El Paraiso: Our Sulfur-Laden Paradise

If I counted my days correctly, I returned to the world of the living on Day 6 or so. We tread carefully that day, since my intestinal adventures had already led us to miss Roberto and the girls with the van that was to take us to the next locale. Operating on our own agenda now, I became ever more thankful for my sister's relative familiarity with the Guatemalan transportation system.

Our first excursion (a test run of sorts) was to El Paraiso, a small hot spring not far from where we were staying. Since my innards were still somewhat unpredictable, little sis did me a huge favor by splurging on the nicer coach-style bus headed in that direction. While still decorated like a chicken bus on the inside, it provided a far more comfortable ride and on-board bathroom, just in case.

We disembarked near a farm and made our way, along with a small group of others, towards a hot spring in the jungle/woods. After walking a short distance, we began to smell something truly putrid. It was as if we were hiking on a garbage pile loaded with rotten eggs. In the midst of this odiferous paradise, we came upon a (less sarcastic) visual one.

Our sulfur-laden paradise

The springs had a strong waterfall on one end, and an easy entry point on the other. The pool at the entry point was rather cool, and after a few moments in it, you were most eager to get to the hot part of the springs, beside the waterfall. There was, however, one little hitch: a patch of reasonably deep water (11 feet or so was the estimate given by others who'd crossed) between the cool entry pool and the warmth and thunder of the springs and waterfall. While a short distance swimming in pool-depth waters is not daunting to most, I am not one who has ever had tremendous confidence in her swimming ability. Water deeper than I am tall makes me anxious if I am not in a watercraft and/or wearing a PFD. Again, this was something that had to be overcome if I were going to enjoy this experience. Plus, the group of Belgians at the spring with us were watching, and after I'd won cool points for knowing that they were speaking Flemish, I couldn't lose all those points by wussing out on a little swimming.

In the spirit of the trip, I eventually joined my sister and the Belgians on the other side, enabling me to enjoy more fully both the heat and the smell of the springs. Heading back, the second crossing of "the depths" was less daunting and more urgent. We had a bus to catch back to our island of monkeys.

Day Four: Rio Dulce

No day in Guatemala can be dull, as we found out when our 3 hour tour on board a sailboat turned into a day long cruise along the Rio Dulce.

Early on, our captain informed us that we were sailing into the river where the early Tarzan films were shot. Vines hung from steep cliffs on either side of the river and small fishing boats with one or two guys scraped the edges of these cliffs in search of lunch. Our captain was a Breton and his mother, who was vacationing in Guatemala for the summer, was along for the ride. Also on board was another guy--a friend of the captain--let's call him Carlos since I forgot his name in the several days of delirium that followed our encounter. He seemed like a cruise director of sorts. He had some sort of a business relationship/friendship with the captain and it later turned out that he managed a hotel in the river town of Rio Dulce.

Our gang had grown. We had said farewell to Roberto, who was to drive back and meet us in the town of Rio Dulce. In his place, we now had the captain, his girlfriend, his mother and this guy whose name I've forgotten.

After breakfast, Michelle began chatting with the captain's mother. This didn't turn out so well as his mother's Spanish was very choppy and laced with a thick French accent. This was the beginning of the linguistic spaghetti that would have me all day. It was also right about this time when the trolling motor on the boat went out. The steep cliffs on both sides of the river blocked any wind we'd have caught and so now begins our 8 hour odyssey on the Rio Dulce.

Of all the places to be stuck 8 hours, the Rio Dulce rates pretty high, right up there with being stuck in a chocolate factory, or in a spa. The weather was beautiful, the scenery unlike anything I'd ever seen in person and the company as easy-going and sociable as I could have asked for.

I was having such a rockin' time that I even threw my stupid fear of deep water out the window and hopped in with the others for a splash in the river. Although I am proud of the courage this entailed for me and truly enjoyed floating alongside the boat, I can't say it was the smartest thing I did while traveling. I am fairly certain that this little adventure was at least partially responsible for the severe intestinal discomfort I felt for the remainder of my stay in Guatemala.

At the end of our elongated boat tour, I became suddenly very ill. I spent a good deal of the evening sitting on the toilet with my head in the sink. It was not the way to spend a holiday. Fortunately, that guy from the boat had set us up in his hotel for a reasonable price. We had a nice bamboo-style cabin with monkeys on the roof. Their crazy noises actually lulled me to sleep, but I am still disappointed that I didn't get to see them.

