This community, Maxbal (spoken Mash-bal) is a two and a half hour rough-road (anything without low geared 4wd can’t make it) drive away from the town I live in.
This is the first group of students, ever, to graduate from 9th grade–the community was proud.
The teachers had the students go out into the soccer field to take their picture while the game continued.
Well, here it goes: this is my first whack at building a website.
Rough draft:
http://www.porchcoffee.org/lifeandhope/Home.html
The buttons don’t work (unless you’re an IE-user), there are no pages but the main page and the two boxes below the slideshow have absolutely zero format/style/font/zing/content. Ok Kelvin, fine, maybe it’s not absolutely zero, but it’s dang close. And with respect to being edgy, hip and cool (beautiful examples: Amnesty International, RED or Kiva), it’s simply not even an attempt.
But it’s a website, which is a new thing in dave world :). Also, for its audience the only need is easily available content. Once we here have made some orders-of-magnitude epic growth, then it’ll be time for a slick website to draw in more publicity and viewers. For now, I think it’s time to go eat a delicious two dollar lunch of carne asada, Guatemalan veggies and an orange.
Edit:
The buttons work now. Done son, wOOt, boomshicka-wow-wow and all that jazz, I’m pretty stoked that they work now. Apparently the slideshow div was messing with the button bar (?). A switch from relative positioning to absolute positioning did the trick. It’s probably a hack way of doing things (I don’t know enough about webpage code to even know if something’s hack or not, haha), and I don’t really understand why it worked, but it worked and (I’m pretty sure) it works in chrome and IE and firefox. Close enough.
Here are some photos of Guatemala, I hope you enjoy them!
Part I is here: http://wp.me/s14q4r-boxers
I love to take naps. If you’ve spent time around me, you’ve probably seen it. A few weeks ago Tuesday was a free day–apparently October 20th is an important day in Guatemalan history, a revolution of some sort took place a while ago.
I woke up early (5:300ish) to go running with one of my buddies here, Andy. Best I figure, Andy somehow got a tiny bit of Gazelle DNA in his system, at least by the way he runs it seems like that’s the case. I need to go find me some Gazelle steak to eat. We got back at 7ish, ate food, he left and I ate some more food and read a book for a while. I didn’t have much success reading my book, as I really just wanted to sleep. I decided to crash for a nap in my room–Barcelona had a game against Copenhagen at noon, so I had a few hours to sleep. It was already a good day.
I slept like a log until I heard a door-sound. Here I’ll give you four relevant facts:
1. A cleaning lady comes by every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
2. There’s a bathroom right by my bedroom, and the bathroom door is loud. When someone goes into the bathroom, it almost sounds like my door’s opening. I’m used to it now, so I don’t worry much when I hear what sounds like my door opening, because usually it’s just someone using the bathroom. Besides, my housemates are all awesome at knocking-first.
3. On a warm morning, after a hard early run, there is only one way to take a nap: boxers only (in the privacy of my room, of course. No indecent exposure, thank you very much)
…and number four, which I wasn’t aware of…
4. Sometimes the cleaning lady comes on Tuesdays.
Yeah, you can probably see where this is going. So I woke up to what sounded like my door opening, but didn’t worry about it. Somebody was probably opening the bathroom door.
Then I heard footsteps in my room. Then I heard sweeping. She was sweeping the room. I was napping on my bed in my boxers and this poor soul, the cleaning lady, came in to clean. I thought and thought and thought…did she even notice me? What about my boxers? Even if she didn’t see my self on the bed, my boxers I was wearing, green polka dotted…are awfully hard to miss. This is why I usually wear pants over them. More footsteps, more sweeping. She lifted up my napsack in the corner of the room, swept under it, and put it back down. I didn’t move–I wondered to myself, maybe she just simply won’t notice me.
A little bit more sweeping, then suddenly a pause..and panicked gasp of air. Then very quiet but also very hurried footsteps, and the sound of my door closing very quickly. Then silence. The poor girl.
It was a week and a half before we saw her again.
In a not-very-surprising turn of events that followed, I was unanimously nominated to be the fill-in house cleaner till she came back.
The End.
