To Rabinal and back again (very long post)

*UPDATE: Did I mention that Hannah and I had a run-in with a tarantula in our room in Antigua? Yeah. Hannah hyperventilated while I caught it in a Pollo Campero paper drink cup and took it outside. We were both extremely jumpy for the next several hours.


Hello again! It's been several days since I had access to my laptop since I left it in the Habitat office for safekeeping while Hannah and I were off on our first build team excursions. Let's see what I can remember from the past week:

We spent Friday in the office getting orientations on Habitat work.

We met some other Habitat workers.

My allergies were really bad, but they're getting better as I get better at finding food to eat. The thing is, traditional Guatemalan food (i.e., beans, rice, corn tortillas, meat, fruit, the occasional vegetable) is almost entirely edible to me, but a lot of places serve wheat/milk/sugar-filled American food. But I am getting better, I'll be fine. I have a lot of supermarkets to choose from.

On Saturday Hannah and I were dropped off at the Oakland Mall, which is ENORMOUS. We wandered around and glanced into high-end American and European stores. Everything is high-tech and shiny. Overwhelmed, we had lunch in the food court and watched a World Cup match.

At 7:00 pm Saturday evening Luis dropped us off at the airport to meet up with Lauren and Kristen, two Habitat field coordinators, and wait with them for several flights to come in containing Habitat build teams from the US. Hannah and I waved Habitat signs as our groups trickled out of the airport, dazed and confused.

Hannah went with Kristen and I went with Lauren and their respective build teams.
My group went to Hotel Aeropuerto to spend the night. The next morning we took two private buses (my group contained 17 people, plus Lauren and I) approximately four hours away through valleys and over mountains on windy roads to the town of Rabinal.

My build team happened to be from Seattle, with a few people from Portland, which was great. I even got to chat with some of them about this year's Northwest Folklife Festival! My team was also led by an older woman with a lot of Habitat experience. She used to be a clown, apparently, so today (they are still in Rabinal) I am missing a carnival put on my her and the other team members. The team is varied in age, a few 14-16-year-olds, some middle-aged parents, and some grandparents. I love hearing all their stories, they are a great team and I plan on attending the goodbye dinner in Antigua this Saturday.

My beloved G9 camera seems to be shorting out somewhere between the lense and the screen, so I can see photos after they're taken in the preview, but I can't see what I'm pointing the camera at or how focused it is or anything :( I do have a viewfinder, but it's not very accurate. Help!

The road to Rabinal was ridiculously scenic, mountains and deserts and forests (Pine trees! Pine trees!) with lots of brahma cows, horses, mules, donkeys, black-headed vultures, and dogs, all in varying degrees of health.


Lauren and I stayed with the team in Rabinal from Saturday until Wednesday morning.
We all had Breakfasts at 6:00 am and Dinner around 6 or 7 pm every day at a restaurant called Angello's, and the restaurant spoiled us by bringing us hot lunches (chicken, rice and beans, tortillas, mangoes, and limeade) to the work sites every day (Apparently most build teams usually receive only crappy white-bread-and-some-jelly sandwiches for lunch) by motorcycle.

On Saturday evening at dinner we all gathered together for a welcoming ceremony with the team and the two families were were going to be building with/for. It was a little awkward but we had lots of eager Spanish-speakers and semi-speakers among us so apparently it went much better than it often does.

I went to both work sites, one on Monday and the other on Tuesday.

The first work site was about a kilometer away, so we walked. It was way out at the edge of town, and all day we were avoiding being run over by brahma bull-drawn wooden carts (EPIC!!!) hauling sand from the river into town to be sold. There were also a lot of little floppy-eared gray pigs, mules also drawing carts containing people and materials (Sometimes reeds, sometimes firewood), horses carrying people around town, and dogs.

I have divided dogs here into several categories: recognizable breed, mostly recognizable mixed breed, totally unrecognizable, Yellow Dog. I like the Yellow Dogs.
Some dogs here are pets, many are guard dogs, and way too many are starving, beaten strays. Not many cats.

People on bicycles and motorcycles also passed by a lot (we were on an unpaved, muddy road) as well as a few tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled golf cart things used as taxis.

At this work site I also saw a small tarantula (caught in a jar by some kids) and a rattle snake (being caught in a sack by adults, to be killed and used as medicine).

The second work site I went to on Tuesday was slightly less than a kilometer away in the opposite direction. Tuesday was much hotter than the day before, and I pinkified slightly but today it has just turned to tan.
There were a bunch of ducks at this site, all busy eating fallen mangoes and stalking flies like cats... except they're ducks, so it was hilarious.
There were also a lot of really crazy bugs on the trees at this site, I saw two very large well-camouflaged spiders that hardly moved all day and dozens of black-and-yellow ladybug-like beetles in various stages of their life cycle.

Some team members took to calling me Plant Girl. It's that obvious, apparently. Unfortunately, I know little to nothing about Guatemalan plants, so while I speculate much I have very little actual information and if anybody has a good book to recommend to me, please do so!


I worked hard at both sites, if I do say so myself, and I got really good at whipping out 20-foot-long rebar towers. I have the blisters to prove it.


Wednesday was Lauren's 25th birthday and the evening before our team surprised her with cake and ice cream, and in the morning, fireworks.
Last night Hannah and I stayed at another Habitat worker's very nice place in Antigua, and we had dinner and then went to a bar with a really great Cuban salsa band.


Right now, I'm back in the Habitat office in Guatemala City, utilizing the internet while I have nothing in particular to do.