Yum, parte dos

Horchata

6 tablespoons rice
6 ounces (about 1 1/4 cups) blanched almonds, or seeds of squash/mellon
1 inch cinnamon stick (canella)
3 "2-inch" strips of lime zest (rind only, not the white pithy part) 3/4" long
1 cup white granulated sugar

Pulverize the rice using your blender. Grind the mixture as smooth as possible. Combine the rice with the almonds, cinnamon and lime zest. Let this mixture stand overnight (minimally 6 hours).

Place the mixture in the blender jar and blend for at least 3 - 5 minutes until the mixture is smooth and no long has a gritty texture. Add 2 cups of water and blend again for just a few seconds. Place a large sieve over a mixing bowl. Line the sieve with 3 layers of damp cheesecloth. Pour in the rice mixture, a little at a time and keep stirring to help the mixture go through the sieve. Once all the liquid has passed through to the bowl gather the cloth together at the top, give it a twist and squeeze out any additional liquid.

Now add 2 more cups of water and stir in as much sugar as you'd like, to taste. If the mixture is too thick, add some additional water.

Cover and refrigerate. The drink should keep several days, refrigerated.
Serve in a tall glass over ice.

Salsa

Fire roast two roma tomatoes. Grind/mush together with 1 Tbsp finely chopped raw onion, finely chopped raw jalapeño to taste (1 tsp should make "medium" salsa"), 1 Tbsp fresh shredded cilantro, 1/2-1 tsp lemon juice, a pinch of each of the following: salt, oregano, barbequeque salt, fresh minced garlic, black pepper, Chilé Cobán (or Chili powder if you can't get Chile Coban.)

Honduran Baleadas

Fill a tortilla with refried black beans and a small amount of sour cream. Fold and fry on both sides... great for breakfast!

Pie de Elote (sweet corn pie)

Ingredientes:

1 bar of cream cheese
1 tablespoon vanilla
Corn from two pre-cooked cobs
2 tablespoons corn flour
1 package sugar cookies
1 bar butter
1 can condensed milk
4 eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch cinnamon

Procedimiento:

Melt the butter and slowly crumble the cookies into it.... adding slowly as the butter is absorbed... forming a paste. Add more butter if necessary. Cover the sides and bottom of a 9 inch round cake pan.

In a blender or food processor, blend the remaining ingredients until well mixed. Fill in baking pan.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Put pan on middle rack, uncovered, and turn up oven to 375 degrees, cooking for 40 minutes (until a knife comes out clean.)

Can be eaten warm or chilled.

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

Impressions of Guatemala City:

Light spilling in through small windows onto a vinyl couch in the hotel lobby. Tans, browns, and rust colors all around... Faded Spanish tile, plastered walls, an old wooden hotel desk and cubby holes, and chirping pet birds... some within cages, some outside. The attendant lounges beside the desk, and a daschund trots across the floor, hopping up beside me on the couch.

The main square, in front of the Parliament... filled with high school marching bands, kids getting pictures taken on fake horses in front of fake backgrounds. Vendors hawk cloth and food, and a tender urges his goats through with a huge hemp whip.

Abandoned train tracks running past barbed wire, over stone bridges, and overgrown with corn and morning glories, meandering towards the old yard where diesel behemoths sleep in the sun, still waiting after decades for a new coat of paint.

A bar of all Guatemalans. A dark beer (made in guatemala) in my hand, as the tanned faces sit and chat, or listen to the marimba player.

A night filled with neon and jewelry, and silk shirts, as young people walk from one bar to another along cobbled walkways... cars not allowed. Sushi, laughter, mixed drinks, and cell phones in all driections. City lights reflect down off the bottom of the clouds as the evening chill sets in.

Still

The air is still. The water below reflects the clouds clearly, without its choppy surface as usual. The heat pushes you down, and brings back one of the most basic urges... to just sit. And that's what all the kids are doing... not playing in the park or the streets, but sitting in the shade, letting life go by, minute by minute.

