New Blog Title

Yesterday, work began on the new property.  I chopped down about 20 coffee trees, which leaves around 2380 more to come down (eventually).   The reprieve is over, and so too must end The Reprieve Report.  In the interest of cohesion and ease of transition for my faithful readers and myself, I´m continuing the same blog with a new title.

I´ve purchased a great piece of land in Tzununa here at Lake Atitlan with the intention of building a few cabins for rental, a sweet kitchen, a small yoga studio and a farm of fruit trees, vegetables, chickens, rabbits, ducks and worms.  This will take a few years to build up.

The place will be called El Jocotel.

First and foremost, I need to address blog content.  I do not intend to provide extensive details of construction or progress at the site of my new home.  Rather, I intend to continue the line of unfettered, unmoderated, unreliable and maybe uninteresting posts that you are used to.

Please look forward to reading about the following (assuming I follow through with writing them):

Why I Chose Tzununa
Why I Chose This Plot
Hotel Namesake and Mission
Corrections

Once again, if you would like to be added to a list of people who get emailed when I post, please get me your email address in the comments or in a private note.  In conclusion, I would like to wish everyone a Happy Dia de San Pablo this Saturday.  

[VIDEO] How to Eat Ramen

Hello Readers,
In lieu of more text and as an apology for the recent lack of photos, I am posting one of Youtube's finest videos, which I happened to be shown yesterday.  It is unrelated to anything Reprieve Report or Guatemala.   Please enjoy.

Dear Four-Year-Olds in the US,

Dont you hate when you go down to your corner store and they wont sell you firecrackers even though you feel well mature enough to handle them responsibly?  Consider a trip´to Guatemala, where a minimum age requirement for the purchase of such incendiary devces in unheard of.

Happy daily celebrations,
Maximo

How to Deal with the Tzununa Food Situation

I'm not sure yet.


I tried not eating. That doesn't work. I got cranky, headachey, weak, tired, a loud stomach and hungry.


As my faithful readers know, there's no kitchen here at the Mirador. I'm not fully comfortable arranging dinner with the family yet. They usually like to know this kind of thing in advance and my hours and presence here are highly irregular. I'm not ready to say, "Hey, I smell food and hear tortillas being clapped into delicious shape. Is there extra food I can eat right now? I'm starving. There are are no restaurants in this town and your stove doesn't work even though it makes me all warm and fuzzy on the inside that I'm free to use it whenever I like. Muy amable." Assuming I still possessed the lingual wherewithal to translate this well enough in my depleted and delirious condition, I'm sure I would be offered all the food needed to fill me up.


There is one restaurant in town. It'd be about a twenty-five minute walk to the posh hotel on the hill and the food is probably expensive. Out of the question. I've heard about a lady somewhere in town that
"if you're hungry and you ask her, she'll make you food."
"What will she make you?"
"Whatever you want to eat"


Like you, I know that last statement is dying for some qualification. When it sounds to good to be true and all that. Here however, qualification is often thrown to the wind. I can attempt to qualify for you:


"What will she make you?"
"Whatever you want to eat that involves, on any given day, a selection from the following: tortillas, tamales, rice, beans, eggs, maybe tiny dried, salty fish, tomato sauce or ramen noodles."


It is a good list, but I haven't found the lady yet.


There is fried chicken in town. "Rostipollos y Papas". Fried chicken is the only hot thing on offer in the centro and there are three identical stands. I had a nice chat with Pablo at the stand by the tienda when I first came to town. We got friendly quickly because he's so friendly. His teeth are done up like many of his countrymen of both sexes: gold-rimmed front upper four with a gold star center two front. I liked his chicken right off the bat. It was very lean, dark and flavorsome and reminded me of the fresh chicken, as my faithful readers know, that I prepared and ate back at the Yoga Forest. If it ain't broke and all that, so I stuck with Pablo for a while. I don't do too much fried chicken even though it is crack delicious when hot, but the papas are a good snack whenever. One day Pablo wasn't around so I strolled across the little street to Maria. The sort of dejected disinterest she always showed after I walked away having gone to Pablo for food wore off as soon as I said hello to her and she too was quite friendly. I found out there that the three stands are run, one, by a father, two, by a son (Pablo), and, three, a daughter (Maria), but they are separate even though I've seen them run to one of the other stands when they come up short on chicken, fries, plates, napkins, toothpicks, ketchup, picante or bolsitas. With Maria:


