So I'm now living and working in a bike repair and bike-machine-making shop in San Andrés Itzapa, a small town of a couple thousand people. It's about a 15-minute bus ride (Q1.50) south of the CA-1 highway which runs between Xela and Guatemala City, about an hour west of Guatemala City. It-s mountainous and steep; you can't go anywhere in or around town without going up or down a big hill. The town is surrounded by small to medium-sized farms, very different from the large banana plantations I saw around Bananera and the coffee plantations near the Pacific coast west of Xela, around the Escuela de la Montaña. I am pretty sure that in general, the food from the small plots isn't exported or even sold in supermarkets - it's grown for subsistence and sold in the markets here in Itzapa and other nearby communities.
It's about as different here from Xela as between a small town and a big city in Canada - in some ways more different. It has that small-town friendliness, where no one locks up their bike and people smile and say buenos días in the street to people they don't know. I'm more of a curiosity here: there was one other gringo volunteer at Maya Pedal for my first to weeks, but now I'm almost the only gringo in town save for a few I occasionally see and are apparently making a movie in the area. Little kids smile as they say "goodbye, hello" or "gringo" to me. It's been easy to make friends here, with whom I spend as much time as I can talking to. The woman across the street who I buy frozen bananas on a stick from for Q0.25 apiece. The tailor who made me a custom pair of jeans (with no label!), gave me a servilleta to wrap tortillas in, and hopes I'll be able to help him find good migrant labour in Canada. Also the owners of a friendly tienda/cantina that sells Brava beer for Q5.50/bottle, who I think were ready to adopt Andy, the other Maya Pedal volunteer. My good friend Omar who goes to university in Guat City, teaches chess, works in the internet café every spare moment he has, and has now featured me in his
own blog, translated to English
here, where he writes the longest sentence in the world. I've been emailing back and forth in Spanish with Lila who I lived with in Xela and a couple folks I met while travelling who are now back in Spain. Then there's Mario, the administrator and salesman of Maya Pedal, who apparently learned sales from info-mercials or used car sales (¡es una Schwinn! ¡La mejor calidad!). And Carlos who I work with in the shop building and reparing things, who I occasionally visit at his house, and who is going to get me set up to carry firewood from his farm using a tumpline to get my neck muscles ready for my 7-week canoe trip this summer. Carlos says that when he was younger, working on the farm, he would carry 4 quintals of firewood with a tumpline, which weighs 180kg. I'm sure the 4 quintals measurement is accurate, whatever that means, but I'm almost sure that 180kg is impossible - anyways he said he'd start me out with 1 quintal.
I was originally planning on spending only 2 weeks here, then moving onto another project in Guatemala City or Xela, but I think I'm going to stay til almost the end of my time here. It takes time to make good friends, it's too sad to keep moving around and leaving people all the time, and I feel like being here is a really special opportunity. I probably won't have any contact with other gringos for the rest of my time here, which is not all that easy a thing to accomplish. The town is about 75% indigenous, all of whom except some children speak their indigenous language Kaq Chikel. Most of the women wear traditional dress and most of the men wear straw hats. This in drastic contrast to Guatemala City, where from my bus window I didn't see anyone in traditional traje, and Mario told me that when he took his mother there people continuously shouted racial abuses at her so awful that I couldn't possibly translate or repeat them here. I'm learning a little bit of Kaq Chikel and trying to use it to buy tortillas and things in the market, which is usually amusing to the vendors.
More about Itzapa soon...
