Saturday, April 24, 2010
west coast bike journeys
and then, BAM... I'm back from Guatemala. After four long despertidos (goodbye parties), and lots of see you laters, I hopped on a plane and headed back to the US. Now I didn't just head back for any old reason. Not at all. I was going on THE BIKE TRIP 2010. That is, a total of 7 friends and I were about to jump on bikes loaded down with tents, sleeping bags, stoves, spare bike parts, and ride from the top of Washington down to San Francisco. We will start out with 5 people, be joined by 2 more in Astoria, one will leave in Newport, and another with join along the road. WOW. The scenery should be epic, and the times should be good! More updates along the way!
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
mornings in the cornfield
Slap slap, slap slap, slap slap
The sound of my host mother making tortillas lulls me out of my lazy sleep in the morning. The smell of eggs, frijoles and tortillas welcomes me to the new day. I step out of my room and the sun is shining amid blue skies and cornhusks are waving in the slight breeze. In the distance birds join in the chorus of a reggeaton song, the gentle drumline a heartbeat of Latin America felt even way out here in the Solola pueblo regions.
My host famly consists of my mother Aura, father Fermin, fourteen year old brother Nelson, Ingrid, a thirteen year old girl who lives at an all girls boarding school an hour or so away and only comes home every other weekend, and the three little cherubs: Jessica age 8, Mari age 5, and Minor (pronounced Minersh) age 3. The three tiny ones are absolutely adorable, with smiles that split their faces in two and laughs that sound like little bells peeling over the fields. Minor is always hiding from newcomers, pressing his faces into his mother´s apron and peering out nervously.. eyes wide and full of sport. His favorite phrase is ´mira´... ´mira´... which he usually couples with holding the small kitten or other exciting toy up high in his hands and showing whoever will look. Mari is exceptionally cute, and her and her sister Jessica run around giggling while wearing tiny little traditional Mayan dresses.
All women here wear traditional dress starting at age 5 or so (sometimes earlier), and while they at times do wear athletic clothing for sports, generally they are always seen wearing their own beautifully handmade skirt and shirt. They take pride in these dresses, and over time I´ve come to notice that each dress is different, with a different design, pattern and colorings. My host mother Aura consistantly wears perhaps the most beautiful dresses of them all, and she spends much of her time over her wooden loom, painstakingly designing each line of patterns, each color and each thread, with striking results.
My family is poor. They have only enough money to buy food every day, and have a difficult time planning ahead of time... for who knows what might happen with the government here, with their jobs here. Fermin is a school teacher and the family runs a tienda, a tiny store, next to the market in Solola´. Currently none of the school teachers are getting paid by the government, so there is no school today as the teachers are all on strike. The times have been very hard for teachers, the country´s most important workers, with most schools being incredibly overcrowded with children and understaffed by the government. In the area that I´m living in there are three small German organizations that have been working for around fifteen years here, building schools in the poorest of poor areas, trying to provide for this nation´s least fortunate.
I am here technically to teach soccer to kids and to provide a space where in the future we can launch an educational program for girls coupled with soccer in Solola, and yet I am also pulled into this struggle of schooling. For this region, and especially for the women, education is the only means of emancipation, but without a school and without books, pencils, notebooks, what hope do these kids have of achieving said liberation? The people here need so much and have so little ... ultimately it is so heartbreaking and I often wonder what real good I am doing here.
My program needs more volunteers, more equipment, more donations, more everything. We are working with a rediculously small budget and very limited resourses, and yet trying to take on the challenges of the world here. For the first month it was just me, the only volunteer, and Luis, the Guatemalan director that I get along with fabulously. Jon Brooks arrived here last week, a good friend from my university and a welcome support for the program. However, I leave in a month and Jon leaves a bit after that and I´m worried, scared, that what we are setting up down here will not be sustainable and will collapse. Without the certainty of new volunteers on the horizon I´m reticent to take on too many practices, and hesitant to promise too much to these villages. Anyone reading this that might be interested in the program, please contact me, we need your help and your time, if you can offer it.
Overall I´m having an incredible time. I´m learning.. so much... everyday. And I can only be thankful for the opportunity to live here and share my time with the people in this village. It is such a calm, beautiful, special place.
The sound of my host mother making tortillas lulls me out of my lazy sleep in the morning. The smell of eggs, frijoles and tortillas welcomes me to the new day. I step out of my room and the sun is shining amid blue skies and cornhusks are waving in the slight breeze. In the distance birds join in the chorus of a reggeaton song, the gentle drumline a heartbeat of Latin America felt even way out here in the Solola pueblo regions.
