Anywho, the first couple of days I spent in Antigua were super cool. It was nice to be able to relax and enjoy myself after having to work and deal with summer Calculus (yuck) the previous six weeks. I met some really cool people through the hostel I stayed at, and also got to go do a hike up through the mountains around Antigua with the tour agency that ran out of the hostel. The hike itself was really interesting because it went through a coffee plantation, Finca Filadelfia, which is one of the coffee providers for Starbucks.
For me, that part of the hike was cool because I got to see the opposite end of what ends up in millions of Americans cups every day. There was not really anything fancy about the plantation in fact it was pretty sparce as far as walking room went. I would equate most of the path to a single track bike path, all of it was roughly 2 feet wide and made of dirt. The path was probably at least a 20 minute walk up or down hill to the road, and so I can imagine that carrying 50 plus pounds of coffee to the road would be quite a chore. However, the views of the plantation as we got higher up on the mountain were pretty spectacular. It just amazes me that so few people realize what the far off places that they get their daily dose(s) of caffeine really look like, and for that matter how beautiful they are.
Continuing on, I met up with my Mom and the rest of the group from FUMC Hurst on Sunday and we drove out towards the west coast of Guatemala to San Antonio, a small town where we worked in 2008 building up the walls of a new dental facility. The changes we saw whenever we arrived were pretty astounding. Where we had left a half finished wall and a broken slab cleared away by sledgehammers was an almost complete clinic that had a roof and an entirely new building we didnt even know about. A majority of what we did for the week was making the existing clinic more functional by painting rooms and building tables that were more custom designed for the purposes they served in the clinic. On Thursday, part of the medical staff from Salud y Paz came down to open the clinic for the day and treat a few patients. They were all very surprised and grateful for the changes we had made and especially the tables that made their work much easier.
Friday afternoon, the group left for Antigua and then to head home, and I headed to Panajachel, where I will be spending a majority of my time in Guatemala. I got settled in to my small apartment and sort of relaxed after a really long week with lots of early mornings. Monday and Tuesday I went up to the clinic in Camanchaj and did some odd jobs around there, including getting started on the inventory of major things they have in the clinic and making the wireless printer work on their network (very important whenever you have 6 or 7 different computers all trying to print on the same printer).
This post was originally titled The First Two Weeks, but I changed it because this is a really long post as it is and I am really hungry. That and I really need to do justice to the awesomeness that was my trip to Tikal. So now you have something to look forward to for this afternoon or tomorrow .
Hasta Luego!
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