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.