Shakedown

17 July 2005

Go look up the Boston Globe online and read the review of my sister’s play, Arcadia.  She got a good review, and is making some waves.  I am amazed by her – it is such a tough profession to make a go of it, and she has done it for nearly a decade.

The cops had stopped Matt, and were harassing him about not having the papers on him while driving.  He had gone to get Danny (soil scientist working with us for two weeks) and Don Jorge (Papatulo) from San Pedro and got stopped.  And they hassled him quite a bit.  He had stopped at the entrance to Trinidad, where they pulled him over, and he managed to explain that the car papers were “just over the hill” where the owner of the car was working.  They took his keys and told him to hurry.

When I arrived on the scene, they turned their attention to me.  I have seen it before in Mexico, but usually the Guatemalan police are not out for mordida.  But this was a shakedown, plain and simple.  They even threatened to tow the car to the Mexican border for overstaying my welcome – I was past the thirty days for renovating the car papers.  They tried several tacks – that I had overstayed my permits (untrue; I renovated the car papers two weeks earlier), that my car papers said the car was green, but it was actually green and black (also untrue – the bottom panel is also the same color green as the rest of the car, but one set of car papers actually says it is red, which they fortunately did not pick up on). 

I told them they were wrong on both counts. 

They even tried the seat belt law, claiming that they would have to charge me for driving without a seat belt (forty people can cram into the back of a pickup truck without fear of being ticketed, but heaven forbid the driver not be wearing a seatbelt!)  But since I had not been driving when they pulled Matt over…

The final one was charging me with just raising dust.  I don’t know anybody in town (untrue), I ask them for help with a landowner dispute (true) but then don’t file any paperwork that says that the dispute is over (true – but we did stop by and explain it to the officer in charge).  And all I do is drive through without stopping to talk, raising dust as I pass.

Guilty, I guess.  But weird.

The work has been steady, if not exciting.  Matt continues to excavate cool middens from the other side of the site, and I continue to struggle to understand small household architecture.  I have a building with no walls.  I have no idea what happened to the walls – they are just gone.  All that I can find in the structure is a partially preserved plaster floor.  And I was excited to finally find that.  Both of the other structures have good, if small, walls defining inner and outer space.  But not this one. 

On Tuesday, I was at the site, when everyone started to point out a figure in a pink shirt making his way towards us.  “It is Don Angel,” they explained.  He moved quickly across the arroyo, and came up to the area where we are digging.

I was glad to see him.  I had heard so much about Don Angel, and we had tried to get him to work for us at the beginning of the season.  But he had not been there. 

See, Don Angel is a curandero – a healer.  He had worked for the project before, and knows a huge amount about the area.  So I was thrilled to have him on board.  After talking for a few minutes, he asked for work.  I decided for the project that we wanted him.  We were losing a couple of people, and so I hired him to start the next day.

But Don Angel is not Don Angel.  We got to the site yesterday, and Matt said, in an exasperated tone, “who is that?”  It was at that point that I realized my mistake.

Don Angel is the father of Doña Ana, our cook.  Don Angel is single, never married, and without kids.  Don Angel is from San José.  Don Angel is from Nuevo San José.  Don Angel worked with Gerson on the excavations in 2003.  Don Angel has never done this kind of work before.

Don Angel on the left.  Ticho on the right. Bilo in the back right.

Two Don Angels.  And the incongruities did not really get noticed until Matt and Elly did not recognize him.

Anyway, he is a good worker, and I like him.  He also adds years to the average age of the crew – I now have four dons on the crew – Don  Tirso, Don Jorge, Don Arturo and Don Angel.  And I will likely be getting Don Paco back (he went to work for Elly for her last week).

It is like a donvention.

On my way back into the village last week, I stopped in San Andres and picked up some cigars for the don that smokes (see the attached picture).  I asked the price of the poorly rolled cigars, and was surprised.  I bought eight cigars for Q5.

Granted, they had to be re-rolled before Don Arturo could smoke them, and he saved some of the extra tobacco for later use, but he was quite pleased with the result.  And he can have them.  I sure don’t need them – I got enough from being downwind of him.Odd that Honduras and Mexico, on either side of Guate, are both known for their cigar tobacco, but that Guatemala, which has more biozones than you can shake a stick at, does not have a tradition of growing tobacco.  Except on a very small level. 

A guy named Oscar came back through this week (he made an appearance last Saturday, as well, asking questions about our excavations).  This time he came with his brother and someone else.  He is the head of the water purification company in San Benito (the water tastes awful, but half the time it is all that is available) and he just bought the land on the other side of the road from DJ (150,000Q) and was looking to buy rights to the land at Trinidad.  He views it as a profit venture, he was looking to develop it into a Tikal-like park, so his questions ran the direction of, “will the government take this land away if I buy it?”

I couldn’t say yes or no.  If I say yes, DJ has had his deal torpedoed by me, and the current landrenter is angry with me.  If I say no, and the government does take it away, I have screwed him instead.  Papatulo, while I was waffling, stepped up and said the government was almost certain to take away a site as important as this.  It would be made into a national park.

Bless him.

Turns out Oscar wanted to “clean” the structures privately and charge admission to the site.  But I think the tag-team combination of Papatulo and me dissuaded him from buying the rights.  I told him that the program of test pitting that Matt was doing all over the site was going to cost 12k, and that he was going to spend much more than that in the process.  It would be hard to charge enough to recover an investment like that.  And besides, only the government can really restore sites like he wants to.

Food situation is grim.  I explained at the beginning of the week that Doña Ana had to make vegetables last the entire week – that Friday and Saturday without vegetables was not acceptable.  This week it was only Saturday without a veggie (plain eggs for breakfast, noodles for lunch).  Every other day we got eggs with at least one vegetable mixed in.  And one day, she hit the trifecta – plain eggs for breakfast, egg-veggie mass for lunch, and eggs and potatoes for dinner.  $75 worth of veggies in a market in Guatemala, where veggies are cheap, and it only lasted 6 people five days.  Hmph.

So we were sitting at dinner last night fantasizing about big, full breakfasts, and Christina couldn’t stand it any more.  “Enough with the food porn”.  Yes, Best Beloved, we have dropped another level, and are only dealing with fantasies of food.  I am a little scared to go back to civilization; for fear that I will embarrass myself in the first restaurant I go to.  As it was, last night I ate in near-panic, trying to wolf down my steak as if protein works better when eaten quickly.  Even worse, the moment I was done, I looked around at everyone else’s plate (they were almost as fast) and wanted to start vulturing them. 

The conversation then turned to bad experiences with field food.  In years past, this project has had it bad.  One year, there was nothing but noodles for a two-month field season.  Another project, the director rationed food according to work ethic – lazy people got less (we all agreed that was a bad idea – you mess with people’s food supply in the field, you get wolves circling).  It could be much worse.  It just doesn’t feel that way when you look at another meal of congealed egg mass in the bottom of the Tupperware.

Perspective

25 July 05

Perspective.  It is something that is hard to get, hard to keep, and is the most important thing to gain when you are bogged down in details.

I have been bogged down with the details.  Eat.  Write paper.  Fill out paperwork.  Excavate.  Fill out paperwork.  Eat; whine about food.  Fill out paperwork.  Sleep when you can.  Get up, eat and whine about the food.   Fill out paperwork.

In the day-to-day part of this project, I have had a hard time with perspective.  This week helped me with some of that.

