Tony’s Guatemala

I’ve been working with stuff online for a while now, and over the last 5+ years, I’ve been hosting my personal websites with a company called powweb. This site is hosted on a powweb server.

I’ve recently become an affiliate of powweb, which means that I can put a link on my page, and if you click it and order hosting, I make a few bucks.

If you’re someone in need of a hosting solution, and you’re looking for a reliable service, then please take my recommendation, and follow this link;

I’ve been pleased with them, and can make the recommendation based on over 5 years of experience.

So, I woke up early this morning and headed down to the lake since the sun was out and everything was night and bright and cheery. I took a few good photos and enjoyed sitting by the water.

The boat guys weren’t too rude, and after being told that I didn’t need a boat, mostly left me alone.

Lots of tour groups running around today.

After catching a few minutes of peace and quiet, or as close as you can get here, down by the lake, I thought I’d take the bus up to Solola, which is higher up the mountain, and far less touristy.

I climbed on the bus, and after a little bit, we where off. I paid my fare of $0.38 and got a little change. I had decided to head up to Solola because today was one of the twice weekly markets, and it was nice and sunny.

Normally I wouldn’t recommend running around very many places in Guatemala with big and expensive (looking) camera equipment, but I’ve taken that bus ride a number of times, and generally don’t worry too much around the indigenous cultures unless the place I’m going is kind of deserted. It was market day, so deserted was gonna be the last thing Solola was.

After arriving in town, I walked through the square, and towards the market. Unlike Pana, Solola doesn’t have a dedicated market building, and instead twice a week (Friday and Sunday for the curious among you) they clsoe down the streets around the town square, and vendors from all around carry in their goods.

I normally try to respect peoples desires not to be photographed, especially away from tourist areas like Pana and Antigua, and simply planned to walk through the market taking photos of the colors. It seems that many things here are more colorful, the fruits and vegies, the clothing, the buildings, you name it, it’s likely to be colorful.

So far so good, everyone that I asked had been more than happy to let me take photos of their wares, and I think they appreciated me asking (many gringos fail to respect them enough to ask even before taking photos of the people) and I saw a pile of chickens feet. I asked, and the lady said it was fine to take a photo, so I did. After taking the photo, she demanded that I pay her 5 Quetzales for the photo. I was dumbstruck. It’s not uncommon for people to ask to be paid if you want a photo of them, but I’ve never had anyone try to charge me money for taking a photo of their goods. I played stupid and said a lot of things in very poor spanish that didn’t string together very well. She was unhappy, but not as much as I was. In the end, I didn’t pay her anything for taking the photo, but it did cut my day in the market short.

Here’s the photo by the way:

I’m sure that 5 Quetzales means more to her than it does to me, I think it was the way she went about trying to get it that bothered me. If she had said it would be 5 Quetzales to take the photo, I would have walked away, but she said it was fine, and then put a price on it.

Well, Guatemala has a tendency to cause all kinds of electronics to function sporadically or inconsistently, or just stop functioning altogether. Whether it’s a computer, phone, camera, electric razor, pretty much everything is effected. I think the combination of dust, humidity and altitude just wreak havoc on the circuitry and mechanics of things.

My camera gear has been no different. My battery charger still functions, but no longer recognizes that there isn’t a battery plugged into it, and continues to try charging after the fully charged battery has been removed. My flash ceased functioning within 3 days of getting here, and now occasionally works, but the LCD screen doesn’t always, even when the rest of the flash is, and I’ve lost most of the controls on the control panel. thankfully, some of the time, it still communicates properly with the camera and TTL works, but that’s only some of the time. My nice tele-zoom has pretty much locked up in the fully zoomed position, and refuses to budge to zoom back to it’s shorter focal lengths.

But probably the oddest thing that’s happened has been the fact that my my 60mm AF micro Nikkor lense has suddenly started to work properly. I’ve always used it as a manual focus lens, it was that way when I bought it 5 years ago, and it never worked in Auto Focus mode. Now the Auto focus works. go figure. Not that I’m complaining mind you, when I bought the lens I got an amazing deal on it because the AF didn’t work, I picked it up in a box of stuff along with a sunpak 622 pro, an AIS 55mm Micro nikkor, and a bunch of other stuff that a company that was switching to digital didn’t think they could use anymore. I paid the whopping sum of $25 for the whole box. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of the sunpak, though I did buy a IR head for it to go with my D1R Infrared camera, and have used it pretty much exclusively with that. And I’ve used the Micro-nikkors for several projects as well. That’s the kind of deal I’d love to stumble into once a year, sadly I haven’t found anything close in quite a while, though I did pick up a nikkor 55 mm F1.8 AF-D lens at a thrift shop for $10 the day before leaving to come down here. Sadly it stopped working upon my arrival here as well…

So, I think it was just yesterday that I was writing about Manny, and mentioned that I was glad he didn’t live here in Pana, as I seem to have enough weird people here that want to be friends with me.

