ROJO, RUINS, AND REHAB

Hello, readers, thanks for stopping by. We’ve had quite the eventful weekend. But first, some belated pictures from last week’s excursion to Chiquimullia with Denis and Alvira. Elise and I helped them with their presentation while mom and Jeanette talked to the village midwives.

In more recent news, we went to the three-day ExploMusicFest at Juan Carlos and Jeanette’s megachurch, Fraternidad Cristiana de Guatemala. Some big names in Latin American music were there–Rojo the worship rockers, Alternativa the ska band, and Funky the rapper. The great thing was that Jeanette recruited me to be a part of the official photography team, so I got an all-access pass to take pictures with a really nice camera all weekend.

As people were waiting for the concert to start, I would walk around taking crowd shots, and soon people would be clamoring to be in a picture.

With lots of people screaming for me to take their picture–plus the fact that I was pretty much the tallest, whitest, most redheaded person at the festival–I kind of stood out. I didn’t care, though, because during the show, I got to go wherever I wanted to get some cool shots. Here are a few of them.

During last night’s show, though, one security guard who didn’t already know who I was tried to tell me I couldn’t go into one area I had frequented the night before. I tried reasoning with him by pointing to my nametag that said “Total Access” but he just shook his head and pointed me away. I kept at him, though I realized later that, because of the blaring music and the language barrier, I might as well have been speaking Klingon. I was ticked off that this random guy was trying to keep me away from doing my job, so I found the head photographer and she talked to him. Yeah, take that dude.

Today Denis and Alvira accompanied us and Jeanette and Juan Carlos to the Iximche Mayan ruins in Tecpan. We were only there for about 20 minutes because of rain, but it was still really cool to see real pieces of antiquity.

After that, we visited a rehabilitation center for alcoholics and drug addicts. Elise and I were expecting an actual house, but instead we discovered that it was four walls with no roof and lots of junk lying around. Still, the center’s director told us of his plans for the new facility, which will be a great thing to have.

Mom is leaving tomorrow after 6 weeks in Guate. She’s pretty sad about it and will be going through withdrawal for a while. Once she gets back she’ll email me lots of good photos that I didn’t take on our camera, so look out for those. Once mom leaves, Elise and I will head back to Antigua for two weeks, helping Hector in the villages and taking a week’s worth of Spanish lessons.

Until then, hasta luego!

Next time: livin’ it up in Antigua, and more work with cute kids