Matt has been coming down with something since Thursday.  Friday he looked a little peaked, and stayed in.   The chills and fever hit about midday.  By the time we got home, he was a wreck.  I took him into Flores to spend the night at the hotel, so he could go to the private clinic first thing Saturday.   He got a phone call from Papatulo's daughter-in-law just before I took him in, asking if we could take her into the clinic in Sta. Elena.  Sure.   So when we passed by the house, in perfectly typical Guatemalan fashion, she got in, but also the sick cousin (we thought she was sick, but it was just the cousin), Luki's husband and kid.   To say nothing of the dog.  I dropped them off at the clinic, then took Matt (turns out he has dengue, a nifty little tropical disease transmitted by mosquitoes.  And, as Ingrid put it, we have all been sharing needles) to the hotel.  On my way back through, I stopped to pick up the Guatemalans.

They were not ready, but said it would only be a little bit more.  They were prepared to take a cab back; I said "Don't be silly.   20 minutes?  I'll wait."

After waiting outside with the mosquitoes for a while, Sylvia (the little girl) and her dad and I all moved inside to see how it was coming.   And bumped into Perspective.

A woman came out of one of the rooms.  She was hysterical.   I looked to Luki.  She told me that the woman's three-year-old son had just died.  Intestinal worms.

The woman was comforted by her family and friends.  I will not forget her pain, ever.   She cried.  She fainted, and was revived.  She paced and shuffled.  She talked to herself, she accepted the consolation of her friends.  She pounded her head with her fists, and was gently restrained.  She walked over and touched the door where her son's body lay, willing her situation to return to normal.   Her husband went quietly across the street to pick out a casket.

And she kept turning around, with eyes as dead as those of her son, to look for help.  And for hope.  And everyone looked away.  What can you do for a woman whose child has died?  Only three-year-old Sylvia did not look away.   But I imagine that being comforted by a three-year-old over the death of your own three-year-old is small comfort.

I walked away with some perspective that night. Food?  I have plenty.   I just am not fond of the taste.  Job?  My job is the best in the world.  I am frustrated with it, but that makes it more interesting.   People around me?  I would choose these guys, if the choice were mine.  We don't always all get along, but being in the field is like being married to people who you did not choose – you are with them 24/7, working hard and relying on each other.   Money?  I wish I had gotten any one of the grants I requested.  And the money may still come.   But I have wonderful support from Tulane, and I have enough to do what I need.  None of this comes without effort.  We are all grumpy, exhausted, bordering on being sick, dirty, hot sweaty, frustrated, hungry, and irritated with most everyone in the world at this point.

But I did not watch my child die.  I do not have to feel that horrible, body-wrenching pain.  I still have light in my eyes.   There is hope. 

Dengue

31 July 2005

Want to talk about Survivor?  We have been playing a new game: “And then there were two”.

Elly left with her crew of teenagers, and promptly got sick.  She is due back today, but is unsure whether she will be able to work tomorrow.  The group she is working with came down two weeks ago to volunteer with a number of different projects, including doing some work on the site.

And predictably, their luggage got lost.  At which point, the claims agent took their claim tickets and said that they would be ready on Monday.

Monday came, and I was headed into Flores for an unrelated reason, and gave Elly a lift to the airport, where she had a fight with the (different) claims agent, who said that without a claim ticket, he could not release the bags.  Elly only knew that her mom (the camp director) did not have the claim tickets any more.

She presented the passports of all nine people who needed their baggage.  No.   I recognize all of the bags.  No.  One of the bags has medicine in it that the student needs to take.  Softer: No.  I will call American Airlines to get the claim ticket number.  Do you have the number? No.  Do you have a phone book – I'll look it up.  No.  I see one there, can I borrow it? No, I have to leave now.

Is there anything more frustrating than a bureaucrat in a bad mood?

She finally got the bags without resorting to violence, bribery, or threats.  And I went to Flores to run my errands at the internet café.  And the power went out.

Perspective.

Matt was misdiagnosed as having dengue by the doctor he saw after I left him in Flores last week.  So this week, on Tuesday, he was feeling better and went out to the field. 

And was pretty much carried out.

Immediately after lunch, one of his workers came up to me, really concerned, and said, “Crorey, come quick!  Matt is sick!  He didn’t want to eat his lunch!”

I, of course, know that Matt never wants to eat his lunch, and was not exactly impressed with Bilo’s (Bee′-low’s) description of his symptoms.  I was then told that Matt needed me to drive him, and that I needed to pick him up at the gate.

One problem with that.  Since Matt drives the car after letting me out, he keeps the single Club key on his keychain.  So I chase him around the site for a while, and finally catch up with him at the car.  He is, in fact, in bad shape.  His fever is back with a vengeance.

The project director, who I met for the first time at that moment, was planning on staying at the site for about an hour or two, and then heading back in to Flores.  After we got Matt back to the camp and splayed him out on the couch (shooing away the gathering audience at the same time), Antonia offered to take him into Flores with her when she went.  They threw him in the back of the truck (Freddy would not let him in the front) and drove him in to see the doctora.  While in the doctora’s office, Matt passed out, and woke up on his back in the middle of a large puddle where he had knocked over the water cooler on his way down.

Lab results: dengue?  Negative.  Malaria?  Positive.

And, as Ingrid put it, we have been sharing needles at the site every day, no matter how much repellant we put on.

So he has been holed up in a motel next to the doctora’s office (she comes over twice a day to check on him) and has become increasingly bored and restless.  He is still seriously anemic.  We took over a steak from La Luna and he went from ‘not hungry’ to ‘ravenous’ with the first bite (the body really tells you what it needs, doesn’t it?) He also has a pretty bad case of flojo, but that is to be expected.  They had him on an IV for the first two days because he was dehydrated (they hung it from the top of the window casing in the motel) but didn’t set it up right.  Over the course of two days they kept adjusting the needle to try and get the solution in a vein, with no luck.  He finally drank enough to rehydrate himself and tossed the IV aside.

Most of the rest of the week has been crazy, with trying to help Ingrid cover Matt’s excavations and doing my own.  The only real excitement in my excavations was the fact that someone passed through on Tuesday night and stole half the tarps covering my units.  They had grabbed all of Christina’s the night before (she is working about 3km away) and made off with mine next.  But whoever it was did not want all of them; they left the second large on behind, and have not come back again.  The hunter (there were dog tracks that my guys pointed out) was also interested in becoming an archaeologist.  I had articulated a wall; he dug out a hole of soft dirt under the wall hoping to find something, and also spaded the dirt at the base of the test with his machete.  Not much damage, considering what he could have done, but irritating nonetheless.  If he wants to dig, we pay people to do that.  He doesn’t have to do it for free…

Don Paco

Another neat bit that I got to do this week.  Papatulo mentioned in passing that Don Paco, once a chiclero, is not bothered by bees, and that he will pull the honey out of the hives.  I am fascinated by bees, and immediately offered to help the next time he needed it.  And later that day I spotted an Ek nest.  Ek (Yucatec Maya translates it either as “star” or “black”, but here in Itzá Maya it is just “star”) is a type of hornet that builds a large  paper nest, just like hornets in the states.  The difference is that the grubs are a delicacy and the honey (yep, honey) is prized.  So when I found an Ek nest nearby that was as big as my head, Paco was all ears.  We went over, and he started drooling, describing the delicious grubs, prepared on a comal (griddle) with lime, chile and salt…. lip-smackin’ good.  I did not have my camera, so I asked if we could put it off until the following day.

