Yesterday I help collected rocks with Andres Anay. His house is made of adobe bricks and has water problems in the raining season. He wants to take off and reuse the roof , the floor is dirt but the new walls would be of concrete block and would help a lot. I am noticing that there are a lot of kids with respiratory problems and I suspect two main reasons: damp dirt floors and smoke inside the home. Andres doesn´t make enough money to qualify for a Habitat house and doesn´t have enough land for more animals. He makes $800 a year and has two horses and a foul. With this money he supports 4 kids, a wife, and both his parents. His father is 80 and went with us gathering rocks. We didn´t have to go far off the road, probably 10 minutes, where we loaded rocks onto one mule and one horse. When the animals were loaded we headed down the hill and sometimes Andre carried rocks on his back with the traditional strap around the forehead. For lunch we had one cup of beans and a cup and a half of eggs and chilies with about 20 tortillas. This was divided between 5 people. It rained lightly all day and was cold and the trail was slippery. Three times we lost a load of rocks, one time with the burro bucking across the field. We carried 7 tierras of rock out and he needs 40. Tierra is a pile of material about 3 feet high. Once the rocks are lined up along the road he can hire a truck to bring them home. At night we all had another set of clothes but we were cold and damp. I can not understand how he will build his house. He has saved 5000 quetzales but needs another 10000, which is about 1400 dollars. With the projects I am committed to I can only help out with about $250 but even that is a help. Right now I have not offered anything but I plan to. He is working hard, is responsible to his family, and only has two years of schooling.
I am doing OK. Fighting different bugs. Last night my stomach swelled up incredibly. I had strong exhaust out of both ends. I blamed in on a fruit name wisquil. It taste like a potato and is good in soups but yesterday it was just partially dried and for dinner Andre keep telling me eat eat. I escape with a few in my pocket which probable saved my life. I think I have streach marks. I will be done in Chel and Chajul around March 16th and look forward to a litle more creature comforts. The poverty here is hard for me but this life has be going on for years. Its is becoming more clear each day that I am living with Mayan Indians and not Guatemalans. In Nebaj last week I watched part of a demonstration of 150 Mayans with crosses and coffins and photos of family members they lost in the civil war. The blogspot Mi Mundo just ran a blog on the aniversery of the burning of the spanish embasy with directly affected these people. It is worth viewing.

Tuesday I will meet with leaders in Chel and we will finalize plans to provide 20 cows and materials for a pharmacy for the cows. This will directly benefit the families who will raise the cows for 2 years, then sell them purchase two others, one for themselves and one for another family in the comunity. I hope this program will grow for a long time and reach a lot of families. Next week we purchase and transport the cows and I will get to photograph the comunity at large for the first time. Cost per family $350.

Last year Chel turned on their lights for the first time. The community supplied the labor to build and mantain this small dam. It produces enough electricity for six communities and at this time provides electricity for three. The swim was very welcome as I had another fever. Martin, who is looking down at the dam, told me that when he was 8 the army came to his village and his family fled for 10 years. He lived without enough food or clothes and at age 18 came to Chajul very sick. He was put in the hospital for a while but the doctors sent him home and told his family not to give him any more medicine he was going to die. He told me the church prayed for him and Jesus healed him. Now he is the pastor of one of the churches in Chel. It is common to be told "my father or brother was killed in the conflecto interno." Those that fled to the hills faced starvation and many died. The co-op for the dam had photos of the village carrying pipes, generators, turbines, and building the spillway all by hand. Given tools and peace, these people can help themselves

Alcalde Chel

Alcalde Chel

This last week was my last week in Spanish school. La Escuela de la Montana is working with two communities. One, Fatasma, has a new school but no teacher or furniture. I am planning to buy 40 desk at less then $20 each. The other community is putting a proposal together to build a candle shop to provide work for 30 women - costing about $1200. The following photos are of last Saturdays adventure gathering firewood. Everywhere in Guatemala you see people caring huge bundles of wood, food or what ever. Neither of these communities has land to farm and they have to gather their firewood from a nieghboring finca. It is a 1/2 hour walk up the mountain and has to be repeated every two days. The present spot has enough wood for one year. When Maria, who cooked for me the first week I was in school, tried to raise up for her knees and lift her bundle she couldn't and I had to take some of the weight off as she tried to raise. I do not think I could have done it myself. She is one of the women who would benefit from the candle shop. I feel like weeping when I view parts of this life, yet I can not count the times she laughed that day (mostly at me). During the rainy season there is up to three feet of water in the draw.It was quite a day for me.

