San Andres

12/27/01 - 2nd leg - Dallas to Guatemala City

Weeks of preparation are now coming to fruition. Narrowly avoided missing our connection in Dallas when I didn't set my watch ahead 2 hours to Central time. Luckily I spotted a clock in the food court that had the correct time and it was just 15 minutes till the flight left. Made it back with 5-10 minutes to spare - even got seats changed so we got an aisle seat.

Slept some on the 1st leg. Hope I haven't kinked my neck in a major way. The sleeping couldn't be helped given just 5 1/2 hours of sleep last night. Not that I had trouble sleeping - just had to get up at 4:30am to make the flight.

Gotta remember to take our malaria pills tonight. It has been one week since the first dosage and 8 days since the typhoid injection. I gotta say that Zack was a real trooper the night we got the injections. I could tell he was very nervous but he really seemed to not want to let it show and toughed it out in a really major way. That was on the 20th.

It was the 14th that I went to get Zack's passport. A very easy process if you follow the instructions. It was surprising how many people showed up at the agency without the necessary elements.

Ticketing only 3 1/2 weeks before the trip had its problems. Given travel volumes around Christmas, plus reduced flight availability since 9/11, I really needed to book at least several weeks earlier to have some flexibility.

12/28/01 9:45am - 3rd leg - Guatemala City to Flores, Flores to San Andres

An adventurous morning. At 4am we got the wakeup call at the very ritzy hotel Intercontinental in Guatemala City. By 4:30 we're in the lobby as advised by the front desk. Next we discover that the shuttle to the airport doesn't run until 6am which, of course, would mean that we'd miss our flight. So, hire a taxi it is. The doorman goes out and wakes up the cabbie who has been sleeping his car. We're to the airport by 4:45, only to discover that the GrupoTaca counter doesn't open 'til 5:15. So we wait - at least we're at the front of the line. Check our bags - no problem - of course there is the airport exit tax to be paid. No change for Q100, so I pay with $2US and suffer poor exchange rates. Done by 5:30 for a 6:30 flight - clearly the hotel desk was wrong.

Around 6, we make our way to the gate, but we wait until boarding begins at 6:30. Out across the tarmac, up the stairs into a 24-passenger twin engine prop plane. Our assigned seats are an exit row and before long the flight attendant come to move us to another row. It's unclear if that is because Zack is too young or we don't speak Spanish well enough. Next we get an announcement that the flight is delayed due to weather - fog covers the airfield, so it is no surprise. By the time we're off the ground it is 7:30. No wonder the next flight, of which we met a young American woman passenger, was delayed to 8:30 at check in.

We arrive at Flores International airport, a small 2-room terminal, a non-functional luggage conveyor isn't really needed as the handler just tosses our bags at the end anyway. Nobody from EcoMaya meets us and for awhile I'm stumped on what to do. An insistent taxi driver finds somebody with better English, who explains that he's never seen EcoMaya pick anybody up at the airport. Ok, hire the taxi guy to take us to the EcoMaya office. We get there - its only 8:45, the place is closed up tight. Now what?! After a couple of minutes debate with myself, I acquiesce to the driver's suggestion that he take us to the school in San Andres. The pavement ends at the outskirts of St. Elena, and your basic washboard dirt road leads us to San Andres 30 minutes later.

A tight winding street down the side of a hill leads to the EcoEscuela. Occasionally broken cement over cobblestones - pigs and piglets, scrawny dogs, unattended children all populate the streets.

We arrive at the EcoEscuela and I am relieved that it is at least populated - not sure yet if they were genuinely expecting us today or not. Usually classes start on Monday somebody explains (maybe he's el jefe de la escuela), but he quickly improvises a new schedule for us. He offers special classes for Saturday and Sunday, the regular class on Monday at which the director will provide more of an orientation, Tuesday off because it will be New Years Day, the regular classes and activities in the afternoon for the rest of the week. As he reiterates the offer a bottle rocket flies in through the door and explodes across the room.

No activities on Saturday and Sunday he assures us, but we can hang out with our family and walk around. I ask to see a map of San Andres and he brings it. San Andres in 2001 seems smaller than San Blas in the 1960's. The mercado closed for lack of business he explains, so there are only a few tiendas. For a mercado one needs to go to a larger town nearby (probably St. Elena).

Next el jefe takes us to the house of our family. The lady of the house is out shopping and the eldest son sits the children. So we wait for her return and listen to the sounds around us. A radio plays rap music in Spanish and English, the more standard fare in Spanish, then some classic rock in English. A pig snorts by our window outside. Numerous kinds of wild birds calling. A pair of scraggly looking ducks with a largish downy duckling threaten to traipse in through the door. An outboard motor drones by on the lake which is only 40 feet below the window. A cock crows and startles Zack, who has never heard one crow out of nowhere in the middle of the day.

