We got to the airport very quickly compared to the hours-long trips across town earlier this week, and I was the first to go through security into the gate area where I powered up the laptop and started setting up a new section for Guatemala. The flight from Mexico City to Guatemala City was 1:45 hours on a 737. It was dark most of the way, and when it became light we were in clouds most of the time so my window seat didn't help me to see much of the Central American terrain as I was hoping.

Sr. Arlene Trant met me at the airport and we waited a bit until Sr. Ann came and picked us up in a car and drove me to the Franciscan parish where I was staying with a group of Franciscan friars participating in an experiential part of their formation program. The parish is in a slum so typical of the Latin American scene in the big cities. The roads are full of potholes so deep that the frame often hits the ground. The buses are old US school buses pressed into service here, and they speed through the streets swerving around and through the potholes and belching thick diesel smoke. The church yard when we pulled in was a big muddy zone with deep puddles from the last shower a few hours before.

There are six friars living behind the church, at the rear of the property on the edge of a deep tropical canyon full of thick foliage. They are from the Santa Barbara Franciscan province and stay for ten months here in Guatemala to learn about and experience poverty through living in the slum and working in various ministries. They learn about poverty first of all at home. St. Francis would be proud of them. The house we live in looks like a real log cabin from the front but it actually the outer slabs of tree trunks that are first cut off when trees are run through a saw mill. They are nailed to a framework of 2x4s that are set on the concrete slab where the house sets. The sides and back of the house are more wooden slabs or tin sheets nailed to the studs. Inside, all the interior walls are cardboard, old refrigerator boxes and the like. It's amazing what you can do with old cardboard, and how nice it looks. Actually, the rooms next to mine probably look even better because I have the 2x4s showing in my room, whereas the rooms on either side would have just the cardboard surface. A window goes all the way across the 8-foot width of the room and can be covered with two large wooden shutters of rough-hewn lumber that looks like barn siding. Thank God there is a screen on the window although I still use a mosquito net at night. I was worried about that at first because before I came Arlene was warning me how fierce the mosquitoes are here. (She was right.)

The friars are a delightful bunch, in their late 20s, early 30s, and basically just arrived a month ago. They are studying Spanish and beginning various works where they can be of assistance. They gave me a warm welcome to the house and started telling me all the various standard operating procedures here, e.g.:

• Scorpions, five-inch spiders with fangs, centipedes, mice, snakes, etc., are very common, even in the house (probably because it is so close to the heavily forested canyon just twenty feet away), so, I was warned, be sure to take the bed apart each night to check for scorpions and spiders between the sheets. And shake out all my clothes before putting them on and my shoes, too, to get rid of any undesirable creatures.
• There are outdoor toilets--although they are regular flush toilets--in another little shack made of sheet metal and scrap lumber. But there is an extra garbage can beside each commode--for used toilet paper. It can't be put into the toilet and flushed because they don't have a septic tank but just a big hole where everything goes. Toilet paper sticks to the side of the hole, eventually hardens like papier-mache, and then prevents all the liquids from draining out into the surrounding earth. I found out that is true for the whole city. You can't flush toilet paper!
• Clothes are washed in big concrete sinks, one with corrugations like an old washboard, outside by the toilets. The middle sink is kept full of water and a pan is used to fill plastic tubs for washing and rinsing. Then everything is hung on lines, some out in the open and some under the cover leading to the toilets. During the rainy season--August to November--it takes three to four days to dry things. So far I've been lucky. We've had some sunny mornings that have really helped the drying process. The worst part is leaving clothes out in the open during the afternoon rains and having to start all over again!

I find it interesting that although I have never studied Spanish, I can read probably 75% of the signs and texts that I see here. I can't read 2% of the signs written in Chinese in Hong Kong after studying the language for 12 months in a university and speaking it for 12 years!

