Guatemala: Tikal and Extreme Poverty

Nerves were high on the ship as we entered Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala.  One of the few free websites on the ship is WikiTravel, which details activities and general information about a country. Under Guatemala safety the first sentence was, “Please be aware that the security situation in Guatemala has deteriorated dramatically since the beginning of 2009 with 40 murders a week in Guatemala City alone. Tourists are directly targeted, robberies are common place and travel to Guatemala is strongly discouraged until the situation improves.”  Awesome. So we’ve all been a bit on edge.  For the most part, students were actually safe in Guatemala, although there were several incidents of robberies and a few of holdups. My Guatemala experience was dominated my Semester at Sea trips.  This means that for all of Guatemala, I was in a group tailed by an armed guard. 
Aside from the safety issues, Guatemala was a beautiful country. I’m so jealous of my friends who were able to hike volcanoes – they were actually able to roast marshmallows over flowing lava – so cool.  Instead, I traveled to Flores to see Tikal, which is a complex of Mayan ruins, dating back to 500 B.C.  My last day, I was able to get a more tragic view of Guatemala through a service visit to Camino Seguro, which is located near the Guatemala City dump.  People live and work in the dump. I’ll go into more detail in my day to day, but the project is important enough that I wanted to mention it straight away.  The school is for children whose parents scavenge the dumps for profit as well as food and housing materials.  These were the worst working conditions that I’ve seen anywhere in the world.  In 1999 Hanley Denning from Yarmouth, Maine came to Guatemala to learn Spanish – she was then a Head Start teacher in North Carolina and wanted to be able to better communicate with her students, many of whom only spoke Spanish.  She was convinced by a local to visit the dump and after seeing the conditions, felt compelled to stay in Guatemala.  She sold her car and her computer and with a friend, she cleaned out an old church outside of the dump.  She started with about $5,000 and supplied 40 kids per week with food and a place to be children, not workers.  Hanley was killed in 2007 in an automobile accident, but her vision lives on – Camino Seguro (a.k.a. Safe Passage) now provides meals, education, and playtime for 600 children per week.  There’s a 2008 Oscar nominated documentary made about Hanley’s project called Recycled Life. There are now permanent employees as well as probably around 50 volunteers at a time, many of whom are from Maine and knew about the program through Hanley’s family.  It was so surreal to be discussing the greatness of Big Daddy’s (the world’s best ice-cream place) while in Guatemala.

Day 1: Katie, Andrea and I disembarked to look around the port a bit before our trip left at two.  We were required to take a shuttle to the edge of the port – due to safety issues SAS had sponsored shuttles throughout our days in Guatemala and had given us a mandatory 11pm curfew should we be returning to the ship.  We got to the port edge where there supposedly was a little village of shops and vendors to explore.  We took one look at our surroundings and realized it was yet another market for tourists. At this point in the trip, none of us have any interest in bargaining for non-necessities.  After a few minutes, we returned to the ship to eat lunch and meet our trip for the two-hour ride to the airport.  Our buses were met by an armed police car, which followed us to the airport.
I suppose due to the danger of the actual Guatemala City airport, we were taken to a small private airport where SAS had chartered four jets to take us to Flores.  Andrea and I ended up sitting front row on a 19-passenger plane.  The pilot never closed the cockpit drape (yes drape, not door), so we were able to watch them take off and land, which was pretty cool.  We arrived in northern Guatemala forty minutes later, where we were met by vans that took us to our hotel.  We had a terrible dinner that night at the hotel, so we ended up at “Rodeo Bar” across the street, where we got margaritas, chips and meat salsa, which was surprisingly good. The night ended relatively early with a group of us back at the hotel chatting and reminiscing over the countries we already miss.

