My First Days...

Well, after sitting in Seatac for 5 and a half hours, I am finally here in Guatemala. On the flight from L.A. to Guatemala City I sat next to a Guatemalan couple who allowed me to practice my feo spanish with them in a pleasant, yet stunted conversation. The couple was wonderful, they both worked in a hotel in Santa Barbara and traveled to Guatemala to visit their family, once a year. During the take-off and landing the woman crossed herself multiple times, along with her husband and me. Without knowing much about me and in a custom unknown to North Americans, they invited me to breakfast, to their granddaughters quinceañera, and offered me a ride to Antigua. I of course accepted all of their incredible gestures of hopitality. Unfortunately, I cannot attend the ceremonial birthday celebration. However, I arrived in Antigua sooner than I would have thanks to them and gained a quick appreciation for the people here.
Today, I walked through a public coffee plantation and got a free lesson on coffee cultivation and the classes of the local jade from one of the neighboring locals named Juan Fransisco Garcia. He took me to his sons jewlery workshop, where he made beautiful jade and silver earings, necklaces and pendants. Juan told me how Guatemalans grew their coffee in the shade of the Grabilea tree, so as to protect the coffee plants from being burned by the hot tropical sun(I have also heard that this is a much more sustainable way to grow coffee for both the health of the land and the pickers of the beans). It was a gorgeous place, muy tranquilo, with no tourists, which is always a unique experience in a tourist trap like Antigua.
Juan also told me about his job in a local fabrica or factory, which is owned by Nestle Corp. He packed 90 packages of dried soop a minute, for eight hours a day, five days a week. He said it was a good job in Guatemala, very steady, with good pay and not in the exposed coffee or sugar fields. It appears that Juan, along with the family I met in Guatemala City, are part of the Guatemalan middle class or maybe upper class, although neither was visibly wealthy by any North American standards. They were also non-indigenous as far as I could tell, Ladino is what they are called here. Therefore, I have yet to see or experience the poverty that I saw in South America. It is quite a different economic state here in Guatemala, because the disparities are not quite as dramatic or as visibly dichotomous as they are in Buenos Aires, for example. However, I have not been to the rural, indigenous areas of Guatemala and therefore cannot speak with any certainty on this subject. But I am eager to get a sense of the differences between the conditions of the poor in Argentina's villas and Guatemala's rural, indigenous communities. Hopefully, the Long Way Home will immerse me in that exploited and forgotten world. I´ll let you know....