first week photos

Just to throw some more images at you as I have not figured out how to integrate them well in the blog. We took a boat ride to Santiago, across the lake, to a large (40,000) town where I will work in the Hospitalito.(see puebloapueblo.org) My first day was today, but more on that later this week.
We first went to the house of one of Isaiah's classmates, whose mother is on the clinic board and whom I had corresponded with via email prior to coming. One photo is the walk from the dock to their house, through the neighbors bananas and corn.

Aden is seated on in the view from their porch, across a small inlet of the lake.

The indigenous community of Santiago is quite strong with a history of resistance to the armies occupations. It is the largest indigenous community around Atitlan and the people largely speak only tzutuhil. Each town around the lake has its own style of dress largely differing in their color scheme. Then of course there are the backpackers, hippies and such who add a different sort of color.

Monday was Guatemalan independence day which meant a long holiday weekend, lots of guatemalan visitors to the lake and an incessant barrage of firecrackers and fireworks (without color just noise). There were parades of school bands and lots of school groups who make a pilgrimage to Panajachel. Their visit entails receiving a torch from the mayor of Pana, and then symbolically running it back to their own town. In reality they run around Pana screaming, whistleing, carrying guatemalan flags, then hop on their buses, drive back to their towns around the area, and run the last bit into their town. It made for quite the spectacle here, our first weekend.

You can see the suspension bridge in the nature reserve (see jord's blog) and our gear for the zip lines.

Aviv is forever asking to ride in a 'tuk tuk' rather than walk, and these 4 stroke motorized scooter cabs are ubiquitous. I dont actually know what a 4 stroke motor is but it sounds cool and is written on the back of every tuk tuk.

Guatemala #1

Hi friends and family! I am going to attempt to give an overview of whats been happening lately as weve been completely out of contact with too many folks to be able to send emails individually. My hope is that once we settle down a bit more, we will be able to continue with individual correspondence, as I always feel badly sending “group emails” its so impersonal. Please forgive in advance and know that if we had the time, and the internet connection, we would be writing to every one of you!

We finally got to Guatemala last Weds, and immediately put the kids in their new school.

The picture above to the left is the walk to school with Isaiah and Aden in the lower right. On the right is the hotel we stayed in the first week. (havent figured out how to get these pictures in the right place on the blog posts. [yoni]

London was a cold and rainy blur of visiting with friends and family, attending a fantastic Bar Mitzvah, and preparing for Guatemala. The kids’ school is a collection of open air type rooms surrounding a dirt courtyard with a playground and ball field. Its definitely Central America, and none of these spaces would ever pass code anywhere, but luckily Aviv is past the point where I have to worry that she will eat peeling paint, and though very simple and barebones, it is kept clean and has a very campy feel. The boys have integrated well so far, they are in mixed age groups with a combo of Guatemalan kids and gringos, and the kids are meant to speak English in school, except during Spanish. The boys will not be able to get much out of the Spanish in their classes, as everyone is fluent, so we will hire a tutor for them a couple afternoons a week. At $4 per hour for private tutor, we will all do it. At first glance I think its going to be a great experience for the boys, its so different here that being able to speak English all day for them feels necessary, and the gringo kids who go to the school are also so different from them, that even that is a huge change. They have all grown up here, and various mixed nationalities of German/Spanish, Swedish/American, etc, so that English isnt even their first language, though they all speak it. The teachers seem great, and it’s a small enough group that they have already made friends and were even invited to a birthday party this past weekend.

Aviv has had a more difficult time. She was placed in the “kinder” which is 4-6 yr. olds, and she is the only gringo in the group. While this wouldn’t seem like a big issue, since all the kids have just started school, none of them speak English yet! And for many of them, Spanish is their second language since most people here are Mayan and speak an indigenous language. Aviv was miserable and of course I felt terribly as the trip in general has been hard on her, all the moving around and lack of routine, weird food, etc. On the third day of school she moved herself (!) to the younger group, because the teacher in the 3 yr. old group is American and at least feels very familiar to her, plus the class is much smaller and there are some mixed kids in there who actually speak some English. The first group was large and it seemed hard for her to get individualized attention. We were literally bribing her with toys to get her to go to school last week.

