcos, and Panajachal. The area is reputed to have some serious cosmic energy radiating from it, so the towns are a mix of indigenous Maya communities and different varieties of hippies, from party-harty youngersters to mellow meditators. In San Marcos we saw a gringo hotfooting it up one of the paths with a big bowl of recently sprouted wheat berries, to give you an idea. I think banana bread in Guatemala is the equivalent of banana pancakes in Vietnam: it makes an appearance in the areas extensively catering to their foreign guests. And the towns of Atitlan are a banana bread bonanza. Friday night, the night before my parents left for home again, we met my friend Hannah's sister Janet Volkman in Guatemala City. She's been living in Guatemala since 1985 running missionary projects, which for the past several years has been a soup kitchen, providing 500 meals/night Monday-Friday. We did a shift there, helping to serve a very typical Guatemalan supper (or breakfast, for that matter...) of scrambled eggs, black beans, bread, and coffee. We didn't eat there, but I finally satisfied my resultant craving for those things this morning, when I had breakfast in Antigua. Anyway, bright and early on Saturday morning, my parents took off for the airport, leaving me solita, a little lonely gal. A quick trip, but we all really enjoyed it. I have to hang around the area for the next couple of days to have a meeting and finish up my tooth, so I decided to come to Antigua, which is safe like the upscale zonas of GC but you can find much cheaper accomodation than is available in the swanky zonas. I'm here till Wednesday, when I'll take a marathon bus ride up to Petén. What adventures await?

Hail to the Teeth!

Because of my non-stop pain since my temporary filling last week, I was having second thoughts about seeing the GC colleague of my Xela dentist, and consulted Kathryn Grace's doctor friend Oscar in Antigua for a recommendation. Happily, his recommendation, Dr. Luis Alberto Flores Asturias, also happened to be on the recommended list of dentists put out by the US Embassy in Guatemala. However, neither of these sources mentioned that he is the ex-Vice President of Guatemala. He told me that himself when he stopped by my chair to tell me why my dentist was late. He didn't actually do my root canal, his on-call specialist did it, but he will be doing the "build up" for my crown in a few weeks. Anyway, after retiring from politics, he did a stint as a guest professor on dental implants in Loma Linda, California to get back into the world of dentistry, which is his passion, like painting is a passion for some, and he gestured at some art prints on the wall. I feel I am in good hands now. Apparently the Xela dentist #2 reamed through too far with his pointy scrapy thing, and then didn't identify that I had another infection, and that was why I was in a world of hurt. So the pain is practically all gone now and it's quite a relief.

Esteemed delegates, we must address the global menace of not flossing daily!

Adiós, Xela!

After a little over a month in Xela, it was time to move on, go to the big city and meet with some academics and agencies about my research plans, as well as get my tooth fixed up, all before my parents arrive next Saturday. Unfortunately not all my last experiences in Xela were good, as on my way to the dentist for a check of my temporary filling on Saturday morning, as I walked along a momentarily secluded street at 8:20am, I was the victim of a bike-by boob grab. He was biking in the same direction I was walking, but I guess he saw his opportunity and pulled a u-turn, then whacked me in the chest as he biked by in the opposite direction. I turned and yelled after him, "You jerk!" No big deal, but in combination with the non-stop ache I've had in my cheekbone since my temporary filling on Wednesday, and then the dentist was over a half hour late to our 8:30am Saturday appointment (because of that cursed 'history of the marimba' spectacle going on next week), I was very temporarily out of sorts.

At any rate, I bid my adieus over a few days, including returning Rodolfo's 8th Habit book to him, unread. Maybe because of his definitive split with Martita, maybe because I obviously was foolish enough to have the tools within my grasp but not make use of them, maybe because he read my blog, but when we met he just took the book, gave me a sad look, and bid me pleasant journeys.

