Our Trek Home from Guatemala

Hola Friends and Family,

We finally made it by car to Arkansas on Sunday night, driving all night to arrive
in Bentonville early Monday morning to witness the rush hour over to
Wallmart headquarters. It was about 30 degrees in the shade of a
hickory tree with three inches of ice on the ground, though the main
roads were crowded and clear. I replaced a failing battery in the
car so we could stop at the new house, sliding down a lane just outside
town to a tree-filled stream bed.
“There it is!”
We recognized the house from the internet pictures though the
scene was painted white by snow. The twins dashed through it tossing
white balls. The cold penetrated our jackets in seconds.
Inside the house we found many surprises but nothing devastating. It
will take hard work but the house is nearly habitable as is…once we
get the wood burning stove stoked.

What was amazing to me was the astouding level of development in the
area. The region including Bentonville and Fayetteville is well
above California’s Inland Empire in terms of industry and infrastructure. You
don’t hear thick southern accents or see guys with white hoods at
all…hardly a pair of overalls in sight. There’s a Starbucks two
minutes from the house and Brendan’s high school looks like a
university. New cars everywhere. Office buildings and road
widening underway. The Wallmart effect is truly palpable. Public library
awesome. Museums fine. Galleries. Historical architecture. And the
Ozarks are gorgeous.

This is not to say that Jeanie and I are not experiencing a state of
shock after being in the Third World tropics. Being able to drop
paper in the toilet and shower in hot water has meant an adjustment.
And today we woke up to find the car under a foot of fresh snow.
Luckily, our family members, Jesse and Ricky, have a big new house and we are all huddled
inside waiting out the blizzard, hopefully the last of the year to
affect here.

Tomorrow I hope to drag out some of the old carpet and saw up some
wood for the stove. The upstairs is pretty liveable and the kids
will have their own media room. Brendan is busy trying to buy a
flatscreen locally here, though I’m trying to convince him that
getting a used drum set would be a better investment. In Guatemala
he had become a promising drummer.

The weekend is forecasted to be sun-filled so our flight to LAX should
arrive on time. More to
tell you all when we get to California…

Love from us all,

The Engholms

Chad at the Hostal Holistica in Antigua

Discovering Mayan Gardening (from “The Maya Garden” blog)

In Solola, Guatemala today we visited with Carlos B. His brother is the alcalde of one of the most important cofradias in town, the Cofradia Santa Cruz.  And his family runs a  beautiful Maya-style farm north of the town center on the shoulder of a ridge that plunges 1,000 feet into a river gorge below.

 

Here a special ceremonial corn is grown, maize rojo.  Carlos thinks his is the only such crop in the department.  He gladly arranges to provide us seeds for this beautiful specie to start a crop in the States.  During the war, the family was ‘divided’ and sent to different areas of the country, forcibly removed from their farm since they were indigenous Kachquichel suspected of being guerrillas.  Now, his extended family works the crops and plants forest trees in four separate wooded areas, each representing an element and a direction on the Mayan “cross” of four directions, or “puntos cardinales.”

What an incredible sight when Carlos ripped away the thick husk.  This red corn is used to make a special ‘atol,’ a thick sweetened corn drink used in the cofradias on fiesta days.  The rest of the farm’s production is sold in the huge outdoor market in central Solola.

Enormous natural rocks have been left in place.  Beds for onions are cleared and raised, with deep irrigation channels from which water can be ‘bailed’ and splashed manually onto the seedlings.  This farm also uses simple moveable sprinklers and water that comes to the surface from a natural underground spring year round.

This abode house in the middle of the farm is 150 years old and features a temescal sauna inside.  The walls and roof are original except for some lamina added to allow light to enter.  The family claims abode is more comfortable than block for homes because it better regulates temperature.  However, due to earthquakes and mudslides, a cement block house is considered much safer.

All of the traditional Mayan farms in the area include a farm altar.  There are three important calendar days each 260-day year when elaborate ceremonies take place to make offerings for a crop to be planted and offer thanks for a harvest.  Carlos’ altar overlooks the attractive gardens and natural forests like a lighthouse.

After an afternoon with Carlos, we felt we could begin to plan our Maya Garden in the States.  No chemicals.  Companion plants matched with others to fight pests naturally.  Creating forest areas to break the wind and hold the soil during storms. Most incredible of all, everyone working the farm was cheerful and full of life, whether teenagers, adults, or elderly.

“They Just Shot the Mayor” -&- “Security Patrol Meeting in Our Yard”

Coming out of the Ixil Triangle on Saturday — after visiting a school where a massacre of Mayan farmers occurred in the eighties and meeting with a cofradia during the Santos Reyes fiesta in Chajul — we learned on Radio Sonora that the mayor of the important regional town of Cotzal had been murdered — shot dead in broad daylight in the center of town.  The army was moving in to block the roads south, in hopes of capturing the culprit.  We were almost completely alone on the road to Quiche, a twisting mountain lane of incredible beauty that we luckily traversed without incident; here, a stop at an army checkpoint when nerves are tense can go either way, said Ricardo.  The government has attempted to negotiate with a ‘new’ guerrilla group active in northern Guatemala, but little is known about its leadership or objectives.  It’s also an election year, I said, and already a bloody one.  Once in Chichi it was time for a cold Gallo.

