So I asked my boss Vicky's permission to go with Luis and his family to spend five days at Monterrico - beaches of black sand and hot, muggy weather - provided I'd be back in El Aprisco for the busiest, craziest days of Semana Santa when the park has the highest number of visitors of the entire year: Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Those are hard days to handle in the park for the ridiculous number of Guatemalans who arrive wanting to picnic or barbeque with their families, play soccer, whatever - and when all the El Aprisco staff also wants to be on holiday! My presence there was going to help out the solitary park guard quite a lot.
We left for Monterrico on a Friday morning. And we proceeded to spend the next five days enjoying the sun and the water, and for me it was wonderful to take a break from both El Aprisco and Peace Corps responsibilities. And I managed to not sunburn myself! (mostly)
On Wednesday morning of Holy Week Luis and family piled into two SUVs for the drive out to Xela to visit his dad's side of the family for the holiday. Midday there was a cutthroat soccer game planned to settle the annual rivalry between the Guatemala City cousins and the Xela cousins, and Uncle Alejandro who was driving out with us kept insisting that I should be put in as goalie. See, we had scrimmaged a few times in the backyard with him and the rest of the male contingent of the family, and he seemed impressed, or feigned compliments anyway, about my goaltending skills. So while I had planned for the convoy of SUVs that Wednesday to just drop me off where the road to Totonicapán leads off the interamerican highway so I would get back to Toto that Wednesday, I ended up being hauled to Xela and playing in said heated soccer game (we lost - 20 to 16, but I maintain I was a waaaay better goalie than the other team's - it's that their forwards and midfielders played much better than my team's because they play together on a weekly basis, and a much higher rate of shots on goal means they're bound to get more past me!). But that wasn't all: afterward the whole family convoy, therefore including me, headed to grandma and grandpa's house in a small town on the opposite end of the state of Toto called San Vicente Buenabaj, where his dad and eight siblings grew up.
I was improvising all of this; I had not planned on this part of Semana Santa activities, but was excited to visit Luis's extended family at their home, with aunts, uncles and cousins I had maybe met at family events once or twice. Luis convinced me it wouldn't be that big a deal to hop a bus back out of town early the next morning if I really felt I needed to get back to El Aprisco that urgently!
And it would have been a good idea, hanging out with Luis's family for a bit and heading out of San Vicente as early as I wanted Thursday morning... had the buses been running. Haha!
But lemons turned themselves into lemonade, and had the buses been running I wouldn't have partaken in the family hike and picnic, soccer games and tug-of-war tournament, the town women's league soccer game they loaned me a jersey for:
and the making of "alfombras" the morning of Good Friday:
(a word for rug, this is the Guatemalan tradition with colored sawdust much like Tibetan sand art. Every Lent and especially Holy Week there are periodic processions, and beautiful designs are made in colored sawdust in the streets beforehand, the point being that the processioners walk over the alfombras and usually they are destroyed). Here everyone out helping:
A cool mayan calendar symbol Luis's cousin made, and later when the procession's coming a photo of all the cousins sitting on the stoop waiting for its arrival:
And Friday morning Luis and family brought me back and delivered me all the way to El Aprisco - it was actually Luis's first time seeing the park! - before they headed back home to the capital. And while I arrived a little later than I had hoped, Don Bonifacio seemed to be doing fine holding the fort on his own, and I arrived before the worst of the craziness that Friday. Saturday, well that was a different story... we got a little stressed out by the over 400 visitors that day (in a 13-hectare park most of which is forest! where do they all go??) :) But I guess not everyone chooses to go check out the black-sand beaches on the coast - everybody has their preferences, and now I know mine: I prefer my little forested, mountainous, endemic-bird-ridden corner of the world, and the good news is that other people prefer it too. And keep coming. I hope that much, at least, continues to hold true.
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