We’re back from five breathtaking days in Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz, where we stayed with the organization Community Cloud Forest Conservation, led Rob and Tara Cahill, along with teachers and staff from the surrounding Q’eqchi’ communities. CCFC is working with the conservation of the rapidly diminishing cloud forest, as it intersects with the lives and well-being of the people who live there. The work of this organization is far-reaching. There are two main community programs: Kids and Birds, which is a summer-camp-style environmental education experience for children, and Women in Agroecology Leadership for Conservation (WALC). Through WALC, young women learn life skills and leadership, but also plant agroforestry plots, as an alternative form of agriculture that both repairs degraded forest areas and can be a source of nutritionally dense food. CCFC is addressing both social and environmental issues holistically, and coming up with some wonderfully creative solutions.

During our five days in the cloud forest, we spent three nights in the CCFC facilities, which are filled with windows, light, and wood. The facility was built with careful attention to resource conservation. We got to experience composting toilets, showers heated in pipes that ran through wood cook stoves, and meals featuring ingredients like cloud forest spinach. It felt like there was no boundary between “indoors” and “outdoors.” We got to spend a lot of time outside in the cloud forest. We hiked through the forest two different days, both times reaching caves that were historically places of Mayan worship.

Our other two nights were spent with host families, which we all agreed was one of the most difficult things we’ve done so far on this cross-cultural. We were living in houses perched on the edges of the mountains, in the community of Sebob. While there, we ate meals cooked around a fire, interacted with the intergenerational families who were hosting us, and played a lot of soccer. We wheezed up steep hills (our host siblings nonchalantly sprinting ahead of us), slept on boards, bundled in all of the clothes we’d packed, and tried our best not to cough as billows of smoke from cooking fires hit our faces. Even in writing that, I am cringing a little bit. We all know how incredibly privileged we were to be there, how hospitable our host families were, how little we have to complain about in our daily lives. As we walked down that mountain for the last time, I wrestled with feelings of guilt at the bit of relief I felt at returning to the CCFC buildings, with their hot showers and soft beds. These mixed feelings of gratitude and guilt linger with me, as I return to life at school in the city.

That week gave me a lot to think about in regards to how we talk about conservation and issues of environmental stewardship, since this is one of CCFC’s main areas of focus. Because I am an Environmental Sustainability major at EMU, I was particularly interested in seeing the intersection of culture and environment from an angle other than that of the United States. Our relationship with the environment, and how we respond to environmental degradation, are so dependent on where we were born, who our families are, and what our surrounding culture says about environmental stewardship. I saw a lot of similarities between the U.S. and Guatemala in our environmental concerns: the ways that so many of us take for granted our natural resources, our rapidly dwindling forests, climate change as a life-altering force in all of our lives, the cultural significance of agriculture. Continue reading →

Bucket List for Guatemala:

✓ -Watch a volcanic eruption from our classroom window

-Hike a volcano and roast marshmallows at the top (this coming weekend!)

-Take a moto (motorcycle) ride around the city

✓ -Barter down prices at the central market

-Have a conversation with a stranger in Spanish

✓ -Attend Catholic Mass (one with indigenous flair)

✓ -Visit “the most beautiful lake in the world,” (Atitlán)

-Climb the palaces and temples of Tikal

-Zipline through a Guatemalan forest (free travel?)

-Ride a chicken bus to Antigua

✓ – Squish a lot of people into a small amount of space, transportation-wise

-Bake snickerdoodle cookies for my host family (and figure out how to work the oven)

I find simple pleasure in coming home after school around 5 or 5:30 and sitting down in the living room with my host mom and abuelita, talking about anything from weather to shoes to food to family to the traffic, the depth and subject matter expanding the more Spanish I learn. But along with those times of contentment come frustrations of living in a family with a different religion (Neo-Pentecostal megachurch attendees), different customs (watching sermons on tv (see “religion”) while eating dinner), different ideas of health (don’t sleep with your hair wet or walk barefoot on the tile – you’ll get a cold), and many, many communication difficulties.

