Art Camp

So I wrote those last few paragraphs last Sunday and just never got to the internet café to post them, but now I will tell you about this last week.

My LCF’s (the guy who taught me Q’eqchi, Pablo) wife and her sister ran an art camp for Mayan youths this last week and I helped out at that. The camp was from Monday to Friday 7am-9pm each day, so I was really busy this week. They were supposed to be split up into 6 groups and learn how to make traditional Mayan materials, including champas, hammocks, cuxtals, pottery, and baskets (the last group was Intercultural Bilingual Education, and they did things that encouraged them to continue learning and using their native language). I was supposed to learn how to make a hammock, but the instructor’s bridge got flooded (as so often happens here, I’ll try and put pictures of the bridges they have back in the bush up sometime, they are ridiculous…) so I instead learned how to make a champa. We learned how to make the whole thing from scratch. This meant we learned how to make the rope too. The first day we drove into the bush to find the materials to make the rope. You need a certain plant, a small tree that you hollow out the middle of a piece, and a big tree to lean the plant against (see pictures). After that we then came back and just used normal nylon string to make a bag because it takes a long time to make the rope and hurts your hand a lot. Anyway, the camp was a lot of fun and other than participating in learning how to make the champa I was in charge of keeping the youths entertained at night. This meant card games, sports, and celebrating freedom (the Fourth was this last week if you remember, and I was bummed that I missed it in the States) the best way I could: teaching a bunch of Mayan youths how to make s’mores. Now, for as much cocoa plants as they have here chocolate is expensive and kind of hard to come by, so we had to use M&M’s for chocolate. We also used wannabe graham crackers and colored marshmallows, but it all worked out. The last day I also helped five of the kids in the IBE group make a movie in Q’eqchi about one of their folk stories. I will just let the movie itself, some pictures, and the slide show Darrell and I put together tell the story of the rest of the week. However, I do not have the movies in the right format on my flash drive to upload them right now so I will have to change them and upload them another day, hopefully tomorrow.

 Harvesting the plant.

 You cut down this the whole tree, cut a piece out of the trunk, and then hollow it out until it looks like this.

 Then you use that tool to strip the leave. You also need to cut down another bigger tree to get the log it is tied to.

 You clean the string.

 You roll it into rope.

Your little baby, wussy American hands get blistered after about an hour. The instructor was doing it for hours on end and his hand was fine...

Also, I would like to inform unos that I saw my first kissing bug today a little over an hour ago. If you don't know what they are look them (or chagas) up sometime, apparently they are everywhere around this area. Long story short they bite you and then defecate on you at the same time. In the poop is a parasite that gets in your body through the bite and the parasite settles in your heart. 10-20 years later...boom , death by heart failure.

That is all for now, hopefully I will have some more adventures soon to blog about.