Semana Santa - It doesn't work as well when there's no work to do.

I'm on vacation and I'm not sure I like it. The bits of my mind that are usually filled with work are suddenly free to relax and do something else for a while, and they all seem to have settled on missing home. I had meant to escape Flores (and tourists, and civilization) and go for a trek through the jungle, but the tour to El Mirador (a full 5 day's hike) fell through, and I didn't move fast enough to plan anything else. This turned out well, because I've been hanging out with Gabriel and Terry, their friends from Mexico and volunteers from England. The past few nights have been late and full of music.

But as much as I enjoy my time with my new friends, I miss my family, and my old friends. I feel caught between the two vast, slow months between now and a flight into Boston, and the nine short weeks into which I must fit everything I want to and need to accomplish before I leave Guatemala. More than anything, I'm absolutely done with being a tourist. I've spent the past three months trying to earn my local-ness, and I feel like I'm doing pretty well. I run into people I know all over Flores, I have close friends and a wonderful relationship with my host family, and the Lancheros only try to charge me tourist rates occasionally. My recent trip to Belize showed me how important all that is to me. I crossed the border and everything was subtly new. I didn't know the right prices or exchanges and was immediately taken advantage of. During the first day, I struggled not to respond to questions in Spanish, even though the signs and voices around me were English. Going to Caye Caulker, where the snorkeling is incredible, but the tourist/islander relationship is about as stereotypical as it gets, and where the group of hostel guests "just needs to find a place where we can get a decent pizza!" was not something I was prepared for. My time on the water was wonderful, and I will be glad to tell you in person how many incredible sea creatures I saw, but the minute I got back to shore, I knew I had to get the hell back to Flores.

Unfortunately, I still want to do things that involve being a tourist. The limestone pools at Semuc Champey, the numerous ruins to the north - basically anything outside the Flores-San Miguel loop I live in - I want to see. I hear so many versions of what Petén is - from the books I read, the people I work with in ProPetén, the people we work with through ProPetén and the family I live with - that I have to go out and see for myself what it's really like. It just bothers me that I haven't found a way to do these things without putting on my tourist hat.

At any rate, I'll go back to work week, launch my first website (!!!) and wonder what the rainy season (coming soon) will be like. Regardless of my social/emotional/identity/purpose difficulties, I'm still surrounded by some pretty significant natural beauty, and I'll finish this post up with some pictures.

[edit] for all my complaints, I can't help but smile when I look at the pictures I'm taking of the beautiful world around me. Also, I went hiking this past weekend, and I have CRAZY pictures and stories about that, which I'll write soon - maybe tomorrow.

For a slow-paced lifestyle, things move fast...

I said goodbye to Leah in the Guatemala City airport, boarded a urine-scented bus, and slept on and off for the 12 hour trip back to Flores. This was almost a month ago, and the intervening days have flown like none other.

My March-April crossover (always fondly remembered in New England as that time when we actually get some sun and flowers, and if we're lucky a dry patch of grass to sit on an enjoy it all) has been filled with interesting and new types of work, friends, and plans.

Most of my work has been building this new English website for ProPetén. Their old site was designed on 1990's internet principles, and wasn't really working anymore, so while I had a lot of work to do, it wasn't like I could make anything worse. Because I have absolutely no experience with coding or hosting or site design at all, I put them up on Wordpress - a truly fantastic platform, which I will be leaving Blogger for as soon as I have the time. The first week was a whirlwind of discovering the difference between Wordpress.org and .com (the first requires a server and lots of coding knowledge, the second is just right for me!), checking out other NGOs running Wordpress sites and stealing all of their ideas, and wrestling with widgets. The best parts were my brief encounters with code, during which I discovered that i can totally decipher which parts control what, and make very basic edits. Yes, I was only altering the fontkit installation, but I did feel like a hacker in a movie.

Of course, my work now involves translating and updating the old site's content, some (most) of which is muy viejo - very old. This work makes me feel much less like the kids from Wargames, but it's also the part that people will actually notice when they visit the site. At best, all that fun work will only (hopefully) create a pleasant and professional background that no one will really notice - my objective was basically the opposite of anything to do with flashing neon GIFs.

We plan on lauching (yeah, launching, check out that professional web designer terminology) the site on the 15th, after which I'll no doubt send it to everyone I know so they'll be wicked impressed and test out our new donate button. Coincidentally, the 15th is also the due date of my honors thesis proposal, on which rides nothing less than my acceptance to 5th year. NBD man. So I've been switching between web design and furiously reading several hundred pages of articles, so that I can prove that I actually know what I'm going to be writing about. Odds are that I'm more worried about this than I should be, but being out of the country for this whole application process has set me on edge. I'm basically terrified that I'll do something wrong, and then won't find out or be able to fix it in time. So there's that as well.

Luckily, life's not all work and worry. It's also friends and adventures! We have a new volunteer here at ProPetén (that's right, I am no longer the least knowledgeable person here!). Her name's Julia, and she's one of those 20-somethings who worked for a while after school, and then headed south in search of adventure. She's had some experience with NGO fundraising, which is exactly what we need, and she wanted to settle somewhere for a month and do some volunteering, so we were exactly what she wanted. It's been fun having another volunteer here, and since we live right next door to each other, we hang out a lot, drinking wine (here in guatemala it's pronounced VINEGAR) on the shore with the Lancheros, hanging out with the old peace corps couple that are staying with Marta and Oscar and the like. Yesterday we drove to San Andres to visit the scholarship students, and on the way , Gabriel had to stop to repair a computer cable, which apparently takes forever. The heat might have become a problem while the two of us stayed with the truck, but boredom certainly wasn't. Julia introduced me to Trash Game, which consists of sitting on the edge of the gaping hole in the parking area, and throwing rocks at the trash at the bottom. We got to the point where we were able to bounce rocks off the plastic Coke bottles and have them hit other pieces of trash before Gabriel came back and had a good laugh at us.

We were planning on making the whole trip up past San Andres to Cruze dos Aguadas (the central, more deforested community), but their teachers are on strike this week, so there were no grades for us to check. Today, though, we're heading west to Paso Caballos, closer to the Laguna del Tigre national park, a very fun trip at the end of which, we hope, there will be no striking teachers. I've got my camera batteries charged, my lenses in the bag, and we're leaving in about ten minutes.

So to wrap up with a quick look forward, Semana Santa and the expiration of my 3 month visa are coming up, so I'm planning to run to Belize just as soon as I hand in my thesis proposal. I'm also hoping to head north sometime soon (waaay north) to El Mirador, an uncovered site up by the mexican border. It's two days through the jungle to get there, and two back, which sounds like the coolest adventure ever, and a wonderful escape from the throngs of Semana Santa.

Time to load the truck!

Adios