In the afternoon, I walk down to the lake past a Jesus statuette, and metalworkers in the new water park. There's a storm blowing in, and it brings with it a rainbow that starts in San José and stretches across the lake to the other shore. The waves are up again, and they play their mischief as I swim and wash... trying to snatch shampoo from my hand before it gets to my hair. They sneak up the seawall, teasing that they'll take the whole bottle away westward, and they hide the dock from view so the water appears to be solid as the teens walk across it, then soften as they jump in.

This week has been one of goodbyes. I'm leaving Friday. I just gave away my treasure hoard of spices and my copy of "The Hobbit" in Spanish. These are days of portrait taking, packing, and repaying kindnesses. I'm taking a bus to meet with the boogeyman, Thursday... the big old scaaaarrrry capital. I suspect my experience will be one of trapsing along buying pirate DVD's and new sandals under the shadow of national monuments, rather than one of trembling at the feet of a gang. I suppose I'll see, though.

I'm trying to decide what challenge is next (and perhaps for the remainder of my trip.) There is the longshot in Cobán that I don't have all the information for, and two other options that may be great challenges, or may be beyond my abilities. There's a group of missionaries taking classes here, and after chatting with two of them about my quandry, they decided to pray for me... finishing up the prayer with a smirk and an admonition: Next time, meet us at the bottom of the hill for our prayers, rather than the top. My thoughts... At the moment I just have to sit still and wait for more information, or better yet, a gut feeling.

I have a new English book. It's called "Off the Map." It's another travel journal. I got it from Cristobal who had never read it. A couple hippie backpackers came through his hotel and left it for him. The girl said it was one of her most fantastic reads, ever. The guy said it's a bunch of ranting by a couple of young punks. I suppose I'd say it's somewhere inbetween. It's a couple of girls who have learned to say no to the lives that most people in the States have... No to a desk job, no to a house in the suburbs, no to always following the rules... but they haven't yet figured out what they want to say yes to... and upon saying 'yes'... how to grow that one word into a life. At times it's beautiful, and reminds me of the friends back home like Terrence, Beth, and Jen who make things in a void where others see nothing... and sometimes it falls into a kind of arrogance and cynicism that these girls loathe in their adversaries. It's a great reminder, though, of where I can be at times, why I came here, and where I want to be upon arriving home.

I want the world to make a little more space for the dreamers.

Burning down the house

Not a happy-go-lucky blog, this week... read on if you want some things to think about.

San José, and neighboring San Andrés are small towns, but they are the seats of huge municipalities that reach to the edges of the Petén. So they are in charge of much protected land... and the citizens here are responsible for much of the deforestation.

The areas north of us are supposed to be protected, but are disappearing at an alarming rate. Forests are cut to make farm and ranch land, to sell as timber, or to make way for petroleum drilling... and these deforestation efforts feed off each other. Law isn't an effective deterrent. There are few patrols enforcing over a HUGE area. The one method that seems to have worked best, so far, is to legalize some of the illegal settlements, provided they tend to the forest around them. However, this just slows the degradation, at best. It may be inevitable that these forests disappear.

Some people realize what's being lost, but many don't. The Mayans had a class based society... an upper educated class and a working class, with not much inbetween. It seems that this has continued in the times since. The Spaniards inserted themeselves as the new upper class, then the U.S., then the ladinos. Public education in rural areas is at an extremely poor level... so largely there is still an educated upper class, and an uneducated working class. A working class who doesn't buy into arguments that the forest is worth more intact or that the environment in itself is important. So they slowly destroy a wonderful resource.

Of course things aren't that simple. Many of the people here are terribly poor... so the prospect of free farmland or selling beef and Mahogany to the U.S. are impossible to ignore in the face of nebulous arguements about the value of the land. Indigenous culture (with its values of harmony with the environment) has been devalued for over a century. And the poverty is another deep subject...

