Gautemala thinking

Habits are hard to break as anyone who has cursed themselves with smoking knows. It gets interesting when you need to change you lifelong toiletry methods. The countries infrastructure is inadequate, how can an entire country end up with a sewage system that can’t take paper? What do you do when early one morning after a night of a few too many drinks you forget? Not thinking straight standing over it assessing my options I go to fish it out and realize that with never work but am to scared to flush…. Will it cause the whole town’s sewage system to block up? Oh man what do you do?
The smell does help you remember usually.
Well maybe this is my knew obsession, the rubbish strewn everywhere does bother me but I think it is like cigarettes no one knows better or cares enough to change those habits. The lake shore, the fields of corn, the town is a collage of plastics. Other villages around the lake are much cleaner and even have simple forms of recycling.
My trip across the lake was great a small boat with a bit of wind and chop, I knew we were in for interesting one, so put my snowboarding jacket on. Halfway across I was holding a sheet of plastic and loving it looked around to see others not so enthusiastic and I couldn’t stop laughing.
I finished a week of struggling to teach kids English, hard when my English is terrible and my Spanish worse. On the final day I finally managed to keep their attention for all of an hour, rewarding.

In this village to ask for Maria is a code for drugs. Almost everything is available very cheaply at nine in the morning I was offered coke walking along the main drag. Mayan women seem to prefer drug dealing which is easily understandable when the other option for many is to walk the streets day and night selling cakes. Some of the cake selling women have figured out a way to make a little more per sale. It has become an employment option because of the type of tourists attracted to the area rather than the availability. People have even tried to create Thailand style full moon parties amazingly and impressively the community saw the influence on its youth and requested them to stop, for now they have stopped.

In a village full of problems I see hope. The Mayan family I lived with had a plan that was wonderful to hear, they only had two kids and didn’t want anymore, they intend on putting their kids through university. The father enjoyed telling me his plans and obviously asks everyone for their thoughts on his plans. He has an organic coffee farm involved in fair trade and is building more rooms on top of his house so they can accommodate more students. What do you think of his plan?

The dependency on tourism bothers me an economy can not solely rely on the tourist dollar. The situation is fragile and I have had many discussions with locals about “where are all the tourists” the state of the world economy is this why? The Spanish teaching industry is booming and surely this is a good thing increasing the education among the community. Only if communities don’t become dependant, is it sustainable? Well definitely more so than continuing to fill the lakes and rivers with untreated sewage!