One of my final activities in Xela was going to a soccer/football game between the local team, the Xelajú Super Chivos, and a team from the south-east, Jalapa. We ended up looking like extreme sports fans because it started to rain (the first time since I've been here), and we bought plastic sheets to drap over ourselves as ponchos. But then at half-time it was raining buckets and Xela was leading 1-0, so we split. This morning I took the 8am bus from Xela to Guatemala City. Since it is reputed to be an extremely dangerous city and I have a fellowship application due soon, I am living large at the Howard Johnson's in the mellow Zona 9, where I have internet in my room and where I am overmedicating on non-narcotic pain killers. Owie.

Lucky Mama

Lucky's adopted daughter Moncie ended up ready to come home a few days in advance of Friday, leaving Lucky scrambling to find caretakers while she finished out her week teaching Wednesday and Thursday afternoons at Celas Maya. Her cousin had already taken off Friday for the big day. I volunteered for Thursday so Lucky picked me up after the morning classes ended at 1pm, then took me to her house and I have to say that taking care of newborns is a snap because during the 6 hours I was with her she just slept the whole time and I fed her 3 times and changed her diaper once. Piece of cake! Now that the work week is over, Lucky's going full-time mom and not working again for a while.

Barrio

Since I am springing for the spendy dentist, I figured I'd better get some cash, in which case I'd better start the search good and early to make sure I found it before my 5pm appointment. And since I am leaving soon, here is a photo-journal of the search to show a bit of daily life in Xela.


This is where I've been living for the past 4 weeks, in an apartment on the 2nd floor of this building. Martita, mi señora, is hamming it up in front. She is from Nicaragua but moved here 18 years ago. Below her place there is a restaurant that blasts music from about 11am till 10pm, pretty much the same 10 songs over and over.








Walking towards the town center...














Funerales Quetzaltenango, near the pink tower, below. Urban legend has it that when the buckets of water they sluice over the floor to clean it come flooding out the front door, it is tinged with blood.





The faro (lighthouse). The low orange building towards the back is Martita's other house. She is making it into quite an enterprise with Rodolfo, or at least they were before his latest storming off. There are rooms for rent, then coming in the future there will be a café, an internet café, a latin american cinema, and a botanical garden. She and Rodolfo have a whole concept attached to the place, where it's going to be a space to showcase local artists and film and show a Guatemala that is not hopeless poverty and violence. Rodolfo wanted to call it "pinktowerhouse" because of the nearby Faro, but then he subsequently rejected that as "too gay".

My language school, Celas Maya. The two gals out front are nursing students in Sweden, though the one on the left, Kristen, is Norweigian. Signe is on the right. Look at Kristen and tell me if she reminds you of Julie Karpenko. They decided to accompany me on the money search. When we got to the central park, the first thing we were struck by was the flood of people, mostly men in cowboy hats, waiting outside BancoRed. A crowd of this size in front of a bank is noteworthy, even in these times, especially when they have a common feature such as cowboy hats. I asked a spectator what everyone was waiting for, and he said that they were there to cash there checks paying them for their service as community patrollers during the armed conflict here, which ended about 10 years ago. According to this fellow, most of them are now finally being payed for their work 10 to 35 years ago.

At the central park, site of many banks, but the only semi-dependable ATM on the central square, Banco Industrial, was out of service. I ended up returning to the school to get my passport, then got cash inside of the Banco AgroMercantile. And thus I was flush with cash for my dentist visit. But I still had some time to kill, so while walking home with my laundry I noticed a classmate from the school drinking in a little hole in the wall near the pink tower. Sierran was leaving the next day, and his host dad and he and another friend were having some beers to bid him adieu. This guy recently finished his undergrad in geography at U. of Oregon, then did an internship at National Geographics in D.C., where he worked with UCSB's star geography undergrad Maral Tashjian.

Last stop before going to the dentist, the internet café near the school and my house, El Infinito. This is one of the two places in town you can purchase fresh tofu, which is made at a women's cooperative in Sololá. Pedro on the left is the owner and is friends with my friend Dayna from when she lived here some years back, and Bonifaz on the right is Pedro's roommate and employee. There is a table behind a partition with an internet connection where I come and hook up my laptop, and since I started to refer to it as mi oficina Bonifaz now refers to himself and Pedro as my coworkers.

