I tell the management of the hotel that their place is truly lovely but I need to be closer to downtown. They say fine, so I go back to check at Via Del Mar. The manager tells me that they have rooms for two nites, but not four, when the huge influx of weekend reservations will arrive! Yikes! I guess I can continue to pay $20/nite – at least I have a room for all 4 nites, and there are few rooms in town left. Most of the students I “boated” with did not make reservations and are scrambling for a place to sleep. I walk down toward the Bay and the cook/owner from last nite’s restaurant calls out to ask if I want breakfast…..”It’s the best in town; I cook just for you…” etc. My favorite place from last time was still closed when I’d walked by so I say yes. I invite the owner to sit with me and talk because the place is empty. (One thing I notice about traveling is that it makes me more gregarious than I am at home.) While I wait for my food and conversation, I look at her restaurant: wooden walls covered with photos and postcards, open windows with strings of shells hanging in the openings. No glass in the windows, tho there are wooden shutters to close and lock. Most of the open peaked ceiling is covered with plaited hemp mats, but above the first few feet inside the door you can see up into the traipsing electric wires. The roof is slatted wood; all the tables and chairs look handmade. Pretty casual. The owner has made my eggs and potatoes, HER style: little scraps of crispy scrambled egg among crispy potatoes accompanied by fresh pineapple juice. Finally she sits and we talk a little about our lives. She is Hispanic; medium-light skinned with yellow-brown eyes the same color as her face and hair; probably early 40s. She grew up in Mexico and was married at 19 to an older Indian man and lived in India for the next two evidently disastrous years before returning to Mexico. She has a gorgeous son who works for her somewhat regularly – he is very respectful with her. Another son is in college in Mexico. From what she earns in this tiny restaurant (which is mentioned in Lonely Planet) she supports herself and her son in a one-room cabin down the street, and sends her other son to college, while saving for this son and a good friend of his to go to college in a year. After she moved to Guate, one of her husbands was a Garif. We talk about money, marriage, men, and children – i.e Life. I ask her a bit about community projects here in Livingston, but she doesn't know of any. Eventually I remember that I am supposed to be doing something about a hotel. She suggests The African Place. “The guidebook didn’t seem to think much of it,” I tell her. “No, no; they are great,” she says. Since the other hotels in the Garif barrio mentioned in Lonely Planet don’t seem to exist, at least during my walk up and down that street, I decide to go check out the African Place. On my way up the street I run into Elena, the tall German girl from the boat and the dinner last nite. She needs a hotel, too, for herself and a friend who is coming the next day. She decides to go with me to see the African Place. We look at the large glaringly-white Moorish structures, the hand-lettered sign, the huge garden and beautiful tile work and are intrigued. The owner has two rooms left for 4 days….one with two beds, one with three. After a brief discussion in her limited English and our limited Spanish, we decide to take the three-bed room together. It turns out to be 25Q per person per nite…………more expensive than some of those sparse individual 25Q rooms…..but still only $13 total per person for four nites. That seems incredibly good. I pay and she will pay me back. Unfortunately there is NO hot water in the common bathroom with only two toilet stalls and two shower stalls for this huge place, though the owner suggests that the showers are “un poco caliente.” I run back to the other hotel, take advantage of the hot shower there before check-out time, and then carry my packs away to the African Place. I decide to take a short cut - always aware of the reputed dangers of getting off the beaten path - on a road pointed out to me, and end up puffing my way up a STEEP hill – shades of Jamaica! Then the road peters out and I pass a parked sheriff’s car, presumably by his house, and I take a dirt trail down the other side of the hill to where the road begins again. A left turn near the bar and I am on the road to my new home. Later someone tells me where the ONEGUA office is, back up that same steep hill, and with some difficulty, turning down side roads thru residential areas – aware of being the only whitey and tourist in the area - I find it. They are obviously getting some event together here but I find the office, walk in some wet paint that noone seems to care about, and speak in Spanish to a young woman for some time….she seemed to be understanding me, but even when I ask her to speak slowly I’m not 100% sure we are really communicating …however it seemed that they are open to gringos helping the project (projects in general, rather newly, are preferring to have local help whenever they can get it, even or perhaps especially for professional roles, rather than foreigners) and that they have some sort of school and that she thinks my skills could be helpful….and that the person here who speaks English is way too busy this week but he will answer my earlier emails after the week is over. She gives me an events schedule for the week, and off I go. The first scheduled event is at 2 pm, a seminar on the attempts to retain and revive the Garifuna culture. My roommate, Elena, is also interested in this talk so off we go.
