Summer blockbusters available here

Don't feel sad for me, stuck out here in Guatemala and missing out on all the summer blockbuster movies. Okay, maybe feel a little sad for me, because the other day we watched a bootleg of Hancock, and the sound was so bad that we were pretty much relying on the subtitles in Spanish to understand what they were saying. But at one point I was like, "Wha'? What'd they just say?" so we went back a bit and when the character says (not to give too much away) "My first wife died giving birth to Aaron," the subtitle in Spanish translates into "My first wife ran away with a yoga instructor." Huh? Did the translator not understand what the character had said, or did he just think that line was too much of a downer and wanted to zest up the comedy a bit? Anyway, these were the absolute cheapest bootlegs available, sold by dudes walking around with big backpacks of DVDs, so maybe now we'll buy them in the market where you can preview them a bit and check for the quality.

The Hustler of Livingston

This past weekend Esteban, Perla and I took a mini-break and went to the Caribbean coast, to a town called Livingston. There are no roads all the way there, so we took a bus to Rio Dulce and then an hour lancha trip to Livingston. Livingston is distinctive from the rest of Guatemala in that a large portion of its population is descended from ship-wrecked slaves that (to make a long story short) spread out up the Caribbean coast from Honduras to Belize. And the food's different too, more coconut and seafood than you find elsewhere. We ate a lot of seafood. We actually got denied in our first hotel choice in Livingston because of our canine companion (didn't think to try to pretend she was our guide dog, like the joke... "they gave me a chihuahua?!"), so we ended up in a Hotel Ecologico, as it was called, outside of Livingston out where people go to the beach and we were actually very happy to be out there, even if we did have to take a taxi to go to Livingston. We could swim right outside of our hotel, and water was bathwater warm and the beach had an extremely gentle slope. Lovely lovely. Anyway, there were a bunch of dogs around and one was this good looking young fella and he and Perla had the best time playing, but when we left the two of them alone he took the opportunity to go into our bungalow and steal Perla's bag of dog kibble! We didn't realize it until Esteban went to go look for Perla, and apparently she was watching the other dog as he was chowing down on her bag of food, occasionally trying to get a mouthful herself but getting swatted away at each attempt. Rude! When the dog saw Esteban coming, he grabbed the bag of food and went to an area enclosed by barbed wire that Esteban couldn't get through. Well played, doggie hustler, well played. He actually kept playing with her after he'd eaten all her food, though, so it doesn't seem like he'd solely been working her just to get at her food. At any rate, great trip. Photos here...

Visitor arrives, gets to work

I love my house here. And, unusual for homes in these parts, all the windows have screens on them, but it was missing a screen door at the entry. Therefore, when my friend Esteban came to visit starting a few weeks ago (he'll be here 5 weeks total), our first weekend we got to work on making a screen door. I don't know about Guatemala City, but Petén is not the kind of place you can just drop by a Home Depot type store and pick up a screen door, nor do is wood sold already milled to appropriate thicknesses. The most difficult part of the whole project ended up being following many leads on where to buy wood, ending about 5 tuk-tuk rides later at a carpenter's shop in Santa Elena where he cut the wood for us while we waited. We borrowed a bunch of tools from my friend Memo, bought the rest of the materials, and got to work on the door the following day. Sawing, hammering, sanding, painting, putting in the screening, hanging the door, adding a spring and a latch. The door was up and keeping out blood suckers a week later. Here we are posing with the door. Couldn't be prouder.

Are you there God? It's me, Perla.

Life ain't easy when you're so small, but she's come a long way. Three weeks after her first vet visit, she's gone from 3 pounds to 7.5 , and her puppy fuzz has been replaced with yellow-red fur. It's been said I should have named her MiniMe for her future California life as Josie's little sis. Here are some new pix of the pup, 18 days after she wobbled into my life.

Update: Internet en casa!

Just had internet installed in my San Miguel pad, which means that the blog should be getting a whole lot livelier. My somewhat limited access to the internet (for example, spending the whole week in the field, followed by a weekend of not wanting to leave my house) has lead to some pretty sparse bloggings as of late, but that is now a thing of the past. Now you will be getting up to the minute up-dates, such as news flashes about when Perla finds a teeny tiny coconut on the terrace and starts to chew on it. Read all about it!

