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.