Several people have mentioned wanting to see some photos of the inside of the house that I’m living in.  My daughter in particular reminded me that she likes to be able to picture me in my element. You know, the camper, the campsite, the campground, and now the house.

This is my specific part of the house, the bedroom and the bathroom.  While I was looking at these photos, it reminded me how photos that we look at on line of hotel rooms, BnBs, resorts, etc., always make places look so inviting.  

This is the living room.  The “garage” is in the background to the left.  And below, the kitchen.

Outside my bedroom door are the stairs leading up to the roof top patio.

Behind the house, the ground rises sharply all the way to the top of a large hill.

I like it here, in both the house and in Santa Ana.  Well, there is the oft heard chorus of barking dogs.  But, ………….

I am well and hope you all are too.

First a pic from back home.  This is my little crew of Loved Ones out enjoying some Super Saturday activities downtown.  The caption from the photo was, Buenos Dias from -6 degrees!  Left to right is Blaine, Karin, Carrie, and Adam.  I love these guys to the moon.  No word on whether or not they got a spiff for standing in front of a sleep number ad.

From there to some more pics of my Guate family.  We have a new emerging tradition of street food supper on Fridays in Santa Ana. Risky stuff for most gringos, but for me, worth it.  No, I didn’t have to use my cipro the next morning. 🙂  Seidi is on the left with Renato across from her, then Lourdes, Sammi, and next to her Fernando, a friend from school.     

Here are some shots, from the roof top, looking around my neighborhood.  The third view is looking toward Fuego, one of the active volcanos near Antigua.

And here’s a closer view.  Kinda shaky ’cause I was too lazy to go downstairs and get my little tripod.  One of the differences you see between Fuego and Agua, the next photo, is that Fuego is bare and scarred at the top from lava flow.  Agua, which is considered still active, shows it’s vegetation all the way to the top.

And lastly, a few shots from around Antigua.  This mobile eye exam trailer was parked in the courtyard at The Church of San Francisco.  The sign, context adjusted, says “Consider the View”.

I took this shot because the contrast really struck me.  It’s a very run down, abandoned building, with one of the nicest set of doors on the block.

I still can enjoy the occasional cigar while in Guatemala.  Interestingly enough, I see mostly the same cigars on the shelf here as I do at Stogies on Grand back home.  They come from Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and down here, Cuba.  Frankly, I’ve tried Cubans down here and in Mexico, and never really got the big deal about them.  I guess it’s just the whole forbidden fruit thing.

I am well and hope you all are too.

In my post about Carlos and graduation, I promised a little update on my other two kids, who I also saw during the graduation trip.

Paulina is doing well and getting excellent marks in school.  Here she is wearing a medal she won in a speech contest.  Now to say I’ve watched Paulina come out of a shell would be an understatement of great magnitude.  With a lot of encouragement from one of her teachers, I think the word she used would be roughly translated as badgering, she agreed to enter this contest with great reluctance.  She seemed to get all nervous all over again when talking about the days leading up to the contest.  But she won second place in her age category and I think you can tell from the picture how proud and happy she was with her success.  The other thing I want to tell you about Paulina is what an incredibly nice girl she is.  Her older sister is exactly the same way.  Her mom is doing a great job raising these two girls on her own.

I thought you’d enjoy this picture.  These are some little friends from next door to Paulina’s house.  They often come over to visit and hang out whenever the giant gringo appears. 🙂

Edgar is also doing very well in school.  He’s absolutely driven to get the best grades and he’s disappointed, maybe a little too much, when he is not the top in every subject.  His younger brother, Ericsson, not so much.  But he still does well in school too.

The whole family is very musical.  I’m pretty sure I told the story about the drum set in my first Padrino post.  This is a pic of the two boys, that’s Edgar seated.  During this visit they both sang a song solo and once together.  They have beautiful voices and their duet brought a tear to the eye of the social worker, Alma, who accompanies the visit.

