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.

Nu Cat on the Block

hi Pie.

cat-a-lyst

Chemistry. A substance that causes or accelerates a chemical reaction without itself being affected.

Con Vino

[Footnote: This is from a while ago. It was originally posted on livejournal, but I like it a lot and I think it deserves a bit more exposure.]

Context is what counts. It's in here. It's muddy and mixed up, but it's here.

Archeological expertise, heartwrenching strings.

The quartet will be here in 20 minutes!

The quartet is not coming!

& so, another sip, and I love my body again.

(It's like my chest is connected to my entire body.) (My fucking heart beats & mixes with the oil paints and I fucking feel ALIVE again.)

_____________________________________________________________________

it's actually 3:37am, and i have a paper due tomorrow. said paper has yet to be initiated, hence my sudden re-emergence into blogtasia.

blogblogblogblogblog: say that five times fast

& last but not least, some visual stimulation before the sun rises and it's officially friday:

never mind, i can't figure it out.

Back to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and women's agency in Liberia!

if hank moody can blog, then so can i

Henry Rollins: What’s your latest obsession?

Hank Moody: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People…they don’t write anymore - they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.

Henry Rollins: Yet you’re part of the problem, I mean you’re out there blogging with the best of them.

Hank Moody: Hence my self-loathing.