Less than 6 hours after writing that, I made a new “friend” which means someone randomly stopped me in the street to talk to me because I speak English. Maybe that’s it, I should feign ignorance, and let people believe I’m a European from some odd country, maybe the Czech republic or something. Maybe then I won’t make so many “friends.”

I digress. The newest “friend” I’ve made is named Matt, not to be confused with the fairly normal Matt that I know here who’s from Australia and rode here on a bicycle. This Matt is an American. And when the conversation got to what we do, he said “I’ve got a bunch of kids with a lot of different women, that’s kind of my thing.” American Matt always runs around either bare-foot or bare chested, and sometimes both. he’s always wearing his sunglasses, normally a baseball cap, and a small backpack. I’ve seen Matt around town for about a month, and according to our conversation, that would coincide with his arrival date.

I don’t know how Matt makes his money, and I didn’t want to ask why “his thing” is having a bunch of kids with a bunch of women. Maybe I’ll have the opportunity to say something constructive to Matt.

I went into Antigua for the final portion of the dental work that was absolutely mandatory last week, and did a little bit of traveling from there. When I was stopped at one of the bus stops along the way, I met Manny, or Manuel, or whatever… Manny seemed really nice, spoke some English, and was actually talking to me rather than one of the women on the bus.

Manny is from Mexico, his dad’s Mexican, and his mom Guatemalan. Manny lived in the states for a little while, and even claimed to have a US Social security number. I’m not sure if I believe the last part, since as he was naming off the states he was a “resident” of, he included Florida, Miami, and Orlando, each as separate states.

This was when things in the conversation began to get kinda weird. Manny lifted his shirt to show me the tattoo he had, which read “MEXXXICO” and perfectly framed his beer gut. After that he proceeded to tell me that the reason he left the states was because he had killed three people. “@$%)*^’s needed to die” was his explanation. Afterward, Manny proceeded to curse at and make rude gestures to a group of Nun’s that walked by, and then ran after them, calling them names and opening the fly of his pants.

Sadly, such occurrences aren’t that terribly uncommon here. I’m just glad Manny doesn’t live in Pana, I have enough “friends” that act pretty similarly here.

Still having about an hour a day of water here… oh well, at least I can flush my toilet once a day.

For the last month, or most of a month anyways, since I’ve been back, I’ve averaged about an hour a day of running water in my apartment. I guess I shouldn’t complain, there are a lot of people a lot worse off than me.

I’ve been walking around and looking at the damages done by the landslides and torrential rains, and I wonder how I can complain about something as petty as not having water at my sink.

So I’ve started working to help locally, in a problem that spans much of Guatemala, and parts of surrounding countries as well. There’s not much I can do on a large scale, but I’ve been working with a local family to redesign the drainage on their property to reduce the likelihood of future damage. I’ve also been trying to spend my market money with families that need it to rebuild their homes.

I’m continuously impressed by the ingenuity of the people living here. Both Guatemalans and Gringos alike. If you walk around town, there are several places that you can see pieces of railroad rail being used as telephone and electrical line poles. Most of the funnels that I’ve seen here come from cutting the top off of 600ml plastic soda bottles. Plastic grocery bags are useful for everything from carrying groceries to rain bonnets to serving as makeshift galoshes.

But the things that really struck me and made me start thinking about it were twofold today. First when I was walking by the lake, I saw two young men rowing around in a funny looking canoe. I immediately recognized that this was no ordinary canoe, but rather, it was a gutted jet-ski.

Back in the states, this thing would have been relegated to the scrap pile, here, plug the holes, grab some oars, and we’re good to go fishin.

Later on, I was given a pair of earrings to give Rachel that had been made in a local village. The interesting thing about the earrings was the origin of the materials used to make them. They are quite colorful, and they’re made of the aluminized mylar packages from potato chips. This is the ultimate recycling, if you ask me. Potato chips cost 2-3 Q for a small bag, eat the chips, and have the material to make at least 5 pair of earrings that sell for 20 Q each. And everybody who saw them loved them and wanted some (the women for themselves and the men for their wives). Man, I’m in the wrong busines.