My host famly consists of my mother Aura, father Fermin, fourteen year old brother Nelson, Ingrid, a thirteen year old girl who lives at an all girls boarding school an hour or so away and only comes home every other weekend, and the three little cherubs: Jessica age 8, Mari age 5, and Minor (pronounced Minersh) age 3. The three tiny ones are absolutely adorable, with smiles that split their faces in two and laughs that sound like little bells peeling over the fields. Minor is always hiding from newcomers, pressing his faces into his mother´s apron and peering out nervously.. eyes wide and full of sport. His favorite phrase is ´mira´... ´mira´... which he usually couples with holding the small kitten or other exciting toy up high in his hands and showing whoever will look. Mari is exceptionally cute, and her and her sister Jessica run around giggling while wearing tiny little traditional Mayan dresses.
All women here wear traditional dress starting at age 5 or so (sometimes earlier), and while they at times do wear athletic clothing for sports, generally they are always seen wearing their own beautifully handmade skirt and shirt. They take pride in these dresses, and over time I´ve come to notice that each dress is different, with a different design, pattern and colorings. My host mother Aura consistantly wears perhaps the most beautiful dresses of them all, and she spends much of her time over her wooden loom, painstakingly designing each line of patterns, each color and each thread, with striking results.
My family is poor. They have only enough money to buy food every day, and have a difficult time planning ahead of time... for who knows what might happen with the government here, with their jobs here. Fermin is a school teacher and the family runs a tienda, a tiny store, next to the market in Solola´. Currently none of the school teachers are getting paid by the government, so there is no school today as the teachers are all on strike. The times have been very hard for teachers, the country´s most important workers, with most schools being incredibly overcrowded with children and understaffed by the government. In the area that I´m living in there are three small German organizations that have been working for around fifteen years here, building schools in the poorest of poor areas, trying to provide for this nation´s least fortunate.
I am here technically to teach soccer to kids and to provide a space where in the future we can launch an educational program for girls coupled with soccer in Solola, and yet I am also pulled into this struggle of schooling. For this region, and especially for the women, education is the only means of emancipation, but without a school and without books, pencils, notebooks, what hope do these kids have of achieving said liberation? The people here need so much and have so little ... ultimately it is so heartbreaking and I often wonder what real good I am doing here.
My program needs more volunteers, more equipment, more donations, more everything. We are working with a rediculously small budget and very limited resourses, and yet trying to take on the challenges of the world here. For the first month it was just me, the only volunteer, and Luis, the Guatemalan director that I get along with fabulously. Jon Brooks arrived here last week, a good friend from my university and a welcome support for the program. However, I leave in a month and Jon leaves a bit after that and I´m worried, scared, that what we are setting up down here will not be sustainable and will collapse. Without the certainty of new volunteers on the horizon I´m reticent to take on too many practices, and hesitant to promise too much to these villages. Anyone reading this that might be interested in the program, please contact me, we need your help and your time, if you can offer it.
Overall I´m having an incredible time. I´m learning.. so much... everyday. And I can only be thankful for the opportunity to live here and share my time with the people in this village. It is such a calm, beautiful, special place.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Mi Viaje a Guatemala... parte uno
After all was said and done in Nicaragua (and I may add more about Nicaragua later on), Ben and I hopped on a midnight bus from Managua, Nicaragua to Guatemala City, Guatemala. 18 hours and two border crossings later, there we were: Huge buildings, sprawled malls, bright lights, and fast food restaurants. It seemed to me that we had re-entered the civilization that I had left in New York. Nowhere in Nicaragua did I see a big brightly lit building such as the ones here! But don't be fooled, those bright lights were contained to the 'new town' area of Guatemala city. A bit further in we reached the "old town", full of brightly painted, small, Central American style homes all connected by the same walls.
My memories of the capitol are fleeting; after Ben and I exited our bus Luis, our main man in Guatemala, picked us up and we were off to a hostel for the night. The next day, early in the morning, we borded another bus headed for Solola', a city overlooking the famous Lake Atitlan... and the place that was to become my home for the next two and a half months. As though on perfect cue with the change in environment, my stomach began rumbling tremendously, and my first step off the 2 hour bus ride in Solola ended with my vomiting all over the main square. Welcome to Guatemala! ... Classic.
The next few days are a swirl. I had gotten really sick... perhaps from some soy yogurt I'd eaten in the bus terminal of the capitol, perhaps from something else... but I couldn't eat, could barely drink, and had some really horendous nights. Ben took care of me, and we stayed first in Luis' house in Solola, then afterward in Santa Maria, the village just outside of Solola that I was to live in for the next couple of months.
