Day 13 - 25: Compounded in the City

Day 13 - 25: Compounded in the City

You see some sh*t in the city...

Dreamfood:

• Last Tuesday, me and a couple others turned a dead bar into the hottest club in the city that night. We just showed up, moved all the tables and chairs then created our own dance floor and just lit it up! It was so fun.
• I swam in and climbed a rainforest waterfall at Sabana Grande
• I saw the most beautiful blue butterflies flit about the trees there as well

Culturescape:

• A lot of the citizens of Guatemala are upset with the political situation. I know this because we've started working on our media projects, and my project is about the government corruption and how the civil war and genocide influenced that. But, as I've started my research along with my partners, Lucas and Claire, I've gotten to learn more about Guatemalan culture...
• Asking someone who they voted for is socially not something people do (learned that the embarrassing way)
• Guatemala City is interesting... It's set up in zones. The centre of the city is zone 1 and it continues outward in a spiral pattern all the way to 36 or 37 I believe. Each zone has a kind of theme. Our home base is in zone 2, and when we are out walking near our base, it feels like any other city, but once we take a taxi or a bus we see how different the zones are. There's zone 10, a big commercial tourist area, but then right next to it are large shantytowns where people live in cardboard houses and are starving to death. It's really interesting to see the separation between zones.
• Day 15 we had a city tour. Now, this tour wasn't a 'tourist tour', it was a cultural tour. Juan Carlos, the CCS president of Guatemala, took us to Cemetario General (I think it was this one) which is set up in streets just like a mini version of the city. For the richer zones, there were more expensive looking tombs, but for the poorer parts, there were large above ground tower things with just enough space for a casket. They were all stacked atop each with numbers for the empty ones; 17A, 12C, 14E. People would actually have to rent out these spaces for their deceased loved ones. 
• Near the end of the tour, Juan Carlos took us to an view that overlooked the city dump. It was right in the middle of these beautiful mountains and the mound of trash seeped into the river that split them. There were people rummaging around in the trash, and if I had to estimate I'd say there were maybe 50 people scrambling around the trucks as trash was being dumped on top of them. He told us these people would collect recyclable materials and sell them to plants and that they made less than $2 a day. It was shocking to witness. 

Learning curve:

• Staying in a hostel like situation with 28 people where you're only aloud to leave in groups of 4 is a reality show situation and it's really draining and hard. Everyone's patience is at 0, and we had a group intervention the other day. It's better now, but this is a really stressful living situation. Thank the lord we are leaving tomorrow because I don't know what would've happened had we stayed any longer.
• Interacting with people post-depression is different. I'm having a hard time navigating the social field because I'm a different person now and I don't completely understand what that means yet.
• I continually regret taking French in school because I feel like I'm missing out on so much since I don't share a language with the people here. 
• Assuming things is part of daily life. Not all assumptions are bad; they're actually beneficial to us and that's why we make them. They help us to navigate daily life and manage our natural curiosity. But, assumptions can hold you back. Not everything is what you think it is, so remember to try everything because you never know what may happen...

Scare Cam:

• A fellow TBB student, Tess, came up to me on a hiking trail above that waterfall and says "Do I have something in my eye?" As I went to check, I watched A BUG crawl from one side of her eye to the other! I got it out but will be forever scarred...
• We also encountered a snake along the river there and I tried to kill me.
• As my friend, Lucas, and I were walking down the street interviewing people today, we heard loud noises come from behind us. We turned around to see a man with the biggest whip I'd ever seen just hitting the ground. It was terrifying until we saw the herd of goats that was following him...
• Just today, I was walking in a park with Peter, my program leader, and suddenly a large branch just cracks and falls to the ground just one foot in front of us. We. Almost. Died.

Human Highlight:

My new friend, Lucas De Lorenzo Eberley, for pulling through some tough stuff this week.

Fun fact:

Car alarms sound like a siren you'd hear in a movie when something goes terribly wrong in a science lab. It's a very concerning sound when you don't know what it means.

Now, to wrap it up...

BE patient.

This has proved crucial to emotional survival in my living situation.

"Never been here before; I'm intrigued. I'm unsure,"

This is a quote from the song Pure Shores by All Saints.

Click here to see a video from my time in Guatemala!

Keep thinking,

Meg