There's a forest and good people out there!

I got my hands on a map of the communities we visited, and I doctored it up so I can describe where I've been, and what the different places are like. Above the bright green line is the Maya Biosphere Reserve, divided into core and miltiple-use zones. Between the orange and green lines is the heavily populated and deforested buffer zone.
Our office is in Flores, and the five red dots to the north of the lake are the different communities that the scholarship program works with. Cruce Dos Aguados, the town we visited last Thursday (the one where I was like holy shit where is the forest!?) is #1, and is not very far into the reserve. My sense of distance was obviously skewed by the transition from roads paved with pavement (where Gabriel cruises at 130 kph - lots of miles per hour - refusing to wait behind anyone) to roads paved with rocks, potholes and stubbornness, where we have to creep along or risk a blowout or tipping the truck.

Thursday we got a late start, so we only visited Dos Aguados (#1) and San Andres (#2). Friday we were out early, and made the trek to Cruce Perdido (#3) and then up to Centro Campesino and Paso Caballos (#'s 4 and 5). Cruce Perdido and Centro Campesio were similar to Dos Aguados - we drove past lots of ranchland, and farther west, lots of swamp. It was misty or raining practically all day, but every once in a while the sun would burn off a bit of cloud cover - and birds would appear everywhere! We say several hawks, flocks of green parrots, egrets, and a handful of flycatchers, with tails so long they looked like dragonflies

Paso Caballos was different though. It's farther into the reserve, and it's within the Laguna del Tigre national park, a more protected area (Tikal, due to its tourism value, and perhaps El Mirador, due to its remote location, are the only truly protected areas in the reserve, as far as I can tell). It has a much more indigenous population, and a few of the people we encountered weren't fluent in spanish. The town had a very frontier feel. There was a central road, along which houses and a school field had been cleared, running down to the river. Forest-covered hills surrounded the community on all sides, though we encountered evidence of slash-and-burn efforts to claim more land. The river was fascinating. The town sat on a bend where water, flowing from the wetlands to the north, passed under the hills and rushed from the ground to join the river.

The houses were all similar, each with a large black plastic water tank, and there were none of the frills of the more developed towns to the south - no lights, few cars, only one shop, and - from my point of view, less obvious private property lines.

I haven't figured out what the private property rules are around here. In towns around the lake, and bigger places like Flores, everything is fairly obvious. Entering a building, home or even a shop, is announced with a "Buenas días, con permiso...". However, out in the country, things are less clear. This weekend I walked up the peninsula to a local wildlife rehabilitation station, and the little jungle path I followed dumped me out in someone's backyard. It was very clear that everyone else who lived along this trail would have to walk through this yard to get to the main road. I couldn't see anyone around, so I stepped into the yard with an apprehensive "con permiso? (with your permission?)". In this particular case, I was startled by a Coati jumping out of the house to wave its paws at me.

Boo!

They're kind of like raccoons/aardvarks, with big long tails that they hold up in the air. This one was a pet. At least, I hope it was a pet, and not dinner on a string. I suppose that in smaller rural communities, right of passage across private land is no big deal, since everyone knows everyone, and since land tenure issues make the definition of "private property" debatable. I think I'll avoid crossing any rancher's fences though.

But back to driving around with Gabriel.

We were delivering notifications of scholarship, like I said a few posts ago. One student we visited wasn't going to school - a pretty solid disqualification for the disbursement of a scholarship. We didn't get to talk to the girl, only her mother. I followed her evasive explanations and excuses (she never looked either of us in the eye) in rapid spanish as best I could. Though she blamed the teacher for something, the real reason was that she wanted her daughter to help her make tortillas and take care of the house in the morning, which is when classes are held. There are all sorts of reasons that a family might not let their child go to school. A big one is the parents themselves rarely have any education beyond a few years of elementary school. They're less likely to place much value on education if it didn't do much for them. Another is that by the time kids get to middle school, they're economically valuable. But that's the point of this scholarship - to help out families who are facing the choice of school or work for their kids. We specifically target students entering middle school, when most of the population stops going to school, so we can continue their scholarship through all three years of middle school.

