Panajachel

Some people have asked me for pictures of Panajachel. Here are some:

Second hand textiles market

View from our hotel

River

Santander street, where most of the tourist stores are.

The hotel's restaurant. We had breakfast there every morning.

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The market

Our favorite restaurante for lunch, Bistro. The food was very good. We always ate the special, steamed vegetables, chicken or tofu over rice with a peanut sauce. Excellent and only 25 quetzals, less than 4 dollars. It has beautiful plants and hummingbirds come all the time

Volcanoes

We don't get tired of looking at the lake and the volcanoes. The views are incredible, very beautiful and peaceful. Every time we look at the volcanoes and mountains they look different and the same with the water, sometimes it is very calm and sometimes it is rough. We have eaten a lot at a restaurant called "Sunset" It has beautiful views of the lake and we like "lomito al ajillo". I have eaten a lot of meat here. I am going to miss it when we go back to the USA.

Santiago Atitlan

We visited Panabaj, the place where a mudslide buried many houses in the center of town in Oct. 2005. Many people died. You can see how high the mud was on this house.

We just came back from Santiago Atitlan, on the other side of the lake. It was a great trip. I loved that town. The women and older men wear traditional dresses and it looks so beautiful. Most of the women wear huipils in some shade of purple with appliques. The older men wear long shorts with a long sleeved shirt, shoes and hat. They look so cool! Unfortunatelly the young men are not keeping the tradition and I am sure it will die soon. The young girls wear huipils and cortes so hopefully they will keep this beautiful tradition.

We went to the market and it was very colorful. It was a small market. We walked around and I bought a shawl. I wish I could buy more things but they are not inexpensive. It takes a lot of time and materials to make the huipils and cortes. We did buy another quilt, this one made with pieces of huipils.

We also visited the shrine of Maximom, a very interesting god/saint that likes alcohol and tobacco. You can see a picture here. http://www.robertleon.com/gallery/photograph-467.htm

More pictures of us

I haven't been able to post pictures here but you can see some on Sharon's blog

http://www.mayanfamilies.org/ click on Blog

Another Sunday

I can't believe it is Sunday again. Today I am not going to Sharon's house. Don wants to go to Santiago Atitlan, on the other side of the lake.

Yesterday I went with Sharon and another family visiting from the USA to Ernesto's house. Ernesto is a paraplegic that lives in a tiny room with his wife and two little girls. They do not own the land and need to vacate this room soon. They used to live there with extended family but they have left already and they are by themselves. He has no access to outside and stays in bed for hours. He had terrible bed sores before but they seem to be healing now. We have been trying to raise funds to buy a flat piece of land for him and yesterday he was surprised by this family with a check for $2,500 US to buy the land!!! We are so happy for him and his family. Now we need to raise $5,000 to build the house. We hope he will be able to find something on the side of the road so they can open a little store on the house and earn an income.

Another adventure

We visited the mother and child who are sick. She did not want to go to the hospital yet.

The volunteer firefighter who spoke kakchiquel, resting on the way up the mountain.

Today I translated for a doctor who was visiting from New Mexico. We went back to Santa Catarina with the bomberos (firefighters) to bring a woman who had had a miscarriage and was still bleeding. We rode in the back of the ambulance, a first for me and I hope it will be the last time, especially one in Guatemala. It was very bare, just a strecher, an oxigen tank, IV and little else.

One of the firefighter's spoke Kakchiquel so when the doctor had a question I would translate it into Spanish and then the firefighter would translate it to Kakchiquel. Then the woman would answer and he would translate it for me and I would translate it to English. It was like a telephone game.

A family in need in Santa Catarina

The entrance to the house

It looked like this was were the mother was cooking.

One of the children, eating a cookie we gave him

This is where the children sleep, on the floor, in the corner of the room. They only had a couple of blankets. They also had one bed where the mother slept with the two year old but it did not have a mattress. They were sleeping in bare wood planks. We brought them some food and the children were very happy.

We had started at the bottom of the mountain.

On the way down

Our two guides with Titi

The mother and the baby

On the second day in the afternoon we went with Olga, the Mayan Families social worker, and Cindy, a volunteer from the USA, to look for a woman that seemed to suffer from Lukemia in another town called Santa Catarina. We hired a van to take us there since we didn't want to ride in the back of a crowded pick up like everybody else does around here. The dresses of the women in that town were very beautiful, they were turquoise and all kinds of blues. They also wore a head ornament.

We went to the school and the director told two girls to guide us to the house. The town starts at the level of the lake and it goes up. There are very narrow streets, in some parts are like stairs and others just rocks. The house we were looking for was way up in the mountain. Titi was tired and she didn't want to walk so I dragged her for some time and then Don carried her for a long time. Poor him, it was a very difficult climb for us since we are not used to it. Carlos didn't have any problem but Olga and Cindy were very tired by the time we got there.

The conditions of the house and the family were horrendous. It was a one room house made of mud bricks with dirt floor, there were flies everywhere. The mother looked very sick but the worst was finding a two year old who had a huge belly and very skiny arms and legs. He was not walking or moving much, he was just sitting there, covered with flies. The mother only spoke Katckiquel, so the 9 year old daughter had to translate for her. There was also a 5 year old boy and a 5 month old baby. The father is away working but when he comes back he only gives them 100 quetzals, approx.

We told the mother we wanted to bring her and the two year old to see a doctor but she said she needed to ask her husband if it was ok to go. He is not in town so it could be a while until he comes back. We went back to Sharon's house and she posted about the family on her blog. We hope to go back to convince the mother to come to the doctor with us.