Up ''dates''

In the end, I still haven't met Jesus so no date with him. I have, however, gone on two dates with Raul, but I must admit that I am ruthlessly using him for his Spanish. It's shameless, really, we've gone to have a coffee once and dinner once and I talk to him and he talks to me. Here they'd call me a sinvergüenza.

And now today, I am going to the dentist he recommended to me. I had told Raul my misgivings about the dentist I'd seen before, one being the hygiene of her operation, and as one of his jobs is as an emergency technician I thought I could trust his recommendation. Although they just sent me to get x-rays, which is fine, but they had me get the whole dang mouth done, which makes me wonder if I had a dollar sign stamped on my forehead when I walked in to make the appointment earlier today. Well, whatever he says, I can take my x-rays and go wherever I want. As an aside, while waiting for my x-rays I am across the street in an internet cafe where you can pay three times more per hour (though still only about $1.50) to have your own private booth for surfing the web. Eew.

Okay, I have just returned from my actual dental visit, and the man is a character. He is about 60 and very talkative. He and his wife are really trying to sell me on seeing a folklore performance in 2 weeks here in Xela on the history of the marimba, which is a xylophone type instrument. There will be children dancing and singing from all parts of Guatemala. Unfortunately, I will be out of town by then. His grandfather is Basque, from the region of San Sebastian, but he was born in Guatemala himself. His son, who is a dentist in Guatemala City, has some of the most advanced and expensive equipment, but it's not worth it to have that kind of stuff in a more provincial town like Xela because people are afraid of it and prefer the old style. Anyway, he told me that the treatment plan of the first dentist I'd visited two weeks ago here in Xela, where they drill a hole and leave it open while the infection drains, is like 10 or 15 years outdated. For the past 2 weeks, I have been stuffing cotton in my tooth hole after every meal, and I should have had my root canal last Friday, 5 days ago, but I'd canceled the appointment, planning to have the root canal done in GC. It had started to hurt again, though, so I went to the dentist today to look into my cotton stuffed tooth and we hatched a plan where tomorrow he is going to clean it throughly, and fill it with some temporary junk to keep it clean and sealed from food and drink invasion. This temporary fix is going to cost me about $65, so prices are higher than the last dentist and her antiquated techniques, but still very inexpensive by US dental standards. Next week I am going to see his colleague in GC, an expert in root canals. Not his son, who is more of a specialist in orthodontia. So that is the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth, and I will let you know how the hole thing works out with the dentist in GC.

For now, I have about 5 more days here in Xela, I'm planning on leaving Sunday afternoon or Monday morning. The big news is that the baby my ex-maestra Lucky is adopting was born last Friday, but is jaundiced and was born with pneumonia, and therefore is in the hospital until this upcoming Friday. During our lessons together she'd been debating between naming the baby Montserrat (Moncie, for short) and Anel, but when I suggested Anel might be a bit too close to anal she quickly settled the name issue and hasn't looked back. So this Saturday I am going to hang out with her and the new new new baby. Now I am going to meet her friend Lilia to help her prep for her TOEFL, and then Lucky will join us when she gets done with her afternoon student, who happens to be the dutch student who just moved into my household here, and who Lucky thinks is a twerp. We're going to Casa Babalon, which is a place where you can get hummus and baba ghanoush here in town, so life hasn't been too deprived here in Xela, even if the neighborhood of the school and my home did not have running water for a large portion of the day yesterday. Everyone when discussing this always mentions that the Japanese have been in charge of the water pipe system here for the past couple of years, but so far no one has really delivered a statement about whether things are worse or better than they were before. But whatever the water situation happens to be for the day, it definitely has something to do with the Japanese.

Jesus has been asking about me

One of the teachers at the spanish school today told me that a friend of his had asked him about the "pelirroja" (ha, take that, Lucky!) that he'd seen coming and going from the school, and if he could introduce him. Coming up: my date with Jesus.

