From Guatemala: The sketchiest of things

Tuesday, September 10, 9:52 AM

I write this from the back of a pickup truck taking us from IMAP, a permaculture center by San Lucas to Chocola, a small town where we are going to build pilot greywater reuse systems. Boy what a time we've had the past few days.

The word sketchy has come to mean something akin to suspicious in urban vernacular. But I think for our team it's come to mean the adventures of this trip. Where to begin: Guatemala city is the sketchiest place I've laid eyes on. The hostel (graciously provided by University of San Carlos) was fortunate enough to be placed by 6th Avenue, one of the main streets where police actually patrolled and enforced good behavior. Unfortunately for us the closest bakery where we could could eat to avoid demolishing our immune systems with street food was on 7th Avenue. The magnitude of difference in only going one block away from the policed street was mind boggling. Lights were dimmer, men were staring at gringos like vultures eye fresh corpses. I was relieved when we left for Lake Atitlan.

Speaking of vultures eyeing corpses, on our bus ride to Panajachel, we stumbled into a meeting between a road killed dog and three vultures eating away. Our group proceeded to have a debate about what parts of the dog the vultures will leave. I am proud to have quoted a scene from the Lion King in this instance.

 

Finally we arrived at Panajachel. Hotel Larry's Place, where I stayed in my previous trip (8$/night!), would be housing our group and Roy and Renato, two San Carlos students who have done so much for our project that I consider them a part of the team. Most of our team was fortunate enough to be placed on the first floor. Matt, Roy, and I took a triple upstairs of which Matt elected himself to sleep by the window. All was well until around 7am when Matt shot up from his bed. He proceeded to open his window looking for suspicious activity. Something sandy allegedly struck him on his face and he thought Eduardo and Jamel were up to sand throwing shenanigans, but his window was closed. We looked above to see the plaster of the ceiling above Matts bed slowly deteriorating from water damage. We can say we got our money's worth from Larry.

The next day we left for San Lucas and IMAP. We hired a private boat as it would prevent us from having to take the long public route and we wouldn't spend that much more (split 7 ways for our team). It was refreshing to get back on the lake and see the towns relative to each other. As I turned around to look back at Panajachel, I couldn't but notice our fine driver's attention was directed at texting away on his phone. It should be noted we were in the middle of the lake and had no life jackets.

The driver takes us directly to a dock in Pachitulul, the community IMAP is in. As we get off I notice a fence that seemed to be closing off the small dock from the community. I look around and sure enough there were entrances and it seemed IMAP did not want people coming into the community from the dock. As I relayed this to the driver, he assured me there was an entrance and took me to a barbed wire fence with a small clearing. I have never felt more a trespasser in my life. I snuck into the clearing to IMAPs side and we started sneaking in our luggage through the fence. As we finish unloading the luggage and start getting the team through, a few Mayan women from Pachitulul walk by and look in our direction. You would think they would run and find the men of the town to come run the trespassers off their land, but instead they ran toward us with concerned faces and started helping our group get through the barbed fence. Afterwards, we finished and thanked them and the driver and continued onward toward IMAP.

You may think it couldn't get worse than its been, that the sketchiness gods would have been merciful to our greywater reusing gringo souls. But hungry vultures, texting boat drivers, and barbedwire  fence trespassing did not satisfy them. They had to give us La Casa Pitaya.

The team at IMAP split up into two different housing locations for the night: a small room above the kitchen and a separate house called La Casa Pitaya (literally meaning the Dragonfruit House). We noticed throughout the day there were large spiders looming in the house as it had been unused in awhile. With some screaming from various members (myself among them), we got through the day time in the house. I mentioned the issue to Erik, the awesome volunteer coordinator at IMAP, prior to our dinner in the evening and he responded that La Casa Pitaya is the "house of spiders and scorpions" with a ominous chuckle.

I laughed it off as a joke and went about cooking dinner. After the evening ended, we started wrapping ourselves in our beds for the night. I was the only one on the ground in the house on an air mattress and the members who were living in the room above the kitchen were slowly leaving the house after the debriefing. I realized I forgot to brush my teeth and slowly lifted my back up to go about such business. Suddenly it appeared...a black scorpion the size of my hand crawled out from under my air mattress and was making its way to underneath a cabinet. I don't think I have screamed profanity so violently in quite some time.

All my team turned their heads toward my bed to see what had ensued. Matt, who was sound asleep shot up and would later tell me "judging from the way you had screamed, I knew it was either the biggest spider so far or... a scorpion." I grabbed the bug spray next to me and jammed my finger on the button, blind firing the scorpion with massive amounts of repellent only to hear Irene yell distantly that it would have no effect. Inches away from the safety of the cabinet, Eduardo dove in with a shoe (happened to be mine) and smacked the thing dead center.

My face was tomato red in shock. Matt grabbed his blankets and yelled "I'll take my chances with the fire ants in the room above the kitchen!" Eduardo disassembled his mattress with such furor and sprayed every inch of every crevice in it (Irene's warning had as much affect on him as the spray had on the scorpion). Irene attempted to comfort me to little avail (she nodded when I asked if the scorpion's sting was deadly).

We left the thing dead by the cabinet through the night and showed it to the rest of the members in the morning. I have since vowed never to sleep in La Casa Pitaya again. Guess I might just join Matt with the fire ants.

Thank you Guatemala for the adventures so far. #yolo

Imaan Taghavi, undergraduate student, civil engineering, UC Davis