La Ruta de Maya - Guatemala pt 3

Lanquin, Guatemala
Mar. 02, 2008

I write this latest entry from the banks of the Lanquin river, in eastern Guatemala, at an incredible little hideaway in the mountains called El Retiro. The eastern highlands of Guatemala, shrouded in green mist, beckon out the front door of our bungalow. In the distance the faint strains of Ali Farka Touré's African Blues emanate from the hotel's stereo system. Farther still are the Western highlands, left behind in the rearview mirror of our microbus.

The last several days have been a whirlwind of buses, people, and natural Guatemalan beauty. We spent 3 days at a beautiful cheese finca (farm) of Hospedaje San Antonio, in the Western Highlands, north of Nebaj. The cheese farm lies a short walk away from the remote community of Acul, in the bowl of a deep green valley. Life here is deeply traditional, although the community is making rapid progress into the 21st century.

Acul lies in an area called the Ixil (ee-sheel) Triangle, about 6 hours north of Antigua. The people here are almost all Maya, and speak Ixil as a first language, not Spanish. It's a fascinating language, full of glottal stops and sounds unfamiliar to the Western ear. A woman tried to teach me a few words and my throat struggled to replicate the strange noises. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful language, as are the people and the land.

In spite of its current beauty, the Ixil triangle suffered terribly during Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war. The area was one of the hardest-hit in Guatemala, as the army razed village after village in a campaign to terrorize the population. Ostensibly this made it harder for the guerrillas to wage their campaign against the government, but the people of these villages suffered the worst, caught between both sides in a war they wanted no part of.

Peace came to the Ixil in 1996 with the signing of the peace accords, but prosperity has been far more elusive. The area’s remoteness, coupled with the inhabitants’ lack of Spanish, has left the area out of the government’s development plans, for the most part. Today a host of NGOs and aid organizations have stepped in to fill the void. One such organization is APEI, or Amigos para las Escuelas Ixil (Friends of Ixil Schools).

I met Ingrid Raffel, APEI’s German director, at the hospedaje during our first communal dinner. Ingrid is one of those amazing people whom you know will leave an indelible impression on you the moment you meet them. Ingrid is 72 years old, looks 15 years younger, and buzzes with energy. She has been coming to the Ixil triangle for over 15 years, back when the area barely had roads.

At dinner Ingrid regales us with stories of all-day hikes through knee-deep mud and pickup trucks tipping over on the rough Guatemalan roads. APEI’s mission is simple, she tells us. The Ixil people feel they will make no progress unless their children have education, and education in Spanish, so that they can converse with the rest of the nation. APEI steps in to assist the Ixil in that goal, building schools, staffing them with teachers who speak Spanish and Ixil, and providing financial support to those schools. Since 1991, APEI has built 15 schools in remote, rural communities. Some of the remotest of these communities have had virtually no contact with the outside world for decades: the army forced these people into the hills, where they eventually settled their new villages.

Ingrid returns to the Ixil every year for two weeks, and spends those two weeks traveling brutal roads and hiking steep mountain paths. Her schedule would wipe out a woman half her age, yet she does it with joy, delighting in the opportunity to help people in desperate need of any help they can get.

And her efforts (and those of her partners) are paying off. Students are graduating in droves, moving on to further education. APEI just graduated their first teacher - the first student to go through the system and return as a teacher in the program. This landmark was a huge source of pride for Ingrid and her partner in the program, a cheerful German named Martin whom we met a few days later.

Ingrid tells us that prosperity is slowly coming to the Ixil people. The nearby village of Acul, for instance, didn’t even have a store when she was here last year. Now it has several stores, a new church, even a cell phone tower. On our walk into town one day, we spotted Mayan women dressed in traditional woven clothes, talking on cell phones. Hope has returned the area, Ingrid says, but she is quick to downplay her part in it, bestowing the praise on the local people instead in her typically modest fashion.

As much as the developed world enjoys the quaint notion of the people of the developing world living traditional lives in grass skirts and eating bush meat, the majority of traditional cultures want prosperity (and their culture). They want a good roof over their heads, food, and opportunities for their children. People like Ingrid are helping to bring their dreams to fruition.

Which is why a portion of the revenues of our future tours to Guatemala is going to support Ingrid’s work with APEI. For more information on APEI’s work, visit www.apei.de (you will need to be able to read German, however). If you are interested in supporting APEI, you can contact me and I can put you in touch with APEI.

NEXT UP: Lanquin, bats by the thousands, and the Eastern highlands