Monday, Oct.24, 2005...
...Thursday, November 03, 2005
Beginning: AA Flight 2196
Guatemala City, Guatemala to DFW

It's a good day for flying, sunny and smooth. There are several adopted babies heading to the US for the first time with their new parents, and only a couple of them are crying. I'm enough of a baby nut not to mind. There's a movie playing, but the week has been so packed, both emotionally and logistically, that it's good to have some time to reflect, so I'm sparing myself the two dollar headphone charge. I think I'd pay two dollars to turn the sound off if it were free.

This was my third trip to Guatemala in fifteen months. Cecil Bothwell, who is sitting beside me on the plane, was making his first trip down. He's the Vice Chair of PEG Partners, Inc., an organization that my wife Deanna and I dreamed up on our first visit there. In Guatemala he was called Cecilio, which is a very common name there, with the common nickname of Chilo (pronounced CHEE-lo). I think I'll always call him that now. This trip started out as a bit of a rollercoaster. We headed home from the Charlotte airport nine days ago because Hurricane Wilma had tangled the flight schedules through Miami, so we had two more days to wait, and therefore two fewer in Guate. The good news at the flight counter was that we were bumped up to business class for the leg from Dallas to Guatemala City. I've done a great deal of flying in the last fifteen years, literally around the world once and back and forth across more oceans and seas than I could count at this point, and the most time I had ever spent in business or first was the time I spent walking through to get to my seat in the back. Life's good up here. I think the warmed nuts and the real glass drinking glasses are a nice touch. Cecil noted the irony, though, that he was traveling to the poorest place he had ever been in the greatest luxury he had ever experienced. The trip proved to be full of ironies like that, but it was incredibly gratifying to be there again, work toward some new projects and see the progress on the projects that folks have chipped in on over the last year or so.

Dennis and Chilo on Chilo's first day in Guatemala

We spent the first two nights in Guatemala City, in the company of Dennis Smith, who has been living in Guatemala for over thirty years, and has spent recent years working for CEDEPCA, a well established ecumenical NGO based there. Dennis is a good man and a good mentor, and after a year of correspondence with him by phone and email, it was good to spend some informal time with him and his family.

After that, we basically spent one night in each town, roughly half a day visiting each project or working out logistics, and the other half traveling. Traveling in Guatemala is always an adventure. Mostly we took 'chicken busses,' which are basically school busses with more interesting paint jobs. They're cheap and fairly reliable, but amazingly crowded. My friend David in Santiago explained that the capacity of a chicken bus is "five more." It's not uncommon to see them screaming down the road with three people in every seat, more standing packed in the aisle and several literally hanging out the front door, holding on and pulling their bodies in when other cars are too close.

a chicken bus when it's nowhere near full

This year Guatemala had the wettest rainy season in almost twenty-five years. At the end of that came Hurricane Stan, which hit the coast and immediately lost wind strength, but parked on top of the country for several days, dumping tons of rain on the mountains. On the night of October 5, the volcano that sits just above the village of Panabaj, just outside of Santiago, Atitlan, was too waterlogged to hold together any more, and the ensuing mudslide wiped out much of the village. Several meters of mud and debris completely covered about fifty houses and partially buried many more, as well as the hospital, the police station and the school. Almost a hundred bodies were found, and over four hundred more were just swept away and buried. The entire area has now been declared a mass grave, and excavation is now forbidden. The mud also flowed into the next village, Tzanchaj, but in a much smaller area. Of course, the tragedy was not limited to that village, or to the deaths.Well over 200,000 people lost their homes in the country, more than 800 died, and that many more are missing and surely gone as well.

there are 500 people and their homes beneath this mud

If this is the first you've heard of this tragedy and you're wondering why, the reasons are partly understandable, since the flooding and slides happened on the same weekend as the catastrophic earthquakes in Pakistan and India. That's not to say that there hasn't been a massive aid effort going on, though. Cuba, in particular, has been very generous, sending 400 doctors immediately. Churches in the US have been active as well. The regional office of the Presbyterian Church (USA) called me over a week before we left to say they were gathering much needed pharmaceuticals and wondered if we could transport them. I was thrilled to do so, and even happier after our flight delay when I called to check in and got the news that a larger batch of antibiotics had just arrived. These were headed for another area of the country that was also hard hit by the floods. That same day I also got a call from a Catholic priest I know, Father Flannagan, who said he had three large boxes of supplies from the Catholic Medical Mission Board to take to the Santiago area. Cecil and I were pretty loaded down when we went, but happy to be able to get these much needed supplies to the folks who needed them.