The following day, we took off during lunch, grabbed a bunch of palmetto leaves (finding another species of edible bee nest in the process) and headed over to the nest.  I helped him clear out access to the hive, and snapped pictures when I could.  The hornets were excited and all got out of the hive quickly, but did not sting.  Paco’s hands pulled the nest out slowly, carefully, and even without smoking them out (the purpose of the palmetto leaves), he took their nest away.

The reason they were so docile is that the eggs were not laid, and the honey was not stockpiled.  We replaced the nest so that they could repair the nest, but apparently the nest was not worth saving.  They had moved on by the next day.  But I got some good shots, including some of the swarming bees after we took the nest. 

The archaeology this week was tough, but not without reward.  We found a few nice pieces – a drilled deer tooth, a piece of worked shell, and uncovered a couple of walls that make little sense at the moment.  The information is good, and we are being careful, so I will be able to make some interesting comments on commoner residences at Trinidad. 

I also came over to help Ingrid at one point.  She was trying to figure out how to deal with some architecture she found in a 1x1 m unit, and together we decided to expand to the north, away from the architecture (she is digging middens).  That expansion, as is always the case in archaeology, means moving the pile of screened dirt.  As I began moving the dirt, I grabbed up a round form, and wiped it off to show the prettiest green bead you ever saw.  Apple-green jade.  And it was found in the backdirt pile, so there is no associated context.  Oh, well. 

I am headed to the Belizean frontier today – I have to renovar my car papers again.  I will be taking Carlos and Benito for the ride, so that I am not doing it alone.  Everybody else is staying behind to get shopping done, and we will all meet back at camp.  And we will find out whether Bilo brought home his girlfriend.

The current soap opera at the site is whether Bilo (real name: Cesar Alonzo Ramos) is really getting married this weekend.  He claims that he asked her dad if he could take her back home (common law marriage) to live with his family.  He has saved Q1,195 – roughly $170 - from the money he has earned working for us (working, in Bilo’s case, is a word used very loosely).  That means he spent exactly 5Q on one drink. 

We have a number of bets going as to whether he is telling the truth or not.  I tried to smoke him out at one point.  “Bilo!  If you are getting married, you can’t do it without a party!  Don Arturo!  You have a marimba band; how much does it cost per hour to hire the band?”

“Q100 per hour.  And you would have to have at least three hours of playing,” he answered.  Any of you who have been subjected to endless marimba can wince with me.  Marimba music is the black hole of music – the closer to the band you are, the more time stretches until it simply stands still.  Standing in front of the speakers, five minutes is an eternity.  Three hours?

“Great.  I’ll rent the band.  What else do we need for the reception? Food! How about a pig?  How much for a pig?”

Everybody got into the ribbing.  “Well, for one that is this tall (shake-hands-with-a-three-year-old gesture) it will be about Q300.”

“You would also need a place for the reception!”

And so on.  I ended up telling him that I would need to go to the bank to get money to pay for the things he needed, so please let me know what he wanted.

The excuses flew.  She is Evangelica, and wouldn’t want music.  Answer: Papatulo’s group can play evangelico music.    He would ask her what she thought about the reception.  Answer: call her – I need to know today.  I don’t have my phone.  Answer: Ingrid will let you borrow hers.  I don’t know her number.

You don’t know her number?  What do you know about this woman?

Her dad alternately was, then wasn’t, evangelico.  Bilo’s brothers have not met her, and do not know anything about the “wedding”.  She is known only as Alicia, and she lives in the next village over.  

Best guess is that he is lying, and providing us all with some entertainment for the week.  But he, too, is Evangelico, and we even asked if Evangelicos were not against lying as much as they are against drinking…

At least it has provided a welcome break (for both him and us) from talking about how terrible his work ethic is.  I will be interested to meet her.

Final Photo Op and Acrophobia

7 August 2005

But there is always a solution!  This is Guatemala!

Carlos and Benito and I took the trip last Sunday.  We went to the border and came back, intending to renovar my car papers.  When we got there, the computers were down, so there was no way of getting through and come back – we would be stuck in Belize for another day if we actually crossed over.  Is there another nearby border I can go to?  No, sorry.  What is the solution?  Nothing we can do, sorry. 

After talking with the woman in a fruitless conversation for a while, I turned my situation over to the next guy up the chain.  He basically said the same thing – we have to put the information on the computer and give you a printout.  And we can’t do that today because the computers are down and the techs won’t come in on Sunday.  Come back tomorrow.  I have eight days left on my excavation permit.  Can you give me a three-day handwritten extension?  Sorry, no.  The only concession I got was that I could send someone else to renovate the car papers for me, rather than coming myself. 

Solution!  That could have worked out lovely; Erin (our bone specialist) and her husband needed to go to Belize to mail bones to the US, and were having to rent a car to do it; they needed a break because they were out of money, and I needed to get the car to the border without going myself.  They ended up not wanting to risk it, and so I had to head back to the border today.

The week was productive.  I finished up the household excavations in the three residences in my group, drew the plans and called it done.  I have a couple of small things that I want to do, and a couple more that I have to do, but the fieldwork is pretty much done.  I have some good photos of the eastern structure completed.  I had to climb up into two different trees to get the pics, first from one direction and then from the other.  The first was pretty high and unstable, but I was not concerned.  It was not too bad. 

The second one nearly did me in.  I am afraid of heights, but only when my brain decides that I am.  There is no rhyme or reason to my fear.  And it hit me in the second tree.  Getting to the branch required a quick shimmy up about ten feet of branchless tree.  My guys had prepped a “ladder” of sticks tied to the tree with vines (only one of which broke under my weight) but had run out of both a few feet shy.  No problem, I said, I’ll just haul myself up.

I got up and couldn’t.  I dropped my boots to try again, by my shim didn’t want to shimmy.  At all.  And finally, amid a fair amount of laughter, I had to drop to the ground and let them put another rung up there.  And when I climbed up again, I still had some scary steps to take.  But I got some great shots of my structure, and then got down as soon as I could. 

My legs did not stop shaking for an hour.

After finishing that step, one of the things I wanted to do was to put a small unit off the back of the western structure.  We had hit the edge of what seemed to be a cool midden – garbage dump – just off the edge of the platform.  So I decided to put a 1m-1m unit there, just to see what else we would dig up. 

Almost immediately it proved worth it.  We came down on large sherds and well-preserved deer bone, and recovered a beautiful whistle in the shape of a dog (see the attached photo). 

I left the excavations to work on the plan view drawing I was doing for the group I had just photographed when the call came across from the unit.

“¡Hueso!”

I went over to see, and sure enough, there was quite a bit of bone in the bottom of the unit.  I looked at a couple of pieces, and saw that it was pretty much butchered deer bone, as best I could tell.  Still, we articulated as much as we could, trying to get a good idea of what we had.  After setting up pictures for a while, and cleaning up enough to see what we had, I made the call.  Take the bones out.

So since I was in the unit, I helped, and grabbed a single bone out of the dirt, which I handed over to Don Kike.  He looked it over, and asked what kind of bone is this.  I took it back, brushed the dirt off of it, and my jaw dropped.  Bad call.  It was not deer bone.  I had a human mandible in my hand.

Everything changes when there is a burial.  You clear, articulate, draw, photograph.  It takes a long time to do all of the things you have to do with a burial.  I was 30cm from the end of the unit, when I had to stop to excavate a burial. 

