User:Vagrant/Guatemala

on the tail end (or more probably the middle) of my trip to mexico, i found myself in guatemala. well, i put some effort towards getting here.

Xela(food)

i´ve been in Xela (Chey-la, a.k.a. Quetzaltenango) for two and a half days now. overall, the food here seems to contain more vegetable content than mexico, which is good, but it´s actually harder to find vegetarian food. go figure.

i ate fried banana-mush stuffed with beans today, with a side of fried banana. it was maybe overkill on the banana part, but otherwise great.

yesterday, i got this excellent thing called ¨plato vegetariano¨, which amounted to a huge plate of... arroz(rice), papas(potatos), vetabel(beets), sandia(watermelon), zanahorias(carrots), and cebellitas verde(little green onions), and some other starchy thing that i´ve had before but can´t come up with a name for it. all very nicely cooked, with something that seemed kind of like horchata and of course, nice thick tortillas, with some salsas on the side. it was so good, even the beets. solo diez y ocho queztales!

i also had some roasted corn on the cob, and there was music in el parque central. it made me totally feel like i was in some summer in wisconsin in some rural fair or something. except everyone was speaking spanish and it was very urban. but the corn, the cheesy music... so reminiscent. i guess you have to have been there.

this is also nestled in beautiful, lush mountains, and it rains heavily for a couple hours a day.

this looks to be home for the next few weeks.

my clock

today, someone asked for the time, and i told them, and showed them, and they grabbed my alarm clock and stuck it in their pocket. eventually, he wanted 2 quetzales for it back. i stubbornly refused and even physically got in his face a little, pushing a bit and saying, in plain english ¨give it back¨, hoping my anger, and maybe even my overall mass was apparent to the little guy. useless. this was in some back alley somewhere. fortunately, a woman hovering in her doorway saw the whole thing, and got what i presume to be her husband, and he kindly, firmly demanded from the fellow that he give it back to me, which eventually worked.

looking back on it all, i feel a little stupid. at the same time, i knew the woman was watching and had a feeling somehow that would help out. who knows.

spanish school

so, i´ve been debating for a while weather to go to the awesome-sounding`political spanish school http://www.hermandad.com, or to the cheaper, not quite as cool sounding one http://spanishschool.com (nice domain). well, fate decided for me. after wandering by the one place numerous times the past few days, they actually came to the door and i signed myself up for the not so cool one for a week, with the thougt that i could maybe go to the other later in my stay here. well, the cool place is filled up till august. decision made.

my brain hurts

so, four days in spanish school. about 4 hours a day of active one-on-one spanish lessons. when i am done, i go back to my family (oh yeah, i{ve been inserted into a local guatemalan family{s life), eat lunch, marvel at how my brain hurts, and take an hour or two nap each day. on the second day, i nearly wanted to cry. one of the teaching tools involves making examples for all the various conjugations of verbs, or peculiar uses or phrases. i pretty quickly understand the grammatical structure and whatnot, but pressed for an example with no real connection to necessity, i draw a complete blank. i now have a relatively firm grasp of about 22 verbs. wow.

don{t ask me about apostraphes.

mas vegetales

so, i´ve at times felt some of my sleepiness is due to a lack of vegetables. friday night, though, i finally got to cook. there was a potluckish sort of dinner going on at the spanish school, and i picked up a bunch of vegetables at the market and made a dish that was.... entirely vegetables. zanahorias, cebollas, chiles jalepeno, limon, chiles dulse, and... um... green cabbage and green beans. it felt so good. hopefully we adequately cooked everything and i won´t be regretting it several days later. someone also brought vinto tinto de chile(cabernet savignone... or something like that, anyways), which was so tasty.

we also went out for drinks later, and i tried the local beer, gallo. pretty much the exact opposite of what i want in a beer. light and creamy. gah. rumour has it that it is, in fact, possible to find a good dark beer here. i´m skeptical, the darkest anyone has been able to demonstrate is maybe a nut brown. well, at least i´m a little closer to chile than portland or albuquerque. uh, not really.

p.s. i´m finally at a keyboard that´s properly configured. i can figure out how to make an ¨@¨, ¨´¨ and even square brackets. most are us keyboards with latin american mappings, or latin american keyboards with an inappropriate latin american mapping.

compost sin luces

so, not knowing what to do with myself, i finally sat down and wrote a little something about the church of compost. contrary to usual practice, i actually made a few revisions. then the lights went out, which i took as a sign that it was done.

i´ve been thinking about the church of compost a lot because i´ve been engaging in so much more than usual sacrilidge. it´s doesn´t cover everything, but it´s a pretty good fundamental premise.

comienzo a las moñtanas

so this morning i pointed in a direction towards some mountains and started walking. in about a half-hour, i was walking along a mountain pass with little steep-sloped farm plots all over the place. it was beautiful, with sun streaming down, and mountain mists hanging in every nook and cranny. the farms mostly were growing some leafy green looking thing, and of course, corn and possibly potato. i got far enough to see another city in the distance, and then decided to turn around.