Once we dropped off the kids, we commenced in earnest to find a place to live. This seems to be a primarily word of mouth endeavor here, asking everyone and literally anyone if they know of anything. Any of you who know Yoni well know that he loves this type of wild goose chase, chatting up the man on the street type activity, so we ran around with Sebastian, a tuk-tuk driver and our new BFF, looking at all kinds of dwellings. I am not exaggerating when I say we were shown literal shacks without running water in the kitchen and outhouses for bathrooms. True they were very cheap, but we werent going to live in them, I mean, we are way past that! We were also shown large homes behind huge rock walls with an abandoned feel but could certainly be fixed up. One such place we looked at was like a fortress, with a pool in the courtyard and the feeling of past splendor, with a “guardian family” living on the grounds. The place had a weird vibe, and when we looked at it a second time with one of the moms at the school, she told us the previous owner was involved with one of the drug cartels and died when a substance he was smuggling exploded in his body. The police were there for months, they cleared everything out, the wife now lives in Brazil and the lawyer will rent it to us for a very good price. Fantastic, that sounds like just the place for us. Additionally we were shown a gorgeous property, owned by gringos who are away for a few months, simple yet beautiful small houses set perfectly amidst the jungle grounds, with a waterfall out the window and serene gardens. These types of properties are a bit isolated from the town and although foreigners live in them, they just didn’t feel safe to me. After all, there must be a reason why all those homes are behind immense stone walls and locked with big dogs just beyond the gate. And it’s a long winding walk back from the school, one that I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting the boys do alone. We finally took a house owned by one of the hotels and in the back of the hotel property. Spending a few days walking the area by day and by night, I decided that security really is the most important thing, particularly as there will be several nights when Yoni will stay at his clinic, and I need to feel comfortable alone with the kids. At least the hotel security are around here 24 hours. And there is running water in the kitchen! Now we just have to get used to washing all our fruits/veggies in a bleach solution, and reminding the kids to only brush teeth with bottled water.

Today is our first day of real life, having dropped the kids at school, then Yoni off to the dock to negotiate a price across the lake to his clinic, and me left to go to market and figure out how our home life is going to work. Aviv is only in school until noon, so I will have about 3 hours to myself in the mornings. Luckily I can send the laundry out, or that would have been a big time sink. Driving up the winding switchback road from Guatemala City to Panajachel, we passed many small villages and our driver pointed out cisterns in the middle of the towns where all the women were washing clothes(in the pouring rain, I might add). He told us the women work in the fields in the morning and then come to do wash in the afternoons since there is no running water in the homes. Aden piped up, “Mom, that means you can go in the morning to wash, as they’ll all be in the fields and it wont be crowded.” Thanks, Aden, for that fantastic idea. Needless to say, I found a place to send out our wash immediately. At 5 quetzales or <$1 per pound for wash, dry, and fold, its worth it.

The town is a mile high up, surrounded by large volcanic mountains, on the edge of the lake, and the views are truly breathtaking. Yesterday, with the task of home hunting finally behind us, we went out of town a bit to a nature reserve, wonderful hikes across long swinging bridges that crossed waterfalls and jungle with great opportunities to observe groups of spider monkeys swinging from tree to tree. It reminded us of all the walks we took in Costa Rica, very similar terrain. Yoni and the boys did a zip line tour that looked terrifying, luckily for me Aviv was too young so I was able to stay with her.

We also took a boat ride to Santiago Atitlan on the other side of the lake where Yoni’s Clinic is. The lake is huge and the fast boat takes 30 minutes to cross. Some boats have life vests, some don’t, and I was very happy we decided to schlep one of our own for Aviv. Because it’s the rainy season, the weather turns quickly in the afternoon and the ride back was very choppy. Poor Yoni, that’s when he will be returning from work. The Hospitalito is a two story open air type building much like the main gathering structure at a camp, very rustic and basic. They actually do surgeries there, though I cant imagine. As we were shown around I made a mental note not to get sick for the duration of the trip. Yoni is at his first day of work now, so I’ll be interested to hear how it is there, and hopefully he will report.

