Back to Santa Cruz (Happy Birthday, Mom!)

The morning we woke up in Nebaj it was Mom's birthday! Having had no debit card (and thus no disposable cash) before Mom's arrival, I wasn't very prepared. I had had to sneak away during the night to a place labeled "regalos" (gifts) only to find it full of toy cars and things like cheap clocks and busts of Irish setters (wtf?). I had finally decided on some fake flowers in a plastic pot (the real deal would have been impossible to find at that hour) and an umbrella (think 'useful'). On behalf of Mark I got her some playing cards so she could make me play cribbage with her on her birthday.

Despite my bleek birthday offerings, Mom was gracious and seemed pleased with my gifts and my in-bed coffee service. After a breif foray into a traveling retail show at the local auditorium we hopped a brimming microbus (designed for 12 and carrying about 24) and headed home. Back in Quiche we webbed it up and cribbaged it up until going to be early.

Holy Cross II

Somehow, after the prior day's bus adventure Mom was itching for more. Not I. She seemed dead set on seeing the entire country in fifteen days. Most of our second day consisted of a prolonged negotiating process whereby I tried to convince her not to try to do too much and she tried to convince me to get out and see Guatemala. Having failed to set up a Friday web meeting with Andy, Enlace's founder, I managed to check my email at a net cafe in town and learned that he wants to shoot for Thursday or Friday. I was glad to find this would buy us more time in Santa Cruz since it wouldn't be reasonable to try and go across the country and back before then. Besides, I wanted to take up Rosaura on her offer to cook us a meal one day.

At Enlace, strangely enough, there was no internet in either of the offices, yet the classroom mysteriously possessed high-speed access. More administrative cutbacks? Nice of them to tell me...

After food shopping some more and touring a bit of the city, it was back to the house for dinner and sleep.

Holy Cross

There's really no describing the bus ride from Antigua to Santa Cruz Del Quiche, so I didn't try. I just let Mom experience it for herself. I think a lot about Guatemala becomes clear after winding down into and up out of gorge after gorge and negotiating landslide after landslide while clinging seatbealtless to the backrest in front of you. I think she may have begun to see why I don't really do a lot of traveling here.

After dropping off our things at the house and going shopping for food, we payed a brief visit to Enlace and headed home. Mom set to work cooking dinner while I took a nap. Around 7:15, Brenda and pals (two of them) arrived on our doorstep after Brenda failed to meet with her new intended landlady. Luckily, they had already eaten and Mom's delicious chicken and beat greens were (almost) all mine!

Around nine Brenda, her friends Nadia and Joel, and Mike and I went to the birthday party of one of Mike's students. It turned out to just be the student and a handful of friends hanging out and drinking rum and coke. Brenda was feeling sick and since its best to have an escort in Quiche at night, I opted to walk her and Nadia home. Mom was still awake when I got back. I guess Mike and Joel stayed until the wee hours.

Santa Cruz del Quiche

Sunday we had our first opportunity to sleep in. After lounging around like layabouts until about ten it was time to hit the road. Though I would soon regret it, I decided it was time for Lori to see a little peice of real Guatemala. Instead of finding some kind of Shuttle up north, I opted to take her on the chicken busses. First from Antigua to Chimaltenango on Route 1, then very bumpily from Chimal to Los Encuentros and finally along the ridge from Encuentros to Santa Cruz.

Upon arriving at the volunteer house and decompressing a bit, we decided to hit an ATM and have a bit of a look around. But when Lori went to get her debit card, it became clear that there was a problem. Lori's wallet had been gone through, with her debit card and two credit cards missing. Strangely enough, the theif had left behind more than a hundred quetzales of cash as well as her passport.

Though we hurried to Enlace to block the card, when she accessed her account it appeared it had already been drained. Her available balance was a little more than eight dollars. Upon calling her bank it indeed turned out that someone had spent large sums at McDonald's, Radio Shack and a home improvement store. They told her that if she wanted a chance to get her money back, she would have to go to make a police report. When we told this to my coworkers at Enlace, they laughed. The last place anyone in Guatemala wants to go for anything is the police.

Not knowing what to do, we nevertheless arranged for Pablo to go with us the next day to the police office in hopes of filing a report. Upon arrival at the office the next day, we had the tremendous luck of bumping into a city council member who periodically works with Jesus and Pablo on City Hall's various web projects. He made a couple phone calls and within minutes he had Santa Cruz's Asistur (federal tourist assistant) officer at Enlace with us taking down information.

It turns out when you make a police report, they file something called a denuncia with the Public Ministry. With Edy from Asistur, we were able to bypass the police completely and go directly to the the Public Ministry. After what seemed like hours of waiting and then hours of translating and hashing out the details in writing, Lori's misfortune was now a matter of public record and we had an official document ratifying our claim that the latest charges to her card were fraudulent.

Though I would have liked to have spent more time in Santa Cruz, we had to be at the airport the next morning to greet Beth, so with just enough time to hit Gautemala City before dark, we were on the bus there.