Solola reminds me somewhat of Granada, Nicaragua. A small colonial city, Solola has a beautiful main square lush with flowers, trees, and grass, and is overlooked by a slightly gaudy but still beautiful cathedral. The market starts underneath this cathedral and sprawls outward, revealing rows and rows of tomatos, carrots, potatoes, strawberries, corn, corn, corn and more corn. You can truly get anything in this market, and vendors come from all over the area to sell their crafts here... specifically remarkable are the Tuesday and Friday markets. But however much Solola may seem at times familiar, the village Santa Maria is a world that I have never experienced before... a completely new and mind-blowing place.
My first step in Santa Maria was surreal. Six or so boys around 7-10 years old were playing soccer on a field right next to the main road. They ran up with shy but smiling faces, and explained that they were part of the Futbol Sin Fronteras Santa Maria team... that although there hadn't been a practice in a month or so, they were still playing every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. They had one tattered ball, but their smiles said that they didn't care... that they were just stoked to be playing. I introduced myself as their new coach, and I had a team. Woah.
An hour or so later we had our first meeting with the community, and it was there that I first heard Kaqchikel, the Mayan language spoken in these hills. This ancient eery language drips of a long gone civilization, and sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. Kaqchikel is at times gutteral and at times uses complex throat and tongue patterns, and is accented often by Spanish segue words (such as entonces), proper nouns, and numbers (most that speak Kaqchikel cannot count past twenty in their language, thus Spanish numbers have become commonly appropriated). Most generations living in Santa Maria speak both Kaqchikel and Spanish, with the exception of babies and grandparents who at times only speak Kaqchikel, and it is certainly the language of choice in most of the homes in the village. That is, Kaqchikel seems to function by binding the community together, whereas Spanish enables them to communicate with the rest of the world.
After our meeting, which consisted of instant coffee and about a million "gracias por su apoyo y ayuda" (thank you for your support and help) from all parties present, we made our way to my new home. Literally in the middle of a cornfield, my new home sits snuggled in between recently harvested (and thus the skeleton form of) cornstalks, jutting up an odd angles in the sky. Tiny dirt trails lead from one cornpatch to another, and to several houses all hidden amid the high corn. During the next two weeks of my time here many farmers have cut down the stalks, but when I first arrived I felt on another planet altogether. It's hard to truly describe this experience, other than to say... woah. I'm here, living in a Mayan village, communicating only on Spanish with my family, neighbors, and soccer teams. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. More to come with the people I've met.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Estoy Aqui, en Nicaragua Una Vez Mas
"Bienvenidos a Nicaragua" says the flight attendant as we touch down in Managua, Nicaragua. Just hours before I was in the biting cold of New York... now as I step off the plane and enter the world of Central America, the layers of clothes come off and the Spanish words: all those verbs, adjective, nouns that I desperately memorized months before somehow, magically, have resurfaced. "Hola, gracias, adios". A paxeo shuttle picks me up and we are off, my head half out of the window, breathing in the sweet tropical night and listening to the varied drumlines of reggeaton, salsa, bachata as we speed past buildings and houses... everywhere in Nicaragua you can hear this, the pulse of Latin America. I´m back.
In the barrio I was greeted by La Flaca (Kay) and La Rubia (Zoey), my companeras from my previous months in Nicaragua. They were busy planning the upcoming week of futbol campamento for Futbol Sin Fronteras, the organization that we are all working with here in Central America. Upon my arrival Kay tells me that tomorrow we are heading to the beach for a day, and I laugh in joy... my new adventure has begun. In the morning I find myself wearing a t-shirt and hanging out in the back of a pickup truck under blue skies... racing horse coches and waving adios to farmers on a pot holed road out to the great Pacific Ocean. Nicaragua is crazy, wild, free... and a person can´t help but be intoxicated by its rugged charm.
I could write a book about Nicaragua... and maybe someday I will... but for now I´ll keep my commentary short. After a day at the beach of swimming, shell collecting, and sun basking we headed back to Granada. Volunteers were coming soon and much preparation was to be done.
The week of campamento was incredible. About twenty or so American volunteers flew in, and Ben, the founding director of Soccer Without Borders bussed in from El Salvador (where a previous camp was held). The volunteers were all excellent: everyone had a huge smile the whole week and the little Nicaraguan girls sparkled with excitement. Their war cry "Futbol Sin Fronteras" is still ringing in my ears.
The two weeks in Nicaragua were, in short, phenomenal. My Spanish had improved, my Nicaraguan friends were as hilarious as ever, the soccer was, as usual, fast paced, wild, crazy and fun... full of dark nights with one street lantern in 90 degree weather. The sweat left trails on the ground in the shape of soccer balls, and sillouettes of salsa dancers were painted in the sky.
On my last night we lounged in the balmy air outside the FSF office, riding bikes by twos, laughing at jokes in English and Spanish, slapping hands, pounding fists and saying "adios, nos vemos pronto, cuidate" and my favorite, "que te vaya bien"... may you go well.
