hehee, i just rolled my old dad out of bed to make popcorn and play cards with me!

Do other people's families bust out the vision testing machine after dinner and have eye exams, too?

apparently today was Gag-Me-With-a-Spoon Day and i didn't get the memo

so i woke up this morning.

walked from the apartment into the house, and there, in the dining room, is my cousin and my Q'eqchi "sister" eating cereal with dehydrated milk. like, who DOES that?! i'd rather turn to dust from osteoperosis that drink that crap! anyways.

so we hit the road, heading for san luis. went to 9am mass. priest presiding: padre juan, the nuar's uncle. and HAS THE MAN EVER BRUSHED HIS TEETH? the homily was a lil hard to follow (my espanol attention span is even shorter than my english one), so i was idly people-watching. oh, there's so-and-so (i haven't been to san luis for a year and a half), oh, and look how much Blah has grown, oh, and LADY! PUT THAT THING AWAY!!! YOUR BABY HAS OBVIOUSLY FINISHED HER BREAKFAST!!!! wow.

so we head to our friends' for lunch. lunch is good, we are relaxing in chairs and hammocks on their porch, and then...they bust out THE FRUIT FROM HELL! apparently cashews grow on the bottom of another fruit that resembles a red pepper, and is called M-something-something. guatemalans think that M-something-something is edible. but, OH LORD! avoid it at all cost! i took a piece and licked it, and was vaguely grossed out. i looked over in time to see my cousin, katie, grab a piece with a MOUND of salt on it. we both bit into our pieces, and it was a damn good thing that our hostess didn't see our faces. it was like pouring salt all over someone's tongue, then taking a bite out of it and having it taste like boo-tay. oh, and it makes your mouth and throat all dry as if you are strangling, and coats your teeth for the next 5 hours. fun, fun.

the rest of the afternoon involved a GROSSY river (think: tons of litter and water that resembles green sludge), a hog barn, and oodles of chickens with their beaks chopped off.

so we cruise out of town, thinking we are home free. ah, no. little sister betsi decides to get pukey. we had to stop to pick up meds for my dad's clinic, and while chit-chatting with the sweet menonite lady, my sis starts barking at the pavement/calling for dinosaurs/whatever. she hoarfs. like no one's business. upwind.

so it can't get any worse, eh? we get home, we shower, we eat dinner. one item on the menu: buttcheese. didn't know they were allowed to market and sell that! seriously, how can cheese go SO WRONG?!

we are nearing the end of the meal, when my Q'eqchi "sister", Aurelia, pulls out a lil surprise from her uncle. Chicharon. chicharon is not too bad, if you don't know what it is. but i know. i've watched them make it. it is hog skin with the hair scraped off, then fried in fat. yummmmmmmy. i kinda like the taste, so i grab a small piece and pass the bowl on to katie with the warning: take a piece without hair on it. now, guatemalans do a lot of things half-assed. making chicharon is one of those things. basically, there's a lot of pig hair left on their chicharon. katie, not knowing what it was, assumed i meant that there was a human hair on one of the pieces. she nearly lost her dinner when she realized the hair was actually SPROUTING OUT OF THE CHICHARON!

just thought i'd share. hopefully you have a less-than-sensitive gag reflex.

my dad, descendant of noah

so i always thought that God, with his notorious sense of humor, would choose someone like my dad to be the next noah.

my dad loves animals. so he says.

animals DO love my dad.

we had a dog, growing up. she was a mutt, a hyperactive but friendly mutt. we named her after the wizard in the Black Cauldron series, Dallben.

every day my dad came home from work. every day Dallben would stand with her front paws on the windowsill, nose on the glass, until dad got out of the car. then she would run to the door, staring at it until it opened. immediately she would leap with joy into the air, again and again. my dad always had the same, slightly annoyed look on his face, holding his briefcase out of reach. he would try to get around her without being jumped upon, then give up and say, "Dallben, dammit, GET DOWN!" at this point the floodgates would open, and Dallben's mixed excitement and fear inevitably took the form of a yellow puddle on the dining room floor. this daily occurance did not add to my dad's enjoyment of the situation or of the pet.

we had a few cats as well. they tended to have a disagreement or two, in the wee hours, with our neighbors cats. regularly we awoke to loud MEEEEOOOWWWing, the dog barking, then my parents yelling. my dad has been known to take the role of "peacemaker" in these difficult situations. more specifically, my dad was spotted in his bathrobe and slippers at 2am, cursing and chasing the neighbor cat down the driveway, while swinging a child's twirling baton.

my solution to the overpopulation of stray dogs in guatemala: volunteer veterinarians, and spay/neuter clinics.
my dad's solution, i quote: "A rifle and a night scope."

my dad loves animals. so he says.

he would do well on a boatfull of animals. for 40 days. but the 40 nights would get to him.