During this November visit I told them I would be back to Guatemala  for a couple of months very soon, and we made a plan for me to come to Ericsson’s birthday party on March 2nd.  Look for a post about it then.   I promised to bring the cake.

About a year ago I wrote a post called Padrino.  It was about the kids I currently sponsor here.  This post serves as a nice update to that one.

This past November, I came to Guatemala because one of my kids, Carlos, was graduating from high school.  Carlos focused on accounting in school and wants to go on to some more studies.  He’ll be an entrepreneur, and a good one.  This is Carlos during the procession.  Each student is introduced individually as they enter the outdoor auditorium.  There is no way to adequately describe what a huge life step this is for kids in Guatemala.  Less than a full generation ago, it’s a step few kids had the opportunity to take.  Not that many years ago a paradigm shift began to occur in the new generations of parents with school age children.  One of the things that poverty drives is the need for each member of a family to contribute to the income of the family.  When kids were old enough to work, they did.  Becoming school age was often interrupted by becoming work age.  Add to that the fact that going to school costs money, and you have a culture where kids work instead of attending school.  In Guatemala, so called public school, is not just a matter of getting your child to school.  It’s like getting your child to private school.  All expenses related to going to school, tuition, books, uniforms, and supplies have to be paid for.  School was not even close to being affordable for most families.  So what changed?  As if by divine providence, ok, I’m just going to go ahead and call it Divine Providence, parents began to understand that their kids would have better opportunities at life by going to school instead of spending all day in the fields or on the streets selling trinkets, or bread, or tortillas, or anything that people might buy.  Couple that with organizations like Common Hope, and hundreds of others in Central America and throughout the world.  They have learned to connect people of resource and willingness, to families who want their kids to go to school but need help doing so.  Good people led me to sponsoring kids, and I like to think I’ve led other good people to doing the same.

I experienced the great honor of being asked to speak at this Graduation.  I was the final piece of the program and when I got on stage this is what I saw.  It was overwhelming and humbling.  That’s Carlos right in the first chair in the lower right of the photo.  The first thing I said to the gathering was that I wished they all could stand up here and see what I’m seeing.  I fumbled for my phone because I wanted so badly to capture that moment.  They were all laughing and I was holding back tears.  It was perfect. 

After the ceremony there was lunch and all kinds of various game stations to visit.  There were memory games, lego building challenges, bean bag toss, pickle ball, karaoke, (is that how you spell that?), and many more.

In this picture we were in line to visit a photo booth.  That’s Carlos of course, and his parents.  They are exact examples of the parents I described earlier in this post.  Also in the picture is Lesbia, a social worker for Common Hope.  She has accompanied me on all my visits with Carlos and his family over the years, and has become a great friend.  She has also traveled to Minnesota and spoke at Common Hope’s annual banquet a couple of years ago.  The game station idea was new.  It was great fun and a great way for sponsors and grads and their families to spend time.

The day did not pass without one other very emotional reunion.

In my speech I spoke of the heart ache of losing a sponsored child.  My little gift Ericka died of renal failure when she was just thirteen years old.  During the years she was with us, I worked on construction projects with her father and brother, and so got to know the whole family very well.  Unbeknownst to me, one of her younger sisters was also graduating on this day, and her mom and another sister were there.

After the ceremony they came and found me and in this photo we had all just finished a great cry together.  They were so thankful that I had honored Ericka’s memory in my speech.  Even now, as I’m writing about it, I get emotional all over again.

Which brings me to a good place to stop for now.  I’ll follow this post with another about my November visits with my other two kids.

First, let me start with this disclaimer; I am not one who believes that my everyday life is all that interesting.  However, …………

I do get frequent questions in person, and in texts and emails, about what I do when I’m down here.  How do I spend my time?  So last night I decided to write a post about my day, which is now yesterday.

I started my day with coffee.  Pretty interesting so far, huh? 🙂  Remember that coffee maker situation?  I went to the store and bought one.  Which in the long run is much cheaper than buying my coffee by the cup for two and a half months.  Have no fear though, my favorite coffee hangouts will still see me plenty.  With coffee in hand, this day as most, started with reading.

