Purulhá, May 23

On Sunday, May 23rd we arrived at Hotel Ranchitos del Quetzal in Purulhá, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. We were able to see several quetzal birds early the next morning, although I was unable to capture them with my camera. They stay very high in the treetops as they call to one another and dance on the wind. The quetzal bird is the national bird of Guatemala and represents freedom.

The food here was delicious and filling. We had tamales wrapped in banana leaves and drank a hearty broth before the main course of vegetables, tortillas, and carne.

It was cool and wet here, with stunningly diverse plant and animal life all around us.

It was from here that we walked to the Biotopo Mario Dary Rivera, a dense cloud forest reserve filled with steep paths and cascading waterfalls.

Below is a photo of my classmates gazing about the cloud forest in wonder and appreciation for its beautiful diversity.

I came home and bought a camera

There is too much to tell about Guatemala.  Here begins the slow trickle of stories from my trip there.

I came back with several things: colorful hand-crafted textiles from the markets in Chichicastenango and Antigua, divine coffee grown and ground in San Pedro La Laguna, black ash collected from the streets of Guatemala City after the eruption of Volcán de Pacaya on May 27th, over 800 digital photographs, a fresh perspective of my life, new friends, and countless memories.

I came back from Guatemala without my camera; I traded it for a hammock in Panajachel. It was necessary to purchase a new camera after my return, so I upgraded to a larger but lightweight Nikon L110 with 15x zoom and 12.1 megapixels. It's a nice improvement from the 3x zoom, 7.1 megapixel Canon Digital Elph that I loved for so many years. I hope the young merchant who has my much-loved Elph will love it as much as I did and be able to use it for a long time. His name is Thomas, and his hammocks are the most beautiful in the city of Panajachel.


My new camera captures the bright colors of this hand-woven hammock:

I've taken the new camera into the yard to capture the Rocky Mountain wildflowers that greeted me on my return.

Wild Geranium:

Prairie Wallflower:

Blue Penstemon:

  

Living Room Revisited

BEFORE AND AFTER PHOTOS OF THE LIVING ROOM.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I wanted the living room to be a place of comfortable gathering.  

So, to encourage visiting, I made the couches face each other. 

The kitties have grown to love having the love seat beneath the great picture window. 

(If I move it, they will kill me)

My apologies for the grainy photos.  My camera came out of my purse covered in hair gel and I'm surprised it's even working well enough to take pictures at all!  

Going to Guatemala

In three days I will be in Guatemala with a professor and a small group of students.  We will travel the country for two weeks with our teacher as our guide.  The purpose of the trip is to experience a part of our world that I have not yet seen, and to learn something about human nature and our connection to the geography and the past.

My intention is to learn all I can in two weeks about one of our neighbors in Central America. After all, the United States and Guatemala have a long and confused history. (Do you like bananas?) I have read about Guatemala, I have seen pictures of the country and her people.  I know about poverty and warfare and colonialism as I have learned from books written by English-speaking journalists and field workers.

In just two weeks, I will observe the outcomes of pre-Columbian and colonial decisions.  I will see how people have lived after their Independence and subsequent neo-colonialism imposed by dictatorships (sponsored by the corporate us).  I wonder how they will perceive me: an overweight American woman with a camera, butchering Spanish while buying up as many hand-embroidered textiles as will fit in my bag.

This will be a great opportunity to practice my Spanish skills.  In a classroom setting, we are tested on our reading and writing abilities.  I have put little effort in hearing and speaking the language, and I expect these two weeks in Guatemala will test these skills and allow me to hear the dialects of a mostly indigenous people who speak Spanish, like I do, as their 2nd language.  I suspect the only difference between us is that my people are the imperialists and their people are the imperialized.

How much can I learn about a country in two weeks?  As much as I can!

Hot Shower Haiku

Hot shower today.
Taken for granted by me,
An American;

Citizen of the
Richest land on Earth, they say.
One day I will know.

The Future of Your Community Lies In Your Hands

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 Women's Leadership Symposium at UCCS where Frances Hesselbein was the keynote speaker.  She has authored 20 books, and spends a good portion of her time speaking at military bases and universities.  She was the Chief Executive Officer of the Girl Scouts of the USA from 1976 to 1990, and is responsible for turning the organization into one of diversity and inclusiveness.

There were over 200 in attendance, including 6 panelists from varying walks of life who addressed questions about women in leadership and talked about their personal commitments to supporting other women leaders.