"Who makes the most money?"
"Someone different each day."
"What do you do to give your chicken a special touch?"
"Nothing. The chicken and the french fries are all exactly the same. I don't know why the earnings come out different each day. It's just luck."


This seems to be the Guatemalan way. If you want to open a tienda or a tortilleria, tornilleria, libreria, ferreteria, carniceria or diarrhea, you build it with concrete, stock it with the same stuff as the other guy/gal, paint it with the same font as every other place but change the first name that comes after the type of shop. Sure, there are places that stand out among any type of business, especially the panaderias, but it's pretty standardized. Maybe there's pride or a sense of legitimacy in building something exactly the same as everyone else.


I asked Maria about her relationships with her siblings. She said besides Pablo, they were all good. Something happened a year ago and they don't really talk since. I had trouble understanding exactly everything. In fact, I understood nothing about what happened because of my lingual limitations and I was busy cleaning a leg of her delicious rostipollo. I'm pretty sure whatever caused the rift had nothing to do with the purveyance of poultry. It will be my New Years' Resolution to broker a sit-down with these two so maybe they can squash it, or at least quash it. They spend about 14 hours every day working 14 feet apart cutting the potatoes and dressing the chicken, which, before slaughter, roam free on a farm in San Juan la Laguna Atitlan, Solola, Guatemala.


Today, when not eating stopped working, I tried the Tzununa Centro combo lunch, which I made up today. I was looking for a small plate of fries. I like Pablo and Maria equally (though I've never been over to the father's cart), so I chose on the basis of who would have fresher fries. Maria's were in the oil and only needed three minutes to finish. Pablo looked a bit hurt maybe but he'll be friendly next time. I went to the little overcharging tienda across the way and picked up:


2 bananas                           Q1
slice of watermelon             Q1
slice of canteloupe              Q1
slice of pineapple                Q1
pan dulce                           Q1.25          should've been Q1 at the most
different pan dulce              Q1.25          should've been Q1 at the most


I went back and asked for a Q3 plate of fries. She filled the dessert plate nicely and plenty of ketchup, hold the (disgusting, atificial, plastic) picante. With the fresh fries, I am faced with the preeminent Max Benjamin dilemma. I've told people countless times that I'm nearly incapable of traveling with food. I can either stay and eat the fresh fries, take them back to the hotel and eat there, or eat them on the way. The hotel is 120 feet away up a paved road at an 18% incline. If I eat them on the way, which I do, I will arrive at the top of the hill now short on not only calories but also oxygen. If I pass out anywhere along the way, the fries are likely to hit the ground where they'll be immediately devoured by chuchos.


With the fries                    Q3


we have a


subtotal                           Q9.5
sales tax                          Q0.0


for a


grand total                      Q9.5


With today's accurate (made up) exchange rate, this equates to $1.21USD. I was never too into watermelon back home, but I'm getting into it here. Can't say why. My favorite stuff here that's new is the papaya and the passion fruit, but nothing compares with almighty Jocote when they're in their long season.



For desert, I'm having some sunflowers seeds in the shell. Here, they come in this flavor called Sunflower Seeds. Tastes real authentic. 

Good to Be Working Again, Part II

I commuted from San Marcos for my first half week of work, delaying my move to Tzununa because I met a beautiful woman and wanted to stay nearby to her. By the time Saturday came, I was ready to haul my shit one village over and see how things played out with the girl having a bit of distance between us. There was certainly already some distance between her mindset and mine but that made it interesting.