Day 2: The morning began at 6am with an early breakfast before departing in our vans to Tikal.  Tikal is comparable to Angkor Watt in that both complexes are largely still undiscovered and maintained by governments too poor to expose more of the ruins.  In Angkor Watt, 95% of the complex was yet to be uncovered.  In Tikal, 80% was still underground.  They call Tikal the “Skyscrapers of the Jungle,” and it definitely lives up to that title.  From one temple, it is easy to see the tips of others, peaking out from the vast Guatemalan jungle.  Our tour consisted of a hike in hopes of seeing animals (we found spider monkeys – it was awesome) and experiencing a bit of the flora.  What I had not expected was the amount of walking the day would entail – our guide told us 3k, not to mention the hundreds of steps we were climbing to reach the temple peaks.  My favorite temple had just a giant, probably around 4-story ladder to climb to reach the top. The temples are made of huge stones, some as old as 500 B.C.  I marveled at the Mayan capability to build these structures.  The strange thing is that most were purely ceremonial.  There are some housing complexes, but the tall five temples were only used for special occasions.  Tikal was once a city of 100,000 people.  The complex expands far further than the bit that I was able to see.    We spent the entire day at Tikal, and flew back late that night once again in tiny chartered planes.  I went with the boys to get Pizza Hut before our flight.  Its so strange how nice Pizza Hut is outside of the USA – in both India and Guatemala, I went to Pizza Huts that were really clean and looked like nice places to go.  They even gave us mini cups of Fanta while we waited for our food.  Although many of my friends headed to Antigua with Andrea, Katie and I stayed behind, as we had an SAS trip the next morning.

Day 3: After a two-hour bus ride, a group of about twenty SASers had arrived in Guatemala City.  None of us were really sure where we were going until the buses stopped in the middle of a graveyard. There we were told to wait for our local guides to arrive.  Staff from Camino Seguro, Also known as Safe Passage, arrived and led us through the graveyard.  I looked up huge black birds swarming.  They were flying in large circles and resting on trees – I knew we must be near the dump.  We arrived to an edge overlooking the dump as our guide began to explain what we were seeing.  The Guatemala City dump is where everything goes.  This includes food, paper products, glass, medical waste, and even dead animals from the city zoo.  The best word choice I can think of is infiltrate – the smell infiltrates and it took me a few minutes before I could focus on much else.  Within the dump, there was a line of yellow trucks, which Ben, our guide, tells us are privately owned and rented by the municipality.  When a truck prepares to dump it is just a split second before a row of hands hits its side.  The dump is not just for trash – it also serves as a livelihood for several thousand people.  These men and women live and work the dump.  Although they are no longer allowed to live there, their houses remain on the outskirts and are created out of dump materials.  Their clothes are things that they’ve found there, as is their food.  They find left over pieces of pizza, bread, meat, and will either eat it straight or cook it, in hopes to not get so sick.  The only money they make is by selling to recycling companies anything they can find in the dump.  The problem is that the workers never know what will be bought.  They could spend days drying wet cardboard, making it good enough to recycle just to find that the companies want glass that day.  The dump is its own society.  The workers know which trucks come from which districts and will run to the ones with potentially better materials.  One incredible detail – the dump functions on an honor system.  The workers touch a part of the truck and whatever they touch is theirs to sort through.  Workers will sort and leave their piles unprotected, knowing that no one will touch it.  Although there is some gang activity within the dump, it is generally people just trying to support their families. 
So here’s where Camino Seguro comes in.  The people working the dumps have children – between four and eleven, so Ben says.  The children fall into the cycle of poverty because although Guatemala does have a public school system, the parents cannot afford the uniform or school supplies.  The children end up staying at home to help their parents sort garbage.  They grow up with no skills but working at the dump.  Camino Seguro provides schooling, one healthy meal per day, and a safe place to act like children.  It began in just an old church and now has a preschool and secondary school location.  They kids can be kids and learn skills that help get them out.  They recently had a student who dreamt of being a pilot.  The program was able to find a scholarship for him to flight school.  They are attempting to break the cycle the only way it can be broken, through education.  Hundreds of children will grow up better educated, healthier, and with dreams outside of the dump, all because of one woman from Maine.  It’s an incredible story.  I asked Ben about safety for the 50 or so Caucasian volunteers.  He said that they’ve had very few incidents because their purpose is humanitarian.  “I take care of MS-13’s kids.  They want me around,” he says.  We were able to play with the kids a bit and I believe that every girl bought jewelry made by the parents – Camino Seguro also started a mothers and fathers school, eventually providing a sixth grade diploma for them.  With that, one mother is now studying to become an accountant, and another group has started a jewelry co-op.  The money that they make will allow them to not have to work in the dumps. 
After an afternoon visiting Camino Seguro we rode back to port, where we swiped our cards and got onto the ship for the last time.  It was a sad moment for all of us.  This wasn’t my favorite country, but I’m going to miss being in constant motion like we are here.  My days on the ship may include some downtime, but to be in motion towards something new everyday has been the best feeling.