Farewell to the capital

Spurts of automatic gunfire interrupt the comparative tranquility of the night. Airplanes roar overhead at 500m on their way to La Aurora. Everyone you meet tells you not to carry watches, cameras, jewelry, or look confused or lost. Just keep walking, quickly. And don’t go to zone 1… or several others… and don’t be on the street after it starts getting dark. Ick. Sounds awful, but from the bits of “Guate” that we’ve seen, it’s not so bad if you’re careful. Of course, we haven’t done any of those things we aren’t supposed to do, so maybe we’ve just been in the right places at the right times. I think I’d much rather be in room at night anyway. The streets would get kind of spooky. Today was a party in Guatemala City. Every Sunday is. Since there’s not a lot of free space in many zones, they cordon off streets and let people walk and ride their bikes and play with their kids on them—converting them into mini-parks. It’s a wonderful change from the cacophony of traffic and the clouds of smoke that belch from motorcycles, cars, and buses with unregulated emissions. Where traffic needs to cross the street for some reason, crossing guards with plastic chains stop pedestrian flow for a minute at a time and let the traffic across. After walking down to the nearest chapel, where there was a stake conference at 10a.m., we meandered back enjoying the change of scenery in the streets. Families with their pets, kids with their bikes, the occasional skateboarder… all these people must go into hiding somewhere during the week, but on Sunday they can play. After church a missionary couple working with the Perpetual Education Fund picked us up and took us to their apartment for dinner. It was wonderful. Between delicious food (I think we mentioned that we hadn’t really had dinner all week, since everything was closed by the time we left our second workshop, and the restaurants are all catering to a higher budget than the one we subscribe to) and excellent company, we had a lovely afternoon. We learned a bit more about the city, about Quetzaltenango (“Xela”), and about bargaining at local markets, and a lot more about the Perpetual Education Fund. Great program, that! The view from their 9th story apartment was incredible. You could see all one side of the city and out into the mountains. One active volcano near the edge of the city was spewing smoke. It’s been a few years since anyone had to be evacuated because of increased activity, and even longer since it’s had a major eruption, but it would still make me a little nervous to live under its shadow. Tomorrow we leave Guate for Xela. It would be wonderful to spend some time exploring Lake Atitlan or any of the places between here and there, but we’ll go pretty much directly. Hopefully we’ll have some time to enjoy the scenery once we get settled in our new place. We’ll kind of be starting over there—we aren’t sure what we’ll be doing and who we’ll be working with, what is already in place and what we’ll have to put in place ourselves. I guess we’ll find out. It’ll be a fun adventure and we have each other for good company, so we won’t get lonely. I really won’t miss being in the capital. It's been a great week to get to know some things about the country and the work we'll be doing, but I wasn't made for the big city. It would be a great place to be if I was touristing, because I’d have money and free time, and a tourist guide, but I’m excited for the calmer, less troubled life in the highlands. We’ll take some pictures on the way and get them up whenever we can. We don’t know how often we’ll have Internet access in our new place, so I won’t make any promises.