Sick and delirious, I did manage to get up and have some soup and seltzer around 10ish. That turned out to be such a crazy brain scramble, as I stumbled into 3 conversations, each in a different language. I was too tired for it to matter, so I flowed between French, English and Spanish. Despite the worst kind of sick I can ever remember, me and my amoeba were havin' a blast.

Day Three: You put the lime in the coconut

This was the first day I felt like I was in The Beach, with Leonardo DiCaprio. Livingston is the sort of place you go to hide from the authorities, or from responsibility. There were hotels like something straight out of The Beach or Brokendown Palace, enough khaki shorts to do a commercial for the Gap and a history and people very different from the rest of Guatemala.

Livingston, according to legend, is inhabited by the descendants of renegade slaves. After mutiny aboard a slave ship, they escaped to the coast of what is now Guatemala. Garifuna language and culture are rich and unique. We missed an opportunity to see live Garifuna music, but didn't miss our chance to learn a bit of the language. Unfortunately, time and lack of use have led me to forget those tiny bits.

We started day three early, waking to the sound of the hostel manager banging on our door to tell us that our bus was here -- we had overslept again in typical Angelroth fashion. We scrambled to throw our things together and wash up (always a challenge when the water is so bad for you).

Once in the minibus (a van actually), we encountered our travel companions, two American women, Jocie and Pam and a Norwegian woman, Brittelyn. We road for what seemed like ages as hunger and the need to use a bathroom grew more and more urgent. Finally we stopped for breakfast in the middle of nowhere. Apparently people lived in the middle of nowhere, as there was a huge birthday party at the restaurant, a sort of truck stop, early in the morning when we arrived. We ate and got to know Roberto, our driver. He is divorced, charming and had a sort of tired look in his eyes that was there always.

Back on the road, Roberto had me sure we were dead a number of times, as we swerved in and out of the path of semi trucks on winding mountain roads. All the while, Michelle was giving me a lesson in Spanish verb conjugation, as I had done for her in French when she came to visit me.

Along the way to Livingston, we stopped at the ruins of Quirigua, where we climbed ancient Mayan ruins and bought a coconut from a man with a machete and far too few fingers.

Our boat to Livingston (the best way to get there is by boat) left from Puerto Barrios, the seediest place I have ever been. Even at the height of day, this was a seedy port city. It was the worst quarter of Marseille worsened, or so it seemed in the roughly 15 minutes we spent there.

Fortunately our hotel in Livingston made the stop in Puerto Barrios worthwhile. We all took turns using hammocks in the courtyard and even the rooms were cool and comfortable despite the heat and lack of A/C.

Brittelyn, Michelle and I hit the beach, where I changed clothes behind a towel and chatted with Brittelyn about her skydiving hobbies. We caught up with the others later that afternoon. Pam had been braided.

Pam, we began to find out, was a crazy woman in the best sense of the word crazy. She is a teacher on the east coast. She got the drinks started that night and is the one responsible for our meeting up with Roberto after dinner.

I held my own pretty well that night with the Spanish conversation, impressing all when they found out I hadn't really studied the language. (Pat myself on the back for a second...) Apparently 11 years of French is worth something in other Latin languages.

It was a touristy day like none I have ever had. We'd known eachother less than 24 hours and already we were tight-knit.

Sue Patterson Gives WINGS to the Women of Guatemala

I arrived to interview Sue Patterson in a travelers’ café, which, like many other buildings in Antigua, was open in the center, with the sky overhead. I had flown in the night before, and was still being mesmerized by the way in which the jungle seemed to be on the edge of taking over the city whenever you weren’t looking – a real change from the rust belt city of Milwaukee. Just before coming, I had been reading up on the history, politics, geography and culture of Guatemala, and was here to find out how family planning fits into the mix.

Having served as a Consul General in Guatemala, Sue Patterson possesses a unique familiarity with the nation’s problems, many of which she sees as related to its recent population explosion. During her time years before as a Peace Corps volunteer she realized a passion for the problems of poor women and her current work with two non-profits serving Guatemala’s poor mothers demonstrates that this passion has not waned over the years.