The first thing I did was to get Elly.  She has done it; I haven’t.  My only experience in digging burials came when I was on the beach in Yucatán, and we grabbed bone as part of some rescate work.  Not the same kind of work at all.

I then had nothing for the guys to do, and so I sent them to wash sherds at the camp.  Which was likely a poor decision – the first hint of interesting things, I send them away?  Bad call #2.  We work at articulating horribly crumbly but intact bones, take the photos, and draw the resulting plan view for about 4 hours. 

The more I looked at the bones, the more I was convinced that they were not human.  There were simply too many unknowns.  I recognized nearly nothing out of the bones we are articulating.  So I started referring to the collocation of deer bones with human mandible as the were-deer burial.

Bad call #3. We removed the bones as though it were a burial, so no information was lost, but the next layer of bones included something that was unquestionably a human tibia – a shinbone.  There ended up being three layers of bones, taking up two full days of excavation and drawing (my least favorite part of all of archaeology – I really have a hard time drafting).  And all for a unit I wanted to do quickly so I could move on. 

All the bones seemed to be pointed in similar directions, except for the jaw, which was just off to the side. Everything was pretty heavily weathered, and the remains were fragmentary.  I am pretty sure it was the burial of an older male.  There was heavy bone resorption in the posterior dentition (bone-speak for “the tooth holes for the molars had closed over”), which only happens when the molars have fallen out long before – usually only showing up in older people.  We also recovered no teeth at all, and teeth preserve better than the rest of the skeleton. 

It all points to a secondary burial.  The bones, not the body, were bundled up and placed in a shallow pit.  No offerings, no rich grave goods.  A little bit of soil to cover him.  Then covered over with garbage. 

Pure ignominy.

So it set me back, but it is axiomatic in archaeology.  On the day when you are planning to pack it in, pack it up, and ship it out, you hit a burial that stops everything.  There is no escaping it.  So I put everything on hold until I finished it, and then moved on.

Kind of.

After work on Friday I took Matt out to a site that I had been shown at the beginning of the field season.  It is about a five minute drive away, and is absolutely amazing.  The quantity of chert flakes is simply astounding.  There is a looter’s pit in the middle of the platform, and in it, you can see at least a meter of debitage, just stacked up.  This is the kind of workshop you read about in books when you decide to become a lithic specialist, but you only visit once.  And never get the chance to dig.  Now that my season is over, I can put a unit in, just to have some numbers for comparison.  When I claim in my dissertation that they are producing lithic tools at Trinidad (and I am pretty sure that they are), I will put this pit in, just to give it some perspective.  In comparison to everything else in the area, Trinidad has a huge quantity of chert debitage.  But once I have dug a 1x1 into a platform that produces more than 10 times the total amount of chert I have excavated so far, well, that creates a perspective all its own.


The really nice thing (and, at the same time, the awful thing) about it is that the site is slated for destruction.  A subdivision of Nueva San José is planned for the area, and the site will be destroyed.  It has already started.  So my excavations can be important in terms of salvage archaeology, and I can dig without too much concern about saving something for future archaeology – I can just dig what and where I want.  As soon as I get permission to dig.  A woman stopped by to see what we were doing, and informed us that to dig on this land, we needed owner permission.  Which means we did not start Saturday as planned, and might not start Monday.  But it will be done, and I can’t wait to get started, as soon as we have permission.  Which might happen today, next week, or a year from now.  But when I can dig, I will be ready.

We had the despedida yesterday.  It is the party we give at the end of the season – it literally means “the firing”, and the project has put out a decent spread for a decade now.  But this one, they tell me, was the best one yet.  Papatulo showed up with his band and hammered away at tuned cordwood for two full hours.  One of our workers works down the road as a cook, and prepared chicken on the grill, grilled vegetables, rice steamed in coconut water.  He had wanted the job of cooking for us, but Carlos had forgotten, and had hired Doña Ana instead.

My taste buds may never forgive Carlos.  The meal was fabulous, we bought ice cream that everyone loved, and listened to some really fun music for a long time.  Not a bad send off for those of our number who are leaving.

Today has been a fantastic day.  After a really good night’s sleep, I woke up and took Chris to the airport – she left today – and came back to have a leisurely breakfast with Ingrid and Elly.  The food was good and we finally tore ourselves away to actually take the trip to the border and face the dreaded bureaucrazy.

We got there in record time, helped along by a little bit of pirated music we bought in the Sta. Elena market.  We arrived at the border, and were going to try to avoid doing anything extra.  She had to renew her visa, I had to do the car papers.  Five minutes later, I am headed to the car to remove the sticker, having completed the hard part of the business in record time.  And Elly is in front of me, headed back to the car. 

I asked her what was wrong.  She was done.  Five minutes later, we were out of the border town, CCR screaming out of my one functioning speaker.

Renewal of the visa requires leaving the country, paying a $30 fee, possibly staying overnight or finding another border to cross.  And always is a hassle.  But at the “Leaving Guatemala” line, Elly walked right up, handed over her passport, and waited for the next step.

“How long will you be in Belize?”

“Only today.”

“Coming back right now?”

“Yes…”

“Why not just let me stamp the visa?  You pay Q70 here (ten dollars), but if you cross the border, you have to pay $30.”

You have never seen Q70 exchange hands so quickly.   No hassle, nothing.

My car papers were almost as easy.  He asked how long I would be staying, took my passport, stamped the old permit cancelled, signed a new one, sent me to the bank next door to pay $40, and gave me my new sticker.

In and out in 10 minutes.

On our way back, I called DJ.  In talking to him at the site on Saturday, I had agreed to give him and his wife a ride to Sta. Elena – out of our way, but not impossible.  She is going in to the capital for surgery, and was in need of a ride.  We were early, and I called ahead to find out if we could swing by and pick him up.

He politely declined, and said they would catch another ride.  So we were also saved an uncomfortable ride around the lake.

I am buying lottery tickets right now.  Luck like this is too good to waste. 

End of the field season

13 August 2005

I can’t believe it is over.  I am sitting in the Guatemala City airport, waiting on my wife’s plane to arrive, and I simply cannot believe the field season is over.  I keep looking around to see if someone is going to jump out at me from behind a post, tie me up, throw me on a plane back to the Petén, and make me go back to work.

It is not all over, of course.  The easy part is now complete – the fieldwork.  Now I have to switch modes and get busy with the analysis.

For that matter, the fieldwork is not complete, either.  Let me back up.

The luck I was having only lasted through the border trip.  On the way back through, we decided to ask permission to dig at the lithic site I have been calling “Tok’il” – the chert place.  Rumor had it that Papatulo had had a visit from the owner's dad.  Papatulo’s house was locked when we went by, but the five-year-old grandson Detlep peeked out of the door, and opened it once he saw it was me. 

“Do you know where Papatulo is?”

“He went walking to San Andres.”

“Where could we find him?”

“At the house of his daughter-in-law.  Or if not there, at the cantina.”

San Andres has no dearth of cantinas.  And since Papatulo doesn’t drink….  “Which cantina?”  The best answer I could get from Detlep was that it was “the cantina with those things that are up and down.”

Great.  We eventually find Papatulo at the soccer game, and he goes with us to the house of Don Angel (yet another one).  He warned us that Don Angel was pretty upset when he showed up at Papatulo’s house, so we were surprised that the codger was no more of a problem than he was.  After a half hour of talking, he said we had to talk to his son.