Weekends we plan to do small trips around the area, though the drive up here was so windy that I am reluctant to do it again. We have some Jewish contacts in Guatemala City where we hope to go for Rosh Hashanah, and depending on how its all going, we may leave this area a week early and travel around the country a bit. That is totally dependant on how the kids are doing with school and their life. The boys were anxious to feel settled after so much travel.

That’s all for now and I will attempt to post this and have Yoni weigh in some other time.

Jordana

Why we are in Israel 1 day late

This is Aden writing.

When you are going to get on a plane, you hope your flight does not get delayed, or even canceled. When my family and I were driving to the airport on Saturday, I hoped none of this would happen.

Many things went wrong on our flight to Israel. Let me just tell you that on Saturday/Sunday night/morning, instead of being on a flight to London, where we would eventually get on a flight to Tel Aviv, we were stuck in the Newark Airport (and this was at 1am).

Before I get to the details of how this could possibly happen, I want to give you the details of our flight (this was how it was supposed to be).
From NC - Newark: 5:05pm Departure (Continental Airlines)
From Newark - London: 9:10pm Departure (Virgin Atlantic)
From London - Tel Aviv: 12:50 (London Time) 7:50 (US Time)

So there is the information. And the bad part of Saturday started right at the beginning, right when we got to RDU.
We were checking in and we were all excited until the man at the counter said we were delayed. So the flight now was at 7:30 instead of 5:05. And he also said that the flight was probably going to be canceled. Every flight to Newark was delayed or canceled because of storms in Newark. The man at the counter said that he would try and put us on another flight. He did. The flight was a 1:00pm flight to Newark that had still been being delayed and was now set for a 7:09 flight. However, there still was a chance that the flight would be delayed. So we hurried through security and to the gate where the plane was. But somtime around a half an hour later the flight was delayed another hour!
Remember that we still had to catch a Virgin flight to London at 9:10! And if the flight was delayed a whole hour so it took off around 8, we would miss the flight by a half hour!
So my dad started calling and calling the Virgin 1-800 number to see if there was anyway we could make that flight or get us on another flight. They couldn't help him much. And neither cou;\ld the Continental people. They all told us to go see the Virgin Atlantic office and then if that didn't work try the Continental office. We got on the plane leaving for Newark and got to newark around 9:30, but we were sitting around for a whole hour more b/c they didn't have a gate for us.
When we got there the Virgin Atlantic office was closed. There was ine guy working at the Continenal office. He tried to help us. He said that someone had set up a flight for the next afternoon for us but had not finished it so we had to tickets, just the reservation. That someone was my grandmother. But the man couldn't print us the tickets. So we were all very sad and we still had no flight. We ended up taking a taxi to my grandparents house in New York to sleep for the night.
When I woke up Sunday morning at 9:30 and got out of bed, i found out that my dad had stayed up most of the night trying the get a flight and he did (what would we do without dads!). The flight was the exact same flightas yesterday but a night later. We ended up spending the day in New York, which was a lot of fun.
When we got to the Newark airport, the man at the counter for Virgin Atlantic said that we had to pay a fine for switching flights. My dad said that Virgin had said over the phone that they were protected and wpuld not have to pay a fine. There was arguing for a few minuets but we ended up have to pay a fine which was...... 200$ per ticket. Woo hoo. 1000 dollars gone. But, everything at the airport went smoothly after that and we got on the flight to London. Half a day later we got onto a flight to Tel Aviv. Everything was okay.

But there was 1 small issue. When we were getting our bags and we couldn't find one of them. And my mom had also lost a pair of sandals. So we went to the lost and found and the people will look for the bad and the shoes. And that was it. We then got to the house in Tel Aviv.

So here I am finishing a very long explanation.

fog of a blog

just to check it out....