When Sue decided to retire in Guatemala, her aim was to work with micro credit loans, which are loans too small for banks to handle that are made to groups of women with no collateral. These small amounts are generally for use as seed money for their small business projects. This ambition never fell into place, but what happened instead was the creation of WINGS, a non-profit that affords women more control over their finances and their bodies by improving their access to family planning. By creating smaller families, WINGS may create better-fed and better-educated families and communities.

WINGS, Women’s International Network for Guatemalan Solutions, is a small but very rapidly growing non-profit that provides education, cervical cancer screenings and family planning resources to the poorest of Guatemalans. For over thirty years, there was only one organization, APROFAM, legally providing family planning resources in Guatemala. Abortion is illegal there and, up until a few years ago, the government, which was, at the time, dominated by Catholics, was generally very unsupportive of any family planning endeavors. APROFAM survived because of the financial contributions of international foundations, organizations and governments and individual donors. Recently however, the more Evangelical government passed a law stating that every Guatemalan has the right to plan her or his family, making it somewhat easier for organizations like APROFAM and WINGS to do their work and for women and men in Guatemala to learn about and obtain the methods that assist them in planning their families. WINGS began by working very closely with APROFAM.

SP: When WINGS got started, and it was kinda by chance, I was asked by a Guatemalan friend of mind, a nurse who was head of a health unit at an organization called Common Hope that works with poor families – she said she had eight women who wanted to have tubal ligations, but they didn’t have the money to pay what APROFAM charges, which at that time was equivalent to about US$35. So this friend asked me if I would pay for the surgeries (one of these women has at least seven children) so I said ‘yes, I would be happy to pay for one and I would write to a few friends on email.’ So I wrote to a few friends to see if they would sponsor anybody. I thought I might get $150-$200. Before I knew it, I had $4000, $2000 of which was from a woman I didn’t even know – a friend of a friend.
So all of this was just sitting in my own personal bank account and when I added it up, I said, ‘whoa, if I get struck by lighting, this money does not belong to my daughters.’ So I went to APROFAM here in Antigua, and asked them if they ever had poor people come in who are interested in a family planning method, but then leave because they can’t afford it. (Their prices are heavily subsidized, but still, it is out of reach of the poorest of Guatemalans.) They said that they definitely had people like that; so I offered to set up a fund to supplement whatever the family could pay, or the difference between the cost and the service.

Things worked this way for about a year until Sue realized the passivity of this approach and made the first steps towards the establishment of WINGS’ current program.

SP: The people who have some initiative or some wherewithal come in and inquire, but there must be people out there who don’t even know where to go, or that such things are available. So I decided to hire a young Guatemalan woman; she has been working for WINGS now for the last three years. After a year and a half, I hired a young man, and those are our two full-time WINGS employees. They go out and do most of the educational talks working with other non-profit organizations.

WINGS works mainly in rural areas, where need is greatest and poverty most common. By working with community organizations, WINGS educates people in isolated areas on family planning methods and reproductive risks like STIs, HIV and teen pregnancy.

SP: A lot of girls here get pregnant at 15. They have a much higher risk of death; I think it is six to eight times higher than if you are between the ages of 20 and 24. Especially so if you add in the facts: that they are malnourished, they’re small, nobody’s looking after them, they don’t have prenatal care, they don’t have vitamins, they’re anemic, they have all the risk factors.

Maternal mortality is a serious problem in Guatemala, with 36.91 deaths among every 1,000 live births . Another organization, on whose board Sue Patterson sits, Behrhorst Partners for Development, also works on this problem by training traditional birth attendants to better identify crisis situations. WINGS encourages teens to postpone first pregnancies in order to lower their risk of mortality and to better their educational and vocational opportunities.

SP: We are starting to work more and more with teenagers to get them to postpone that first child. Keeping them in school is one of the best ways of doing that. There you get into a whole series of other problems – WINGS does not give school scholarships, but that is a very effective way to get girls up to the age of 16 or so without getting pregnant. We are working now to start a major effort – a train the trainer program for teenagers. With the idea to train these teenage leaders intensively enough that they can be counselors to their peers and reference points, we’ll see how it pays off if we can get kids to postpone that first pregnancy, or at least the second one. I think it’s sometimes easier to catch their attention after the first one, but the traditional pattern here is to start young and have six children. Then, at age 27, to say, ‘wait a second, this isn’t working out so well, I can’t keep having to do this,’ and then to come in for a tubal ligation. We are really hoping to work more on birth spacing.