After a trip up the block for a muffin, a couple of hours of reading and catching up with emails and the dreaded Facebook, it was time for a run.

Running in Guatemala is an exercise in survival.  Some of you who saw me shortly after my stay down here a year ago, probably remember I returned with a nasty scrape above my right eye and two black eyes.  What didn’t show were scrapes on both knees and one elbow, and a nasty big bruise on my right hip.  All of which, at my age, seem to take a long time to go away.  Back to survival.  I almost don’t know where to begin.  The only roads with any kind of smooth surface are too busy with traffic, too clogged with fumes, and no room on the sides.  If one of these thoroughfares does have some room, it is typically lined with fences or walls that have nasty little bits of rusty barbed wire hangin’ about.  On the side streets, the footing itself is challenge enough. (See description above of last year’s mis-step).  The cobbles have twisted ankles lurking everywhere.  The sidewalks are narrow, uneven, and often slanted.  To step up or down from the cobbles to the sidewalk is often up to a foot or so.  Any cover or grate along the path is not to be trusted.  There are numerous driveways that require a step down and a step back up, and bay windows that protrude over the sidewalk.  Oh, and did I mention the dog poop to be dodged.  To say nothing of the dogs themselves.  Many of them not friendly like me.  I shouldn’t even get started about the dogs, but you’ll have to allow me this small rant.  Guatemala has an ever growing problem of stray dogs and people who do not control their dogs.  In some areas it is reaching a level of a threat to public health and the common good.  Having to stop and face down a dog is becoming to common an occurrence.  One of my former sponsor kids, Kimberly, was bitten while running just the other day.  I should stop.  I should have stopped at dodging the doo doo.  It makes me crazy.  In spite of all of that, I still run all the time when I’m down here because it’s the only way to get some real exercise.  On to more pleasant things.

After a shower it was off to noon mass at San Francisco.  One of the changes in my routine this time is that I don’t have morning mass a quick five minute walk away.

The Church of San Francisco is about a twenty minute walk from home, so I’m figuring out how to satisfy my fondness for daily mass by planning for noon or 5 o’clock when I can.

After mass I was craving (and needing) vegetables, so I headed over to an asian place near the center of Antigua that I’ve been wanting to try.  I ordered chicken and vegetables which came in a portion that can only be described as a small mountain.  I also ordered some egg rolls thinking I’d get an order of a couple.  Oh no, no, no, grasshopper! It came as an order of eight.  I’m either proud or embarrassed to say I ate everything.  I would like to call what happened next a nice walk home, but it really was more like a sloshing stroll.  The trip, which  normally would take about twenty five minutes, took forty five.  It mercifully ended with me beaching myself on my bed.  Thankfully with enough recovery time before an evening plan with my Guatemalan family.

Part of the family is pictured here at Sunday breakfast during my last visit.  Seide is in the foreground, then Lourdes, then Samantha.  Not in the picture are Renato, who took the photo, Stefani, and Kimberly. Kimberly is actually Lourdes’ cousin but is like another daughter and lives with the family.  She’s the same Kimberly mentioned previously in this post.  I sponsored her “off the books” to help Renato and Lourdes with their support of her.  The story of how she came to live with them is not a pretty one.  But now she has graduated from high school, went on to get a degree in Hospitality Management, and is now working in one of the exclusive hotels in Antigua.  I’ve known Renato since he was in his early twenties and I’ve come to think of him like another son.  Lourdes frequently tells me that I’m the closest thing to a father that she’s had in her life, and the girls all refer to me as Grandpa Eric.  Voila.  Guatemalan family.

Meanwhile, back at the post about my day………..

Over the years I’ve been to all kinds of functions at the girl’s school.  Stefani is on the Student Council and they sponsored a show for a group of seniors who have been studying Improv as an extra curricular activity.  So last night we all went over to the school for the show.  The group was a complete delight, very funny and talented.  What they did with the spur of the moment challenges, which came from both the MC and the audience, was truly AMAZING.  