After spending the first couple of days making contacts with people from Guatemala City and Antigua, we headed to Xela (also called Quetzaltenango) to catch up with Karla Koll, who also works with Cedepca, and to visit the first of our funded projects in Pachaj, a nearby village. After spending the evening with Karla and her family, we woke up the next morning and she gave us a ride out to Pachaj. Karla drives a small four-wheel-drive jeep, and that was handy when we got off the main roads and started driving up the dirt road to the village. We turned off of that one on to a rutted road, and then parked the car and walked up paths through the cornfields. We turned off of one path on to a smaller one, where we had to walk single file, and eventually came to a small adobe house in the middle of the fields. I had been to this house last year and shared a meal with Manuel Yac and his family. Now, one year later, we walked into the same room and found a computer lab. Yes, a computer lab. This house has an outhouse with thatched wooden walls and they cook outside over wood, and there's a computer lab in what was the dining room last year.

Manuel's son, like kids everywhere, playing a computer game

PEG funded the purchase of four computers to establish a computer lab last year for students and the community to use, and this was my first chance to see it. The plan is for the children to be able to use it free, and for adults to pay reasonable fees so that the project will be self-sustaining and can expand on its own. We were thrilled to not only find the computers in place, but to find five instead of four, networked and operational. Another donor had heard about the project and chipped in for a fifth machine. It's our hope to do some more work with this school in the future, and it was good to have some more face-to-face time with Manuel Yac and Romero Morales, who are heading up that project.

the computer teacher and tech guy installing software

Later that day we traveled to Santiago by chicken bus, a much longer trip than usual due to washed out roads. This summer, PEG funded the building of a preschool for the village of Tzanchaj. Last year when I visited the village, they were renting a tiny room that only held eleven children and their desks, with thirty more in the village who couldn't attend because there was no room. A local Mayan community leader, Nino Tecun, has organized the local project to build the new preschool, and it was profoundly moving to find the solid new building standing, with only the windows and door left to be added. Nino brought tears to my eyes when he told me he wants to name the school after me. It was also powerful for me to hold Nino's one-year-old youngest daughter again, whom I had held last summer when she was just a few days old, just a couple of weeks after his two-year old daughter had died of flu. Life is raw in Guatemala.

Nino and his children and me talking on the steps of the new Escuelita

We walked with Nino through Panabaj on the way to Tzanchaj, where the school is. It was an astounding synchronicity that we happened to be there on el Dia de las Almas, the Day of the Spirits (or Day of the Dead). This is an important holiday in Latin America, dedicated to honoring the dead and decorating their graves. Needless to say, it was poignant to observe that holiday at the sight of such a horrific and recent tragedy. We came upon two women mourning at a partially excavated site where a home was covered, and though I had been taking pictures all day, I couldn't bring myself to take that one. After traveling to another town, we were surprised the next morning to wake up and find that the cover photo of the national newspaper was of those women. We were standing right next to the photographer who took it. The accompanying article explained that the women had lost fourteen family members in the slide. The morning we spent there deepened our gratitude to the folks who had gathered up those drugs, not to mention the hundreds of people who had contributed money at concerts to help build that school, which is now standing. It feels good to be a catalyst for something good to happen in this area that has suffered so much. We also had some leads on another village we might want to work in near Lake Atitlan, and we're looking forward to following up on that.

Me and Chilo on the ferry across Lago Atitlan

There is so much more to tell you about this trip, but I guess embedding a novel in my Notes From the Road might be a bit extreme. I guess the overwhelming feeling was how gratifying it was to see these projects in place after dreaming about them for the last year.

There's a new preschool in Tzanchaj.

There's a new computer lab in Pachaj.

They are there because people like you chipped in donations at my concerts this year. None of that money went to airplane tickets, salaries or stamps. It all went to those projects. And those projects are going to make differences in people's lives that you and I will probably never even know about.

It's been a dense and rich week, and it's almost surreal to be back in the U.S. In the airport today I picked up a paper that someone had discarded and read about Rosa Parks' funeral. She's one of my heroes, and I'm sorry to see her go. Her story is so powerful, and it becomes even more powerful the more you learn about it. In school they told us about her refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery that day, but they never mentioned that she was a trained civil rights activist who had been the first female member of the NAACP in Montgomery, and had been attending meetings there for twelve years. That part of the story is often left out, and I think it's important - don't let anyone tell you that you can't change the world by working in a movement for what you think is right. She made decisions of conscience that irrevocably changed the world. She took a powerful stand (or sit) and went to jail for it because she understood that in spite of popular opinion, what was happening wasn't right. I don't think we all have to be Rosa. It's OK if you're not ready to go to jail. We do have to bring the gifts we have, though. The small changes matter, and the small changes add up to big ones.

Two of Nino's daughters

So now we're on the next plane, somewhere over Tennessee. I turned on my cell phone when I got to DFW and checked in with Deanna, and with MJ in my office. MJ let me know yesterday that the first advance copies of my new S.S. Bathtub children's book had just arrived, and I'll get to see it for the first time less than an hour from now. They both said it looks great. There's so much to celebrate. Thanks for celebrating with me.

David