Ulisses come down to tell us lunch will be in an hour. I ask him to spell his name so I can remember it then look up "warrior" to ask if that is who he is named after.

12/28/01 - 8:40pm

After Ulisses made and served us lunch, we had a bit of a siesta. At 2 he came to take us on a walk around town. Parts of town had splendid views of the lake, much does not. The town is perched on a hill over the lake and is steep along the lakeside. We ended up across from the city hall at a place that used to be the mercado. I heard a marimba playing and so we went to investigate. A kid about 7 or 8 was practicing in a storage room of the old mercado. After awhile Ulisses convinced him to play a song or two. Then later some adults joined from the restaurant next door to cheer the boy's playing. At length I asked how long he'd been playing and whether he was learning from his father. The answer was that he'd only been playing a couple of months and that he was learning from a friend who ran a local marimba school. At even more length, the adult friend arrived and played as well, beginning with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. I laughed and then explained to the boy that it was the national song of the U.S.

Zack finally lost interest, so we moved on. Ulisses took us to the pool hall around the corner which he explained was run by his aunt (wife of his father's brother). We played a couple of times at the local game where the balls must be shot in sequence from 1 to 15. The game is made more challenging since the cue ball wasn't round and the bumpers didn't bounce true. Zack had one angle shot into a bumper that came straight back! Although the first game was supposed to be free, I paid for both and a soda for Zack as well.

On the return trip in the late afternoon we sat and watched a kid's soccer game - one team uniformed, the other a motley mixture of kids of various sizes. The little kids were fearless and tackled with gusto, running, passing and shooting with no shoes let alone shin guards.

A bit more meandering on the way home and then we met Ulisses's mother there. She made dinner that was soup with squash and potatoes.

A little later Ulisses joined Zack and me for a game of Five Crownes, which he mastered fairly quickly, but apparently got bored and left without finishing.

12/29/01 - 5:15pm

First day of school. My teacher is Alixa (pronounced Alitsa) - the niece of Francisca our host. We spent a great deal of time just talking about who we are where we come from and etc. She's 20, a university student in a 5 1/2 year program to become a social worker. Her novio is 16 and in the same program as Ulisses to become a teacher.

I took a standard exam that allowed la maestra to determine those things that I needed to work on. We took a brief walk to the tienda up the street to buy notebooks for Zack and me; something like Q2.75 apiece (about 34 cents U.S.). Then I got to take notes in earnest as we reviewed the past, present and future tenses of ser and estar, plus all of their uses - 8 in all for ser and 3 for estar. Then I got to copy a bunch of vocabulary words used in conjunction with the verbs.

By the end of the 4 hours Zack had gone from being very shy and hardly saying a thing, to exclaiming "Oh!" when he knew the answer to a question. The teaching clearly seems appropriate to kids his age, even with nearly no experience in the language.

Lunch back at the house was amazing - deep fried cauliflower, potatoes in a creamy sauce and fried rice with carrots.

Zack and I played a game of hears using an improvised subset of the Five Crownes deck, then worked on our homework together since we both had lessons related to ser and estar.

Mid-afternoon, we decided it was time for a walk down to the lake. After asking Francisca for directions, we strolled down to a public "beach" between San Andres and San Jose, a village maybe 1/2 mile east on the lake shore. The beach featured a relatively fine gravel of sandstone and random broken bits that were larger. Zack found appropriate stones for skipping and I amused myself trying to capture him on film without having him mug for the camera - only moderately successfully. A gaggle of late teenaged girls arrived. They went up on the top of the building that is the apparent main feature of the beach - being distinguished by the fact that the surface of the lake is a few inches above the window sills. This makes it an ideal sunbathing platform and the locals clearly enjoy it. The older boys seem to dive from it was well, although we didn't witness any. Before the girls left, a gringo showed up to sunbathe on the roof. A little later we joined him and chatted for awhile. Alex is from Philly and is down visiting friends. Apparently everybody in town IS related. The family he's staying with is Ulisses's tia (aunt) that owns the pool hall, and he's staying in a house about 3 doors up the street.

Also spent time trying to get some shots of local fisherman in dugout canoes. Two guys in the water with a net walking in chest deep water. The fish they were catching seemed to be finger sized, so I've got to assume they're the bait for something else. Maybe I'll ask at dinner.

Tonight we have electricity. Last night we did not and so played cards by candlelight. I spoke with Francisca some last night. She's separated from her husband, reason not given, and supports herself and 4 kids, and is studying to be a nurse. Clearly this part of the family values education highly, as well as the right of women to choose a career. Perhaps her husband didn't agree.

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