So I’ll end this post with telling you about a meeting I had this morning with my young friend Erin.  It’s pertinent to this post only because it speaks to how I’ll be spending my time.  Erin is a Minnesotan who works for Common Hope down here and is the coordinator for volunteer activities.  As long as I’m here for an extended visit, we were plotting ways I can plug in and help out during my stay.  Whatever of that I might think would be interesting to you, I will surely write about.  Right now I can tell you it’s going to start with a sanding and varnishing project of the shelves and bookcases in the day care center.  I probably won’t be writing about that one. 🙂

I am well and hope you all are too.

Sometimes old guys get confused when they get off the bus, so lucky, I have this sign to always get me going in the right direction home.

If Guatemala had suburbs, Santa Ana would be an inner ring suburb of Antigua.  Where I am living on this trip, as the crow flies, is not very far from where I’ve been staying the last couple of years.  But it is quite a different world from staying in the heart of Antigua.  Picture small town America versus, say, St. Cloud or Mankato.

Central Squares are common in Guatemala just like small towns in the United States.  This is the central square in Santa Ana looking towards the church.  I was hoping for a church that had Daily Mass but no such luck.  Only Sundays here.

The squares in most towns are pretty lively at night.  The people who sell food come out at about six o’clock and start their grills and fires.  This is where I’ll be finding dinner most nights.  Lots of traditional food choices.  A nice plate of rice and beans, some veggies, and a piece of chicken with tortillas will cost about Q25.  In your pocket that’s about $3.50.  Take that same plate of food and move into Antigua proper, and the price will more than double.  Eight Bucks!  Call the cops.

This is the street I live on in Santa Ana.  Number 99 Calle Real Santa Ana.  You really don’t get a sense from this photo, but it’s a fairly steep walk up from the bus.

And this is the house I live in, the one on the left.  My room is upstairs in the back so those aren’t my windows.  By anyone but the most wealthy in Guatemala, these would be considered very nice houses.  Inside parking for vehicles is an upscale design and the garage space is almost always open to the rest of the house.  When you park your car in this house you are looking right into a small family room with the kitchen off to your right front.  The owner, who does not live here, runs this as two bedrooms with private baths,  on Air BnB.  My room is very nice, the bed is comfy, the wifi is good, and the neighborhood is noisy.  Conspicuously absent from this house are a TV and a coffee maker.  NO COFFEE MAKER?!  Call the cops.  Again. Really.

No TV?  Well, the bad news is I will likely miss a lot of the Olympics.  The good news is I will hear almost nothing from those dipsticks in DC.  Yeah, I’m talkin’ about all y’all.  Both sides.  Embarrassing!  Don’t get me started.

The coffee maker?  That’s a situation gonna need a remedy.

Many of you who read my stuff know two things about me, (or are about to). I’m a huge fan of college women’s softball, and I’m a fan and consistent user of public transportation. I was in OKC for the Women’s College World Series, a tournament I’ve been wanting to attend for quite a few years.  I also had an intentional plan to visit the Memorial to the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building on a peaceful spring morning in April of 1995.

Here’s a plug; most cities have a public transportation website that’s user friendly. It’s not always the most convenient method, but if it is, it eliminates all the worry about how to get somewhere in your car, where to park when you get there, and how much parking will cost. Instead, it gets your legs moving and allows you to see and experience the city in a different way. And so I found myself on a bus ride that terminated at the Downtown Transit Station which is two short city blocks from the Memorial. I had planned to spend about one and a half to two hours at the Memorial. It turned out to be four and half. Most of that was just spent sitting in different places throughout the grounds in a state that was somewhere between lump in the throat and tears. It was for me a very emotional experience.

