Nov. 17

Yesterday I went to IRTRA, which is Guatemala´s huge water park that´s pretty awesome! It has tons of water slides, pools, and a lazy river- all that are really really CLEAN! I was so happy to spend my day there, and it was the beginning of a 6 day vacation, which made it even better. I definitely reccommend it if you´re ever in the area!
So now I´m at the finca (farm) Santa Elena with the other 3 volunteers. It´s so much fun when we all get together and share stories from our communities, which are all really different. It´s such a great releif to be able to talk in English and laugh about rediculous things for a few days! It´s also really neat to learn about the farm and how it´s being diversified now since world coffee prices are too low to support the 80 or so families that work here. Coffee has had such a strong history here and ties right into the books we´ve been reading about the war (Nunca Mas, and Silence on the Mountain- which is amazing, by the way) so it´s interesting to be sitting on a real coffee plantation and discussing them- not to mention it´s beautiful here!
So we tried picking coffee this morning, but only Sarah and Lora actually accomplished the task. I seem to have amoebas, which knocked me out, and Leslie got bitten by an ant (she´s really allergic) so we bummed around all day. They picked 12 pounds though, which sounds like a decent amount, until we realized they would only have been paid about 2 Quetzals (.26 cents) for that amount of coffee beans. It´s really sad because people are paid for the weight the bring in- not the amount of hours- and so they have their young kids out helping them and they still only bring in around 100 lbs. a day. What a hard way to make a living! It´s really hard on the owners, too though, so there´s not really many good answers to the problems facing the significant portion of the population that rely on the fincas to live.
Tomorrow we´re headed to Xela for a few days which promises to be exciting since we´re gonna go to a great Indian food restaurant and we get to go to The Bake Shop (the best bakery ever!!). Not to mention there are hot showers and nice, cool weather there! YAY! Things are looking up here!