Merida

Tuesday was spent mainly on the bus on our way to Merida. We arrived in the "cultural center of Mexico" at around 4:30 after an 8am departure. Long day. Had chicken tacos and fresh papaya juice for dinner and then wandered around the zocalo for a bit. Also hit up the Internet and had a 15 peso mango margarita at a place called Maya Pub. In the zocalo, there were all sorts of hippies and tramps selling their art and wares. There was a girl reading poetry and a clown and a really great drum circle. I sipped a peppermint tea and looked and listened and felt so incredibly happy and comfortable and content in the most surprising way. It was that comfortably uncomfortable feeling that I had decided to search for two Octobers ago. I wanted to dance and just explode but my tea was at the perfect temperature so I stood and listened and sipped and danced on the inside. All I could think was "Life is good."

So good.

It you would like to see some snazzy pictures from Guatemala go here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/110812900673979302357/Benhameen?authkey=Gv1sRgCLrEgMSQgJmdBA&feat=directlink#

They are my friend´s pictures, he had the nicest camera. They´re really pretty (except for the ones with me) so take a look.

(His name is Ben Frisch)

It all started when Graciela´s butt was in the air and I smacked it and she said the word´pedo´along with some other words that i didn´t understand while she pointed to her butt. So naturally, i thought the word for BUTT was PEDO.

WRONGO.

So later on when we were all piling into the car, my butt got in the way of the door and I jokingly said ¨Pedo larga¨. what i MEANT to say was ¨big butt¨, but when Raquel burst into delirious laughter, i realized i must have said something stupid.

They tried to explain but it wasn´t until Angie actually made the sound with her mouth that I realized ´pedo´is the word for ´fart´. Once I realized this I legitimately burst into laughter that resulted in tears streaming down my face. What I had accidentally said was ¨long fart¨.

So, note to self: NALGA is the word for butt. Don´t get the two mixed up again PLEASE.

Although, it did make for a good laugh.

Just wanted to make a quick update as to where I´m at etc. Sorry I haven´t updated in a while but I promise it´s only because I´ve been so busy and happy &etc.

So I am in Costa Rica now. My Costa Rican family picked me up from the airport, and I quite literally cried when saw their shining faces at the arrivals gate. It is so surreal that I´m back here and that they care about me so much after only knowing me for 2 weeks 2 and a half years ago. We drove through San Jose and then up through the mountains. There is this one mountain that separates San Jose from the South West section of the country and... as far as i can understand my spanish host dad, it´s called death mountain. It´s freaking huge. Oh, and i can see it from my backyard.

The house is exactly the same as i remember it except this time they have a dog! it´s this awful pit bull/ midget dog mix and he is so adorable. i don´t know how to spell his name... and i usually just call him Perro anyways. I have my own room (my little brother´s room). My mom is still as good a cook as ever (My real mom is an amazing cook to, the cuisine is just more desireable here... more carby and cheesy and DELICUS as fabian says). However, the whole family has become more health concious since i was here last, which is good too.

The final days of Guatemala were some of the most bittersweet of my life. I tried very hard to soak it all in. The community itself is so inspiring, i learned more and more about their story and their strugles the further i got into the project. We ended up finishing 1137 bug traps, which is phenomenal. The traps that we put out have been checked and they already have bugs in them which means they´re working. Since the farm is struggling to be identified as an organic farm, the bug traps are crucial to the coffee plants.

I played a couple of games of futbol (soccer) in the final 3 weeks, and it was so much fun. I generally got my ass kicked (i have the bumps and bruises to prove it) but its SO much more fun getting you ass kicked at soccer by a guatemalan than a......stouffvillian.

So it´s been about two weeks since i departed Toronto. I have showered 3 times. I´m in a town\city called coatepeque... i think. I love driving out of La Florida, my heart was full to burst today. It´s just so beautiful. Mountainous jungles as far as the eye can see, mist, little clusters of communities and farms, patches of coffee plantations. And always a bright bright sun. Today there was an old man sitting on the side of the road with a double barrel shot gun and an orange push pop icecream. Guatemala has the most perfect weather.

So I don´t have much time but i´d like to take a moment to let you all know more about the project i´m on. It´s really cool.

La Florida is a farm community 1 hour outside of ´civilization´that is run collectively. That is, the land was donated to this group of people by the government, and they will never have to pay for it so long as they produce a certain amount of output per year. There is no single figurehead that makes the decisions, every decision is made and voted on by everyone in the community (except for the youth but we are working on that). All the money that is made from the farming (they have macademia, coffee and cacao plants) is distributed evenly amongst the workers, as everyone works from 6am-1pm on the collective farm, and then they can increase their economic income by working on their own individual plots of land. The farm is also completely organic. Right now we are working on making 2000 bug traps that are made out of plastic bottles that the community bought off of homeless people. They use a little bit of alcohol and red paint to attract the bugs to the traps and then the bugs get caught in a pool of water. They are a group that respects all living things. Including mice, so we have welcomed three little cats into our Casa Grande to take care of the mice and cockraoches.

We have a little bit of electricity now. Sometimes we have light and sometimes we don´t I still stink at cooking but everyone pretends to enjoy it. I´ve never eaten so many legumes in all my life. It is very peaceful in La Florida, except for when the icecream truck comes... he has a loudspeaker.

Spanish is improving little by little. I can understand almost everything anyone says, so long as they speak slowly. And i can muster up just enough spanish to respond.

On thursday we started our social projects. I had four women show up to my stretch and relaxation class. It was hard to do anything with them because they all wore skirts, one women was pregnant, and the other was 49 years old (but we all though she was at least 70). I am excited to continue working with these women, as they´ve expressed that they have no hobbies or anything to do. It was nice to see them giggling at the positions i had them in.

I am humbled daily my the members of La Florida. I have never seen poverty like this before but they are all so passionate about their collective way of life. I wake up every morning to a rooster and fall asleep every night to the crickets. They call the crickets ´hope´here.

to learn more about the finca go to fincalaflorida.org

just got word of a big earthquake in Guatemala City and I thought I'd touch base to let you know that I'm fine except for a bit of a humidity headache.
We felt some tremors here today but they say it's very normal.
Miss you tons.
I got to use a machete today to clean out the macadamia fields!

We got our luggage the day after landing and drove for 4 hours to the nearest city to the project, called Colomba. There we got onto the back of a pickup truck and winded our way up the mountain to La Florida. I feel like i´ve been in La Florida for years and it has only been 3 days. There was no electricity for the first few days. Our beds are wretched things, just planks with a thin mat over top. I wake up in the middle of the night from dreams on looking at bruises on my side in the mirror, but it´s just because i´ve rolled onto my side in my sleep and it´s really freaking painful. We have to cook all our food over a wood burning stove, but i am learning how to cook!!! so that´s pretty cool. All the food is really oily and carby and delicious. The local women make tortillas for us fresh every day.

So far we have only been working on orientation stuff but i am slowly meeting the members of the community and my spanish is improving exponentially. Our schedule, however, will be working in the feilds with the farmers from 8am to 1 pm and then the rest of the afternoon will be for social projects. We´re planning youth empowerment, social acivities for the women because we´ve learned that they really have no hobbies other than gossip, and english and spanish literacy classes. Most of the adults in La Florida don´t even know how to spell their own names.