La Vida Campureña

I swear I haven’t turned back into a lazy blogger. The past week has had me running all over Guatemala in areas where gmail took roughly 5 minutes to load—let alone the ability to upload photos.

So after Tikal, I took a bus over to Rio Dulce and hopped on a beautiful boat ride up the river to the Carribean coast of Guatemala and the neat little rundown town of Livingston. With a healthy mix of Mayan and Garifuna (people descended from slaves) cultures, a great (fun) hostel, and good food, Livingston proved to be a worthwhile trip. While I only spent roughly 24 hours in the town (and entirely way too much money on booze), I had to keep moving and make my way toward the city of Cobán.

The 13 hour trip from Livingston to Puerto Barrios to Cobán was easily the most tedious of the trip, as it required a boat ride, a few too many chicken bus transfers, a military stop, and a micro ride into Cobán at night. I’m not the biggest fan of traveling at night for safety reasons, so during my ride into the city, I was probably on edge the most that I’ve been this entire trip. However, I made it to my hostel without a hitch and enjoyed a nice deep sleep before waking up early the next morning to visit two of my friends in their village roughly two hours outside the city.

Campur

Jareau and Hannah are two Peace Corps volunteers that we met way back during our first visit in Antigua. When the Guatemalan government decided to flex some muscle and hammer down on some drug lords who were finding a safe haven in Cobán, they instituted a military siege in the Guatemalan state of Alta Verapaz, and as a result the United States government pulled all the Peace Corps volunteers out of the area for safety—but mainly political—reasons. After talking at length with Jareau and Hannah about the good, bad and ugly of the Peace Corps, they extended an invitiation for me to go visit their site in Campur after the siege had ended and see what the day-to-day process is like. Having had an intital pause about visiting the area due to reasons involving my safety, they were able to convince me otherwise by claiming that life in their village is much different than anything that goes on in the cities. So I awoke early in the morning in Cobán and hopped on a little micro for roughly two hours out to Campur.

Riding on the bus I realized I was in for a completely new adventure and my time spent in this village would be unlike anything I had done at that point mainly due to the fact that everybody looked at me as if I was an alien from another planet, traveling to a place where gringos didn’t travel, and I couldn’t understand a single word that anyone was speaking—because hardly anyone knew how to speak Spanish.

One of the most surprising facts that I learned when I arrived in Guatemala was that nearly 50% of the population either spoke Spanish as a second language or didn’t speak Spanish at all. Due to the strong Mayan lineage in Guatemala most of the population in the country is raised speaking one of the many dialects that the original Mayan languages have branched into. In Alta Verapaz and many other areas throughout Guatemala, the main dialect that is spoken is Q’eqchi’.

My little van wove through the lush green mountains of Alta on unpaved roads that failed to have any guard rails until I reached my final destination: Campur. My first impression of the town was actually a bit of culture shock. While the brick and brightly colored buildings were what I was used to throughout my travels, the dirt roads (which were mud roads, as it was pouring out) weren’t really something that I was used to. It took only a few moments before I was covered with mud up to my ankles. Also giving that I arrived on a market day, there were hoards of people about and when I exited the micro, all eyes turned to me: the tall gringro with a beard. I definitely felt like an outsider. While I had fairly good directions to find Hannah and Jareau’s house, I still was lost in this new town, and for the first time I found myself having to ask shop keepers not only for directions, but if they knew how to speak Spanish, as I do not know a single word of Q’eqchi’. I eventually found their humble abode and after dropping my things on the couch, I was taken on tour of the town to see some of the schools they worked at and to meet some of the locals.

Little did I know before coming but I happened to descend upon Campur during ‘feria’ when the village gets a sort of mini carnival to visit and each day is celebrated with a variety of events. My first day I was lucky enough to attend a beauty pageant, where a panel of judges picked the Campur girl who looked the best and provided the best answers to a variety of questions. While the three of us had an absolute blast at the packed event eating local treats and mingling with coworkers and friends, I couldn’t help but think that the American-export of a beauty pageant was probably not the greatest thing for Guatemala. Oh well, the town—or at least the men of the town—seemed to enjoy the event.

The next day I traveled with Hannah for roughly an hour to a neighboring village where she established the first women’s group in the area. For the past few months she has been working on getting funding to build a series of pilas (concrete wash basins where the women clean food, clothing, dishes, and children) in the village. The group was able to put together roughly 30% of the cost themselves, and Hannah called the meeting to tell the women that the other 70% of the money had been raised back in the States and the check was in the mail. In addition to a bit of talking about logistics, we also spent the majority of the meeting introducing black bean burgers to the women—who tied for cash as it was, could be introduced to new high-protein foods that were not as expensive as meat. My presence at the meeting was quite the novelty, as both the children that were there and the women loved my camera. Throughout the meeting the women couldn’t stop giggling at me and my mistakes in cooking and dropping food, and Hannah also told me that the women thought I looked like a soap opera star. While the meeting was rather flattering, I thought that having a group like this in such a far off area was absolutely amazing. While it didn’t seem like a whole lot got accomplished during the 2.5 or so hours that we were there, having just about every woman in the small village to get together and just talk and share stories once a week was amazing to be around, and being there was easily one of the highlights of my trip.

The following day we were treated to a fantastically long parade where all the schools in the area strutted their stuff by walking through the streets of Campur behind a series of drumlines. As in the States, some of the drumlines were better than the others but I was truly impressed at how many people were involved with each one, as some of the drumlines had about twenty members or so. As expected, the drums were of a quality that would be laughed at in the United States, and the kids carved their own drumsticks out of tree branches, but many of the groups could not only hold a beat but some were very very talented. I was very impressed.

After a few days seeing the town, seeing the schools Jareau and Hannah volunteered at, meeting quite a bit of people, eating a lot of really good home cooked food, playing Bananagrams and sharing quite a number of laughs, I had to move on and travel only an hour down the road to an area that was described to me as “the most beautiful place in Guatemala” when I first arrived in the country: Semuc Champey. Even though it poured during the two days that I visited the national park, I had an amazing time swimming in the river behind my hostel and exploring the spring fed, deep pools of the park. The low hanging, misty clouds provided me with a feeling of isolation that was similar to feelings I received while in Palenque, and the howler monkeys were out in full force--making the park feel (and sound) like Jurassic Park. Along with Livingston, Semuc Champey is a place that I will most definitely return to when I make another visit back to Guatemala.

Howler Monkeys

So I currently find myself back in Cobán ready to board a bus in the morning to head back to Antigua, where I will stay for a night before boarding a plane Wednesday and returning back to Chicago after two months abroad. I plan on having one more blog post before I return to O’Hare to try to sum up this experience, so until then I hope everyone is enjoying themselves, and I plan on seeing many of you very soon.

Semuc Champey

Clowns at the Feria

I guess I'm tall.