Camino Segure/Safe Passage

I wanted to send out the website to one of the service visits we did in Guatamala. The non-profit is called Camino Seguro ("Safe Passage"), http://www.safepassage.org/welcome-to-safe-passage, and if any of you are in a position to volunteer or help financially, this is definitely a worthy cause and an honest non-profit that is making a difference. I am thinking of going back to volunteer here on either a short term or long term basis. The recently oscar-nominated film documentary "Recycled Life" is a movie about the Guatamala dump and those that make their living there if you want to check that out. The non-profit Camino Seguro works to provide shelter, food, & also education to the children of the dump-workers to try to stop the cycle of limited options. The pictures I've posted are of the Guatemala dump and the workers that make their living their sorting through the trash and sustaining themselves through what is thrown away by others. The dump is partially walled off, set to the side of Guatemala City, and located in a ravine which is rapidly filling. We took these pictures from the Guatemala City Cemetary, which is at the top of the ravine overlooking the dump. It was drizzly, we all were shocked into silence, surrounded by tombs, mausoleums, and vultures, looking out into the dump itself, with the taste and smell of it overwhelming all. The area around the dump is apparently extremely dangerous, with people driven to desparate measures. Our guide, who grew up in this area, was one of the people who "made it out". His repeated line was "this is the real world". We had two armed guards with us in addition to our 3 guides for the entire trip (from the dump, to the 2 Camino Seguro school sites we visited). I appreciate this non-profit for letting us, however briefly, into their world of making a difference.
I would be happy to talk about this further with any of you if you'd like more information.

next steps in the journey

ahhhh, dear readers (if there's even any of you left), 19 days without a post! The rest of Nicaragua, steering the ship between Nicaragua & Guatemala, all of Guatemala, and re-entry back into California has passed and awaits comment. I do intend to blog, this blog wasn't just for a particular adventure or voyage. I have many adventures and voyages in life, and so this will continue--I even thought of this ahead of time in picking my blog-name, I didn't want it to hinge on one experience. What's in my head right now: well, I'm getting over the ship-cough, which I'm told takes about 2-3 weeks to get over. I'm incredibly thankful that I didn't get sick on the ship til the last 3 days, and then not even really sick until the day we docked in San Diego on Tuesday. Wednesday was loading up our rental car and driving home--that day wasn't much fun with an upper respitory infection, but immediately upon getting home I started to feel better. I had said, about two weeks earlier, that what I missed about being home was sleeping with the windows open, and sure enough, as soon as I started doing that I started feeling better. I am so thankful that I felt great the rest of the voyage--I did the whole thing full-throttle, and that was exciting, invigorating & strengthening. What's swirling about my head right now is a combination of thankfulness (for an amazing voyage with amazing students and amazing colleagues), and wonder (both wonder from what I've experienced and seen and wonder as in I wonder what's next?). I do have several posts to finish to round out the voyage experience--Guatemala itself is worthy of at least 3 posts, one for the trip to the Chichi market, one for the lake experience, one for the service visit to Camino Seguro & the Guatemala City dump, and probably one more from a photographer's perspective--this is the country where it came together for me as a travel photographer.

Nicaragua

10pm Corinto, Nicaragua
8/8/07 Okay, here’s the rough outline of my itinerary for Nicaragua (of which I still have one more day)—arrive on Tuesday, get to a beach house, stay there Tuesday night & Wednesday night, leave Thursday at 6:30am to be back to the ship for duty by 8:30am, be on duty on Thursday day til Friday morning, and then go to possibly an orphanage on Friday morning, and have dinner at David’s mom’s house on Friday evening. (David is a Nicaraguan who we—myself, Tom & Rebecca, met about 4 hours ago, he’s 24, looks 18, and is very sweet—he showed us around town).
Many people say that Nicaragua is like Costa Rica was about 30 years ago—friendly people, beautiful country-side with a plethora of natural resources (minus the whole Iran-Contra CIA debacle). I think that statement, from the little I saw of Nicaragua, is probably true. This includes only the merest beginnings of a tourist infrastructure, and some of our students were at a loss as to what to do the first day—I’ll get to that in a moment. A group of us had decided to rent a beach house up the coast a bit, and Mario found a great place online that slept 12 and had a communal kitchen, with a pool, and right on the beach. It was about 2 hours away, and on our first day, we all disembarked in search of a van that would fit us. We procured one, and were just waiting for it to arrive for about 30 minutes, when we saw a van-load of students return to the ship, which was unusual, because we had only really been cleared for about an hour, so we checked in with them. They had found a beach recommendation in Corinto in the Nicaragua Lonely Planet guide, jumped into a van, and went there, only to discover, in their words: “the beach was dirt and they said there were buildings but there were only shacks”. So they came back to re-group. As I write this today, 3 days into the trip, I know that of the 400 or so folks here on the voyage, there are about 126 on board tonight, which is encouraging as it does mean that people have found their way out and about. Every country we’ve visited so far has had fairly advanced tourism industries, and it is good & interesting to see a country that is not keyed to the United Statesian consumer, and it’s also good to see our students learn to find their way about. Corinto is very different from everywhere else we’ve been—not the absolute industrialized poverty of Calloa Peru, with block after block of dusty homes, but not developed either. Walking around Corinto tonight it was hard to tell right away which buildings were homes and which ones were businesses—lazy hot dogs lolling about, people sitting in plastic chairs in the doorways, and somebody grilling meat outside.
Here are some free-form thoughts:
It’s super-hot here during the day, with amazing lightning shows at night lasting about an hour. From 7am-2pm there is no electricity anywhere, since Nicaragua has been having some power issues.
Driving around you can see all of the political party slogans painted everywhere—for the ALN party, for the FLN party, for Daniel Ortega (the original Sandinista and now a newly elected president again) “la gente pobre del mundo unido.”
Men with machetes in the fields, by the side of the road, and only men.
Kids with buckets of sand filling potholes for tips.
Finding a crab claw on our bed in the beach house…not sure where the rest of that guy went, but leaving at 6am & grabbing my backpack & finding another crab underneath about the size of a soap bar—crab: “oh, errr, hey”, me “hi little crab—hey, you got the bottom of my backpack all wet”, crab: “errr, yeah…gotta go” scuttle scuttle scuttle, me “ahhhh, let me get my feet out of the way”.

Annnnd--more to follow. Dinner at David's house was wonderful, and we were all sad that we had just met at the end of our quick trip there. Nicaragua ended with us leaving port at 10pm & me flashing my flashlight at the front of the ship in a pre-arranged signal, which was responded to by David & his family on shore flashing their bicycle lights--amazingly touching.

Costa Rica

Pura Vida! Costa Rica is beautiful. So this is really a place holder, the one day crossings are really hard to keep up with journalling & blogging, but I'll get back here. In the meantime: We went to Arenal Volcano, where you could see the top of the volcano glow red at night. During our visit we paid a home visit to Don Juan's organic farm where we crushed sugar cane and picked fruit & vegetables for our lunch, where we helped to make fresh tortillas. The finca (farm) was really cool--they collected methane gas from the cow dung which they used to heat their water. We did a canopy walk through the jungle, and saw howler monkeys, including a baby howler monkey. And then it poured (they don't call it the rain-forest for nothing). Our last day we went ziplining through the forests--we went on a 7 cable-segment trip. Some of the cables were over half a mile long and we zipped at up to 60mph. It was truly exhilarating--and actually over rather quickly.
Yay rice, beans & plantains!