My first night in Tzununa was awful. Thinking back on my worst nights from all my time spent traveling, this was up there in real shitty ones. It commenced while I was reading in the afternoon. I started Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which I would recommend to some of my male friends and Michelle Railsback. Music began to blare. There's a church next to the hotel. In preparation for the band a couple hours later, they played song after song way too loud. They had mounted a bullhorn-looking speaker, as if the rest of the amps weren't enough, on the church roof pointing at the center of town right through my hotel room. I read for a while and was actually able to get into the book. Loud music. I took a long walk, bought groceries, and came back. Loud music. I cooked dinner, ate, and cleaned up. Loud music. I read more and got tired and fell asleep. As soon as I got under the covers, I became allergic to the bed. There's two blankets but no sheet. Nothing seems dirty, in fact, I'm not sure anyone's ever stayed in this room, but I would really prefer a sheet.


I woke up at some unknown time later. It was obviously still dark, The music was still blaring. My nose is an itchy, snotty mess. I'm groggy and very unhappy. A bare bulb burning out on the porch feels like an arc welder against my retinas as I search for something to blow my nose into.


I realize when I step out to the toilet that it's no longer the church next to the hotel but the church behind the hotel. I don't know which way their speaker is pointed, but I'm sure their wall of amps is facing me. It's far too loud.


I don't have any tissues, so I use the toilet paper in the room to angrily wipe the snot from my face. My nose will fare worse for this. Calm down. Be angry but wipe your nose gently. It's rough toilet paper. But if you don't wipe with some force, most of the snot remains on the face and mustache. There's no trash can in this horrible room, so I fling each saturated clump to the wall forming a pile that will further depress me in the morning.


This sucks. This reminds me of the torture scene in Zero Dark Thirty. If anyone ever wants to torture me, use the music and I'll probably break. At the end of each song, I pray it was the last, but for hours on end, my prayers have been shat on. OK, what can I do? I don't know why, but that light is killing me. I would certainly trade in the fancy one-way mirrored windows for some regular windows and a curtain. I string up my towel and that's a big help but unfortunately that's it for improvement. It's funny to think about what would happen if I went over to the church and asked them to turn their music down, or off, because I'm trying to sleep and also I'm not feeling 100%.


There's one other hotel in town. Not a hotel like in a hotel sense with reception, etc., but a few extra rooms at a family's house where you can stay if you give them money. Walking up there now, where I'll still be able to hear this music, if not as loud, at this unknown hour on a Saturday night seems out of the question.


Then there's the bed. I can't just become unallergic to this bed the same as the mattress won't magically become thicker and more even. I posit that if I put a couple shirts on and keep the blankets near my waist, it may ease the reaction. It helped enough to fall asleep after a while.


I woke up a bit after sunrise and reveled in the lack of blasting music. I opened up my book and read a few pages when the music started up again. Luckily, the responsible church was off in the distance and the music came in at a now seemingly amateur volume.


Back to work tomorrow. Thursday, we erected the scaffolding using bamboo and wire. There are two crews on site: Walter's and Santiago's. Walter is doing the bamboo so I'm with him and Gerson has been brought in specially by the architect Charlie for his bamboo experience. In places, two horizontal bamboo rods side by side will have a plank laid over and screwed in to form a decent platform. Gerson wanted to walk across one of the single rods that spanned about 10-ft between two platformed areas. He simply walked across. If he fell one way, it would be 20-ft down to hard, sandy, rocky earth and if he fell the other way, it would be 16-ft down to a stone stairway. He made it each time he did it.


Walter really welcomed me into his group right away. He's the 23 year old crew chief who wear s a neon green tank top with “Nudist on Strike” painted on. He involved me and the rest of the guys soon followed suit. It also helped that I joined in hauling bamboo. They help out when I need it, kind-spirited and eager to show off their talents and skills. I hear a lot of “Cuidado Maximo”.