I arrived unsure of what I might learn, yet I came away from the meeting refreshed with a belief that my dreams are worthy and attainable.  I spoke with and listened to a number of women about leadership opportunities and the progress women have made over the past few generations.  I came away with a revived opinion of who I am and who I want to be.

"Be aware of your thoughts, for they become your words.  Be aware of your words, for they become your actions.  Be aware of your actions, for they become your habits.  Be aware of your habits, for they become your destiny."  This was how Mrs. Hesselbein opened her speech.  She spoke to us about how her choices have made a difference in the lives of other people, and how we too can make a difference in our communities.

Lessons I took from the meeting include:

• We learn and develop by working with other people, therefore we should include people from all backgrounds into our networks, and grow our garden of friends for the benefit of all included.
• The children are our future, and we should give them all of the tools that we can to help them become sociable adults.  
• Ask questions about the status quo, and have the courage to challenge it and change it for the good of everyone involved.  We can make a difference!
• Find a woman to be your mentor, and in return, mentor another woman or a girl.  It is by teaching and learning from one another that we strengthen our goals and one another.  
• Women can be most cruel to other women, and this is our greatest setback.  We should respect the choices of other women, even if they are different from our own.
• Although many younger women (including myself) have misunderstood the feminist philosophy to mean that we can have it all (family and career), we need to have the courage to make a choice and stand by it.
• Women have a tendency to internalize their feelings.  Self-mutilation and eating disorders are evidence of inner turmoil.  We need to find a way to let the emotions out rather than bottle them inside. Choir, theater, band, sports, running, martial arts, whatever it may be - find it and use it!
• Have the confidence to stand up and do what is right.  Whatever you think, you will become.
• Never stop being a student.  Never stop being a teacher.  
• Mrs. Hesselbein quoted a mentor of hers: "We live in a nation that pretends to care about its children, but it does not."  We must gather the tools to change this, and take better care of our children.  They are our future.  

While the Internet Was Down

The internet stopped working today with no explanation and no warning. And it happened at the most inopportune time!

It stopped while I was in the middle of micromanaging my tribe of shipwrecked islanders via Facebook’s highly addictive MyTribe game (in summary: it’s a free game where you start with 7 tribe members and guide them through technology and skill developments as they age, have babies, specialize in skills like agriculture, fishing, and construction, and the goal is to build a Great Ark to one day leave the island). My tribe is up to 15 members, the oldest at 49 and the youngest is 3.

I have given my tribe members ancient Greek names (like Gaiana, Helarios, Lysistrata, Leonidas, Kallisto, Demosthenes, etc.) because one of my favorite websites, www.behindthename.com, gives me millions of names organized in lists by region, language, time period, popularity, and religion. Without perusing those lists, I wouldn’t know that Demos is Greek for People, or that Kallisto (meaning “most beautiful”) was a young woman fancied by Zeus, so Hera turned the beautiful girl into a she-bear and cast her away into the night sky to be a constellation. (Just another example from ancient times that illustrates the frustration of watching your husband as he watches younger nymphs.)

How pathetic I am, and how very tired I am becoming, every few seconds looking at the bottom-right corner of the screen, hoping that the little network icon will indicate that I am once again connected to the World Wide Web and all it has to offer.

Dusty and I were marveling just last night at the volumes of books that were published by great authors long ago, in the days before we could type 75 words-per-minute. How did Shakespeare do it? How many rough drafts did he have to painstakingly write by hand before he came up with the final Romeo and Juliet? And even after type-writers were available, how did H.G. Wells manage to write so many thought-provoking works in his lifetime without the ability to copy and paste and spell-check and cross-reference with other sources at the click of a button?

I am going to assume that growing up with computers and the Internet has made it difficult for my generation to memorize and think for ourselves...  Where are the Tolstoys and the Cathers and the Poes?  Will there be anymore of them now that our lives have been made so easy?

How does a stay-at-home-mom suddenly write a book that appears in the top 10 for young adult readers, and then gets a movie deal within a year? Twilight isn’t the best book you’ll ever read, but it’s fun and the people like it, and the movie is gorgeous (although I refuse to comment on its horrible sequel).

I know the internet will return one day. But until it does, I have no way to obsessively-compulsively check my email, or manage my tribe, or lookup information to help me study for and write my final exams. I can’t go to www.dictionary.com or www.thesaurus.com to quickly copy and paste a word from this document to find one that sounds better than horrible.

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Hey, guess what? The internet just came back into my life. It was down for a little more than 2 hours, and in that time I was able to put a 3rd coat of red paint on my front door, write this horrible article, and do a load of laundry. Oh, the marvels of technology!