One of the friars is named Ricardo and he has started working with Arlene with the Catholic deaf group. He was an RID interpreter in the US. Tonight the three of us met with four of the hearing volunteers and interpreters who also interpret mass at the cathedral on Sundays, etc., to talk about the retreat we will have on Sunday. We met in Pollo Campera, the Guatemalan equivalent of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The volunteers are delightful people, and talking about the retreat with them radically changed my ideas about how to approach it.

We really had no idea how many people were going to the retreat because of the confusion surrounding last week's sign up, so we planned for 30, thinking we would be really lucky to get anywhere near that. It turned out we had 33 deaf people plus 9 volunteers and about 10 children of deaf parents. We started off with coffee and cake while they signed up, and then got underway.

The theme for the day was reconciliation and the joy of being loved and forgiven by God, and our first activity was to dramatize the healing of the deaf man in Mark's gospel. Then Arlene spoke about Jesus taking the deaf man apart to speak to him, about his healing touch, and then about the joy we feel when we are open to the touch of Jesus. Ricardo then led a meditation on identifying the presence of Jesus in our lives through our relationships with others. Mauro and Erika then helped identify and explain various sins and faults we could be guilty of, and the deaf groups then portrayed them in quick skits.

After lunch which everyone brought and which we ate outside on the grass under the trees, we started a liturgy with a reconciliation service using the dramatizing of the healing of the deaf man again. Finally it was time to start the actual reconciliation service and we found we were close to our designated closing time so we had to negotiate with the center to allow us to leave at 5:00 PM instead of 4:00 PM. That part of the liturgy went well and was followed by a liturgy of the eucharist.

We gave out little crosses as reminders of the retreat to everyone, and then I was surprised to receive a Guatemalan deaf association T-shirt and a Mayan design shirt. We were already past out extended deadline for leaving but went ahead and took some group photos, and finally got out the center front gates at 6:00. Mauro and Erika again graciously drove us across town.

I went to the sisters' house and sent again some e-mails from the day before that had been rejected by my HK ISP. Apparently as a security measure, the Hong Kong server rejects some relays from foreign ISPs so the mail I was trying to send from my own address didn't go. I had the same problem when I was in Thailand last month. After resending the mail, I head home about 8:00 PM, and was just 20 steps from the friars' front door when the night skies opened and the rain REALLY poured. We were so fortunate that it didn't rain during the day!

Inside the church the first thing we did was to go around to a room behind the main altar where there is a stairway going up to a large statue of Mary that is mounted above the main altar and visible throughout the church. Apparently there is some special devotion connected with this statue and there was a long line of people waiting to climb to the platform where the statue is set in a glass enclosure. After a moment of prayer, they descend down a stairway on the other side of the platform, only they go down backwards to avoid turning their back to the statue! In the room below the statue is another one, life-sized, of Jesus falling as he carried the cross. It is brutally realistic and dramatic in showing the wounds he might have suffered.

Then we went to the cathedral which is a traditional style with lots of side altars and alcoves for various saints' statues and a lot of oil paintings, probably brought over from Spain a couple hundred years ago. The most significant part of the cathedral are the columns supporting the wrought iron fence around the front entrance. They are engraved with thousands of names of those who disappeared, were massacred, and were tortured by the military government a few years ago.

Across the plaza from the cathedral is the presidential palace and we walked through some of its courtyards and corridors. Really beautiful. This is where the peace process was signed on 29 December 1996, finally bringing peace to the country after a decade of suffering by the indigenous peoples. The memorial of the peace process is a pair of uplifted hands, sculpted in bronze as if they were closing in prayer. Between the hands is a rose which is ceremoniously changed each day at 11:30 AM by an honor guard.

After a quick lunch at Wendy's, we headed home and I washed some clothes and then updated the home page. Elmer, the director of the formation program here, returned from Huehuetenango where he had been checking out a project the friars will work on next week.

