Marjolein in Guatemala
Workdays 1 and 2
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Días 1 y 2 de trabajo.....

Hey everyone!!

How are you guys??? Well, not that much has happened, but I thought the first two days of my work were kindof funny!

Well, wednesday we started working. We dropped by Ecomaya that Tuesday for some information about what and how, and Manuel told us something about ´Paso Caballos´. Well, caballo means horse in Spanish, so we actually thought we had to go horseriding or something. So what was going to happen the next day was a big question for us! We had to be at the office of Ecomaya at 12 o´clock in the afternoon. We picked up a few other people. Among them Lucrecia Romero. She is the lady with whom we emailed a lot before our trip to here. I even talked to her on the phone a few times. It was fun to finally meet her! And the funny thing is that they call her Lucky here, pronounced at Louky! She´s very nice!

We went to some restaurant with a pick-up truck to have some lunch. It was free! How nice! Then the trip went on to a little village called Paso Caballos! So NO horseriding!! haha! The road was all unpaved, so only rocks, dust, sand etc. Actually, almost all the roads here in Petén are like that, unpaved. It was a two hour trip!!

We arrived in Paso Caballos, a tiny village. Although, I don´t think it could have been called a village. It consisted of 10 small wooden houses or something, and that was it. We found out that we had some meeting with some other people of the village there. Paso Caballos is the link to a archeological site called ´el Perú´ and some scientific station as well.

The meeting was very funny! It was held outside on some platform above a river. On the one side there were Mayan women washing there colorful clothes and naked children were swimming in the lake, and on the other side they were trying to put some horse in some little boat by trying to tie is feet together. Pretty sad!

On this platform (right) we had our meeting!
pcveranda.jpg

The goal of the meeting as far as we could understand, was to attract some other target group, and to lower the price. It was pretty funny, because they started discussing about what they should serve for breakfast, lunch and dinner during these trips. It went like this:

Spaghetti....no, better rice with beans.....no...maybe together...etc. It was soo funny! And they went on for like a half an hour about this subject!

After two hours the meetig was over, and after some coffee, we went back to Flores. Sara and I got to ride in the back of the pick-up truck this time, which was amazing! The first few minutes we thought it was awesome! The wind through your hair, etc. But after about 30 minutes it became a little bit uncomfortable. We just wanted to get out! But yeah, our own fault! We wanted to sit there, we just had to deal with it! haha! But it was an amazing experience!!!

Last night we invited Kathleen, the lady from Canada, to eat dinner at our place. It was her last night here in Flores before she would travel to the South. That lady is just extremely nice! We hung out a lot with her, and she´s just so much fun! Sara and I made her tuna salad, vegetables, and potatoes with toiletpaper! haha! Yeah, we know, it was pretty stupid! The thing was that we baked them in oil. Since we used a bit too much oil, we wanted to dry them a bit. So we decided to use toiletpaper! I guess we found out that that was not such a good idea. The toiletpaper got greasy and started braking. So there were little parts of the toiletpaper all mixed up with the potatoes! Mistake!! Luckily we could get some of it out, and it tasted pretty good after all! We just had to laugh with it!

Anyways, our day two of work. We had to  be at the office of Alianza Verde at 8 o´clock in the morning. Alianza Verde is the company of which Sara will work for. They work together with Ecomaya. There was some meeting that would actually start at 8 o´clock, but finally around 9 most of the people had arrived. The meeting was held at some balcony of the building, just outside, so that was pretty cool! There were about 11 people in total. Around 9:30 the last person arrived. Yeah, they are not really very punctual here!

The meeting was pretty funny for us! It was definitely different! Everything was a big mix, and we didn´t understand it at all! Especially when you don´t even speak the same language! But it was fun to observe all of them

Around 12 o´clock there was a free lunch. Yeah, pretty nice! It took about an hour and a half before everyone was ready to continue again. In total the meeting lasted from 9 until 4:30pm!! It was not normal! And they were not even finished with everything! In Holland they teach us that the maximum time for a meeting is about 1 hour, because people lose interest, and here they just do it the whole day! It was pretty amazing!

So yeah, those were our first working days! Tomorrow we will get more information about how and what, so we´ll see. We´re excited to get to work finally!

Well, hope all is well with you guys. Hope to hear from you again!

Ciao,

Marjolein