This obviously frustrated me and Gabriel. We were very respectful and made it clear it was the family's choice as to whether they wanted the scholarship or not, but we griped about her as we drove away. This sort of thing is happening all over the country, but this girl had been recommended by her teacher. She had good grades, and her family needed the assistance. We had driven all the way out here to offer her this opportunity to get a middle school education, something she was in serious risk of not getting, and her family was saying no.

It was therefore entirely appropriate for Gabriel to run into my office this morning and shout "We got her!". The girl's teacher had called to let him know she was back in class, and that her family would be accepting the scholarship to keep her in school. It was a perfect example of how the program works, one of the rare occasions when you can see the results of money and effort immediately. A solid way to start our day.

I'm also a film critic

It’s been raining all weekend, which threw a huge wrench in my “swim and tan all weekend” plans. In the face of these difficulties, I turned to the bootleg DVD stalls in the market. These places are great. The selection is eclectic, everything is dubbed into Spanish, and they’re cheap. A disk costs 10 Quetzales, only slightly more than a dollar. The best thing about the DVD stalls are the collections. Rarely does one disk only contain one movie. Instead of going home with one rocky film, you’ll go home with three. Some of the combinations make sense - I’ve seen the Rocky/Rambo pack in practically every stall. Steven Segal, Van Damm and Terminator are other common themes. I am the proud owner of a disk containing all five Ong Bak films in the original Thai, with Spanish subtitles (which doesn’t matter at all, as there are more broken bones that lines in those movies).

These collection’s aren’t always grouped by actor, and that’s where things get fun – trying to guess why these particular films were paired. “Three films with aliens/spaceships” includes Aliens, Star Trek, and Predator. You, Me and Dupree, Leap Year, and something with that guy from all the romantic comedies is clearly the “romantic comedy booster pack”. And then there are more intriguing combinations… I purchased a disk containing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The Expendables, and Salt, clearly an action pack, the first week I was here. I made the mistake of purchasing it at a stall without a TV in which to test out the disks, and when I brought it home, I found out I had bought a blank DVD. Swell.
Yesterday though, I saw the same disk, in a stall with a TV. I had the guy test it, and Nicolas Cage leapt onscreen, waving his hat and throwing fireballs. Excellent. My rainy, cold Saturday afternoon was saved!

Except that, after the wizards were done killing Morgana in New York City, the movie that queued up next was not the Expendables, but the Other Guys. First off, no matter how much I like Mark Wahlberg, he is not a replacement for all the action heroes ever killing everyone. Second, I struggled to find the connections between The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Other Guys. Was this disk “Films in which both main characters have lady-troubles”? “Films that take place in New York, but with wildly different stories”? The third film confused things even more. It was a Twilight parody called Vampires Suck, and the sections I skipped through were only slightly more entertaining than the original. Edward’s disco-ball-jockstrap was appreciated. The film as a whole was not.

Sitting there, slightly dejected and confused, I was temped to write this compilation off as a mistake. The disk cover didn’t match the movies on the disk, perhaps the movies didn’t match each other either. This made me sad, my vision of street vendors selling carefully crafted movie playlists shattered by this cinematic jumble.

But no - I suddenly realized that there was a connection between at least two of these films! A statue of a bull in New York!

Here it is, witnessing the breaking of the partnership between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, a crucial scene to any cop film.

And here, here it is standing next to the evil wizard!

And here it is, animated by the wizard and kicking the ever-loving crap out of a volkswagon! Made in America bitches! Don’t fuck with our sorcerers!

I can’t explain the twilight movie (a universally true statement), but it was incredibly satisfying to understand the subtle cinematic undercurrents tying the first two films together. Order was restored to the world of bootleg DVDs, and my back-up job will definitely be "bootleg movie playlist crafter".

Field Trip

I went out into the field today! Saying it like that, I feel like a scientist on some new frontier – venturing from camp to explore the field. Armed with my pith helmet and butterfly net, I’d return with jars full of specimens and a notebook full of observations of the local population.

What I was actually doing was driving with Gabriel to Cruze Dos Aguados, a town north of San Andres/San José (towns on the lake), deep in the Multiple-Use Zone. All I brought back was a delayed dose of surprise.

