Hola from Guatemala City!
We arrived tired and safe to the G-22 organization yesterday afternoon. They greeted us with delicious food and a lovely community-centered space to live in. Our beds are all next to each other and they’re also in our dining room! This room has seen many card fights and games and heard lots of laughs and songs and sleep-talk conversations.
We’ve learned so much about G-22 just over the past two days. Their focus is urban sustainability, which can be described simply as Eco-friendly living in cities. The founder, Alfredo, is incredibly inspiring and works, lives, and breaths environmental awareness. He’s an architect so he designs apartments, houses and even schools that minimize energy and water consumption. He has shown us how big of an impact one person can make. We also had the pleasure of meeting and learning from Mindy, who has lived here in Guatemala for three years and is one of the happiest and most generous and genuinely kind women we’ve encountered.
Today we took a bus into the center of town and saw beautiful parks and markets and lots of seagulls. There was a slight scare when we thought we lost Jess, but the weather was perfect and it was really nice to be out and about in a metropolis for a couple of hours.
The real excitement came on the way home when we stopped to get our clean clothes from the lavanderia and we discovered it was closed!! We’re taking off for Nicaragua in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow so things didn’t look good for us. We prepared ourselves for a few days of living in the few clothes we hadn’t washed until our locked up clothes could make their way to us, and Brent and Jess even offered to buy us all new underwear! Luckily neither of those things had to happen because Alfredo and Mindy sweet talked handfuls of people into doing various things that ended with the return of our precious clothes! We are eternally indebted to them.
The night ended on a highly contemplative and reflective note after watching a powerful documentary on the deterioration of the world’s environment. It was a refreshing and thought provoking topic that hasn’t gotten much attention yet during the trip, but judging by the conversation that ensued it won’t be long until it resurfaces.
We have been incredibly happy and comfortable here at G-22 and in Guatemala as a whole, and we will leave it tomorrow morning with only the fondest of memories! As usual, we send our love to all those reading this!
Lisa