A lot of that time, and time since, I’ve spent trying to figure out how I define what hallowed ground is. It’s easy for me to list places that I consider hallowed ground, but not so easy to put words on a personal definition. Fact is I’m still trying to figure that out. The list of places in my head doesn’t necessarily have a lot of common denominators. And I’m pretty sure it isn’t solely about loss of life. One thing I have been able to identify for myself; hallowed grounds are places of immense serenity. The kind of serenity that keeps you there for four and half hours and makes it hard to leave. The serenity is caressed by how beautifully designed and cared for the grounds are.

This small sculptor garden sits on the corner of the block containing The Cathedral of St Joseph.  The church was largely shielded from the blast by the Federal Building itself, but on this corner was an old historic chapel.  It, and the Rectory, were damaged beyond saving.

It is across the street from one end of the Memorial Site.  Behind Jesus is the monolithic entrance of one end of the grounds, and the building you see in the background, which now houses the museum, was then a records building.

Because this was a crime scene, the area was surrounded by chain link security fencing.  A number of sections still stand to this day right where they were put up, and have remained as collection sites for notes, flowers, mementos, and personal remembrances.  Even now, as I think about walking along this fence, I begin to well up.

The reflecting pool is where NW 5th Street was that ran past the front of the Federal Building.  The Monoliths at each end mark the time 9:01, the last moment of innocence, and 9:03, the moment healing began.  The tree below marks the spot where Timothy McVeigh parked his Ryder Rental truck, walked away, and detonated  it at 9:02.

Each person that was lost that day has an empty chair.  The chairs are in the area where the Federal Building once stood and symbolize the chairs that will forever remain empty at desks, dinner tables, and classrooms of the lives that will never be.  19 children died in a day care center that day and their chairs are smaller than the rest.  The chairs are lit from underneath and I was left wishing I could have returned at night.  I have no doubt the site has a different kind of power at night.

This tree stood in what was then a small parking lot across the street from the Federal Building.  After the blast it was pretty much a bare trunk with two stump branches.  It became the subject of a lot of discussion in the days and weeks following the devastation.  Some thought it should simply be removed.  But it became the symbol of healing and surviving.  If you look back at the black and white photo above you can see it near the center.   In the museum are photos of the tree at 9:03 and then the years of it’s slow return to thriving.  It truly became an important symbol.  I wouldn’t have thought I could be so emotional looking at pictures of a tree and then standing underneath it, bathed in it’s shade on a hot Oklahoma day.

This photo is from the terrace where the tree stands.  In the distance is the steeple of The Cathedral of St. Joseph.  And below is a message scribed on the side of the records building, now the museum, by the crews that were working in the rubble of the aftermath.

My words in this post cannot adequately express how emotional visiting this site was for me.  If you are ever in Oklahoma City, please go.  It deserves all of the import we can bring to it.  We can’t let it fade to nothing in our collective memory.  Which brings me to the little story I’ll end this post with.

On the Friday morning after I returned from Oklahoma I had the occasion to sit next to a young man at our monthly breakfast for St. Paul’s Outreach.  He had just graduated from the U and was heading to the University of Missouri, Kansas City, for a year of campus ministry.  In our conversation that morning I was telling him about my trip to OKC and my visit to this memorial site.  It was clear from the look on his face that he didn’t have a clue about what I was talking about.  He deserves no criticism for this because he was born in 1993.  He was two years old when this happened.                                       So what do we do with that?  We don’t teach what in my day we called Civics, or Government.  We don’t teach Geography.  I get the impression that we barely emphasize history at all, unless kids choose to major in it in college.  How do we not lose these pieces of history that shape who we have become as a nation, as a culture?  Our memorials that mark one horrific day and it’s aftermath, like 9-11 or Oklahoma City, or a horrific three days like Gettysburg, certainly do that.  A visit to Washington, D.C. is a concentrated example of these efforts.  I think everyone should go.  But is there a greater point here about what we preserve?  What we choose to preserve.  How far have we wandered from the vision, and more importantly, the faith in God that shaped our founding fathers and mothers?  Is the challenge to preserve not just about incidents?  Is it also about resources?  Is it also about ideas?  About stories?  As time marches, the last witnesses to things and events leave us.  And the “new” witnesses to things learn about what’s important, how?  Bringing it down to a personal level, should I be having conversations with my family and friends about Viet Nam, something I almost never do?  Or is The Wall enough?