The weekend of Feb. 9th, I left Chajul to go to Chel, one of the communities that I was told needed a student center. The trip and situation was different then I expected. I rode out with a church from Chajul that had chartered a bus for an annual meeting at Chel. We were definitely in the mountains. At one point I think if I could have leaped 75 feet off the road I would have landed 1000 feet below. We only saw one or two trucks in the two to three hour crawl to Chel. On the way back we got a break as they looked under the hood. I asked if that was the brake cylinder that had a oil geyser. Si, si ,was enough of an answer for me so I took a 1/2 walk while they fixed it. Chel is a town of about 150 families. A bus leaves there at 3 in the morning and comes back at about 8 at night. In 1984 or 1985 ,the Army massacred 85 people here. Last year they got electricity and they farm coffee or coffee or coffee. They do farm other crops but coffee is the cash crop. The school project was not with the community as a whole but the church group I traveled with. There are three public schools in or just outside the town. The school in town is big enough for 60 children but only 25 or 26 kids attend school. I plan to help the pubic school out with supplies but will not be building a school. I am going back this week and probably the next week also to teach some carpenters how to build basic furniture. This is project #2 for me. During this time I want to learn more about the local needs and decide on a request of me to provide 30 cows. I was also asked to look at 3 acres of coffee to buy. Both requests are from the church of about 150 people and would be owned collectively for the purpose of raising funds. This is a hard decision for me. The coffee finca is about 3 acres and it was a 1/2 hr walk through incredible mountians. During harvest, one person can pick about 100 pounds a day and then packs it out in a sack attached to their heads. More to come on Chel

Sorry for not keeping up with the blog, but in a lot of the places I have been, I have been unable to. Today I am back in Xela a city of 250,000 -300,000. Just passing through and staying long enough to chatch up on the computer. The following photos are from Chejul, where I will be tomorrow. I had meetings there and Chel, during the week of the 4th and it was in Chel where I had hoped to build a school. More on that in the next post. The first picture is of the sink in the "Hilton" I stayed at. They have a urinal under the stairs that doubles as a mop sink. Very efficient and for $3 a night I guess you can´t expect much. From now on I will be staying with a family while I am in town. They have a block house with a dirt floor , two kids and he is a teacher at two different schools. The next two pictures are of some farmers I met on walk. The first two were repairing a fence at thier field. They buy fence posts for 30 cents that last them two years. For 30 cents, a friend of theirs cuts a pole , then cuts it in two or three pieces with a chain saw and packs them out to the road. The next two pictures are of Juan, another compenero, I met and who I will meet with tomorrow and again the following week. I am trying to set up a micro-loan program for 5 families with him. His family consists of 3 generations under one roof, a dirt floor and a clay block house. I am planning on offering three different "loan" options and we will buy pigs ,chickens or goats. Half the loan will be a gift and the other half will be paid back in one year to other to help other families. The second year I will offer 1/2 the amount with the same terms. By the third year the goal will be that they can buy the own animals with their own money. For example we buy 6 pigs and during the first two years they have one pig to eat ,two pigs to sell and use 25% off the money for family needs now and the rest for the next years pigs. Two pigs are sold to expand the program to other families and one pig is not counted in case one dies. I will not go in to detail on each project's form but this is the basic method. 1/2 as a gift 1/2 to multiply the outreach and personal involvment of the recipetant. I love the personal contact with these people and the opportunity to help. If anyone wants to help in any project let me know by e-mail.
In Chajul, I am a novelty and sometimes at night I would have people three or for deep asking why I was there. Ixil is the primaray language, so two or three people would ask questions while I would try to explain in Spanish and then they would translate to the rest of the people. A carpenter makes between $2.20 to $3.50 a day. The farmers walk 15 to 40 minutes to their fields, work them by hand for about $900 a year. A loan of $250 will make a big difference.

Well I hope to get a lot better at this blog but I am happy to have gotten this far today. I have to post and write things from last to first so for this time scroll down and read your way up. Its better then nothing!! Today I travel to Chajul to try and organize a plan of action for the next month.This is an adventure as I climb farther out on limb. All is well and I am excited about the upcoming week Michael

Well, poco apoca, I am learning spanish and poco a poco, I am learning about computers and this blog site.This first series of pictures are from a town called Almolonga -the molar. It is shadowed by a volcano crater that looks like a tooth. This valley is home to 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants who live on the sides of the mountains and farm the most fertile valley in the region. The market is set up for export, connecting families with large bags of produce with buyers who export to other villages and countries. The picture with the well in the middle shows the size of a family plot. The men then become human rainbirds and shovel water with wooden headed shovels. What might be a farm for one corporation in the states is a way of life for thousands of families. They farm this valley year round and farm the surrounding hills in the summer. It is very fertile and subirrigated.