In addition to education, WINGS sets up mobile clinics providing Pap smears and tubal ligations. Cervical cancer is the top cause of cancer-related deaths among Guatemalan women because many do not have access to regular detection screening and adequate follow-up treatment . By doing Pap smears and educational talks in rural areas, WINGS is able to scout sites for tubal ligation mobile clinic visits. When at least 15 women seeking the procedure are found, WINGS is gets the APROFAM mobile clinic to visit the area, setting up in a home, school, health clinic or other area to perform up to 35 surgeries in a day. “It’s really a fantastic method. We’ve negotiated a rate with APROFAM; they charge us under 100 Quetzals (US$13) per surgery. There is no general anesthetic, only local. The woman is on the table for six minutes, she rests up for 45 minutes or so, the doctor examines her incision and if she is not bleeding, she’s free to go home. These women walk right home. It’s a really efficient method and it doesn’t require a sterile environment,” Sue Patterson describes the efficiency that WINGS’ cooperation with APROFAM has produced in order to help these women. WINGS pays for all of these operations, asking the women to bring what they can as a gesture of commitment to their own reproductive well-being. And they have been quite busy in 2004, “So far, in the first six months of this year, we’ve paid for around 3,000 tubal ligations. $13 is cheap, but still when you multiply it by 3,000, it turns out to be a lot of money, so I spend a lot of time trying to raise money.”

Raising money is not an easy task but Sue hopes that the stories found on the WINGS website, of clients like Alba, speak for themselves.

Alba, 32, already had 5 children when she recently opted for a tubal ligation. From her small village of La Palmas, Alba had to walk approximately 5 miles to Yepocapa, where WINGS had helped coordinate a rural tubal ligation clinic. Although she had wanted to undergo such an operation since about a year ago, she told us, she didn’t have the economic resources to do so. Alba’s husband is a farm worker and gives her Q180 (about $24) per week to provide for the household of 8, which includes a grandparent. “I thank God for the help that WINGS brought me,” she said.

“They lead tragic lives that are ameliorated by our interventions,” Sue explains.

If you would like to help improve the lives of these women, or for more information on WINGS’ work, visit: http://www.wingsguate.org.

Day Two: Viernes - WINGS

Friday morning we had a list of things to do that was suprisingly long for a "vacation." Most was little stuff, but the two major tasks of the day were to make our arrangements for the trip to the Carribean and to interview Sue Patterson for Boxx. (formerly: www.boxxnews.com)

The first task, we tackled pretty accidentally while eating pastries, as someone handed us a flyer with what was, comparatively, a good deal on the trip - $70 each for a minibus to the coast, including a stop at the ruins of Quirigua and a boat across to Livingston, followed by a sailboat ride up the Rio Dulce. This turned out to be more of an adventure than we could have known, as you'll see in the following days.

The interview we tackled at a cafe after breakfast. Many of the cafes and restaurants in Antigua (and the homes, hotels and hostels) let the sun in. They are usually open in the middle and many have plenty of plants and fountains to add to the ambiance.
Sue taught us quite a lot about reproductive rights in Guatemala, and about the increasing, but as of yet, undocumented risks of HIV/AIDS and STDs.

You can read the article above. To learn about WINGS (or Behrhorst) for yourself, as the article is only a small sample, visit their websites as well.

Day One: Guatemala - Escuela de Espanol

I grew up in the barrio but my first conversation in Spanish wasn’t until I went thousands of miles away to Guatemala. It comes down to fear, as does much on this trip. Things I am afraid to do at home, I will do far from it.

When I got onto the plane at the Atlanta airport, I was not even brave enough to tell the woman that I had seat 23B, instead I pointed at my ticket and made helpless facial expressions.

By the time I arrived in Guatemala City, I had watched all of Hidalgo in Spanish (understanding little), listened to the "seat cushion flotation device" speech (in Spanish) more intently than ever, and was finally brave enough to ask the nice lady next to me what time it was.

Once I arrived in Antigua (about 25-35 minutes from the airport), I had found out that my driver, Frederico, had 2 sisters and a brother, spoke Spanish as a second language (I am not sure what his first was) and that he was tired. Although, he may have said married, as the two words always confuse me.

We spoke about much more than this, but I did not journal the conversation because I was just so excited to have had it. I used my broken Spanish to converse with someone who uses the language everyday.