Two parts of that sentence beg more description. The Multiple-Use Zone makes up half of the 16,000 km2 Mayan Biosphere Reserve (The other half being better-protected core zones and biotopes). It is an area of protected forest open to sustainable extraction practices – Allspice, Xate and Chicle production being the best options in the sustainable/economically viable category, according to what I’ve read. The reserve itself occupies the northern half of Petén.

Gabriel Gámez is in charge of me. He is ProPetén’s communications department (administration, finances, and the radio-drama are likewise one-person “departments”). I was put in communications because my most immediately useful skill was my ability to write quickly and well in English. I’ve been working with Gabriel translating publications, searching for funding opportunities, and glaring at the website. Our plans for the next few weeks include writing up 2010’s bilingual annual report, and fixing the website. Gabriel is wonderfully genial, and surprisingly laid back, given his daily intake of coffee, coca-cola and cigarettes. He switches back and forth between Spanish and English with ease, which lets me practice my Spanish, but also make sure I’m understanding important things. This is fantastic, because nothing ruins your self confidence like starting off a day’s work only mostly certain you properly understood all your instructions. He hangs out with the American expatriates who run a local café, where they’ve started to have screenings of artsy or intellectual movies and discussions of relevant social topics every other week, which is a lot of fun. We also watched the Superbowl with them. Working with him is great.

We were driving to Cruze Dos Aguados to deliver scholarship notifications to families, and to make arrangements to return the next week to sign contracts and disburse the money. The scholarship fund supports 20 students this year, providing money for school supplies and expenses. The students are at the basico level, (roughly equivalent to middle school, at my homeschooled best guess), which is the point where most Guatemalans stop going to school. Money plays a significant role in this cut-off, as may don’t see the benefit of continuing their education once they approach a more economically productive age. I had translated a few pamphlets for the fund, and had actually been a part of the applicant selection process. It’s kind of a fun position to be in, picking out which students deserve to have their lives improved. It’s also depressing to realize that if you’re not academically stellar or economically destitute, it’s really hard to draw attention to yourself when we line up all the applicants. There’s just too many deserving students in the middle, so we focus on the edges.

But today was positive stuff, delivering good news, taking pictures of proud students, getting out off the office and into the world!

Right?

I spent 3 hours driving through the MBR without realizing it. Not knowing where the town was located, I assumed we were still in the Buffer Zone, an unprotected but designated border region surrounding the southern edge of the reserve, intended to hold back the encroaching settlements. I honestly didn’t realize what we were driving through until I sat down and started writing this evening. I had to dig through articles to make sure I wasn’t confusing the Buffer and Multiple-Use Zones.

I knew the Buffer Zone was heavily populated and deforested, and based on what I saw around me, I assumed that's where we were. Our truck bumped along the road between open swaths of pasture dotted by isolated hardwoods, palms, and every few kilometers, herds of cattle.

These pictures are taken well within the borders of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, the largest area of protected forest in Central America. It still boggles my mind that that was part of the Mayan forest. I was shooting rolling hills and open skies, the agrarian lands that lead up to the jungle, and what I’m now looking at are pictures of a place that less than 30 years ago was covered in dense forest, pictures of the famous MBR. Along this road it’s not a protected forest,

because there isn’t any forest to protect. This one shows just how thin the topsoil is - and without trees, it washes away very easily.

Now, we were driving along the main road, to the largest community in the reserve. We were in the most easily accessible (and therefore the most heavily developed) part of the reserve. The expanses of forest I had imagined do exist, they’re just further north east or west, away from the roads, and a little smaller than I had thought. Tomorrow we’re driving to a community about an hour deeper into the reserve than Dos Aguados. I can’t wait to see what it’s like further in. Hopefully, there will be forest.

Kids + Motorcycles > Religion + Crying

I moved! I'm now living in San Miguel, across a narrow stretch of lake from Flores. Instead of riding a bus for an hour to get to work, I ride a boat for two minutes. I also have my own room (complete with Pokemon curtains and Spiderman sheets), my own bathroom and a gorgeous lake view I'm very willing to share with the Australian couple staying across the hall. I'll put together some pictures of my new home this weekend, when I have time to explore the peninsula. I hear there's a beach, and a watchtower in a tree, and a small mayan site!

