Perspectives of a Wandering Geographer

After I returned from the weekend at the Paredón beach, there was only one day left of classes (Monday) followed by an end of vacation school pageant and special lunch on Tuesday.   On Monday, the students made Christmas trees with paper, green water-soluble paint, glue, and salt.   The mixture took forever to dry so I don’t think the kids got to take them home.   The pageant/fiesta had a Christmas theme as Thanksgiving is unknown in Guatemala.  Groups of students gave short performances or presentations of various things they had learned and practiced at the vacation school.  A good time was had by all including quiet and curmudgeonly old Will.     After lunch, I bid warm goodbyes to Eunice and Carmen who had supervised the exercises in the science lab where I spent most of my time as a volunteer.   I also thanked and was thanked by Susan García, the volunteer coordinator for the school, who had invited me to come help out several mon...

I had one weekend left before returning home to Denver.   Should I stay in Antigua to see more of the city?   Well, I’d seen quite a bit of the city ten years ago when I was in Antigua for a conference and one-week Spanish immersion course.   I really wanted to get out of Antigua for the weekend, especially because of the two-day Festival de las Flores (Flower Festival).   I don’t have anything against flowers but Violeta and Fernando told me thousands of people would descending on the city meaning crowded streets, crowded restaurants, and many decibels of noise.   I also learned from Fernando that five young women who were attending a wedding would be staying in the room next to mine which was usually vacant or had one quiet guest at a time.   I could easily envision the five of them returning from the wedding at midnight – ¾ sloshed on free booze and ready to continue the party into the wee hours.   And I was also eager to get away from Michael, the ...

My time as a volunteer at the School of Hope was during their four week “vacation school”.   One of the objectives was for the students to have fun while learning in a less formal setting than they had during the January-October school year.   During the first week I was helping out in the science lab, I suggested to Eunice (the Guatemalan science teacher) that we have a class and lab exercise on Dinosaurs.   After all, kids love dinosaurs, right?   During an internet search, I found a five-minute video in Spanish about dinosaurs (“dee-no-SAUR-ios” in Spanish) as well as    instructions for making dinosaur bones using a mixture of flour, water, and salt. So, on the Monday following my return from Honduras, we showed the video to two groups of students, then had them mix up the ingredients to get the correct consistency for making the bones.  The result was a variety of sizes and shapes of bones based on drawings I showed them.  I had hoped that on...

I  woke up early on Sunday morning remembering it was November 10, my mother’s 120th birthday.   What a different world she was born into on November 10, 1904, in rural northwestern Ohio.   My grandmother was working in her garden on the family farm in Henry County when she went into labor.   The midwife was sent for and Mother was born on the dining room table! So here I was 120 years later waiting to be picked up by a van at a hotel in Copán, Honduras.   I think Mother would be pleased to know of my many travels (she died in 1981).   The furthest she even traveled was to the Panama Canal Zone where she was teaching school in 1941 when she met my Bostonian father (a sergeant in the US Army Air Force) a couple months before Pearl Harbor. The same driver that got us through the border the day before picked me up at 6:20 AM, 20 minutes late.   There were a handful of other passengers.   We arrived at the border in about 10 minutes to find a huge...

The Drive (ugh!) I wondered if I was a bit nuts to commit to a 12+ hour round-trip over only two days to the Copan Ruins in Honduras.   In order to make the trip and have time to see the ruins during the first afternoon, I had to have my ass ready and waiting in front of my lodgings in Antigua at 3:30 AM on Saturday.     The tour van arrived only 5 minutes late and I was the first passenger.   I started to climb into the passenger’s seat at the front, but the driver, a quiet and sullen 60ish grayhead, insisted that it was against “las reglas” (the rules).   “¿Qué reglas?” I replied, insisting just as strongly that I always rode in the front seat in tour vans.   He had other passengers to pick up and probably didn’t want to waste time arguing with an assertive gringo who spoke Spanish, so he relented, and I climbed into my coveted front seat. Heading east out of Antigua on a serpentine four-lane highway, we climbed about    1200 feet in 5 miles...