Meet the newest member of our team

I wasn't exactly looking to get a dog, but it was in the back of my mind that if some day a dog in need came along, maybe I'd take it in. Well it finally came to pass last Saturday. I went to my office to pick something up and the guard wasn't there to let me in (off buying tortillas), so the ladies across the street invited me to come wait in the shade at their place. So I was chatting with them in their yard when this tiny little wobbly thing came along, and the ladies were like, 'Poor little thing, it's going to die. It doesn't like to eat.' Someone had given it to one of their daughters, but apparently it wasn't thriving on the standard Guatemalan pet diet of cast-off rice and tortillas. I figured if it had no appetite it was maybe a lost cause, but then they said that it loves fish, so that gave me hope. And after they said that it was going to die for the fifth time or so, I finally asked if maybe they'd like to let me have a try caring for it and they said sure, go for it. So she and I got in a tuk-tuk and then a launcha and went to my place in San Miguel. Here is a picture of here about to tuck into her first dish of tuna at my house. They said she's two months old, and the vet on Monday said she weighs 3 pounds. She looked really funny when I first got her because she was so skinny and here ears are so big that they were just ridiculously out of proportion. She's already noticibly put on weight, I've pulled about 50 ticks off her body, and her hair is growing in thicker so she already looks less ridiculous. Here are some more pictures from the weekend I got her, I'll put some newer ones with her looking a little less bag o' bones soon. I didn't come up with a name for her until Monday night. I brought her to the office that day and people quickly started calling her Rata and Dumbo, so I knew I had to come up with something fast, so that night when we got to the guard station where we're staying during the field work and one of the guards called her Perla, I was like, 'I'll take it!' So Perla it is! I think I ended up looking pretty ridiculous in front of the Guatemalans there at the guard station with the level babying I was providing her, but I think she's becoming a bit of a mascot there anyway. And I was kind of unsure of how my parents would greet the news given that they are currently caring for my other rescue dog, but my mom was happy to hear about it, not only for the sake of the dog but also so that I wouldn't be alone here. And in case you're worried about how Josie has been faring all these months, here's a recent pic from my parents.

The Dustpan of Life

It’s been raining for days, which has been a welcome relief from the incredible heat we’d been experiencing before that. It’s been a pretty dramatic switch, to go from boiling hot days to gray and rainy all the time, but I prefer it this way. It’s actually bordering on chilly at times, last night I went back to my winter habit of wearing two pairs of pajama pants (since I don’t have a blanket, just a sheet) and today I risked electrocution to take a shower with warm water, whereas for the past months the unheated water has been such a relief at the end of the day. And everything is damp and nothing dries out. All my money bills are slightly moist to the touch. Anyway, I was at home on Sunday preparing for going out to the park on five days of field work this upcoming week when I started to hear the sound of thrashing about in water. Most houses, including my own, have a big cement sink with three basins, called a pila, outside on the patio or in the yard. They’re actually pretty handy, they make hand washing much easier. I just assumed I could hear my neighbor splashing around in her pila while doing some cleaning, but then I did become curious because it sounded closer than my neighbor and was coming from a slightly wrong direction. So I went outside and peered in my landlady’s pila, which is unsheltered (unlike mine) and had filled up with rainwater in the central portion. It was a little bit difficult to get a good look inside though, because there is a big, wet lime tree hanging close over the basin, so I could only easily see the far corner without pushing the lime branches out of the way and getting soaked in the process. So when I saw the frog in the corner I assumed that was it, but then the thrashing continued even though the frog was perfectly still so I peered in closer and there was a big blackbird submerged up to mid-wing and not able to propel itself out of the tub. So I got my camera, duh, then I got my plastic dustpan and it turned out to be the easiest thing to get it out. I just hooked the pan under the bird and it was like I’d announced to the bird “going up!” because it just held on and I raised the whole thing out of the water very smoothly. I put the whole thing in the shallower basin, and we looked at each other for awhile. It actually didn’t decide to move for awhile, and even though I didn’t want to freak it out after waiting about 10 minutes I came towards it a bit to motivate it to move so I could see if it was actually hurt. I have to admit that I did have some fantasies of me and my new best friend the blackbird living in harmony, it hopping cheerfully towards the front door when I came home. They’re supposed to be really smart animals. I just happen to have a National Geographic on animal intelligence and it says the blackbirds not only can use tools to reach food stuck in a recess, they can take a material and create an apt tool (like fashioning a hook on the end of a straight wire) to grab the food. But I knew that plan would never work because starting tomorrow I’ll be away for 5 days so I couldn’t be there to take care of it. Happily, it hopped away from me (almost falling in the washtub again), and chilled out for awhile longer protected by the limbs of the lime tree. I looked again at the frog, which looked dead, and then I realized it had a long tail so it was actually a lizard, not a frog. The way it’d been floating in the water looked very frog-like. But I left it there because I didn’t want to freak out the bird again and I figured I’d fish it out later when the bird had recovered a bit, striking a balance between not hassling the bird and letting a dead animal decompose in my landlady’s washbasin. Next time I went out, the bird started hopping from limb to limb in the tree, seemingly mostly recovered, and I used the dustpan to get the lizard out, which turned out to be alive. I put it in the same place I’d put the bird and I guess the extended soak in the water made the lizard sluggish because it didn’t do anything. After a few minutes I decided to move it to a more sheltered place, since it was still sitting in a bit of water and I figured that the bird trying to eat the lizard is probably how they’d both ended up in that mess to begin with, so I put the lizard under my own pila where the ground was at least dry and it scurried to a more covered spot. So there you have, the dustpan of life safely escorting two animals from a premature demise.