{"id":2401,"date":"2014-02-24T18:14:57","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T22:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crosscultural\/?p=2401"},"modified":"2014-04-17T16:58:49","modified_gmt":"2014-04-17T20:58:49","slug":"tikal-travels-and-facing-the-reality-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/2014\/02\/24\/tikal-travels-and-facing-the-reality-of-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Tikal Travels and Facing the Reality of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, February 14th<\/sup> we travelled to Tikal for our second weekend trip in Guatemala. We had a really early start to the day – we needed to be up and ready to leave CASAS at 4:30 a.m. so we could catch our flight to Tikal at 6:00 a.m. The flight to Tikal took us about 45 minutes and we arrived safely in our 30 passenger propeller plane. From there we went straight to the Tikal National Park where we toured the Mayan ruins. We hiked to five different sites and our tour guide gave us some background history about the ruins along the way. It was really fascinating to see these ruins and to learn about the Mayan culture in such an interesting place.<\/p>\n

Later on Friday afternoon we made our way to the Hotel Gringo Perdido, which was where we stayed for the weekend. Hotel Gringo Perdido sat along a beautiful, large lake and the entire hotel was open. It truly felt like paradise to all of us. The hotel was located in the country about a 45 minute walk outside of town. So if we wanted to go into town at any point it was quite a bit of a walk as there were no buses. It was really nice to have the whole weekend free to relax and hang out after a very long and busy week of Spanish classes and Spanish exams. This trip was something that all of us needed to help us clear our minds and take a break from schoolwork. There were a variety of activities for us to do during the weekend such as swimming in the lake, kayaking, hiking, and horseback riding.<\/p>\n

On Saturday morning eight people from the group decided to go horseback riding while everyone else stayed back at the hotel to hang out. Then on Sunday morning most of our group woke up early to see the sunrise over the lake. It is easy to say that this was one of the most beautiful things we saw on the trip. Seeing the sunrise reminded most of us how beautiful and peaceful a place Tikal really is. The food on this trip was amazing and I think everyone would agree that the food we had in Tikal was some of the best so far.<\/p>\n

Going back to Guatemala City was very hard for many of us because we missed the quiet peacefulness and sun of Tikal. Going back to the city meant it was time for us to go back to our daily routines, host families, and Spanish class. Overall our trip to Tikal was very successful for everyone and it was a weekend full of friends, laughter, sun, relaxation, and delicious food!<\/p>\n

-Christie Martin<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The end of our first term of Spanish brought a new class for Becca and I, and Kiersten will be joining us sometimes as well.\u00a0 We finished our Latin American Literature class and are now beginning a second course on Violence, Peace, and Justice.\u00a0 This class will study these themes in the history of Central America and especially Guatemala, and we will focus on themes such as women\u2019s rights, the identity of the Maya, the 36-year armed conflict, and theology of peace and justice.\u00a0 Our teacher is a seminary professor here at CASAS-Semilla, and we are really enjoying interacting with him in class and learning from his vast knowledge about this subject.\u00a0\u00a0 This heavy subject matter has given me much to reflect on, so I will share an excerpt from a journal entry that I wrote on February 18.<\/p>\n

“Our teacher is so knowledgeable, and I hope he tells us some more of his own story.\u00a0 He had to flee the country during the war and go to the U.S. because he was accused of communist activities.\u00a0 All it took then was an accusation to end up in jail, but he told us that usually the accused were tortured and killed rather than jailed.\u00a0 When he told the police that he wasn\u2019t a communist but a pastor who preached the gospel, they told him that preaching the gospel was a communist activity.\u00a0 Awful things happened during that time.\u00a0 Only recently, one of his students asked him to talk to her dying father, who had something that he wanted to confess.\u00a0 He went to talk to him and learned that this man had been in the army during the war.\u00a0 The man confessed to throwing live people out of helicopters into the jungle, the ocean, or the craters of active volcanoes.\u00a0 He wanted to be told truthfully if God would forgive him for what he had done.\u00a0 Our teacher told him, \u201cS\u00ed, Dios te ama (Yes, God loves you).\u201d\u00a0 If our professor hadn\u2019t had the opportunity to go to the US, he would probably have been killed too.\u00a0 He pointed at the whiteboard where he\u2019d written \u201c250,000 dead, 1,000,000 homeless, 50,000 disappeared\u201d and said, \u201cthe people who couldn\u2019t leave, here they are.\u201d\u00a0 It was an odd feeling to look at him standing there in our classroom and realize how easily he could have been one of those statistics.\u00a0 I think I\u2019ll have a lot to journal about as this class goes on.”<\/p>\n

This class material relates to an experience we recently had visiting a forensic anthropology lab that works to identify the remains of persons found in mass graves from the time of the war.\u00a0 Their organization is trying to find and return the 50,000 disappeared people to their families, the vast majority of whom are villagers from the Mayan highlands who were wiped out by the Guatemalan army so that they couldn\u2019t assist the guerrillas.\u00a0 They also keep all of their records so that they can be used as evidence in future trials if need be.\u00a0 As I stood in their lab beside a table holding the bones of a child who was maybe four or five years old at the time of death, I was reminded of a different trip where I along with other members of my high school\u2019s touring choir visited the Auschwitz death camp in Poland and saw hair that had been cut from the heads of prisoners.\u00a0 The feeling I had in these two places was the same.\u00a0 The Auschwitz prisoners were executed for being Jewish, and these Guatemalans were killed for being Mayan.\u00a0 Both were incidences of genocide.<\/p>\n

As all of these heavy thoughts and experiences have been mulling around in my mind, words of encouragement have also come to me.\u00a0 A few weeks ago, I decided to open my Bible to a random passage to see what I would find, and I happened to turn to Psalm 37.\u00a0 It is too long to post the whole thing here, so I\u2019ll just pull out the passages that meant the most to me.\u00a0 I especially connected with verse 9, which says that \u201cthose who hope in the Lord will inherit the land,\u201d and verse 37 most of all, which says, \u201cthere is a future for the man of peace.\u201d\u00a0 The future for the man of peace has been so hard to see in the history of Guatemala, but these promises are full of hope.<\/p>\n

-Maria Martin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday, February 14th we travelled to Tikal for our second weekend trip in Guatemala. We had a really early start to the day – we needed to be up and ready to leave CASAS at 4:30 a.m. so we could catch our flight to Tikal at 6:00 a.m. The flight to Tikal took us … Continue reading Tikal Travels and Facing the Reality of the Dead<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4037],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guatemalamexico-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2401"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2517,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401\/revisions\/2517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/intercultural\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}