Contradictions

The view from my rooftop.

One of my teammates and I in front of the Catholic church.

One of the many Evangelical churches.

A typical street, with the inevitable chucho (street dog).

My training town is located on a hill that slants down from the highway to a ravine below that divides it from the next town. The large white Catholic church is in the center of the town, where there is a small plaza and the simple municipal building. Scattered throughout the village are very small Evangelical churches where you can often hear live (though not quality) Christian music... honestly, it's more like wailing than singing. (In Guatemala, you are either Catholic or Evangelical, and which one you are is one of the first questions you'll be asked). We're just off the of the Pan-Americanhighway that runs from Alaska to Panama, and since I live on the street that parallels it, I can hear its roar constantly.

Besides the churches, Tigo, the most popular cell phone company in Guatemala, is one of the most prominent features of the town. About every other building is painted Tigo-dark-blue with bold white letters depicting the company's logo and slogans. Many families have their houses painted because Tigo will paint them for free, and almost everylittle tienda (store) is painted with Tigo. All this advertising in the same town where I regularly see women walking down the street witha bundle of firewood pefectly balanced on their heads, pass men carrying machetes back from the fields, and hear roosters crow everyhour (but more frequently at 4 a.m.). The town is a sleepy little village during the day, where everyone politely greets you with a'Good morning' or 'Good afternoon', but after dark (6 pm) it's prowling with groups of men that like to harrass the girls and has seen gang activity in recent years. It's just another example of the strange contradictions that seem to confront you everywhere you look in this country.

In my family, the unlikely mix of modern and traditional is especiallyclear. Every adult family member has a cell phone, yet I have never seen any of the women wear anything else but the traditional traje (even before or after bathing, before going to bed, etc.) The family has a microwave but does most of their cooking over a fire. For some meals we'll have pepsi alongside hand made tortillas. We watch tv with dinner (mostly b-grade voice-over American movies or even WWF wrestling... yuck), but in their rare spare time the women work on their pain-stakingly slow and elaborate weaving to make the traditional blouses. Everything here is a surprise.

Example of a Tigo building.