Basic Update

As of the beginning of June, I am no longer working at Greenpeace. I very much love what Greenpeace is all about, but my grassroots burn-out job had left me feeling a bit... burnt out.

So now I'm busy being a vagabond student of sorts in Guatemala. My sister is living in Guatemala City on a Fullbright scholarship doing forensic anthropology at the FAFG. In 1954 the CIA staged a coup, ousting the communist-leaning, popular and democratically elected president of Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. This ended a period of relative stability and plunged the country into 30 years of internal conflict and genocide against the majority, indigenous Mayan population. Jen is helping to excavate mass graves, identify the bodies and return the remains to surviving family members for reburial. Check out her blog: Digging for Truth.

I've been taking one-on-one Spanish classes for four hours a day and living with a host family in Antigua for the past couple weeks. Antigua is considerably safer and considerably more gringoey than Guatemala City, but a close chicken-bus ride away. Antigua was once the capital of Latin America, known for its Spanish colonial architecture. After this I'll hopefully be moving on to Quetzaltenango (The Place of the Quetzal Bird) also known as Xelajú (Under Ten Mountains) or just Xela (pronounced "Shay-la"). Xela is the second biggest city in Guatemala and has a 50% indigenous population. There I will be doing an internship with a non-profit travel agency. Basically, I recruit gringos to go hike volcanoes, and the money is used to build libraries in rural communities.

The goal is to stay here as long as possible (money being the limiting reagent) in order to 1) learn Spanish 2) get a taste for a developing country 3) contemplate things big and small as I figure out the next step in life.

(Fun fact: The long, green tail feathers of the quetzal were once used by Mayan rulers in their head dresses. The feathers were traded almost like currency, and this is where the Guatemalan Quetzal gets its name.)