We dropped off all the stuff at the camp and headed back to San Benito.  We got there, and Don Angel introduced us to his son, Miguel Angel.  We walked through the situation again.  We are archaeologists.  We understand he has a small (really small – about 60 foot x 60 foot) piece of property, and there are some interesting features we would like to explore.  We are not interested in causing him problems with the government – it is his property, and he can build or mine rocks or whatever from his land.  We only want to do a small excavation that will take two or three days, and we will be gone.  We only want information.  Once I saw him glance back at a very angry-looking woman behind him, and she shook her head once, very firmly.

After we presented everything, I said, “And we would like your permission to excavate.  It would be a great help to us.”

He took a deep breath, and stared at the ground in front of our feet.  Seconds ticked by.  Then minutes.  We waited.  After he had enough, he looked at Dad.  “What do you think?”

Don Angel launched into another salvo of how he couldn’t make the decision, his son was independent, ad nauseum.  And eventually lapsed into silence.  We sat again, watching him stare at the ground in front of us.  Five more minutes of silence. 

After it was all over, we decided to give him more space to discuss it.  We went around the corner, and talked it over with Papatulo.  The way we were reading it, the guy 1) wanted money for the permission, 2) was afraid that the government would take away his property, 3) was worried about getting accused of looting (there is a huge looter’s pit in the center of the plot) and 4) was mistrustful of a couple of strangers.

Papatulo explained that he also was likely worried that if he gave permission, he wouldn’t get to keep whatever we found.  People here believe (this is confirmed by our workers) that we have these machines that tell us where the good stuff is underground, and that is how we decide where to dig. 

We finally round the corner and walk back up, to hear, “and if they aren’t going to give you money, there is no reason for you to do it.”  Dad speaking.

Fierce woman glances in our direction, and tries to shush him, but he can’t hear her “¡SSST!”.  We give them a minute more, listening all the while to a rant about how we should pay for the right to dig.  Then when they turn back to us, Miguel Angel said, I think it would be best if you didn’t dig.  We tried a couple of rear-guard actions to convince him, but ended up simply thanking him for his time.  And gave the two-faced old man a ride home.  At the end of the ride, he turned to me and said “My son will be coming over tomorrow to look at his property.  I’ll try and talk to him.”

Yep.  Please do, you two-faced jerk.

So no permission, and the best we could do was to tell him, real friendly-like, that we would be coming back with the head inspector of archaeology for Guatemala, who would “explain what we wanted to do better than we can.”  Which means that he will explain the law to Miguel Angel, and maybe even cause some trouble for him for allowing his land to be looted.  So much for not wanting to cause trouble.  Gustavo, the inspector, has been reluctant to visit us this season (I think he doesn’t like coming out) and has been putting us off.  He is required to visit twice (at our expense) and he has not even made an effort to come once.  But he will likely show up within the next couple of weeks.  He has assured me, however, that I can write a letter requesting an extension of the field season and get back for a couple of days more fieldwork, even after the artifacts are moved.

So instead of working on my research on Monday, I went back to Trinidad and helped close up the season there.  With Ingrid gone, my help pretty much involved supervising a couple of small tests and running the backfilling crew, which involved enough foot-dragging to make two days of work out of it, rather than just one.  There was a lot of stuff to be backfilled, but it should not have required a crew of ten two days to complete the task. 

While I was supervising the last of the excavations, word came back to me, in the form of gossip, that Bilo had decided not to work.  The moment I turned my back, he sat down.  I asked around, and found out that it was true.

Now Bilo and I had been having problems of this nature all season.  Pleading, being nice, getting angry, yelling, threatening, none had any effect on the guy.  He was hired because he was the son of one of our local contacts.  He knew this, and figured he could get away with anything, including this kind of insolence.  

There is also something not wired right in the kid.  He did not marry the girl, but refuses to admit that he lied about it.  He still holds to the story, even though the girl was asked directly and she said “¡We are not even novios!”  Her father went on a rampage when the story that Bilo was telling got back to him, and he confronted Bilo’s dad about it, wanting to call Bilo out in the street to answer for what was being said.  There is also a strong rumor that the girl was pretty severely beaten for her (non-existent) role in the lie.  Bilo, unaffected by the vortex of lies and violence around him, holds to his story, even offering to ask his “wife” if she would come to the camp and make tortillas for the despedida last week.

But the insolence and the laziness finally got to me.  I fired him.  I did it in front of the guys, which was probably my worst move.  When he did not leave, I took the unused shovel gently from his hands, and said “No more, Bilo.  Go home.”

It has been the source of stress for me ever since.  First stressor is the relationship between us and the family.  They are our connection to Nueva San José.  Next was the relationships among our workers.  One of the guys came to me during work and asked me to talk to one of the brothers, who came by with some veiled threats for “the whistleblower”.  “If you would talk to him before you leave,” he said, “it would be a big help.  You leave, and the problem remains behind you.  And I have to live here.”

I talked to the brother, and we smoothed things out.  But it has created awful tension all week.  We worked through Thursday in the field, however, mapping in excavation units and backfilling excavations in the harbor.  I completed a neat mapping trick shot, reminiscent of old games of horse we played in the back yard: off the water, through the corn field, past the trees, under the overhang, nothing but net.  It took 45 minutes to set up the shot (including a couple of dumb moves where we sent the guy holding the rod away too soon, only to have to call to have him sent back), but it ended up saving about three hours of multiple shots, as well as a fair amount of combined introduced error.  The high fives that resulted rivaled anything I ever saw at college basketball games.

The only odd thing about that day was the fact that Don Kike, who has quickly become one of my favorite guys in the field, asked permission not to go to the harbor.  When pressed, he claimed that his uncle, who is the guardian there (so that’s how you ended up here!) does not like that Kike is working with us.  Furthermore, recent gossip let him know that Soto will cause problems for him the moment he steps onto the property. 

At least I can be reassured that stressful problems and gossip are part of all aspects of life in the Petén, and that it does not all get laid at my feet.

The last day of mapping was completely anticlimactic.  We set up, ran a number of shots in the field, and changed station on top of the ballcourt.  Then, verifying our location by shooting back to the previous station, the computer failed.  For the next three hours, we repeated the same twenty steps we thought of the moment it failed.  And nobody was content to believe that the others knew anything about it, so each new person to touch the machine ran through the same steps, figuring it was sheer incompetence that was keeping progress at bay.

One definition of insanity I have read runs something like this: “A mental condition characterized by the repeating of identical input while holding the expectation of different results.”

Finally, Matt broke through the insane cycle and called the help line (I love the fact that we can call on a cell phone from the Petén!), and actually managed to get a guy on the line that knew the machine.  A bad connection, he said.  Check all the connections, and I have to step out of the office for an hour, and I will call you back.

In Guatemala?

Yes.

Five minutes later, all the connections were checked and rechecked, and we ran through the twenty-step diagnostics again.

Same result.  And now, a fifty-five minute wait while Ned gets back from his walkabout. 

At the end of the wait, we decided against waiting further.  The details that remained were relatively trivial – more of a backup than anything else, and we called the field season done.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Since then, it has been a pretty heavy-duty packing frenzy.  Three trips to Sta. Elena to get loads of boxes (see attached photo) and a lot of attempted organizing of a huge amount of pottery, stone tools and debitage, obsidian, some jade, a few droplets of blood, rivulets of sweat, and, yes, a few tears.  It was not completed when I came into Flores last night; Matt will be finishing it up in the next few days, and will be transporting it to Sta. Elena, where he is setting up for his laboratory analysis.  I will make arrangements to transport the lithics back to Antigua when my wife is gone, but in the meantime, I am just going to try to push back the insanity for a while. 

