EST. 2011

This man decided to dig his part of the trench barefoot. His boots got so heavy with the mixture of pine needles and mud that he decided to take them off. Pine needles and mud are the two ingredients for making adobe blocks, which are still used, more often than not, in the construction of Guatemalan homes in the campo . My house is made of adobe .

Everyone who has a child in either the pre-school or grade school in Piache was summoned to dig for a day. Many widows, like this woman, had to come and put in their days work. She was accompanied by her 6 yr. old son(on the left-side of the photo) and upon arrival many men left their own work and helped her out. It was nice to see chivalry in a culture dominated by the antiquated notion of machismo . Other widows simply paid a worker 50q(6 US$) to do their share. Fifty quetzales is a small amount of money for a days work under the Guatemalan sun, although something is better than nothing.

On the left are the old latrines. There are nine in total, although only 2 are not completely full. Due to their current state, many of the children refuse to use them. On the right is the InterVida constructed bathroom facility that since its inauguration(2007) has been left locked and unused.

It was 6:30 AM yesterday morning when my phone started to ring. It only rang once and then said I had missed a call. In the world of buying saldo , the amount of electronic credit one has on his TIGO Peace Corps issued cell phone to make calls, send texts, etc, it was clear to me that the caller was out of money, as my phone rang once and only once. This is TIGO’s way of letting the person without saldo contact another person to alert them of their insufficient funds and lack of ability to make an actual call. In essence, it’s like being paged in the year 2011. After looking into my missed calls log, I realized that it was my albañil , Don Milo. Albañil is Spanish for mason. Although, foreman better suits the role that Don Milo plays in my USAID funded SPA project. Regressing a little, I returned the call to Don Milo and it was only then that he began to share his unease about the weather. We talked for about three minutes after which it was clear to me that we would have to postpone...

Miguelito(little Michael), son of my host brother Miguel and older brother of Angelou, shows off his newly acquired skills. Miguelito is 8 years old and loves FC Barcelona. I've spent countless hours kicking the ball around with him in the family's patio area. In this short video clip he's quoted saying - " It's hard being a good soccer player like me!"

In the entry iSad, I talked about how great it is to watch a child play in the rain just for the feel of it all. For the past week we've been experiencing a tropical depression and so it has been raining almost 20 hours of the day. This inclement weather has given me the opportunity to catch some of this innocent curiosity on camera. This is a video of Beto, son of my host brother Juan Fernando, playing in the puddles on my patio.

It’s been a week since the passing of Steve Jobs, so I thought I’d put together another entry. All this talk of technology has lead to me wonder how our world will look in 2050? As we advance in technology, our ability to turn once thought impossible inventions becomes more and more a reality. A good example of this is the new concept for the iPhone 5. It has a holographic element that evokes a George Lucas’esk Star Wars way of leaving messages. It makes me wonder if one day we’ll leave holographic 3D messages instead of the old annoying boring voice mail. The link below is to the youtube video that shows the new and ridiculous features of the concept iPhone 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsBwnv_dAg I’ve compiled a list of things that I believe could possibly be extinct or completely out of use by the year 2050. While some of the items below are already on their way out, others are slowly starting to vanish due to advances in technology and people’s access to high speed Internet....

There are few times in the world where a person that you've never met, seen, or even had a conversation with can have such a direct influence as to how you see and interact with the world. Thanks to my father, I grew up a "Mac kid" and fell in love with Macintosh long before it was the "cool thing to do" or before the ipod came out in 2001. Even before it was main stream or socially acceptable, I was hooked. I remember being one of the only kids freshmen year at college who had a white storm trooper like laptop. Most of the other students rocked an HP, Dell, Samsung, Sony, or any other brand of PC that wasn't Apple. It wasn't until sophomore year when Apple decided to make the laptop sleeker, sexier, better running, and with a web-cam that I began to see that I wasn't the only kid on campus with an iBook or PowerBook. As I write you now, from the hills of Central America, I'm typing away on my iBook G4(2004) which, for better or worse, is on i...

This is a normal view from my patio area and one that often greets me as I leave my house . The guy with the pot is my host father Don Willy. In this photo, he's preparing to de-feather the chickens that have been previously sacrificed for the day's lunch. In Guatemala, the day's largest meal is lunch time and it's not rare for my family to eat criollo chicken three times a week. Criollo literally means born in spanish America, however in our current context of the chicken it simple translates into home-grown. Home-grown chicken, like this, doesn't taste the same as the poultry that we eat in the States. It's a more natural meat with less added preservatives, steroids, etc. When my father came to visit, my family prepared us a local chicken dish using this type of home-grown poultry. Needless to say, it was delicious.

This a panoramic view of the aldea Quiaquizuyal. This frontier like photo was taken a couple months ago, although could easily have been taken a hundred years ago as not much has changed in the rural areas of Guatemala. Houses are still constructed with adobe or mud blocks, there is no running water, no electricity, and a majority of the homes still have dirt floors. This is a photo of Don Luis. Don Luis is an employee of the Municipality and acts as a right hand man to the Mayor. Here he is standing in the back of a pick-up truck looking over the hills of Huehuetenango. The mountain range in the background is the Cuchumatanes. He accompanied us out to Xepon, one of the farthest out villages, and joined us for the free ride back to the centro of Malacas. As you can see by this photo, many of the roads in Huehuetenango are of dirt. I'd say that 10% or less of roads in this part of the country are properly paved. This is a photo I took last year in September of 2010. I was returni...