One born every minute

A good thing about coming to a foreign country is that the oldest jokes in the book are made new again. Today, for example, I was talking to my maestro Mynor and I attemped to massage the word "naive" into a spanish version, but when that got me nowhere the dictionary yielded ingenuo and the closely related synonym for gullible, crédulo. So we talked about that for a bit, and I asked him if he knew that there wasn't an entry for crédulo in the dictionary, and he was like, "Really?" Ha! I then cracked him up with "why did the chicken cross the road?"

I love you, I hate you

Just as I suspected, there would be follow-up with the 7 Habits. Rodolfo, who gave me the books, came by last night apparently just to see if I was already more effective. I hadn't even started with habit 1 yet, but I said I was just about to get started now that I was done with some other stuff. But his presence unleashed a whole love triangle scenario later when her boyfriend came over. When I don't use the tools for self improvement, I'm not the only one who suffers.

I've never gotten sick there.

Talking to Guatemalans about restaurant recommendations, it becomes apparent that foreigners are not the only ones who suffer problems from the food and water here. Foreigners are definitely more likely to get ill from those things, and I think part of that is habituation to the microbes and part of that is poor choices in where we eat. We're not as practiced in scoping out a place before choosing it if it's unknown, and it seems a lot of folks that I've spoken to here only eat street food that's been recommended to them by someone else. I have a date to go with Lucky to a get chuchitos from a lady in the Parque Benito Juarez sometime this week. But every time a Guatemalan recommends a restaurant to me, they're like 'The food is delicious and I've never gotten sick eating there. Not once!' Although I can think of occasions when friends of mine got sick from a restaurant (Hannah, Zona Rosa, Telegraph Ave), it's not a must-mention when suggesting a restaurant. So yesterday Lucky and I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant here in Xela called Woon Kooc. I had invited her, my treat, since she'd gone to such pains the week before when making me lunch (getting a pie and cookies, for example, just so I could try the muy ricas polvorosas, meaning 'crumblies', as in that's the way the cookie... ), and then she'd taken such good care of me during my dental crisis. The day before, Saturday, in the latest search for cash, I ended up at the shopping center that has País, the supermarket now owned by Wal-Mart. I was picking up a thing or two while there (aside: if you were here, you'd shop there too), when the man in line behind me started laying huge bags full of broccolli on the conveyor belt. More than a household would eat, even if a recent super-foods convert. So I looked at the gentleman, who has an asian appearance, and then when the cashier entered the broccoli buyer's NIT (numero de indentificación tributaria, it's like a tax number for a business and they enter it when you check out if you have one) the name Woon Kooc came up! These are the kinds of things I linger around to find out about, though I didn't realize that the name would come up. I told Lucky about that when we sat down at the table on Sunday, and she nodded her head sagely and said 'So we know we will be eating healtfully today,' as she has great faith in País and Hiper-País. As an aside, when she and I had gone to Hiper-País the weekend before, we talked about the Wal-Mart take over, which was like 4 months ago, and she said that it was a great thing because before the workers had been paid terribly and they had to work long hours without compensation and now things were better. She was surprised when I told her that that was the reputation Wal-Mart has in the US. I felt like kind of a party-pooper telling her that. So even though foreign food except for maybe Italian doesn't enjoy much popularity here, the Chinese restaurant was bumping and it was pretty much all Guatemalan family groups. The food was good, not notably different from what you'd get at a Chinese restaurant in the US, and just to bring it home I'll mention we had broccoli beef in oyster sauce. The only thing that at first seemed odd to me was that many tables had large pitchers of white beverage on their table. I asked Lucky if they were pitchers of milk, but she said they were pitchers of horchata. A lot of tables had these pitchers, so I'm not sure if horchata is thought to go particularly well with Chinese food, maybe they make a particularly good horchata there (it did look good), maybe I'd just never seen a restaurant so stuffed with Guatemalan families on a Sunday... At any rate, it's been over 24 hours since my lunch there, and I can say Woon Kooc has done it again, it was delicious and I didn't get sick.