Elly, meanwhile, is starting her own project, now that she is finished helping with ours.  She is putting in a couple of test units at a site called Chachaklu’um, located about six kms to the east of Motul, the regional capital.  She will be looking for funding for next year, and her stuff will be exciting.  But even she had a hard time getting psyched to go to the field after the long, hard season we had.  Fortunately, it will only last a couple of days.

On a final note, dinner Thursday night was for Maria Magdelena’s birthday (her husband is the guard at the camp; she was hired to wash our clothes, and is single-handedly responsible for a severe outbreak of chafing on the project).  We bought the cake, and she stayed in the house all day preparing a dinner for the men.  Now that is a real birthday present: Hey, dear, I thought for your birthday this year I’d invite all the men folk over and you can wait on them hand and foot.  How does that sound?

I dealt my own sneaky hand in there, sure to be placed under the category of “the gringo doesn’t know any better”.  I served the cake.  And not only did I serve (men don’t do that sort of thing) but I served the kids first (they had asked for the cake to be served before they had to go to bed, and had even sung to me: “We want cake, we want cake, we want cake now”), making sure everyone got a nice slice.  But the colmo was that I also served the women, and I served them before the men.

I actually heard some snide remarks.  “Well, maybe we should start singing so we can get a slice before the cake is all gone,” one of the men said, almost sotto voce.

I said nothing.  I just kept serving.  But it made me smile inside.

I continue smiling now.  My wife is minutes away from appearing, and we have twelve whole days of respite from the field.  I simply cannot wait.

Final Pre-Katrina Post

28 August 2005

Those of you who are not fleeing the storm, please remember those who are.  It looks pretty bad, and there is likely to be a lot of destruction before it is all over.  All the projections said that if a category 4 hurricane came up the river, there would be hundreds of thousands dead.  Katrina is now a category 5.  Kathe left this morning with the animals, and is getting out of Dodge.  Many people remain in New Orleans, with no way out of the city.  Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

The two-week “vacation” ended up being a crazy haze of “it’s Tuesday; this must be Belgium”.  We walked everywhere – to the apartment, to the ruins in Antigua, to market, to check e-mail, to Jeanne’s house, to breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

After a full season of whining about food, I can brag again.  While the folks were here, I ate some of the best meals of my life.  At the outset, I had a diet of meat.  It was three days before my brain allowed me to want anything besides protein and iron, and a week before I had a vegetarian meal.  And I still have not had a scrambled egg…

The first few days were spent wandering around in the highlands.  We stayed pretty close to the hotel (eating and living in Casa Santo Domingo is such a chore…), just letting us all get our feet under us. 
Mom and Dad had just done a trip to Romania, followed by a trip to Boston, and then came to try out Guate.  But we wandered around for a while to get the feel of the city, and Mom and Kathe bought textiles.  Those of you who have been here know of the sensory overload that occurs at the artisan market.  Take two artists and turn them loose, well, the results are pretty frightening.  It isn’t so much the money they spent (but it is such a wonderful deal, don’t you see, and if I were to work for a month on a tapestry…) but what to do with them.  Even after buying gifts for people we have not yet met.  And then when we got to Chichicastenango, let me just say that it was difficult getting the suitcase closed at the end of the trip, and only part of that was coffee from the coffee plantation we visited.

Time in the Petén was spent panting a little more.  After introducing my folks to the beauty of walking everywhere with no oxygen (Antigua is about a mile high), I got to introduce them to the jungle again.  We walked over Tikal, Trinidad, and Yaxhá, and even coaxed everyone, even a severe acrophobe, up to the top of a couple of really tall structures.  Temple IV at Tikal is just about as high as it gets, and the drop off from the top of the principal structure at Yaxhá is pretty terrifying.  But the view from both (see the attached images) is amazing.  It does not appear that the filming of Survivor did much damage to the site, and it is still my favorite of the sites in the Petén. 

Interspersed with walking all over creation for days on end were some more fabulous meals (as well as some forgettable ones).  But for the most part, we ate like kings.  For one night, we stayed at a still-under-construction hotel called Casa las Americas next door to the camp.  The couple who took care of us there were wonderful.  Jean Luc and his wife Lori were amazing – they cooked us meals to die for, and made sure we had what we needed.  When the construction is finished, and the water pressure is enough to shower (our one complaint), the hotel will be among the finest anywhere.  Just beautiful.

We also ate at Carlos’ house, and we brought the ice cream.  It was a wonderful evening, and we have a large number of fabulous pictures of the kids and the adults all having a great time. 

We ended up spending very little time in the Petén, and proceeded back to the highlands, where we continued our walking tour of everything for the two days before everyone, sadly, went home. 

The time since then has been a blur of packing and watching CNN and Fox.  The hurricane was as amazing and horrific a disaster as I could ever have imagined.  The focus has always been on getting traffic leaving the city to flow more easily – we have had a number of evacuations before, and every one of them resulted in calls for better control of the traffic.  But because all of the evacuations were “fire drills”, the issues that got addressed involved getting vehicles out of the city, and not the poor people who failed to evacuate.  I honestly believe that because the previous drills were false alarms, the only people truly inconvenienced by the drills were those whose voices were later heard, complaining about sitting in traffic for hours.  As a result, traffic flow was amazing.  Over 80% of the inhabitants of New Orleans fled the city in a very orderly fashion, much more quickly than any of the previous attempts. 

But because none of the hurricanes responsible for the previous evacuations resulted in the flooding of the city, the plight of those who stayed behind were not truly addressed.  The horrific display on CNN has shown the result of that oversight. 

The media coverage has not addressed the entire city, though.  Uptown has been conspicuous in its absence from the overhead shots.  My suspicions were confirmed when I was directed by a friend to the www.noaa.gov web site.  A large part of Uptown New Orleans is dry and undamaged, including both my house and GM’s house.  Dry, undamaged houses don’t make the evening news, and so the coverage of the newscrews failed to include my neighborhood.  I am pretty glad of that.  It does not make the suffering any less (most of the shots you do see come from about a mile from Earth Search, where I worked last year), and I would never diminish the true suffering that  is going on.  People are dying, people are sick, and people are really displaced.  But the media are also making it seem even worse than it is.  If I saw the statistic “80% of New Orleans is currently under water” one more time (80% of New Orleans is under water with every spring rain that comes through) I was going to scream.

Check-in After Katrina

Guys,

Kathe, her son and daughter-in-law and the grandkids are all safe.  They got out of New Orleans, only at Kathe's insistence (the grandkids were going to an NO hotel before she put her foot down) the day before the hurricane hit.  They only went to Wiggins, MS, to the house of my in-laws, which, not surprisingly, ended up bieing right in the path of the storm.  They lost water, and a number of trees are down, but they were able to drive to Alabama to get cell phone reception long enough to tell me that they are all right, and that despite some stress and lack of sleep, everyone is OK.

The current status of the house is uncertain.  There are reports coming through the internet (a chat room in www.nola.com, where you can ask for information about specific neighborhoods) that the area is not heavily flooded, but that there are trees down.  This is no surprise, since we have that sort of thing with every rainstorm that comes through.  In fact, one report said a Saab drove out from the house about three block from where I live.