Just two days ago, I came home from school and wanted to go on a run. We had talked about it the day before, and I reminded my family, thinking I was conveying it well, before I went upstairs to change. When I came back down, both my host mom and abuelita were ready, too. Apparently they were coming, too, and were excited to join me on my “run,” which was now a walk to and from the park down the street. I was disappointed, wanting some time to myself and to get some real exercise after eating mostly processed foods the past week. However, walking through the neighborhood close to dusk, many families were out, strolling to the little tienda nearby to get a staple for dinner, passing each other with friendly waves – there was this small town feel nestled in the midst of a sprawling city, and I didn’t realize how much I had missed greeting acquaintances with pleasantries, like on EMU’s campus.

I live in a colonia, or a gated neighborhood, and while I knew I should appreciate the safety measures surrounding me, I felt caged most of the time. I realize, without the walls and gates, I wouldn’t have experienced that small community feeling of Monday night, but overall, we are still surrounded by imposing “safeness.” Stores are guarded by men with guns and rifles. CASAS is surrounded by walls. Most houses, mine included, are surrounded by walls, within the larger wall of the community. “Con cuidado,” is my host mom’s parting words to me every day when I leave for school. I experience the cognitive dissonance of living in Guatemala City with the knowledge and many warnings from my host families that the city can be very dangerous, while experiencing nothing more harmful than wolf whistles from passing motos. I count our group blessed that we haven’t encountered worse, and maybe it’s because we are white people from the US. Maybe I don’t find it dangerous because I am not the main target population for gangs, and we’ve been wisely kept from the “red zones” of the city, but when I read an article last week that claimed Guatemala City to be “one of the most dangerous cities in the world,” I wondered if that was true, and if so, dangerous for whom?

I have always lived near cities, in towns and suburbs with large populations, but they did very little to prepare me for Guatemala City. Every day, a bombardment of the senses accompanies the walk to the microbus – the smells of baking bread from panaderias, diesel, trees and flowers, masses of people, and the sounds of whistles, honking, engines revving, fireworks, dogs barking, roosters crowing, “singing” (screaming) birds, and again, masses of people. Traffic causes most of my sensory overload: the number of cars on the road, the poor conditions of some roads, the traffic laws (and lack thereof), and both extremes of speed – way too fast when there’s a free 100 meters of space in front of the car and not moving at all during rush hour(s) – it’s all a bit overwhelming. The idea of driving a car here puts me into a cold sweat. However, I haven’t seen a single accident, yet, so it must work for them.

Those are just some of my thought processes of the last few weeks here. It’s lovely. I’m happy and sometimes homesick. See you in 2.5 months, US!

— Anali North Martin

Last Tuesday after classes, everyone loaded into the CASAS minivans on an unusual tourist excursion. We were not headed to the national museum, nor to the presidential mansion, but to the cemetery: a resting place for some of Guatemala’s wealthiest elite that also happens to overlook the city dump.

We arrived to elaborate cast iron gates set in a high stucco wall that insulated the cemetery from the noise and bustle of the city. Inside, we found cyprus-draped roads lined by magnificent mausoleums, crumbling monuments, and elaborate marble statuary boasting the remains of some of the city’s best-known generals and politicians. The silent streets were in a surreal state of leisurely decay: gothic spires crumbled after years of neglect, joining the ruins of the long-forgotten Mayan tombs over which the graveyard was constructed in the mid-19th century. Only the monuments of the immortally wealthy—such as the massive [Egyptian] pyramid built in tribute to the Castillo family—escaped the general atmosphere of deterioration.

I wandered down the empty streets with the rest of the group, listening to our guide explain the historical and symbolic significance of the memorials we passed. As we neared the fringes of the cemetery, the decadent, crumbling mausoleums gave way to chaotic walls peppered with tiny marble placards, photographs, and faded silk flowers. Thousands of tiny crypts within these walls held the remains of those who lived by a humbler standard than the elite whose tombs we had seen earlier. But, even these memorials represented a relatively wealthy population: anyone who wished to be buried here had to arrange for an annual rent to be paid postmortem—otherwise their remains would be “evicted” and their crypt would be leased out to someone else. Continue reading →

Last Thursday, I woke up early and stepped outside into a gorgeous, sunny, Guatemala morning. It was our first day at CASAS. After a long day of airplane rides and a late night arrival, it was refreshing to finally begin the second part of our journey. The group was surprisingly animated for a short night’s sleep, probably due to anxieties surrounding our upcoming events: our first day of Spanish classes and the introduction to our host families. A walk through the beautiful flora and fauna of the CASAS courtyard helped to put our minds at ease.