In a world bent on bigger, faster, and stronger, we say less is more, slower is more human, and true strength comes from relaxed contemplation.

tripping on chickens

i got over 8 hours of sleep last night! it's been months...

so my friends are popping out the kids, left and right. seriously. several of them are on infant #3! and i'm not talking about my "grown-up" friends. i'm talking about my 22 year old friends. ok, most of them are still on pregnancy number one, but damn! so i've got a bit o' shopping to do. in general i'm not too into following rules of polite society, but i DO feel a twinge/pang of guilt for not giving wedding presents to most of my friends. true, i'm usually on the verge of broke-ass, if not the actual definition there-of, but i still feel bad. like, if i were wining and dining everyone i know, i'd want a lil something. likewise, if i were to carry a child around for 9 months straight, INSIDE OF ME, losing all stomach muscle, gaining countless stretch marks, sweating, and peeing every two minutes, finally spending 15 hours of...well, we don't need to go into those details. i'm just saying, i wouldn't mind some free stuff at a time like that. so meanwhile i've got to hold up my end of the deal and do the giving. which leads me to the story of the day.

since i've got a few presents to buy, my mom decided to take me to el mercado, the market, this morning. apparently the santa elena market is completely out of hand, so we went to the smaller, tamer (?!) san benito one. we parked our pick-up between a truck-full of watermelons for sale, and a man whose sign declared that he had "just opened bundle used american clothes". the parking lot is concrete, covered with a thick layer of fine dust, and hundreds of fuzzy mango pits of various ages and states of run-over-edness. we head "inside"; the market is covered, mostly, with corrugated sheet metal. it keeps out the majority of the rain, but, on days like this, keeps in all of the heat. the stands are run by sweating Q'eqchi, Qiche, and Castellano women. the items for sale are many, but each stand has the same basic selection of roma tomatoes, white potatoes, zapotes, jalapenos, small onions, guiskill, bruised platano bananas which fill the air with a sickly sweet smell, wilted herba mora, and carrots. there are a few stands with goodies, such as plums, avocados, and oro bananas. they are called "oros", or "golden ones" because they are tiny, little things with a yellowish or golden colored flesh, unlike the whitish/brown color of common bananas. i don't eat bananas. i hate the taste, and gag at the smell. but the 3-bite-size oros and manzanas are a different story. they are sweet and firm, and don't make me want to hoarf. that's what it comes down to, really: the hoarf factor.

the market has so many more things than food. el mercado is not to be confused with el supermercado. el mercado has everything. el supermercado has everything, but Everything is presented in a sterile, organized fashion with set prices. all of each Everything is in the same place. all of the peanut butter is by all the other peanut butter, which is right by all of the kinds of jelly, which is within easy reach of all of the bread. at el mercado, however, everyone has some of Everything, but no one has it all. this stand has 4 kinds of soap. that stand has 3 different types. the prices depend on the day, on the worker, on who you know, on how rich or how white you look, or on how long you haggle. haggling or bartering is expected. even when the initial response to the question, "Cuanto vale esta?" is reasonable, no one just opens his wallet without question. at one stand, a cute innocent-looking little girl sold underwear, towels, and cloths. one of the cloths was exactly what i had in mind for a recently married friend. "20Q for four", was the going price. my mom offered fifteen. the girl wasn't having any of it. "16Q?". Nope. "Eighteen?". my mom said, ok then, we are going somewhere else. i looked at the little girl, looked at my sister, and said, Really? that's it? but, by this time my mom was around the corner. yup, she's serious. i gave the girl a sympathetic smile and trotted after my fam. should i go back and just give her the twenty? after all, it's only about $3. i'm richer than she is... my mother has no patience for people who won't accomodate at all. it's true, most people do assume that we are rich American tourists. we are white, we wear sunglasses, we ask weird questions. they have no reason to think that we are volunteers, come to assist them at no cost to them or to guatemala. so we are stuck asking our friends how much things are actually worth, before putting ourselves at the mercy of the market vendors.

