Back from the Lake

Well, I´m back from my visit to a place that without question cracks my top five on the list of the most beautiful places I´ve ever been. I took plenty of pictures which I´ll throw up on that photo album site I set up so you can get a solid image of where I was.

Paul, the guy I was staying with, lives about a 10 minute walk outside of Santiago, the biggest of the villages surrounding the lake. We didn´t do as much work as I thought we would, but we stayed relatively busy most of the time. Paul lives in Santiago, but works with the bomberos (firemen) in San Jaun, a very small town across the lake to the North(ish), so we went back and forth a couple times from Santiago to San Jaun/San Pedro (right next to each other) taking care of a lot of little business. But most of our time was spent in Santiago and at his house, and if you take a look at the photo album you´ll see some of the better pictures I took. It was cloudy most of the time, so it was a little tough to get great pictures of the three volcanoes surrounding the lake, but I got some good ones.

One of the most encouraging things about the trip was meeting a ton of people who are doing good things for the communities there (Paul being one of these people). The people in the villages are almost entirely indigenous Mayans, which is really cool, but they´re also very removed from the outside world. Of course, in no way is this a bad thing, but for a long time these people haven´t had access to health care, great education, other services, etc. I was proud of my fellow gringos here (for the most part). For most of them, their reasons for living at the lake are based primarily on helping the Mayans gain access to the best the modern world has to offer, without (again, for the most part) imposing modern western standards of materialism and greed on the people. It´s a tough balance to make, but I hope it remains and gets even better in the future.

So after relaxing for a few days, I´m ready to get back into the bustling city and dive into whatever David will have me doing this week.

Hasta Luego,
Daniel