None of this means we came through unscathed.  We won't know until we can go there ourselves to assess the damage.  But it does mean that the media are reporting the bad stuff.  And there is bad stuff aplenty to be reporting.  It is possible, however, that the house is dry and undamaged.

And even if not, it is just stuff.  The only things in New Orleans that I truly care about got out Sunday morning at 6:00am.  And they are safe.  The rest can be repurchased, remade, or forgotten. 

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.  Please continue to pray for those who are in the city in this tough time.

Post K

4 September 2005

Please keep the displaced and the suffereing and grieving in your thoughts and prayers this coming week.  New Orleans will never be the same, and countless lives have been destroyed.  I am grateful that the people I care about all left the city.  It even appears that damage done to our neighborhoods is minimal.  But we are the exceptions, and an awful lot of people will be building from scratch.

After watching the news for the past two weeks, it seems almost silly to write about the time I spent with my folks here in Guatemala.  The two-week "vacation" ended up being a crazy haze of "it's Tuesday; this must be Belgium".   We walked everywhere – to the apartment, to the ruins in Antigua, to market, to check e-mail, to Jeanne's house, to breakfast, lunch and dinner.

After a full season of whining about food, I can brag again.  While the folks were here, I ate some of the best meals of my life.   At the outset, I had a diet of meat.  It was three days before my brain allowed me to want anything besides protein and iron, and a week before I had a vegetarian meal.   And I still have not had a scrambled egg…

The first few days were spent wandering around in the highlands.  We stayed pretty close to the hotel (eating and living in Casa Santo Domingo is such a chore…), just letting us all get our feet under us.   Mom and Dad had just done a trip to Romania, followed by a trip to Boston, and then came to try out Guate.  But we wandered around for a while to get the feel of the city, and Mom and Kathe bought textiles.   Those of you who have been here know of the sensory overload that occurs at the artisan market.  Take two artists and turn them loose, well, the results are pretty frightening.   It isn't so much the money they spent (but it is such a wonderful deal, don't you see, and if I were to work for a month on a tapestry…) but what to do with them.   Even after buying gifts for people we have not yet met.  And then when we got to Chichicastenango, let me just say that it was difficult getting the suitcase closed at the end of the trip, and only part of that was coffee from the coffee plantation we visited.

Time in the Petén was spent panting a little more.  After introducing my folks to the beauty of walking everywhere with no oxygen (Antigua is about a mile high), I got to introduce them to the jungle again.   We walked over Tikal, Trinidad, and Yaxhá, and even coaxed everyone, even a severe acrophobe, up to the top of a couple of really tall structures.  Temple IV at Tikal is just about as high as it gets, and the drop off from the top of the principal structure at Yaxhá is pretty terrifying.  But the view from both (images will be sent tomorrow) is amazing.   It does not appear that the filming of Survivor did much damage to the site, and it is still my favorite of the sites in the Petén.

Interspersed with walking all over creation for days on end were some more fabulous meals (as well as some forgettable ones).   But for the most part, we ate like kings.  For one night, we stayed at a still-under-construction hotel called Casa las Americas next door to the camp.   The couple who took care of us there were wonderful.  Jean Luc and his wife Lori were amazing – they cooked us meals to die for, and made sure we had what we needed.   When the construction is finished, and the water pressure is enough to shower (our one complaint), the hotel will be among the finest anywhere.  Just beautiful.

We also ate at Carlos' house, and we brought the ice cream.  It was a wonderful evening, and we have a large number of fabulous pictures of the kids and the adults all having a great time.

We ended up spending very little time in the Petén, and proceeded back to the highlands, where we continued our walking tour of everything for the two days before everyone, sadly, went home.

The time since then has been a blur of packing (we are giving up the apartment, and have to move the artifacts) and watching CNN and Fox.   The hurricane was as amazing and horrific a disaster as I could ever have imagined.  The focus has always been on getting traffic leaving the city to flow more easily – we have had a number of evacuations before, and every one of them resulted in calls for better control of the traffic.   But because all of the evacuations were "fire drills", the issues that got addressed involved getting vehicles out of the city, and not the poor people who failed to evacuate.   I honestly believe that because the previous drills were false alarms, the only people truly inconvenienced by the drills were those whose loud voices were later heard, complaining about sitting in traffic for hours.   As a result, traffic flow was amazing.  Over 80% of the inhabitants of New Orleans fled the city in a very orderly fashion, much more quickly than any of the previous attempts.

But because none of the hurricanes responsible for the previous evacuations resulted in the flooding of the city, the plight of those who stayed behind were not truly addressed.   The horrific display on CNN has shown the result of that oversight.

The media coverage has not addressed the entire city, though.  Uptown has been conspicuous in its absence from the overhead shots.   My suspicions were confirmed when I was directed by a friend to the http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov web site.  A large part of Uptown New Orleans is dry and undamaged, including both my house and GM's house.   Dry, undamaged houses don't make the evening news, and so the coverage of the newscrews failed to include my neighborhood.  I am pretty glad of that.   It does not make the suffering any less (most of the shots you do see come from about a mile from Earth Search, where I worked last year), and I would never diminish the true suffering that   is going on.  People are dying, people are sick, and people are really displaced.  But the media are also making it seem even worse than it is.   If I saw the statistic "80% of New Orleans is currently under water" one more time (80% of New Orleans is under water with every spring rain that comes through) I was going to scream.

Please remember those who are left behind.  Life in New Orleans is going to be incredibly difficult for the foreseeable future....

Shakedown!

20 September
I have to admit that it is hard to write about the struggles of life in Guatemala,  when there are real struggles going on in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast.  Even so, things are going on that need to be addressed.

My family is fine.  All my friends, including Redius, a guy that worked with me at Earth Search and who stayed in New Orleans through the storm, are safe and sound.  Some made it out of New Orleans with very little of their possessions, and others are looking at a long period of clean-up of houses and apartments.  But they are safe.  Stuff can be repurchased.

Gianmarco went back in to see his house.  What greeted him was revolting.  Mud, filth, mildew and mold and buckled floorboards were awaiting his arrival.  He grabbed some things and went back to SC.  Another friend of mine went back and found a body in his front yard.  Each story I hear is more horrific than the previous one.  And it will get even worse.  Gianmarco mentioned that the fronts of buildings are marked to indicate whether anyone was found inside when they broke in – a sort of grim goy Passover. 

According to all reports, my house suffered no harm.  While I am relieved that the damage to my own recently renovated home is minimal, I feel guilty even worrying about that when other people are looking for kin.  When (if) I go back to New Orleans, I figure it will be a cinch to get a job with a carpenter on a part-time basis, making a good living while using the rest of my time to write the dissertation.

The rebuilding is going to take time, and it is going to be a tough road.  But I have no doubt that it will be rebuilt, and New Orleans will be beautiful again. 

Meanwhile, back in Guatemala, life has been pretty crazy.  After finishing packing the artifacts in the apartment, I went on an overnight bus to Flores to retrieve the car, picked up Christina and came back.  We packed up the personal stuff and cleaned the apartment once Matt returned, and put everything on a flete and drove back to Petén. 

Originally, we had asked for permission to move artifacts from Antigua to Petén, and to move the lithics back from Petén, all in the same trip.  The return trip was turned down.  They do not want artifacts from the same project in different locations.  Understandable, I suppose, but it sure makes things more difficult for me, when I already set up a lab here in Antigua in anticipation of working here for the fall.  Matt originally thought that we could request permission for a separate move later, and maybe get it.  Now, after talking with our contact in IDAEH, he is not so sure.  Seems that the bureaucrats in charge are continuing to work as hard as possible to make life more difficult for this project.