The guys start at seven and take a half-hour for breakfast at 10. Their wives, or maybe mothers, sisters, aunts, or cousins bring their warm food to the site sometime before. It's always a stack of tortillas and something to put on them. We've been breakfasting standing up around a 55-gallon drum and everyone shares. The first day I couldn't scrape much together so I only brought cold tortillas. Walter wouldn't allow that as cold tortillas need either be heated up or given to the chuchos, so I shared in warm tortillas topped with various ramens, spaghettis, black beans and even a bowl of shrimp in tomato sauce. Day 2, I brought some leftover pasta and before I knew it, forks were flying over to give it a try and I felt officially in.


I was hoping working the construction gig would include built-in Spanish practice, but unfortunately for me, it's mostly Kaqchikel spoken on site. Kaqchikel is difficult and almost completely unwritten. I can't repeat a short phrase correctly. I try to repeat the sounds that seem like the important ones to me, but the breathy noises and different mouth action sounds carry great importance as well. I'm not sure how to jump into Kaqchikel but I wish I did.  Luckily, the local children are happy to repeat a phrase as many as 16 times in a row finding great entertainment in my repeated, failed attempts to pronounce correctly.  We worked with trying to nail down the names of two villages above Tzununa up in the hills: Sanxshjomelxsh and Pajomelxsh.



Back on the site, I experienced sheer horror after we hoisted a 7-meter bamboo to stand vertically atop the 2^nd level scaffold. Now out of our reach, Walter and Samuel hugged their bodies into the beam and the beam it would be wired to. I craned my neck looking upward remaining ready to dive out of the way as the rod swayed this way and that in the wind. We don't have a crane or anything like that. We do have a drill. A drill and wire snips and a handmade ladder. It's good to be working again, half days of course.  

Merry Christmas from the Heart of the Mayan World

Happy Holidays and New Year!

It does feel a bit odd to experience the Christmas Season around here.  It's beautiful during these days of the windy season and long-sleeved shirts are only necessary in the evenings when the air carries the faintest touch of a real chill.  Ninety something percent of the local population here has never seen snow.

The locals are excited for Christmas and so am I.  I'm very excited for Christmas to come, and go, so the people can take their lights down.  Very popular here are 'music lights'.  These are Christmas lights with a built in loop of Christmas songs that emit in high-pitched terrible beeping tones that sound like the ringtone from the first, and worst, cell phone ever.  There is an (unused) option to have the lights go with no music, which is great, but there is also the option to play the loop in double-time, not so great.  As I sleep, at the Mirador, I can hear a mixture of two sets of music lights.  In fact, muddling up Frosty and Rudolph may be better than each alone.  As I write this on 21 Dec, I think I can manage four more nights and trust these people to dismantle all their noise-making decorations promptly on Christmas Day.

___________

I feel as though at times I'm being unfair to Guatemala here at The Reprieve Report by speaking about the country with a voice that doesn't match my real attitude.  I write a lot about the funnyisms, sillyisms, oddisms, frustratisms, et ceteraisms, of the land and I may exaggerate certain things (though not much).  While it seems like a completely different world from the land of my upbringing, I absolutely love it here.  The differences make it fun and it's simply more free and less rigid.  It's a dirt poor country in an extreme environment but there is happiness in the people that would rival that of people anywhere, rich or poor.  You learn a ton daily simply by virtue of your presence here.  The landscape is stunningly beautiful and seems to magically change if you walk, or just wait, ten minutes.  After three months around this Lake Atitlan, I'm scratching the surface of a real knowledge base of its contours and villages happy to succumb to its temptation to stay and make a life here.  I encourage anyone thinking about visiting to do so.  I can help with arrangements around the lake and the rest of the country has plenty to offer all very affordable and not nearly as dangerous as books and the internet make it seem.

I'm also excited to pass into a new year 'overseas', which I've never before done.

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, happy other holidays and a very healthy New Year!!

Good to Be Working Again, Part I

11.20.13

It's good to be doing something again. I'm volunteering, for now, so I wouldn't dare set an alarm, but I usually wake up at or before daybreak, around six, and work doesn't start til seven.

