Team Pic - Ain't we cute?

So this is us! Plus a couple guests. Back...Carina (with pigtails, she's who's place I am taking as CASAS study abroad director for the Semilla seminary in Guatelmala), John (Tara & Rob's), our driver!, Melany and Nataly (Irma and Antony's daughters) Next 'row'...me, Gini & Travis (Betel land project), Nate (emergency Hurrican Stan relief and food security coordination), Tara (Bezeleel school and agriculture projects)Frontish...Ruth, (Tara and Rob's), Toby (HIV and AIDS prevention program in El Salvador, , Juan Pablo, (a local Guatemalan who hosted us during a trip to his rural community in San Marcos), our driver!, Beth (Music and Arts school for youth in the capital), Antony and Irma (Guatemala/El Salvador Country directors), Peter (blondy with Antony is R & T's), rob (Connecting Peoples rep, coordinates US-Canadian group learning tours or service-learning).

Taken right before we were headed back from our team meeting in San Marcos, the department on the northwest edge of Guatemala. Weirdly we crossed the Mexican border to get there, since vehicle worthy roads gave way to an hour hike into the community up into the wooded mountains. BEAUTIFUL place. Hope to get you some pics once I get some forwarded my way.

Great time connecting with fellow MCCers and sharing about our lives and work throughout Guate and El Salvador. Made some ugly, misshapen tortillas on the comal over the open fire with women from the community while they chuckled and patted perfect circles. Sang some songs outdoors together to candlelight and a passed around guitar. Ate yummy campo (countryside) food and chatted with community folks about their hopes for their community in the rebuilding, including the agriculture and fish farming food security projects Nate is helping to coordinate, after the 2005 hurricane wiped homes and farming plots from steep mountainsides in the mudslides.

The resilience of people here continues to amaze and inspire.

"Thank you for my hat"

Bantioux lin punit.

Carlos was coaching me in my very first Mayan Kekchi sentence. He had just gifted me a handwoven straw hat, and I fumbled the strange words in my mouth while he laughed and corrected me. Carlos was happy for the visit and proud of his new hobby - having recently rekindled a craft that had been a lost part of his heritage from generations past. His wife Maria was rekindling a forgotten craft as well, weaving "backstrap" style.

Carlos is the appointed forest ranger for the fledgling Betel community, a new settlement of 16 families situated in a remote area in the cloudforests of the Northern Guatemalan department (i.e. state) of AltaVerapaz, alongside a forest reserve protecting among other natural beauty, the fast-disappearing national bird, the Quetzal. The families are part of a new land project funded by a local foundation, whereby formerly landless, displaced farmers are given the opportunity to buy a home plot and a farming plot at a fair price.

I was visiting fellow MCCers who were stationed in this and a neighboring community
in AltaVerapaz, learning about their work in the cool, green, rural highland
communities, where Kekchi, one of the 23 indigenous Mayan languages of Guatemala is spoken. Here, my limited Spanish did me little good, so I soaked in the new sounds of Kekchi and communicated as all humans can through smiles, thankful eyes and laughter. MCCers Gini and Travis, a my-ageish couple, who took me through the forest, proudly showed me their baby banana trees and how they rigged makeshift "plumbing" for a gravity flow shower in their rustic house where they lived among the Betel community, along with Carlos and Maria.

A bumpy, 2 hour, forest/mountain ride away, Rob and Tara gave me a whirlwind tour of the Bezelel boarding school, where Kekchi youth from communities throughout the Ketcki-speaking region live and study academics during the weekdays and vocational training in tailoring, weaving, baking, carpentry, masonry and metalworking on Saturdays. Tara (daughter of a Calvin prof Bert DeVries ya'll, among other bizarre GR connections!) brought me to visit sweet-faced girls with their flourishing collections of goats and rabbits - part of a Heifer International project to incorporate more protein into rural diets, and then onto an impressive terraced organic garden, which is helping to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the middleschoolers at Bezelel.

These MCC supported programs address two of the main problems that Guatemala faces--land distribution and accessible primary education. The roots of these problems trace back as far as the Spanish Conquest in th 1500s, where lands were seized from the indigeounous peoples and and given to Spanish nobles. But recent history bears blame as well with eonomic and political moves in the last 100 years seizing prize farm lands and turning them over to US corporations such as United Fruit Company
(aka Chiquita).

Today, many Mayans are left with little choice but to farm steep, rocky mountainsides - the last available land - and/or work the multinational banana plantations or coffee fincas of rich landowners for wages often 1/3 to 1/2 of the legal minimum wage of 6ish dollars a day. And this system of exclusion and exploitation has also kept indigenous Mayans from accessing basic services, such as health care, and primary education.

So seeing some small steps like these gives me hope, although there are still many deeper, structural elements that need addressing that I will continue to learn about each day I am here. But I am encouraged to see hope in the faces of Carlos and Maria. And am struck, as I knew I would be, with a taste of just how much I will be blessed and changed during this new life I have been given in Guatemala.

>Bantioux.