This evening there was a mouse in my room. I had seen several of them (or the same one several times) in the kitchen area and the corridor leading to the rooms, but this was the first time I saw one in my room. I tried to chase him out the door but he ran the other way instead, under my suitcases. They were closed but not latched, and I was just hoping that he didn't jump inside. I zipped them up and then got the mosquito net set up and was about to get in bed when I noticed a huge spider on the wall and whacked that. I didn't ask if it was a tarantula or not.

It turned out we didn't have to hurry. We were lucky to get on the bus early and I got a seat by the window, but only about half the seats were full. But when we actually backed out of the bus area and started off, it took us 45 minutes to go the first 200 feet. The bus depot is a jammed mass of people and bus bays, and all departing buses must exit through one tiny lane. We just sat for 20 minutes at a time, breathing in the black diesel fumes from the mass of buses heading in every direction from the capital city. Finally we managed to get onto the highway and were soon climbing even higher up into the mountains.

Before we got out of the city, our path was blocked several times by demonstrations of campesinos marching into the capital for a large protest rally. Groups marched on the city from all over Guatemala, some walking two or three days. The men would carry staffs and big three-foot machetes on their belts, and the women would be carrying large bundles on their backs and heads. Some were barefoot. They came to demand clear title to the lands where they live and farm.

These regular buses are just old US school buses that have been given a new life as part of the Guatemalan transportation system. The one next to us still had "Duval County Schools" marked on its side, but most have been repainted in gaudy colors and with a saint's name on the front. The buses are designed to hold 32 school children, but we quickly started picking up more people heading for Quiche, and soon we had three adults in every seat, along with bundles of flowers, vegetables, and bags of every sort. Then the ten-inch aisle started filling up with standees (who would crouch down to pretend they were sitting whenever we went through a police check-point) until there were about 50 people inside the bus and huge mound of stuff stowed in a rack on top.

The bus trip gave a beautiful view of Guatemala's hills and mountains and volcanoes and the people who inhabit them. Some areas of the city we passed through seemed relatively well-to-do, but soon we were among the little shacks of the poor people who inhabit and farm the land with simple hand tools. I didn't see any mechanized equipment like a tractor at all. Any everywhere women mostly were carrying large bundles of firewood on their backs, gathered from farther up on the mountain slopes. Little children would carry smaller bundles, supported by a tump line around their foreheads.

We got off the bus at the little village of Lemoa after passing Lake Atitlan, one of Guatemala's scenic spots. In this little village three Maryknoll sisters have set up a contemplative prayer community in a house next to a parish church where mass is celebrated just once a month.

• The Lemoa church is an old Spanish colonial style, very simply appointed with crude wooden benches and plain windows high up in the walls. Several statues are placed around the church, usually in glass cases, and several processional crosses and images to be carried were leaning against the walls inside.
• Sebastian, the caretaker of the church, was sitting inside the door when we entered, weaving reeds together to form long woven strips to be used in making sombreros. His caretaker job is non-paying but he is so proud of his position and asked us to take his picture so he could show the people back in his village. For weaving the sombrero pieces, he gets about 11 or 12 cents for a day's work, his only income.
• We arrived just at lunch and the sisters had enough to invite us to join them for a simple meal. They don't eat meat and produce a lot of their own vegetables in a garden in their compound.
• Arlene and I walked around the little village and down by the small lake there. The kids are just darling although often with perpetually runny noses and covered in dirt. They are all friendly although several did not want us taking any photographs.
• Pentecostal churches are all over the place in Guatemala. Three of them are within a block of the Catholic church where we were staying. One had a Tuesday afternoon service going on with about 40 people inside praising the Lord with simple--mostly out-of-tune accompaniment on an electric guitar and electric piano.
• The sisters have two solar ovens set up in their courtyard, one homemade and one commercial. They used them for some cooking and especially for boiling their water supply.

We walked down to the road and waited maybe fifteen minutes before the "Guate" bus came chugging along. Arlene and I were lucky to get the last of the empty places to sit at the end of the seats, the third place on a two-person seat which means that you sit half on, half off the seat with your legs in the very narrow aisle.

