Sorry I have not written in a while. I am been so busy, with projects, tests, presentations, and papers. I want to tell you about the rest of our Guatemala trip and then summarize the last two weeks. The day after the girls were followed was a Wednesday. We got up in the morning and took a bus to Guatemala City, one of the most dangerous cities in Guatemala. We went to a museum, which talked about the history of the clothing of Guatemala, which is important to the history and story of the people. Today it is very common to see people in authentic clothing. Afterwards we went to the national theater, but it was closed for “presidential activities.” We looked at the Cathedral near the center square, which was beautiful. There was some time to do some shopping in the markets and lunch. The last thing we did was looking at the replica of the land forms of Guatemala. It is hard to explain so I will put a picture up. We went back to Antigua, where we went to a hill where there was a cross. We walked up a million steps to get there. When coming back down, I was walking with Sara, because of her ankle. We were the last ones down. When we got there the bus was not there, but Hope and Ellen were there waiting for us. They told us everyone already started walking back, so they waited for us, so we did not think that the bus had just left us. Luckily there was a guy in our group who was not too far ahead that we called him to stay by us, because we know had no idea where we were, or where the hotel was. We had a map from the hotel, but the place where we were was not on the map. We asked some people, but every time we asked they told us we were in a different place. It seemed no one knew the city too well. We ended up walking around the city for two hours. When we got back some people were at the hotel and others had already gone out to shop. We went to the markets, and then did dinner at a restaurant. The rest of the night was just spent hanging out. The next day, Thursday, we traveled from Antigua to Copan. We just spent the day poking around. We had no group plans. Friday, which perhaps was my favorite day, was at the Mayan ruins in Copan. We took a tour of the ruins, which were beautiful. It is hard to believe that people used to live there, and lived lives so different than ours. After the ruins we went to Macaw Park, which too was beautiful. We took a tour, to look at the variety of birds at the park. We ate lunch at the park. We had the rest of the evening to ourselves. Saturday we got up early and spent the entire day in the bus returning to Tegus. I was very tired when we got back, but it was nice to be back. Living out of a suitcase at numerous hotels gets old after 8 days.
The following weeks have been crazy with papers, exams, and projects. I always have a lot to do, but I am getting it all done. A lot of the work just takes so long, because it us in Spanish. A 6-8 page paper in English would not be too bad, but in Spanish, it takes a very long time. Luckily, and unluckily from this point I only have four weeks of classes left. One week before vacation, and 3 after. Speaking of vacation, I ended up in charge of planning my group’s vacation in Roatan, which is an island north of Honduras. It has been very hard because some people do not want to spend a lot of money, and others only want to stay part of the week. Right now we have it down to two houses. We will make reservations Monday.
This past weekend we went on a mini trip to visit this help organization. It is run by a gringo, but is now considered a Honduran organization. They have programs in tons of different areas; health, education, agriculture, churches, domestic violence, a national park, and many more. We spent two days going around and looking at some of the different projects of this organization. One thing we saw was a bridge that had been destroyed in this recent tropical storm. None of us had realized how bad this storm has been. With about three weeks of continuous rain, town, especially in the north have been damaged. Infrastructure is horrible now. This one bridge was swept away. To walk across they are using the ropes, as seen in the picture. For the one night, we slept in the cabins in the national park. That night we had a group meeting to talk about our observations of the day as well about the organization of my professor. He and some others started an organization about ten years ago. It’s an organization to fight for a more just society. The programs they run are programs that other organizations do not want to run or have not thought to run. Some of the stories he told us were crazy. They have changed Honduran laws, helped capture gang members, and numerous other things. I was very impressed.
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