The Blog Must Go On!

I’ve been back in Guatemala for about a month now, but the blog has had a set-back because my camera was stolen. It was actually stolen at some point when I was en route between Flores and Santa Barbara last December, my hunch is during the bus ride between Flores and Guatemala City. I realized I didn’t have my camera when I got to SB, but then I figured there was a small chance I’d forgotten it at my place in San Miguel. When I got back to San Miguel after being away for 3 months, I scanned my room and saw it wasn’t there, and that’s that. I’ll be making a quick trip to SB in about a month, so I’ll pick up a new camera at that time. Until then, it’ll be words, words, words!

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks making journeys into the park to familiarize myself with the communities in which I’m going to be doing my interviews. There are two roads which run along the edge of the park, the Bethel route and the Naranjo route, so I visited each route over the past two weeks. So far so good. I’ve been staying at the field offices of Defensores de la Naturaleza, the NGO that’s hosting me here. Accommodations aren’t too bad, usually a bunk bed in a room shared with a bunch of other people, mostly park guards and then the outreach technicians that I’m running around with, plus my two student helpers. Occasionally there will be a huge glut of people at these places, like when they’re trading out the guards from the posts down the river they all show up at the more accessible Bethel post for the night before heading home on a two week break. Two weeks on, two weeks off. So there will be like 10 dudes sleeping in the room, scattered all over the place. And then last week, at the post along the Naranjo road (in the community of Villa Hermosa), there was an issue with some illegal logging in the park. Apparently there were something like two big truck loads of illegally harvested timber, but both of the exits were being watched to try to catch them on their way out. So the military showed up at the post at like 10:30pm but I didn’t hear them arrive because I had my earplugs in. So I woke up at around 1am to go to the bathroom (err, pee in the bushes) and to my surprise there were about eight soldiers sitting on the patio, some of them sleeping and some of them keeping watch. According to Aracelí, my student assistant, occasionally you’d hear a gun go clattering to the ground as a soldier fell asleep and relaxed his grip. This was all a few days ago, I need to ask about what happened with the wood. So other than the room for sleeping, each place also has a separate kitchen, and cooking is done over a fire. The Bethel office has a kind of fancy stove for cooking with firewood, I think they bought it from some NGO that gives them to households to try to reduce the frequency of respiration problems since many women spend most of their day in these partially ventilated kitchens with open fires. It uses less wood and has a chimney for ejecting the smoke out up higher. I’ve heard that some of the guard posts don’t want to install it because they hear that it takes a long time to heat up. I think everyone at the Bethel post was happy with it, though, so we’re going to try to go forth and talk it up to everyone who is reluctant to use it. The other post, the Villa Hermosa one, hadn’t installed it yet and there is definitely a difference being in a room with the open fire vs. the stove, even if they both use fire wood. And each place has a latrine, basically a deep pit with a seat over it. Not too nice, but considering many households within these communities don’t even have a latrine, it’s nice to at least have a wooden box for some privacy. Every time I go into the latrine I think of my friend Enki, because she would not be okay with it. She doesn’t even like to use a gas station bathroom, on road trips she’ll stop at a Denny’s and use the bathroom there. I can understand that, but here there are not a whole lot of options. For bathing, in the Bethel post there is the river about 10 minutes walking away. The river is probably about 30 feet wide, and on the other side is Mexico. In the Villa Hermosa post there is a well about 20 feet from where we’re staying, so Aracelí showed me how to use a bucket to draw up well water, and then there is a semi-private area set up nearby for bathing. I did it at night so it was a bit more private since people were done getting water for their home for the day, and no one else seemed to choose to bathe at that time. The first two nights Aracelí helped me set everything up and then waited for me to finish, but the third night she went to church so I did it all by myself and wasn’t she proud of me when she came back. It was pretty funny to be bathing in the middle of a little wood, in the moonlight, with a white horse grazing nearby. I figured if there was an opportunity in which I’d run into a duende, a forest elf that people tell stories about here, this would be it. But alas (or actually, fortunately), a duende did not interrupt my bathing, even though they supposedly have an affinity for white horses.

Updates and Happy New Year

For completeness, I just thought I'd note that I'm back in SB for the next couple of months, working with my committee on getting all my ducks in a line before doing the actual field work back in the Sierra del Lacandon. Here is a picture of me snuggling my well-fed nephew Tommy at my brother's house a few days after Christmas. This is the face of the next generation of Suters. Does that fluff on his head appear to have a reddish hue to you?

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