some of the stands sicken me. booth after booth sells "American clothes" as if they were gold. english music from the states plays loudly, and everywhere people wear t-shirts with english lettering. what the heck do they think is so good about our country, our lifestyle? just the wealth? (boy, are they wrong there.) the freedom? (what is freedom?) seriously. it's like being in high school, you know, if you aren't cool then you have to buy the cool brand names, or something. other stands sell plastic brooms, plastic buckets, plastic dishes/combs/toys/cups/home decor. the disposable lifestyle is bad enough in countries that have heard of garbage dumps, but all this crap is just going to be burned, or end up along the guatemalan roadside.

then there are the meat stands. oh lordy. gigantic slabs of fresh meat sit in the sun until it is dry on the outside. flies crawl everywhere; up one slab, down another, on the butcher, then i shudder as they land on me. periodically the vendor slices a pound or two for a foolish customer, then repierces the slab with the meat hook from which it will hang for countless more hours. some stands sell shrimp and frozen fish, others have vats of chicken feet and innards for sale. while simultaneously staring into one such vat and rounding a corner, i nearly stumbled over three live chickens. they clucked their way under the table...which held a dozen of their plucked, ready-to-boil relatives.

we make one more stop. my mother and younger sister are dicussing something with the man behind the counter, but i'm fading from the heat. spanish surrounds me and i start to zone out. i'm standing in the doorway, but there is plenty of room for people to come in and out. sober people, that is. but it's 11am, everyone is sober...ooo, except this guy! he trips on the step, and catches himself by grabbing the handle on the pop cooler. his train of thought is obvious, "Umm, that sounds good!" he gets the cooler open, and reaches for a Super-Cola. whoa...whoa, all those bottles of pepsi are in the way. there, not any more. oops, there goes a couple orange juices. good thing they come in plastic. too bad he can't figure out that he could use two hands. ok, we've successfully obtained a super-cola and set it to the side of the cooler. now, about all those pepsis laying on their sides, and...hmm, what was that? oh, there's still another orange juice on the floor!

i didn't stick around to see how the inebriated battle with the pop bottles ended. we headed back thru the disorderly vegetable stands, across the mango-pit parking lot, to our truck with the now butt-sizzling seats. then back to our cool, breezy home on the outskirts of town, with our refrigerator, our ceiling fans and our iced tea. and we thanked god.

for the record...

the next two posts have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with one another.

not that you were thinking that anyway.

just wanna keep my good name.

Man, now i wish i had brought my camera.

i'm at that inevitable point in every developing-nation-visit.

i like to call it:

St Michael's Battle with Lucifer.

or I Thought Only Whoopie Cushions Could Do That!

or Carry an Extra Roll of Toilet Paper Everywhere.

The Mayan World

somehow i woke up enough to get from one plane to the other. i don't really remember getting off the plane, or getting on the next one. in fact the only memory i have is standing in the customs line in front of some bastard who wouldn't stop talking about all the food they'd eaten on the plane, how full he was, how it was like waddling off a moving all-you-can-eat restuarant. i slept thru all the food. i had NOT eaten anything, i was NOT full, and the only reason I was waddling was because i had 3 lbs of M&Ms for my dad in my backpack. i vaguely remember walking across the tarmac to plane #2, thinking that it smelled like Guatemala, and passing out promptly in my seat. i awoke, realizing that everyone else was already off the plane and the stewardesses were kind of eying me. i felt like the pope, walking down the stairs of my personal plane onto the runway, but the humid, heavy air that permeates everything with the smell of burning jungle makes everything feel dirty, so i didn't kiss the ground. as i walked toward the sole terminal, i read the gi-normous writing on the side of the building: BIENVENIDOS AL MUNDO MAYA. Welcome to the Mayan world... and the mayan world it is! i was immediately surrounded by a dozen chocolate-skinned, high-cheek-boned men, "Taxi, miss? Flores? Tikal?". i shook my head, avoided eye contact, and headed for the exit, all the while straining my senses to feel the slightest touch on my backpack. there was a tall, white canadian family behind me, and the men began to harrass them instead, realizing they might actually have money. i sat down on the curb outside and waited for my ride.

the next 15 hours were a blur of sleep, food, family, a D-stringless guitar, Spanglish, making cookie dough (not cookies!), some guy trying to explain that he had been fixing the oven racks and now they were ready, remembering not to use tap water to rinse off my toothbrush, laying in the middle of the kitchen floor killing giant ants with a fly swatter while chit-chatting with my mom, and finally a cold shower and bed.

