“Now why don’t he write?”

Once again quoting my favorite line from Dances with Wolves.  And if you don’t remember it, it was spoken to a wolf.

The title of this post is meant to be indicative of, …. what?  My state of mind?  Nah.  It’s more like an expression of complete relaxation.  I have slowed to the pace of, the pace of, me in Guatemala.  Daily walkabouts, going to mass in churches that were around when the Conquistadors either went home or became part of the landscape.  Catching up on Netflix.  Now that’s interesting to me.  It’s something that I don’t quite seem to get to at home.  Reading.  I make time for that, always.  When I’m at home and in conversations about how I spend my retirement time, one of the things I always seem to say is, I’m as busy as I want to be.  Down here, I’m as not busy as I want to be.  It’s nice, and I appreciate it, and this is probably really boring.  Maybe that’s why the title is appropriate.  Crickets, I hear crickets.

So, I just wanted to share a few photos, and write a little something ’cause it seemed overdue.

As I move through my world down here, the contrasts really seem to register with my eyes in a way that isn’t the same anywhere else.  There’s the tiny house in Santa Inez where my Guatemalan daughter Lourdes grew up.  Santa Inez is a poor little spot along the road between Guatemala City and Antigua.  To a coffee shop that is as modern and nicely appointed as any anywhere.

There’s beautiful foliage growing out of the tops of walls, and goats grazing by the side of the road in spot I walk past all the time.  The old churches are all a story unto themselves, and the restorative and preservation work is ongoing.  Thankfully.

I know I promised not to repeat a lot of Procession stuff, but I took this photo because it also showed something else.  It’s been really hot and windy down here and fires are burning in the hills and up on the mountainsides all around Antigua, and probably other areas of Guatemala.  I remember similar fire scenes all around Lake Atitlan last year when I was up there.  Guatemala is in the last couple of months of the dry season and there’s plenty of fuel.

Last year I wrote a little about, and photographed, one of my favorite quiet spots to read and write.  It’s a cultural and training center in Antigua that has quiet courtyards, a nice little cafe, good wifi, and shady spots to sit.  The Central Park is a beautiful spot, but it’s also an endless stream of people trying to sell you stuff.

This year, on my first stop at the cultural center, I came upon this little scene, and it sparked a memory of a lesson learned long ago.  For reasons I don’t know, a tree had been removed and these two gents were pounding the stump into submission with axes.  As you can see from the size of the stump, no small task.  Now some of you might be looking at this and thinking, why wouldn’t they?……., or, how come they don’t?…….., what, use machines?  Logical.  Maybe.

To the lesson learned part.  When I first started coming down here I spent almost all of my time, with my friend Greg, doing manual labor in a mountain project site called Nueva Esperanza.  At it’s height, the Guatemalan construction crew was about forty five guys.  We built retaining walls, built forms and poured concrete, dug trenches and laid PVC, you get the picture.  Stay with me now, ’cause it’s the trenches.  We had a backhoe.  But we dug most of the trenches with picks and shovels.  One day, I asked my friend Jeff Barnes who was the construction foreman, in what could only be described as gringo logic meets cultural naivety, why we didn’t use the backhoe much.  His answer was probably my first lesson in how narrow our perspective and priorities can be as “outsiders”.

In the early days of New Hope, (Nueva Esperanza), the biggest impact this undertaking had on the surrounding communities was the employment of these forty five men.  Backhoes, while more efficient, resulted in less man hours to complete a task.  In America, we value that efficiency.  In Guatemala, the ripple effect into the local economy of the man hours of work provided to these men, (sorry, there were no women hours going on then), was the priority.  Less backhoe equals more pay to the construction crew.  The donations to the organization bought that backhoe.  But more importantly, those donations fueled a different kind of priority.  Payroll.

Now do I know that that’s what’s going on with our two stump pounders, I don’t.  But watching them took me back to a time, and a new kind of thinking, that I thought was worth sharing.

On Tuesday I’m going up to Tikal, an important historical Mayan site.  I won’t be bringing my laptop on this run through the jungle, but look for posts toward the end of the week about my time there.  Before the end of the month I’m also going to have an opportunity to go up to New Hope for the first time in about ten years.  I’ve seen pictures, but being there again, I can only imagine at this point what memories and deja vu will spring from that.

I see that Minnesota is heading for the 50s at the end of the week.  I’m still not coming back until the end of April. 🙂