We think we are in the right place, people direct us up steps past the parked motorcycle and so on…and we stand for awhile, and then a young Peruvian man and his tall German wife come, and it turns out (he spoke only German and Spanish, but she was fluent in English, too) that she is doing her thesis on the Garif. Culture and worked at an ONEGUA project for a month in Belize. It was supposed to be three months, but she said things were so disorganized she finally left early. So mostly the three Germans chat, in German, but occasionally translate for me or speak in Spanish, and then two Hispanic girls from across the river at Puerto Barrios arrive. And then we all wait. Eventually at about 3 pm, a black man in a suit arrives and opens the doors for us and disappears, so we sit inside and wait. Then he returns to announce that speakers from P. Barrios have gotten waylaid and it will be another ½ hour. So my roommate opts to return to the hotel and I walk to the main street. Prince engages me again and wants to talk more about the love of his life who promised him everything in the way of a good life and then dumped him, so I buy us both a coke and we talk. He is obviously a little drunk, especially for 4 pm, and wants to schmaltz me about what a good heart I have, and how younger girls don’t appeal to him, and how he needs a room for the night so he doesn’t feel so alone (he lives in his mother’s small house, here.) All this falls a little flat, so I get out of there after a few more minutes. I then locate a store on a side road where I can bargain for one of the beautiful lacy overblouses the indigenes wear here (since the morning was hot enough for a tank top and I expect a few more days like this) and get a coral one for about $15. I quickly change on the street from my overshirt to this pretty lacy thing, and am pleased when several women wearing similar blouses smile, gesturing at their blouses and mine. I see lights on in the room where we were supposed to hear the speaker, earlier, but decide not to go back up. Later the German girl tells me that a facilitator had them all draw Family Trees (shades of California!) to give some ideas for making a Garif family tree. She and her husband went along with it, but thought the whole thing was silly. Then I go back to our room and Elena has a cough and is lying down, so we talk nicely about her life and my life and why we came to Guatemala, etc. She is only 19. I put on a long skirt to go with my lacy coral top, feeling quite the queen, and we walk out for dinner, and a dance contest scheduled for 8 pm….but after five minutes in the restaurant she says she has to meet someone so she leaves and I have this huge dinner to eat by myself and my breakfast companion/cook is occupied with her helper and ignores me, and two of the guys from last nite come in and sit on the porch with new dates, so I eat and feel a little sorry for myself, here alone. Then I leave and walk up toward the internet shop to send some emails while the Ladino owner of the shop sits in a nearby chair and rocks his baby and sings to her. One of the things I love in Guatemala is the more informal and family-centered sense of work. Many if not most stores are in the front of homes. A different Garif band of drummers and a conch-shell player is at a local restaurant on the main street, so I sit on their steps and listen for awhile. At 8 o’clock I go to the gimnasio where the main contest is supposed to be held – really looking forward to seeing a dance contest - but there are lights and loud music and nothing else. I kill time by walking up and down the main calle, then sit on the wall of the Muni Bldg and watch while the father and son Hispanohablantes from the boat run into the girl who had walked up through the jungle. I almost join them but know I can’t keep up with the Spanish. Prince walks by and joins me on the wall, and two other girls from the afternoon join us and at 9 we go to see if the dance contest has started. I have been dying to see this, but notice that my energy level has dropped considerably since learning that pretty much nothing comes off as planned around here. It’s hard to get excited about things. This is probably good for me – overexcitable and over-planned – but could explain something about the “lackadaisical” people in Livingston. There are more people gathered outside than when I had checked at 8 pm but still absolutely nada going on inside. What a disappointment! We all walk over to the UBAFU bar where I see drummers are setting up so several of us go in, and others opt out. A middle-aged man joins us and for the next hour or so he – a sort of Hemingway/boxer-looking Argentinian who has spent most of his life traveling all over the world and 23 years in the US living in 33 states (or was it 33 years and 22 states?) building and refurbishing bars for people – spins his tales. He and Prince spend their time vying for my attention – both love to tell stories – while I try to watch the drummers. I do want to hear the Argentinan’s stories – I am fascinated by people who have spent their lives traveling; really don’t understand it - so may meet up with him again. He has given me his email address and tries to tell me where his cantina is. After awhile each of them gives up on being heard over the din and leaves, and soon so do the drummers, so I listen to the reggae on the jukebox and watch other people in the room dance or talk together (ever the people-watcher, and actually pretty comfortable just sitting there with music and people to look at,) then walk home about 10:30 pm to find that the stars are glorious overhead, and the warmth is still in the room because I’d closed the windows before I left.
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