Hello to friends and family! Apologies for not getting a blog posted sooner, but I will try to catch you up as best I can on the past couple weeks! After leaving San Andres, the group headed for a small city called Coban. We stayed at an awesome hostel called Casa Luna for a night, and got to spend a bit of time exploring the city and checking out the Ropa Americana stores. (Secondhand clothes stores with American clothing.) Its amazing what you can find in those places – including sweatshirts from places you took field trips to in Elementary school, to Superman capes, to designer jeans for roughly $3 US. The next morning we traveled to a place called Semuc Champey. It is a gorgeous national park with natural pools to go swimming in, and the most powerful river I have ever seen, (no worries, we didnt go in the powerful part of the river). The river goes underground for a while, and you can see where it enters and exits the cave, but not in the cave. We stayed overnight at another hostel, and the next morning the group traveled a couple hours outside of Coban, where we were dropped off part way up a mountain. We continued up the mountain on foot, wearing our much needed rented rubber boots. The trail was a very muddy, uphill, mental and physical task to complete, but at least had some beautiful scenery along the way, and I think the group would say was worth it in the end.
Much to our surprise, we got to stay in a recently built bunk house for guests. In fact, we were told the last Carpe Diem group helped build it! We were the first group to sleep in it, and therefore got to watch a house blessing ceremony that was very interesting. The village we stayed at is called Chicacnab. It has a little over 108 people, and they speak the indigenous language of Q’ eqchi. Most of the males speak spanish, so we could still communicate. The village had no electricity, although they did have a generator they turned on once and a while at night.
The next morning our group started our volunteer project which was helping level the ground for and constructing a second level of the church alter. Tod and Dan unearthed and shoveled clay onto satchels the rest of the group hauled in to the church and packed down. It took us four days of hard work by all, but the project was completed and looked great! It was awesome to see how well everybody worked together, and how much we accomplished. We worked from after breakfast until lunch, and afternoons were spent for the most part in the bunk house lounging around, and some people also took part in hikes and helping bury a cow.
On Saturday morning we hiked down the mountain, not nearly as brutal as hiking up, and traveled back to Coban. We stayed at the hostel Casa Luna again, got to take much needed showers after not bathing for a week, and got up very early the next morning to travel to Chichi – an incredible market in Guatemala. We became bargaining pros, and many people came back to the van with multiple bags. After the morning in Chichi we traveled to Xela, the second biggest city in Guatemala. We will be here until Saturday morning, and are again living in homestays and going to school. People seem to be enjoying being in a city environment and are taking part in different activites such as dance classes and movies at coffee houses. But, I must get back to my homestay to be in time for dinner! Hope all is well and we love and miss you all!
-Megan-