It has now been week since we first arrived. The excitement and anxiety surrounding our recent arrival has subsided, replaced by the comfortable consistency of routine. Every day, I wake up around 6 a.m. to quickly take a shower before my host brother, Jacobo (35), gets out of bed. My breakfast, a bowl of cereal and a cup of instant coffee, is waiting for me on the table thanks to the hospitality of mi madre, Gladys. My sister, Andrea (25), left the house before I got up and won’t return until I am already asleep since she works during the day and goes to the university at night. She barely sleeps.

Jacobo takes my two friends, Anali and Elizabeth, and me to CASAS every morning. We arrive about an hour early so we have plenty of time to relax in the courtyard, drink some coffee, do some homework and talk with the rest of the group members as they slowly trickle in. Spanish classes start at 8:30 and go until 12:30 when we have an hour break for lunch. The afternoon activities vary depending on the day. Early this week we visited the city dump where hundreds of people dig through the trash to find things to recycle for a paycheck of 10 quetzales a day (about $1.40). It’s the 4th generation of workers that has been born and raised in the dump. We also visited a gorgeous outdoor mall that would rival some of the nicest malls in the U.S. which was a stark contrast from the dump we had been the day before.

After school, Elizabeth, Anali and I are either picked up by one of our family members or ride the bus back home. I knock on the big metal door that guards the entrance to my family’s house and mi madre greets me at the door. I sit for a while and converse with her and the family friend Narda about our days. My siblings arrive at various times throughout the night. Monica (32) comes home from her job as an architect around 6:30 and Jacobo comes home around 8:00. My other brother Manolo (34), gets home on his motorcycle around 8:45 and we spend some time together conversing, playing games or watching T.V. I crawl into bed around 10:30, exhausted from a long day of dual language conversation.

Despite the lack of sleep, I look forward to waking up every day to watch the group grow closer, understand the language more clearly, and encounter new experiences in unfamiliar contexts.

-Sol Brenneman

“This wall is not Trump’s wall. This is our wall. This is how we as a country choose to mark our border.”

I know my words cannot do justice to the week we spent at the U.S./Mexico border, so I figured I might as well start with someone else’s. This was said by Mark Adams, one of the coordinators for Frontera de Cristo (Christ’s Border), upon our arrival in the border town of Douglas, Arizona. Our first stop in Douglas was the wall, a towering 23 foot structure that plunges 6 feet below the ground as well. The wall is constructed of tall metal bars spaced far enough apart that border patrol agents can see what’s happening on the México side.

Mark asked us to go around and share what we have heard people in our hometown area say about immigration. It turned into a political analysis, with many of us citing our own family’s left-leanings in contrast to our town’s more conservative politics. We thought we knew what we were talking about: liberal=pro-immigration, conservative=pro-wall. It turns out it is way more complicated than that.

The wall has been a bipartisan effort for a while now, starting back in the Clinton administration. The wall is 23 feet tall in the town, but out in the desert it peters out into a low vehicle barrier. The Clinton administration hoped to use the lethal deterrent of the desert landscape to lower the rate of illegal immigration. It was lethal, but it wasn’t a deterrent. I’m trying to wrap my mind around the fact that our country’s official policy is that we would rather have migrant people die in the desert than live in our country.

We spent the week crossing back and forth between Douglas and its sister city, Agua Prieta, México. We stayed in a church on the Agua Prieta side, and spent our days visiting people, the desert, the wall, listening to stories, asking so many questions.

We spoke to a woman who was held in detention for three months, unable to communicate with her children or even know if they were okay. She was pulled over for speeding and didn’t have her papers.

We learned about what the migrant people are fleeing from: gang violence, economic ruin. We learned that people wouldn’t leave their homes if they didn’t have to; and we learned about our own country’s hand Continue reading →