And so I went. Gracias, Adios.
In the barrio I was greeted by La Flaca (Kay) and La Rubia (Zoey), my companeras from my previous months in Nicaragua. They were busy planning the upcoming week of futbol campamento for Futbol Sin Fronteras, the organization that we are all working with here in Central America. Upon my arrival Kay tells me that tomorrow we are heading to the beach for a day, and I laugh in joy... my new adventure has begun. In the morning I find myself wearing a t-shirt and hanging out in the back of a pickup truck under blue skies... racing horse coches and waving adios to farmers on a pot holed road out to the great Pacific Ocean. Nicaragua is crazy, wild, free... and a person can´t help but be intoxicated by its rugged charm.
I could write a book about Nicaragua... and maybe someday I will... but for now I´ll keep my commentary short. After a day at the beach of swimming, shell collecting, and sun basking we headed back to Granada. Volunteers were coming soon and much preparation was to be done.
The week of campamento was incredible. About twenty or so American volunteers flew in, and Ben, the founding director of Soccer Without Borders bussed in from El Salvador (where a previous camp was held). The volunteers were all excellent: everyone had a huge smile the whole week and the little Nicaraguan girls sparkled with excitement. Their war cry "Futbol Sin Fronteras" is still ringing in my ears.
The two weeks in Nicaragua were, in short, phenomenal. My Spanish had improved, my Nicaraguan friends were as hilarious as ever, the soccer was, as usual, fast paced, wild, crazy and fun... full of dark nights with one street lantern in 90 degree weather. The sweat left trails on the ground in the shape of soccer balls, and sillouettes of salsa dancers were painted in the sky.
On my last night we lounged in the balmy air outside the FSF office, riding bikes by twos, laughing at jokes in English and Spanish, slapping hands, pounding fists and saying "adios, nos vemos pronto, cuidate" and my favorite, "que te vaya bien"... may you go well.
And so I went. Gracias, Adios.
A New York New Years
A hectic airplane terminal lies in wait as I step off the plane in Newark, NJ. People from every corner of the world speaking dozens of languages busstle by, some coming into this metropolis of New York City, some leaving, others simply there to make connections. A shuttle awaits me at the terminal and I am granted my very first tour of Manhattan. The brights lights and piercing cold swirl together, and a Jay-Z song about NYC tells me that these streets will make you feel brand new, and these lights will inspire you. So let´s hear it for NY.
After a tour up and down wall street, the shuttle drops me off a Grand Central Station. An old regal building seeping stories of colonial America, the beginnings of NYC, and the millions of immigrants that have accessed this country through the NYC portal, the ceilings are high, brass, and certainly grand. My time in the city, for now, ends with my entry onto a train heading for Woodstock, where I am to spend New Years with Haley, her family, and Julia. New Years is excellent... the combination of wonderful food, a warm country house, a bon fire spurred on by Haley´s dad and his gasoline can, and good friends is something priceless and wonderful.
Later on Julia departs and Haley and I venture into the city to stay with her family friends that are living in Manhattan. My favorite part is Central Park, where in the winter the trees are frosted over, the ponds and streams are frozen, and runners and roller bladers (and their dogs) are bundled up in a million layers of clothes. This city is romantic, and yes, let´s hear it for New York.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Utah: an adventure after all!
I haven't written in quite awhile. I've been home, living in my parents house, for almost three months now and I am rapidly approaching my next Latin American adventure. I leave in a week and a half for New York, to see Haley and the BIG APPLE, and then Nicaragua a week after that. After buying my tickets the other day the upcoming change felt like a brick in my stomach... one that will take some time to digest. The weird thing is, the whole time I've been in Utah I've acted like it was a chore... a place to come to, rest for a bit, work and save money... not a place to really have fun in or live in.... and certainly not a place to forge new experiences. It turns out that I was immensely wrong. Utah is an amazing place. Between the desert in southern Utah and the high alpine Wasatch Mountains, the geography is diverse, gripping, and immeasurably soul cleansing. The dry crisp air fills me with hope, energy, and enthusiasm, and the friends that I still have here are of the most incredible stock. I've filled my days with working in a genetics lab run by David, a crazy hippie who celebrates and supports all people's lifestyles, my karate master of molecular biology Kazuzuyki, teaching me 'his way' in a wax on wax off fashion of pipetting, and rockclimbing with my tough as nails and inspiring as shit mountain friends. I feel warm and healthy from three months of good meals at home with my parents, and I feel rejuvenated from my emotional windstorm of a breakup with Izzy. My time here has been phenomenal, and it is with a taste of sadness that I prepare to leave, once again, on another adventure. More blogs are sure to come soon!
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