one last look at Guatemala

Hola Amigos. We just got back from visiting Coban and Semuc Champey. We invited our Korean friend Carmela along. She´s been in Guatemala several months and hasn´t had much opportunity to travel around much ( a Catholic sister and a nurse, so she´s a worker). The area around Coban is wet and cool, ¨cloud forest¨country ( think of the Olympic rain forest, just a little warmer. Semuc Champey is really out in the sticks, miles and miles of dirt roads in 4 wheel drive to get there. Hot springs meeting a cold rushing stream over eons have created a fascinating sculpture of stairsteping pools over caverns that the river has dived underneath. We swam and jumped from pool to pool, climbed down a rock cliff, swam under a waterfall, and climbed up into a cavern. A strange place of wet, glistening, fantastic shapes. We finished with a 15 foot leap into the stream. Wow! All this barefoot so as not to damage the fragile limestone. To top off this jungle experience Howler Monkeys sang us their version of ¨Good Night Irene¨. After 2 days we caught one of the very efficient minibuses they use to get from town to town here and went to Biotopo Quetzal. This is a park set aside to protect cloud forest habitat, a place where the increasingly rare bird, The Quetzal, lives. This is the national bird of Guatemala, with the feathers of a showgirl, but terribly shy. We never saw one but we did see a green toucan, a heliconus charitonus (sp?) butterfly ( black wings with yellow lightning bolt and red heart markings), and some really great trees. I love this stuff. It´s amazing nature´s variety. We´re packing up now to leave for Honduras at 4 AM tomorrow morning. We met a friend, Mike, from our last time down here. From my last post you know how dark the future looks for Guatemala. Mike encouraged me, pointing out a couple of things. One is that we modern Americans have gotten away from looking at things from the long view. Our forefathers , like many recent immigrants, worked and sacrificed, living through really hard times, keeping hope for their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Think how heavy are snowflakes? How heavy is the last one that breaks the branch? The other thing was the candle in the dark, Amnesty International´s symbol. Each little light makes it a little harder for the dark powers to have their way. The moment will come when they will have no place to hide. Today I read Psalm 103:4-6. God will come to the defense of those who suffer violence. Til later, Gilberto