dolore en mi cabeza

so, after a nice brunch (platos vegetarianos) in this little place near el parque central, i hopped up the little steps to leave, and BANG, smack my head very hard into a metal roof beam. next thing i knew, i was sitting in a small puddle, and everyone was looking at me. surely it was pretty loud. i took me glasses off, felt for blood (thankfully none), sat for a bit, stood up, tried to say something funny in spanish and failed, and they were still staring at me, so i simple said ¨esta bien¨, and started walking off. it´s a little raw.

i´m too tall for these parts.

history lesson

Guatemala has some brutal colonial history that still effects them to this day. from the spanish conquistadores, to involvement from the US as early as the 1820s, up through more recent times.

i often get this impression that there is US involvement in nearly every latin american country caught up in internal military strife. it´s part of my ambient shame with being a US citizen. but to know more specifically, to learn about exactly how it has effected individuals, entire communities, countries and ecosystems, it tears me up a bit more.

the following is information i learned from two sources, a movie(in english) about a survivor of one of the 1982 massacres, as well as from a talk (en español) by an ex-combatante involved in in the armed resistance to opression in guatemala. i haven´t verified much of this information with other sources.

as i understand it, during 1945-1955, there was a democratically elected government making wide-sweeping social changes for the health and welfare of it´s people, including novel ideas like giving women voting rights and major land reforms for the agrarian workers. somewhere in the late 50s and early 60s, with the help of a US trained military, this style of government was swiftly turned into a military-dominated government that continued on through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and quite possibly through the present day. it´s not infrequent that i see armed military walking around town on any given day.

in the 1960s up till 1996, there were small groups of poorly armed resistance. their numbers quite possible totaled around 2,000 individuals. in individual conflicts, the numbers were often 4 or more to 1. poorly funded and fed, they walked great distances in through mountainous regions. exactly how or what they accomplished, i unfrotunately couldn´t discern. but they struggled for beliefs for better education, health care, land rights, and other reforms which were largely either turned back, or simply not implemented. they certainly believed in what they were doing.

one of the large examples of oprression, one could even go so far as to call it genocide, was a series of massacres by the military, primarily in rural indigenous mayan villages in and around 1982. an approximate count of the lives directly effected includes 1.5 million displaced from their homes, about 50,000 missing, and 200,000 murdered. the dead were buried in mass graves, and there´s been recent international efforts to unearth these graves as proof in an attempt to hold those involved responsible.

to know that this military is US trained and supported is simultaneously no surprise, and repulsive. and i know the situation in guatemala is not unique.

so what to do? what to do...

homesick

ok, i´ve been pretty homesick this week. not that i really have a home. but yet, there are people, there are communities, and vegetables in sufficient quantities somewhere out there, and it´s a little difficult for me to really find it here. i mean, i know there are possibilities here, but as much progress as i´ve made on my spanish, it´s still pretty basic.

i both want to stay here longer in the hopes of getting over this phase, but also just want to race back immediately (well, as immediate as bus trips can be, anyways).

i spend a lot of time just lying in bed, thinking about so many things. and my old standby, default behavior when i don´t know what to do with myself, working on free software, isn´t so possible with my computer broken still(which has in many ways, been a good thing).

i´ve been living with a family for two weeks, and i barely know anything about them. it´s also really hard for me, the gender stereotypes- the women cooking, cleaning, everything domestic, and the men presumably going off somewhere to work, and when they come home, they´re expectant... not that they´re cruel or even disrespectful really. personally, i´m not even allowed to wash my own dish or clear the table or help in much of any way. it feels so awkward.

i´ll be staying in a hostel this coming week, just so i can cook for myself and eat vegetables, and maybe be more likely to stumble upon opportunities to get into these beatiful mountains. i´ll only be studying spanish for three days instead of five. depending on funds, i might study at the school for another week.

luces

the other night when i went to sleep, i kept seeing a bright flash out of the corner of my eye. a little disturbed that i might be having hallucinations or something, i investigated further and figured out it was a very large firefly that had snuck into my room. it was comforting to me to see it. i remembered a time when i had been in the northwest for several years, and returned to the midwest at the right time, and realized that i had totally forgotten fireflies existed. i was such a wonderful rediscovery, and i felt a bit of that again.

linux en español

so, working with my instructor, we convinced (they were pretty willing) the school to let us install linux on the second computer. so now i have at least one mostly working linux environment. por supuesto, i installed debian sarge. unfortunately, it was a little more difficult that i expected. so far, i´ve only gotten X to work at 640x480@16. the network card is some weird model, encore 10/100, that doesn´t work with the standard sundance module in debian sarge (hmmm... maybe i should try a newer kernel from backports.org). there´s some talk about recompiling a module for it from different sources on the intarweb. fortunately, i had a USB ethernet device that i´m currently loaning the school. hopefully i can figure out how to get this card working or find an alternative before i leave.

getting a working linux install is a crucial step towards getting my laptop working again. all i need now is that USB disk caddy for laptop drives that my instructor´s freind has... it´s suffering a little from the mañana syndrome. mañana notwithstanding, i hope i´ll be able to install linux on an extra partition, and then fsck my borked partition.