Guatemalans have lots of children (and the Catholic church fights many of efforts to teach about family planning.) Even if the parents have sufficient money to support a family... what happens when the twelve kids grow up? We of the first world often stack the cards against third-world countries in trade treaties, and the government of Guatemala is corrupt... skimming more than 50% of money off before it ever reaches its intended destination. It sometimes seems like rural Guatemala is beat up from every direction.

There's also the market we provide for the products of the land. I've talked to people about poaching of birds and a jaguar. I've walked past farmers fields that were monkey-filled jungles only five years ago, and buildings that were beaches five months ago. I've been to Mayan ruins where peices are missing... either taken by the first Westerners to visit, cut away or shattered by looters to carry to rich private collectors, or paid for and taken by American Universities. There are pyramids in the jungle with a whole section ploughed away to get at its central tomb. One such Mayan city has 80% of its pieces now missing. And the situation I'm most intimately familiar with: I watched as a decision was made to illegally harvest old-growth cedar from a protected area.

In a way, it's history repeating itself. When the Spanish arrived, the Mayan civilization was already in ruins. The cities had been abandoned for a thousand years, and all that was left was 25 divided tribes of their descendants. The most popular theories of the decline involve a multi-year drought and the Mayans choking themselves out with over-use of natural resources. I worry that there is no happy ending to this tale, and worse... that unlike with the Maya... this time it won't just be regional. Damage to the environment isn't unique to Guatemala; it's all over the world.

Of geeks and gurus

I usually avoid geek talk, for fear of putting others to sleep... or for shame that it's not as worthwhile as creating art or being social... but I'll start with a brief peek into my "other life."

My job here in the Petén is rewriting the web pages of the Bio-Itzá Association. They'll all be online, soon. First, I went through all their old pages, adding a little bit here, taking out a bit there, updating some information... and a LOT of cleaning up bad HTML code. So Exhibit A: pages not really to my aesthetic, but nice clean web pages. Then, the school down the road made a new web page for their Spanish School... between the head of the school here, and myself, we decided on a complete redo of that section of the web pages. So I'm doing it in my own style, but with a program they bought that writes terrible code. So for Exhibit B: my artistic style with a mess on the back end. Uggh... this program even writes its own implementation of a table, rather than using what's built-in to HTML.

Sometimes I get bored here... and sometimes I entertain myself by doing more geek stuff. At times, it turns out to the benefit of the association's web page... sometimes not. Here's a list of how silly I can get when bored:

• Using unicode, rather than graphics to put arrows to indicate sub-menus on a web page
• Erasing power cables from a photo of San José for the website
  
• Putting all my favorite sites in "Google Bookmarks," finding a browser plugin that adds a menu with my google bookmarks, then sending code for new features back to the author.
  
• Writing a program to catalog what songs I'm missing on my favorite radio station, back home
• For the record, I found that I could bittorrent music MUCH more worth exploring from the sampler of last year's South by Southwest festival.

I spent my Saturday helping Noé and Tori building their café, on the edge of town... so full circle... back to hauling brick and mixing concrete. I really like them. Tori is from New Zealand, but has given up explaining that to locals. She just says Australia. She's engaged to Noé, and is a bit worried about her parents' upcoming visit. I think her father said something about his "college educated daughter" living over a dirt floor. She told me why she wants to be here. There are less rules here... if a person wants to do something, they only need to step up and do it. She's right. Noé impresses me. He likes to learn, seems to always be in a good mood, and does what needs to be done... be it brain work, or physical. He says things that wouldn't be out of place in a Zen sermon... but didn't need read it or obsess about it. He lives it.

You see, I can overly-romantisize this place. There's bored people here, watching television at night. There's people who think of personal profit, over ethics. There are bosses who won't listen and idealists who dither over when to speak up and when not to. There are people wearing jeans and T-shirts. And there seem to be two constants in life here: a need to be patient, and a need to accept change.

Recently, I've been realizing what I have to offer people. I'm not terribly ambitious... so I'm not usually the idea person, but I listen to people. I already knew that about myself, but what I didn't realize is how rarely many people are listened to, and how they treasure it when it comes along.