My first impressions of Tzununa after half a week of work were good. It's a simple, poor village much like the others, but the people in each village have a distinct look in their faces and skin and a unique, traditional style of dress that the women still wear every day. Here in Tzununa, the base is black. I like it a lot. There are often diamonds or lines stitched in a string in a low contrast color, like a grey. With brighter, more colorful threads, they stitch in lines of other shapes or flowers or birds. The bright colors used here on the skirts and shirt collars are mostly a mix of blues, greens and aquas. I've only been here for a few days, but I'm enjoying the look. The women seem to have attitudes to match their snazz uniforms. Serious and stern: the black. But lighthearted, friendly and kind: the blues and greens.

It's nice to be working again.  Work is the construction of a three-story bamboo hotel here in Tzununa. The ground level has already been built up with stones. Stones are free except for the paying the men who gather them from the river and haul them to the site on their backs. They use a bag and rope system with a strap that goes around and over the forehead. A group will help each other get loaded up, except I suppose the last guy does it on his own. They carry incredible weights, especially for the size of the men, great distances. You have the guys who hike up the mountain, chop up firewood and load it on their backs with a similar head-rope system. They hike steep, rocky trails several thousand feet down. Wellies are common, busted up shoes are common and some old dudes do it barefoot. Rarely does a guy do it in the type of shoes I would wear walking the same trails with a small backpack. Those guys haul downhill.

Construction guys haul shit uphill. It's convenient and comforting to know with certainty that the smallest guy in any crew is well stronger than me. When I'm cringing through a task and give the load over to the small guy, I'm assured that if I was able to do it at all, he'll do it without cringing. After hauling a full load a good distance, maybe 20 minutes uphill, the workers release the load slowly and gradually and sit to rest for at least five minutes. One sight at the site made a big load easily quantifiable. A guy carried up two 50-kg bags of cement at a time. 220 lbs. Maybe it doesn't sound like that much, but imagine giving a 220-lb woman a 15-minute piggyback ride up a mountain. Imagine doing it in flop-flops.

Day 1 involved moving the bamboo up from the road to the site. Handling the six-inch thick, 20-ft length or bamboo was more a challenge of balance and maneuvering than a test of bearing a great weight. I got the hang of it and it was actually harder on Day 2 when those muscles behind the collar bones were so sore that reloading them with more stick was painful.

So it's nice to be working again. I've had two weeks off since my last vacation ended trekking in the Western Highlands. I spent the morning hours of most of that time working on the writing of an instructional, and partly anecdotal, book about travel photography for people who want to stop taking such horrible pictures and showing them to me. I spent the afternoons doing a variety of things that together constitute general fucking off. My enthusiasm for the writing waned after my own camera briefly went swimming in the rio above San Marcos at the little pool where the trail goes over the huge rock. This was the day after I wrote the part about keeping your gear dry and protected. A little probably won't hurt, but try to keep it dry. You can't take pictures if your camera breaks. My camera is fucked. A guy in Panajachel is going to look at it. The last guy I let look at something fixed it. It was this $11 Casio alarm clock. All the liquid crystal displays stopped displaying and the little light wouldn't turn off. I was going to be American about it and toss the thing in the garbage. Just for shits, I brought it to the Casio Authorized Dealer Specialist that happened to be next to the hotel in Huehuetenango. This was probably the third highlight from Huehue after a really good torta at the square and finding an XL J. Crew button-neck hoody at a used clothing store.

The owner took the job seriously. He kept it simple stupid; batteries were his first suggestion for the cure. I pointed out the illumination yet hiding in the daylight so he went to work cracking it open, spraying some stuff on the circuit board and viola. What was wrong? It's a “bad machine”. The camera is seemingly fucked, but I'm gonna let this other guy look. His shop is down a hall through a tienda past a couple bedrooms and you never know. I wish I could still take pictures. But I have a lot of other stuff on my mind and it certainly feels nice walking around with no valuable stuff. I'll be excited to finish the book a bit down the road and maybe with some fresh photos.

TBC