UPDATE: The next day it was reported by Sonora Radio that the mayor had, in fact, not been killed. Another male citizen had but the mayor was wanted for extortion and had tried to escape Cotzal by car. Thus, the police and army had moved in to block the roads out of Ixil. The reporting error was gross, but “they only had one man up there covering the events.”

In Pana today the fun continued, when I learned that my offer to help local nighttime patrol groups better interface with the foreign community here was being taken at face value, and I was now in the unlikely position of sponsoring a meeting tomorrow night where the armed and masked groups could present their mission statement to a coterie of foreign residents.  We’ll be serving jaimaica iced tea, just like Starbucks.  But ours is homemade.  I’m sure the group will be impressed with our lawn furniture and sole bathroom.   “Let’s see, who should we seat next to Eduardo with the machete?”

UPDATE: The meeting was a hit with nearly everybody. We had about 15 people in our terrarium-size yard, sitting around our kitchen table and couch on the lawn. Jeanie overdid it as usual, with turkey sandwiches, veggie platter, and iced jaimaica tea. The volley of discussion was tough for Chris to manage in two languages but the night patrol leaders felt meetings of this informal sort were more efficient and downright fun than working with the municipal “security commission” where things take forever and support for their efforts doesn’t materialize. Everyone stayed civil though some of the foreigners have reasonable gripes and serious concerns about unidentified masked men stopping cars at night and harassing partiers. Jeanie and I felt that a couple of large signs placed at the entrance to Jucanya, the residential area in question, blaring the message that “This is a drug and gun-free zone and you will be asked for identification,” would turn back locals and tourists alike who are entering the neighborhood to buy some fly or weed from the well-known dealer houses. The dealers would have to relocate, and would do so likely without a fight. Anyhow, this is the plan Chris and Ricardo will pursue with the patrols, helping to find the needed wood and painter to create the signs and getting them tacitly approved by the authorities. It seems like the best first step for a group of desperate residents wanting their neighborhood made safe again in the absence of police assistance. Wouldn’t families in a crime-infested barrio in the States do the same?

Our New “Maya Garden” in Dixie

For family and friends, here are some shots of our new place in the States.  It’s an old farmhouse on three acres with a river running through it.* There are two facing art studios and a huge cement pad for a workshop or place of business in the future.

We’re new to this bucolic stuff but a friend here has lent us a great book about “perma culture” and we’re learning fast about how to create a sustainable organic farm in the Ozarks.

Today we are meeting with a group of Mayan farmers who are going to tell us how to create an authentic “maya garden” using companion gardening and something they call ‘forest farming.’  No monoculture for us!

 

In case you’re wondering how a gaggle of Californians will fare in the ‘Ol South, the airfare to Vegas is only $65.  Whew!

The red thing that looks like a Roman bath mated with a Spanish fountain is called a ‘pila.’  Great for washing clothes, gardening, dying…everyone has one here.  Tough to find in the States though, and we can’t fit one in the van!

Oh, and this is what you can get in Northwest Arkansas for under 50K.  But please don’t tell anyone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(*) The use of the word ‘river’ in this context might be questioned by the sensitive reader. What width must a creek or stream attain in order for it to achieve the status of a river? Well, as we are from Temecula in Riverside County, the term river is highly subjective since there a ‘creek’ might be nothing more than a sump, and a ‘rivulet’ can be created with a garden hose left running in the front yard. Hence, our new home in Arkansas, indeed, has a 30-foot wide “river” running through it. (…it’s also in a flood zone, but we’ll leave that for a future blog entry.)

Lake Atitlan at the Wrong End of the Pipe…Again

On my left is Francisco Lec, an expert on the ecology of Lake Atitlan, who works for the governmental body that oversees ecological efforts to restore it. In the middle is Ricardo Barrios, an educator and culture expert in Panajachel. One of the oddest items learned at our meeting yesterday was that the so-called “waste water treatment plant” severely damaged during Hurricane Stan, which sits half-destroyed in the Pana River, was actually a sham. It was built ten years ago without any intention to treat water of any kind. As of the late 1970s, the hotels and chalets around the lake have been pumping the bulk of their raw sewage into the deep, flat, bottom of the lake. Ricardo once worked at the Hotel del Lago where trucks would take its sewage to fertilize the coffee plantations across the lake in San Lucas Toliman. But around 1978, the hotel decided it would be clever to run a pipe into the lake and dump the sewage there. The other hotels and home owners around the lake (many foreign-owned) quickly followed suit. As we boated back from Santiago today, howling Norte winds nearly capsized our launch. I could only say to my white-knuckled wife, “This lake has a lot to gripe about, and we’re all at risk in its presence.”

Francisco Lec, Ricardo Barrios, Chris Engholm

Happy New Year, and “Is Our House Still There?”

We just saw the CNN footage of Arkansas being ripped up by tornados today. We are moving into a house there in February. Checking the storm path, the destruction hit Benton County where our place is located on three acres. A shaman here in Guatemala told us yesterday, “These are end times, but while the beginning of the end has started, the end will be a new beginning.” Yes, but I dread clean-up and I’m hoping our pad has been spared. Wall-Mart headquarters is located in Bentonville about 5 miles from the place, so we’re probably fine since Nature wouldn’t screw with Wall-Mart, right?

Happy New Year to you all.