Life, times, shmem: Ix-Canaan - El Remáte, Guatemala

Leaving Livingston and the Carib Coast we bused up nearly a full day to El Remate, a small town about a half hour south of Tikal, in the Guatemala's Peten region.

Transient grand-scheme was to spend a week volunteering with Ix-Canaan, a free medical clinic / community organization nestled in the back hills of town, and then visit Tikal before heading back southward to Central Guatemala.

El Remate is this little town that most passersby would only know as a few stores and hotels along the main road up toward majestic Mayan ruins. Infrastructure-wise, there isn't a whole lot more going on for the town than such tourist business, but dirt roads run maybe a mile back into the hills and house maybe a thousand residents (guessing here).

Even that's quite a development, a few decades ago those horribly rutted out dirt roads were just walking paths between homes cut out of the forests. The town is right on the eastern edge of Lago Peten Itza, a beautiful sunset vantage point that includes this jutting penisula closely resembling a crocodile. Apparently even more so from an aerial view.

Eh...not bad.

The community center included a huge library/computer lab/multipurpose classroom (pictured here), seperated from its constructed mirror image, which housed the clinic, by a playground.

We stayed here. I can't even get into how great this house was.

This guy was right by the door to our kitchen, and every day I had to clear off his new silken encroachments onto our entrance.

Another friend in our bathtub.

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Anne, who runs the program along with her partner Enrique, a local Guatemalan, lives in this place, right across from the clinic. It was beyond beautiful, and they built it all themselves.

We basically helped out with two things during our week in Remate. Mel conducted interviews with over a dozen local members of the Ix-Canaan Women's organization. She recorded each woman's favorite recipes (which we later translated), as well as their bio, for a cookbook that a friend of the project will be publishing out of North Carolina to raise money. I helped record a bit and took some photos, but Melissa did most of the work on that.

(The land here is so mediocre...oye)

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We also used the library to host after school program from 2 to 5 each afternoon, and on Saturday morning because it was a shame how soon we had to leave after just getting to know these kids and getting a program in motion. What we did with our time was really great, but just a week in one place is really short.

The last few days of our stay in town included September 15th, Guatemala's "Independence Day." For the kids what that means is

1. A day off from school

2. Making "faroles" (see photo below) and marching in a parade the night of the 14th and the morning of the 15th.

For us it was extra special because we had gotten to know about 30 kids in the town, so we got to run around saying hi to our favorite torch bearers and take a glut of pictures.