These are just a few of the things I’ve been thinking about since visiting this site.  During the whole trip back my head started to write this post.  That was now four weeks ago.  Since being back I would look at the photos, write a little bit, delete a little bit, think a little bit, you get the picture.  Then, there was added to this, a perfect storm of time consumption;  getting ready to list my place, team preparation for an upcoming retreat weekend I’m working, and getting involved in two new volunteer activities.  And of course all this mixed with the usual workouts at the Y, naps, bike rides, reading, hangin’ with the kids, hangin’ at the cigar shop, blah, blah, blah.  It’s time to stop.

I am well and hope you all are too! 🙂

Had a nice, including Easter, six days back in Durango.  I stayed at the same RV Park, Alpen Rose, and the weather was great.

I did a lot of riding and here’s some shots from right in Durango of a skate park and kayak park.  Durango HS was having a four team tournament so I enjoyed some high school baseball as well.  After church on Easter Sunday, I ate an obscenely large breakfast and took a favorite drive up the canyon and valley of the Delores River.

I’ve been remiss in making official what many of you already know.  As I write this I am back home in St. Paul, but I’ll spare you having to look at the same picture of me again in my dining room. 🙂

I am well and hope you all are too.  Thanks very much for following this year’s winter trip.  At this time, I don’t have anything to comment on as far as future travel and posts.

Ok, here’s a question. Should I be completely embarrassed by the fact that it took me this long in life to catch on to the sensibility, (an understatement), of shopping for clothes at the Goodwill and other thrift stores? Feel free to comment ungently. 🙂 I don’t think that’s a word, but who cares.

This “discovery”, hello inappropriate use of the word, has been precipitated by the theft of my clothes tote and the need to get a new phone. There was a Goodwill Store across the parking lot from the AT&T Store that I went to in Merced, CA. By this time there was an angry tally in my head of the replacement cost of the stuff in the tote. And I was loath to spend money on the stuff I needed for the remainder of the trip, let alone the stuff I wanted to have. With the exception of two pair of sweatpants and a pair of shorts, virtually every pair of pants I had with me, as well as the non T shirt shirts, were in that tote. Even I, the sweatpants king, draw the line at celebrating Easter without some big boy pants and a decent shirt on. Have I wandered off the point here? I don’t know.

So it started with that Goodwill Store, and since that time I have sought out the thrift stores in the towns I’ve been in. At a painless cost, I’ve found a couple of pairs of pants, two shirts, and a pair of camouflage cargo shorts. (Hell yeah, they’re camouflage) It’s my first item of camouflage clothing. Well, there was that time in Viet Nam. The boys in Alabama would be so proud. I think I might be hooked. No, not on camouflage.

As I’m staring at the end of this post, a sudden fear has come over me that this all sounds just so stupid. 🙂

But I’m going to post it anyway.

A Blessed Easter to all.                 

This is strictly an advertisement for a deserving place. When I was in this area last year, I did not stop at this center. It’s a bit off the beaten path and has to play second fiddle to Mesa Verde National Monument. So this year on my way to Durango, I took the route that goes past the Heritage Center.

In the past couple of years I have been to a lot of Visitor Centers. This one I would put at the top. The two videos they show are quite different from the videos you typically see in Visitor Centers. One is about visiting sites with respect for the stories and cultures in evidence, as well as the preservation of the physical space for the future. The other was about the history of archeology in the Southwest. Both outstanding. I sat through each twice.

This center is also quite a bit larger than most centers you come upon in State and National Parks, and National Monuments. That’s because it is also a very extensive museum and art gallery. I spent a lot of time here and could have spent more. The whole point is, if you are in this area, I believe you should not miss this stop.