The trip started off well.  We had the paperwork faxed over to us by IDAEH at 10:00 am, exactly 1-1/2 hours after it was promised, so we were off to a predictably early start.  Then we went to Fredy and Antonia’s house in the capital to pick up some furnishings that they wanted to send to the lab house.  Still, we left the capital at noon on a trip that even worst-case scenarios had us arriving in Sta. Elena around 9:00 pm. 

What we didn’t count on was that the drivers of the truck would make life more difficult.  About three hours from our destination, they slowed down to about 30 mph, on a road that can safely be traveled at 60.  There was nothing wrong with the truck, and we have no idea why they did it.  Only two options have occurred to us: to put off unloading until the morning, or to save gas.  Either way, they failed.  They even took a wrong turn (these guys drive this trip regularly – it had to be intentional) and headed us off in the wrong direction for a half hour.  By the time we finally got to the lab house, it was 10:30. 

They were surprised that we were not happy about the trip.  We unloaded the truck, finishing around midnight, and sent them packing, so to speak.  After a couple of alcoholic beverages, we headed to bed ourselves. 

The next day was spent putting tables and shelves together, along with organizing the artifacts and cleaning the lab house, which has been recently completed and never lived in.  And the next morning I grabbed Benito, one of our friends who has helped us for years (and who had never been to Antigua), and drove back to Antigua, stopping at Quirigua (a stunning small Maya site with huge stelae), two roadside fruit stands (grapes and pineapples were purchased) and at a roadside police stand.

Shakedown.

The cop asked me for my car papers.  I handed over the title and the papers issued at the border.  He then waited expectantly.  I asked if there was anything else he needed.  The rest of my car papers included my passport and my circulation card.  After Benito explained to me a couple of things that he was asking for, he decided to divide and conquer.  Went back to the police vehicle with him while Benito was shaken down by the other cop.

Yep, the policeman in Zacapa was as sorry as he could be that he had to write me a ticket for driving without a “circulation card” which allows me to drive in Guatemala.  When I protested that no such card was issued at the border, where the bureaucracy functions solely to provide tourists with as many stumbling blocks as possible, the cop quickly changed tactics.

“You have no front license plate.”  Almost a conversational tone.

No, I explained, they don’t issue front plates in Louisiana.  If I were to have a front tag, that would be illegal.

“But here, it is required to have a front plate.  I am going to have to write a ticket for the infraction.”

At this point, there was no question about what was going on.  He did not want to write the ticket, because there would be no money in that for him.  He wanted the money up front.  And I did not want to give it to him.  In my best Spanish of the year (my Indignant Spanish is quite fluent) I asked him why he would do this.  In a country where everyone wants the tourists to come back, why is he picking on me?  I am visiting a friend, we were in Petén, he is riding back to Antigua with me, we visited Quirigua, and now you want to write me a ticket for doing nothing illegal?  I was persuasive, I was indignant, I was convincing.  And still he kept coming with the ticket. 

He even went so far as to tell me that it was his responsibility to write the ticket, because the jobs of the police are to protect, serve, guide, assist, and….

I politely exploded.  “And exactly which of these things are you currently doing?” I asked.  “Are you protecting the cars with front plates from those without?  Or are you serving me by giving me a ticket for being a tourist in your country?  When I got to the border,” I declared, “the officials gave me all the paperwork I needed to drive in the country, and told me ‘Welcome to Guatemala’.  And you want to undo this by harassing me while I am traveling legally through your country?”  I still can’t believe I actually said that.

Meanwhile, Benito was getting grilled, too. 

“Show me your cedula.”  A cedula is a personal photo ID card that everyone has to carry – used to cash checks, get employment, whatever.  Benito handed it over, and was immediately challenged.  “It looks nothing like you,” he was told.

After being satisfied that the picture on the cedula was, in fact, José Benedicto Alonzo Gutierrez, the cop started in on asking about me.  Where are you going together?  What does he do?  How long have you worked together? 

When it was obvious he was getting nowhere with that line of questioning, the fishing expedition continued.  He asked about the cooler in the back seat.  “You wouldn’t happen to be carrying venison in the cooler, would you?” 

“Cokes only,”  Benito said.  “Why would we carry venison?  It is illegal.  He is a foreigner, and would get caught.  I am a national, and it is illegal for me to transport venison.”

Officer Olby was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice (remember Alice?)….

Another Zacapa police pickup truck pulled up, and the cop grilling me held up one finger, and went over to talk to the boss.

When he came back, he handed me my passport, driver’s license, title, car papers, and smiled and said “We are here to serve you.  Please have a safe trip.”

I said thanks, and offered him a coke, which he accepted (and for which the boss lifted a single eyebrow) and we drove on, without paying the first quetzal in bribe money.  We laughed the rest of the way to Antigua. 

Quirigua is amazing.  I have included some pictures, but you really have to visit it to understand what an astonishing place it is.  The site is small, and the architecture is unimpressive, but the carved stone monuments are enormous and stunningly carved.  Truly worth the visit.

Back in Antigua, Benito and I finished the cleaning of the apartment and dealt with the final accounting with the landlady, who charged for every dishtowel that has gone missing in the past three years of renting the apartment.  And, since I had not been there for the initial accounting, I could provide no defense. 

We then moved Matt’s car.  Matt had driven it to the mechanic’s shop to have it repaired, and was paying Q10 per day to park it there.   The mechanic would start it once a week or so to keep it running, but there were less expensive options available until Matt could see it.  As I have mentioned before, the deal with his car has been an issue all year.  He left it behind when he last came to the US, which meant that he did not renew the paperwork every 30 days like you have to.  At that point you are in a Catch-22.  To get it renewed, it has to be renewed.  The paperwork has to be in order to get it to the border, and you have to get it to the border to take care of the paperwork.  And all that has to be done before you can sell it.  After hiring several people to get the stuff done, the field season came and went without resolving the car issue, and now he just wants to unload the behemoth Toyota Land Cruiser for whatever he can get, to fund the rest of his time in Guatemala. 

So I am driving an unregistered vehicle to its new home, while being followed in my car by an unlicensed (and decidedly unskilled) driver.  The fact that I escaped with only one long scrape down the side of the vehicle is pretty amazing.

“¡Dale, dale, dale!”

The official cry of the copilot in Guatemala is heard all over Antigua.  “Dale” (dah’-leh), literally translates as “Give (to) it”, or idiomatically, “Hit it!”  Guys who help you park your car (for a fee) and watch it (fee-bly) while you are inside and maybe wash it (more fee-ble) fill the air with cries of “Dale”.  And, oddly enough, there is no antonym to the word.  No matter what you are currently doing with your vehicle, the response is inevitably “Hit it!”  Which, sometimes, you do. 

Matt and I have discussed this tendency among Guatemalans to the amusement of us both.  We finally decided that the main reason that the Guatemalans do not have an Air Force of any consequence is that the copilot would only give the one command.  Like pulling out of a parking lot, like parallel parking, like driving in traffic, even like negotiating a blind curve, a Guatemalan copilot would be responsible for giving the single command.  “¡Dale!”

And, come to think about it, the “damn the mines, full speed ahead” attitude is pervasive here.