today is the day that feels like part of yesterday. my family tried to get me out of bed for an hour before telling me that there was french toast. then i was ready in 5 minutes. we drove thru the Santa Elena craziness, out to the highway, and turned down a small, rocky "road" to a small aldea called Mango, where little children eat green mangoes and stare at the gringa with shy, but steady, dark eyes. our first stop was at the home of a man with prostate cancer. he is nearly unable relieve himself. my dad took him to the hospital last time and removed a liter of urine. dad told us in the car how he put the man on a schedule of self-cathaderization, and how much better the man will feel. we enter the home with the customary, "Con permiso!" my father asks how the tube is working out for him. the response: "tube? what tube?" after a 5-minute discussion about the elusive "tube", the wife finally remembers it, and takes it (still unopened) from a bag on the wall. they haven't even tried the thing. at this point it dawns on me what is going to happen next. i excuse myself and spend the rest of the visit on a small bench outside, watching bony little pigs, bonier little dogs, and innumerable varieties of poultry roam the yard. thru the gaps in the board wall of the house, i hear my dad explaining once again the necessity of the cathader and the relief it will bring. the elderly man is embarressed to lower his pants in front of the girls (my 2nd cousin who is volunteering here, and a Q'eqchi health promoter). at this point, my dad's coercing tactics change from the U.S. professionalism he was taught, to the Guatemalan "get the job done" method. i hear him say, "look, this is only going to help you, and if you don't drop your pants and start using this thing, i'm going to have to bring the girls back with me every time to insert it."

next we went to a community building, where i was given the task of collecting 5Q (five quetzales, about 75 cents) for each consultation, and selling toothbrushes for 1Q. i was still exhausted at this point, and kept nodding off, regularly starting awake to find an adult standing over me holding out their 5Q bill, or a child shyly holding out a 1Q coin, saying that they would like a "rojita" (little red) toothbrush. by the end of the morning i was surrounded by about 15 staring children, each with his or her respective toothbrush. the older ones gripped them tightly and protectively, the younger ones used them to brush their hair or sweep the dirt off the porch. most of the kids already have a mouthful of black teeth, and their mothers have either gold teeth or no teeth. one of the moms asks me if i bleach my teeth. no, i just brush twice a day.

there are three dark-haired little boys with holes in their shirts having a pull-up contest, and they smile each time they notice me watching them. there is a tiny girl in a tinier peach dress trying to ride a bicycle, but between her tinyness, and her dress she repeatedly ends up on the ground. another boy scratches himself constantly...his left hand scratches his right leg, while his right hand scratches his left arm. i tell my dad that there is an itchy boy whose mother is not having him looked at. dad says, "ok, he has scavies. don't sit by him." i'm just as shy as the kids, but i finally work up the nerve to ask them their names. some have recognizable names, but for most of them i just try to repeat the same sounds. now the ice is broken, and all the children's previously unspoken thoughts and questions pour out: why isn't your hair black? where do you live? is it pretty in los estados? do you have sisters? is that book for school? doctor marcos is your dad? is that other gringa your sister? why does your family live here? where did you get those bracelets? is your mother going to have more children? are you going to get married? how much did that cost? why do you have vacation?

finally we load everything back into the truck, wave goodbye to our new friends, bust out the tuna-butt sandwiches (seriously, the brand of tuna is Atun-Fanny), and hit the road, dodging stray turkeys, dogs, horses, and kids.

boy-restriction

note written to Klaske in math class: psst, i have a crush on a boy.
note written in reply: uh-oh, look out boy!

but it's ok, because, as of my most-recent conversation with auntie trish, my boy-restriction status has been, for the summer, changed from "complete" to "semi-". not like that helps the poor boy...

but my internal compass says, "NO!"

well, you know, some days you wake up and you're in Africa. other days you wake up and you're at TAC. -don, week two

likewise, some days you don't go to sleep because you are learning how The Calculus was conceived when The Witches had The Sex with The Devil. other days you don't go to sleep because you are riding in a pickup thru the jungles of northern guatemala. me, month five

so...

after a week of jungle love, i'm heading back to the northern part of north america to spend the summer with the Auntie Trish of lore:

I stuck my finger nail into my eye in a pillow adjustment accident andthe abrasion is now watering too badly to see very well. Much love to you andall the best wishes for a great time, Trish

is it bad that i just ate like 6 plums, a mango, a quarter of a papaya, my fair share of pinapple, and just-about-enough watermelon?

fruit is good for you, right?

...right?

hours to take-off: 13 hours
percentage of bag packed: 0%
hell, percentage of room packed: 0%

F yes!!!

i'm either a college senior or a homeless bum. either option is far preferable to my former title of "college junior".