• We picked up a lot more people along the way this time, people heading for the big city. No matter how full the bus, the driver never passed anyone up and we just crowded together a little more. In the beginning I had to worry about sliding off my half seat on the hairpin turns but as the mass of bodies increased, we supported each other and there was no place to fall.
• The highway for the largest part of the trip was the Pan-American Highway that runs from Alaska to Chile. Here it is two lanes and in relatively good condition so that the traffic moves quickly and is able to pass slower vehicles on the shoulders.
• There are relatively few private cars on the road. Buses and trucks are the major part of the traffic (including an extraordinary number of Pepsi delivery trucks!) and the private vehicles are almost all four-wheel drives and what I think would be called sport vehicles in the US.
• We passed small schools in most villages but relatively few children in them. More children were seen out on the mountain sides in the steep cultivated areas or with their mothers or grandmothers hauling firewood on the their backs down from the forested areas. Families are so poor every extra hand in the fields means more food to eat and they don't see how education will make anything better so most children get very little education.

Back in Guatemala City, we ate a quick lunch at Campera, the chicken place. This chain is all over Central America and has been successful where some of the other fast-food chains have not been because it adapted to local custom where men don't carry their own food to tables. Entering the restaurant, you go to a table and a waitress wearing a headset and wireless microphone comes and takes your order and radios it back to the kitchen to speed things up. Then she brings the food to the table. Only the take-out orders go straight to the counter.

Coming back into the city brings you back into the gun culture here. Apparently because of high crime, guards with pistol-grip, pump-action shotguns are everywhere, standing outside every story and business. Even the Pepsi-Cola delivery trucks have a shotgun-toting guard riding along. It's rather unnerving to see so many weapons pointed in every direction by rather young kids. All the smaller shops, the little family mom and pop stores along the street have iron grills over the front, like a jail cell, so that you go up to the bars and ask for what you want, and it's passed through an opening in the bars.

Elections for president are coming up soon and the campaign is in full swing. Thousands and thousands of candidates' pictures and slogans are on every tree and wall and bare rock along the highways. The people here tell me that the polls show a strong lead for the former military president under whom the majority of the massacres of the indigenous people took place. He is running under the banner of law and order. The human rights people are appalled at the prospect of his returning to office (he admits he himself killed two people in Mexico "in self defense" and fled the country because the "justice system is corrupt there"). One sister who works in a mental health situation helping people traumatized by the violence and massacres and torture says that she is not surprised since abused people often seek out abusers in a continuing cycle of violence.

Arlene, Ricardo, and I had a meeting this morning to discuss the future direction of the Catholic deaf group here. We all agreed that more workshops and retreats to help both the deaf group and the volunteers group define their identities more clearly would be really helpful.

For lunch the Maryknoll Sisters invited me over to their house and that was delightful. I checked e-mail while there, and then Arlene and I walked to Upavim, a women's development cooperative where she tutors children after school. Started by a Texas lay woman, the center now has a clinic, a sewing factory, a day care center, and the tutoring program. The primary school kids who come for tutoring are really cute. The children here seem to be some of the most handsome and some of the warmest I have seen anywhere in the world. It's hard to think of them growing up to struggle for survival like their parents. And survival is a real struggle here.

At the center I finally got to meet May Chiu, a Hong Kong young woman who worked for the HK Marine Police for six years, then resigned and went to Nepal to volunteer for six months. Then she came to Guatemala where she is helping with the same tutoring program Arlene is in. I really admire adventuresome young women like her who can leave the security of their jobs and families and take off alone to work in really hostile conditions. I invited her to come and speak to our HK Catholic deaf group when we both get back there.

This evening Barbara, the Upavim founder, had a farewell dinner for May at the center. There were just eight of us there and it was a really pleasant, really special meal. Two of the others were a husband and wife couple from Lexington, Kentucky who are volunteering through the VMM mission group, an ecumenical organization. It turns out the husband worked with my sister-in-law Hope in mental health programs in Kentucky.