That, though, is for another day. I still have stories about San José to tell, before they fade too far back into the early days of my trip. I spent my last weekend hanging out with Elma, Rudy and their family. They were a very kind host family, and they made an effort to include me, so I made an effort to spend some time with them. Saturday, I heard there was a wedding, and Elma invited me to the reception that night. This was fantastic news - I love weddings, they're always a good party, and I was very excited to see how another culture celebrates them. The whole family got dressed up (I put on the tie I had brought, "just in case I found myself in a situation where I would need a tie" - talk about vindication, eh?) and we headed down into town. Well, unfortunately, I misunderstood something, because while there was a wedding reception party that afternoon, we were not attending it. We were going to visit the mother of the bride, and eat chicken soup. It was delicious chicken soup, and I practiced my best spanish culinary complements, to hide my disappointment at the lack of wedding. After a half hour of pleasantries over soup, we took our leave, and my family went to church.

There are two churches in San José - the large Catholic Church (the Guatemalan mixture of Catholacism with indigenous Mayan traditions is the predominant religion in Petén) and and a small Evangelical Culto (means worship, but also cult). Rudy and his brothers run the little Evangelical Iglesia de Paz, and I had gone to the service the last Sunday. It had lasted for three hours, and the principle belief I had picked up was that there's no such thing as going overboard when it comes to praising god. I woke to Rudy playing praise-the-lord music at 7am on sunday morning, at a level of volume usually reserved for clubs on friday night. The music continued throughout the Sunday service, with members of the congregation getting up to sing, some powerfully, and some with a stubborn determination that reminded me of the methodist church I attended in my youth. Regardless of talent, they all had stamina. If you got up to sing, you were up there for ten minutes, minimum. Rudy, a barrel-chested man, sang for 22 minutes, the congregation clapping along with every beat.

For the past week, I had begged off invitations to nightly services in fear of similar lengths, but now I was trapped, dressed up and following them into the church. I was asking Elma were the bathroom was as an excuse to step outside within ten minutes. Saturday was the time for the praise-jesus-shouting-to-cast-out-the-devil-people-sobbing-on-the-floor worship. They formed a line, and Rudy, tears filling his eyes, his voice breaking, shouted their faces, imploring god for the forgiveness of this lost, sinful soul. There's something horribly disconcerting about a body, stretched out in front of an alter, shaking as the person sobs. For me, the sight provoked feelings of fear and sorrow, a sense of something gone terribly wrong.

It was very strange, having this side of the family revealed just before I left them. The timing, combined with the fact that this sort of communal religious intensity is very unappealing to me, made it seem like the whole thing had been some sort of secret, or that I was leaving because of it, which of course wasn't true. Nonetheless, the uncomfortable feeling was there. I hid outside with the children for the rest of the service.

I had lifted my camera once inside the church, and everyone had looked at me, immediately. I never lifted it again, though I would have loved to put a lens between myself and that scene. Outside, I found a much more receptive audience.

One kid muttered something about how some other kid wanted to have his picture taken. That other kid hotly denied any such impertinent desire, but as soon as I turned my camera on, every one of them leapt into poses, climbing on the motorcycle, the stairs, each other! All grinning, all throwing up bunny ears, all insisting they see each picture immediately after it was taken. I had a great time with them.

Rudy's nephew, Emiliano (the eight-year-old space cadet in the yellow shirt) was my best buddy. He was the one who would sneak up under my window while I was writing and whisper "hola" quietly until I looked out to see what was going on. Then we'd talk abut his broken remote control helicopter (he could tell me which broken parts kept it from flying), or what sorts of machines I couldn't drive. Hanging out in front of the church, he made me explain the function of every single button on my

camera, something I was pretty happy to try to

do. I even took a shot at explaining aperture and shutter speed. The next day I let him take a picture of me with my camera, one of the first of me down here - which came out great! What a champ. When I left I gave him a high five, and he asked for a hug "¿Un abrazo, amigo?".

My first night in San Miguel, I watched the lights of Flores shine across the lake, and I felt incredibly excited about my new, independent life. Still, it's nice to know that I can go back and visit them (just not on a saturday night) and catch up with Emiliano and the rest.