After a red-eye flight in which I got no sleep and two days in Guatemala City, I am here in sunny, pleasantly warm Quetzaltenango, where I will be for the next three weeks. I arrived in Guatemala City at 5:45 am on Monday the 23rd, which was like 3:34 am Oregon time--except it felt like the middle of the day because it was so light out and because I had been awake for about 20 hours straight. I was met by Vanessa, our program coordinator, and we took a taxi to the Casa San Jose guest house, where our group was to stay for the next couple days. The guest house doesn't look like much from the outside, just a small door and frosted glass window protected by metal bars, in a flat-fronted concrete building. But inside, it is open and beautiful, with colorfully tiled floors, woven hanging and fabric, and plants everywhere.
Later in the day after a few more people had showed up, some of us took a walk to the Plaza Constitucional, which was only about 7 blocks from the guest house. We went inside the Cathedral, and got to take a tour of the Palacio Nacional, the National Palace.
On Tuesday, we got down to business. First thing in the morning after breakfast, we walked to the office of the Department of Peace, to hear about the Guatemalan Peace Accords, which were signed in 1996 and were the official end of the 36-year long civil war. On our way back, we came across a group of protestors marching down the street. They were older people, protesting the Social Security system, which doesn´t really function as it should. After lunch we went to a fancy office building to talk with one of the leaders of CACIF, which is the umbrella organization for Guatemala's private sector. As a business-person, he is in favor of the TLC (tratado de libre comercio, i.e. the Central American Free Trade Agreement), and he discussed with us what he thought the benefits of it were going to be, as is it supposed to be put in action in the near future. In the evening, a women from the organization FAMDEGUA (families of the detained and disappeared of Guatemala) came and talked to us about their mission to find out what happened to their children and family members. She herself had lost a son during the civil war, and she told us her story and that of some others--it was very moving.
We left Guatemala City for Quetzaltenango on Wednesday morning--an over four-hour drive through the mountains. If I had to choose one word to describe Guatemala City, it would be Chaos--forlorn, beautiful, chaos. There is beauty in the colorfulness of the buildings, in the ironwork, in the architecture of certain buildings, especially churches, in the people's smiles, in the peace-promoting graffiti, in the flowers, in the mountains surrouding the city, in the staircases carved into dirt hillsides, and in the hope. The chaos is created by overpopulation, too much traffic, crowded streets, crazy drivers, noise from car horns, bus engines, and shouting vendors, the mish-mash of different styles and qualities of buildings, the lumpy hills, the jumble of signs, the layout of the streets. But this chaotic beauty also has a forlornness to it. It is dusty and dirty; there is much violence in the city, which is why there are grates on the windows, and it is not safe to go out once the sun has set; there is extreme poverty, and you see people, especially women with babies or old women, sitting in the shadows of buildings, on corners, begging; people live in ramshackle homes with patchwork tin roofs all crammed together; there are police with large guns everywhere; the vendors look at you in earnesst there is a high unemploymet rate; the lines for the public hospital stream down the surrounding blocks; and then there are big fancy places with gates, walls, and guards protecting them.
Quetzaltenango is much quieter, smaller, and friendlier, and I think I'm going to love it here (I already do...). The last two days have been used as an orientation to the program, and getting to know the other members of our group (there are 20 of us). Wednesday we had a lecture on the history of Guatemala, and we've been learning more about each other, what our semester will be like, and exploring this lovely city.
If you can't tell, I am thoroughly enjoying myself here. The students are a wonderful group, the food has been mostly great, and nothing has gone wrong yet (except for the bathroom light in our hotel room going out). On Sunday we move in with our host families and begin language school on Monday. More later!