The rains were starting as I walked home about 9:00 PM and I wasn't totally unhappy because that meant there were fewer people on the streets although there were still plenty around. In the slums, people live a good part of their lives outside their tiny shacks and lean-tos. I haven't felt totally secure when I'm out alone, especially at night. A gringo like me really stands out. Yesterday something plopped on the street near me and I couldn't tell if it was something thrown by a group or teenagers or what. Today a young boy called out "Gringo" when I went by, but I don't think it was malicious, more just stating the obvious.

Arlene took me to the Maryknoll priests' residence in Zone 10 of Guatemala City. That's two bus rides and a long walk away from Zone 4 where Mezquital is. They just finished a four-day workshop there last night and most of the participants had left but I got to see a few of the Maryknoll people I had never met and a few others I had. One priest had served in China for several years but is now in Honduras. Two lay missioners from El Salvador were also there. We had not seen each other since their orientation program almost two years ago. We sat and chatted for a couple hours, mostly about the politics of Central America where it seems none of the governments care much about the people, especially the indigenous peoples. Then we had to leave for Arlene to get home in time for lunch. Today is the feast of St. Theresa, a special day for celebration for the Maryknoll sisters around the world.

I can certainly understand how the missioners who work here fall in love with the people and places of Guatemala and other areas of Central America. They are involved directly in the lives of the campesinos, the peasants, in a way that forces you to confront the enormous problems of the poor and landless. It's quite different from our situation in Hong Kong, of course, since HK is all urban area and there is almost no poverty to speak of and everyone has a flat. But here the indigenous people have been driven from their lands, have been deprived of title to the land where they are resettled, and are constantly at the mercy of the governments which are know more for massacring the peasants rather than addressing their legitimate concerns.

Supposedly all these governments are democracies, but here that term "democracy" has a much different meaning from what we would understand in the US where we have the idea that we elect someone to represent us in the highest levels of government. Here it means that people can vote but only for a candidate who sees his position as an opportunity to create wealth for himself and who cares nothing about the people who elected him. In some of the Central American countries, a party is elected to power, not individual candidates, and the party picks the government ministers and delegates to the assembly. If they would vote against the party, maybe supporting the campesinos on some issue, the party just removes them since they are not elected by popular vote.

The political systems are so rotten that it is easily understandable how communism and other promises of total social change are so attractive. A total social change, a real revolution, is what is needed. It would be nice if Christianity, if the church, was working to make that revolution happen. Some of its leaders are, but too many, though, are allied with the political powers against the people's interests.

Pepsi definitely seems to have won the cola wars in Mexico and Central America. Their big blue delivery trucks are everywhere, and the fronts of most tiendra, or small shops, are painted Pepsi blue with the familiar logo. I haven't seen that many people drinking soft drinks, but there must be quite a market for them here. Coca-Cola has a large bottling plant here that we pass often on the buses.

Antiqua is a beautiful old Spanish colonial town, maybe looking like something out of 19th-century Europe with the Spanish-style buildings, cobblestone streets, and a beautiful Mediterranean climate. Someone early on recognized its tourist potential and it is very much a touristy town now but not in the artificial sense. Everything there is authentic but has been developed for its potential for attracting visitors.

We walked first through the central park and then to a Dominican church, the cathedral. I was amazed how small it was. A Franciscan brother who has been beatified--the first step toward being declared an official saint--is buried there. He is revered for his work with the poor in Guatemala. Then we walked to what I thought was another church because Arlene said we were going to Santo Domingo. It turned out to be a five-star hotel that has taken over an old monastery and church compound and transformed it into one of the most beautiful hotels I've ever seen. Most of public areas, even the reception desk, are open to the outside area, with no exterior walls. The reception desk is situated at a huge long table, not a counter, that looks like an old altar and behind it is the traditional tiered platform that was behind most pre-Vatican II altars. Statues of various saints are spread throughout the hotel and its courtyards and gardens, probably every one of them an antique from the 17th or 18th century.