Disclaimer:
This may or may not have actually happened. I say this because if it did happen, I’d like you to think it didn’t (no duh), and if it didn’t I’d like to not ruin the fun by having you think it didn’t. Your call.
Guatemala is a land rich in culture and history. There is war and violence, poverty and pain, pride and love and more variety than you can shake a stick at; its anthropology is deep and rich.
With this deep and rich anthropology comes a particular thing: you generally can’t tell a Guatemalan by hair color or skin tone–there’s lots of variation. There’s only one quick way to tell if someone’s not of Guatemalan heritage: eyes, brown eyes. There are immigrants, African or North American, but they’re not too common.
Today was absolutely stunning. This weekend was a national holiday weekend for Guatemala, along with many other Catholic countries of the world. My unofficially-adopted Guatemalan Uncle, Profe Jorge, invited me to travel with him for the weekend. Not wanting to be stuck alone in Barillas, I traveled with him. Today we went to Santiago Sacatepequez, which I guess is the go-to place to see the celebration of Dia de Todos los Santos: they have an absolutely wild and beautiful crazy kite-festival celebration in the cemetery each year. Of course, there’s also delicious and cheep food aplenty.
We parked about a half mile away from the downtown area and began to walk. Not five minutes later we passed a pretty blonde and blue-eyed girl walking the other way. “Well that’s curious” I thought to myself–a little part of me inside said “hey Dave! There’s a good chance she speaks English. Go talk to her!” It’d been a long time since I’d talked with a pretty girl in English. “Nah, that’s silly, I won’t bother” I thought to myself. We kept walking, and a few minutes later made it to the downtown area.
Not more than ten minutes later, I saw a group of three that didn’t quite look Guatemalan, but I wasn’t sure–they were at least thirty feet away and I couldn’t see their faces with the way they were standing. Two of them, a guy and a gal, were dressed somewhat tourist-ly. The third, another gal in a rose colored shirt, looked less like a tourist then the other two but didn’t seem dressed like a local. All three were fair-skinned, so I figured they were probably not from these parts…but I couldn’t see their eyes so I didn’t know. I should also add that (even though I don’t ever think think much of how a girl looks without having seen her face and smile) the gal in the rose colored shirt, she looked pretty.
Just as I was turning away, something caught her attention and she turned her head and glanced over her shoulder. I saw her face and her eyes and my jaw dropped. I was mildly paralyzed for a moment or two, jaw dropped. Think of that one time when you were walking along and noticed that the sun was getting low. You turn to look at the sunset behind you and see the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen in your life, and your jaw actually drops and you gasp a little bit. Yup, it was like that. This girl had the prettiest eyes.
A few moments passed and my mind was still in “pause” mode. In all my life I’ve never seen a girl with eyes like her eyes. This girl’s prettiest eyes were somehow a glimpse of her self, a little bit of curiosity and contentedness and happiness. I don’t remember if she was smiling at the moment, but I do remember that her eyes were.
“Ok Dave. You need to go talk to this girl, right now” I told myself with conviction.
I didn’t.
Half an hour later I knew what I had to do.
I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and held it in my pocket. My hopes, jittery, unsure and unsecure, written on a little piece of paper in my pocket. Eight digits. Maybe by some wild providence, maybe by a miracle or other act of God I would get a second chance. Is it okay to pray to God to get to talk with a pretty girl? I wasn’t sure, but I might’ve prayed just a tiny bit. One hour passed, I didn’t see her again. Two hours passed, I didn’t see her again. We left the cemetery where the incredible kite-festival celebration was and began the slow return to the downtown area–the road was packed with people.
We were walking on the right side of the road and there she was on the other side. Somehow I’d missed her when we passed and now she was a ways up the road from us. I saw her and my mind started to spin like a wobbly top. Shoot shoot shoot, she’s all the way over there. I can’t get over there in time, there are too many people. She was a long ways away, and I would’ve had to suddenly take off running and pushing, chasing through a very dense crowd and–
“Ok Dave, you know what? You missed one chance at what might become the most beautiful thing that’ll happen in your entire life and you’re about to loose your second chance because you don’t want to get pushy in a crowd. Man up Dave, man up.”
I threw myself into the crowd, people glaring at me left and right. One man cuffed me in the back of the head as I stumbled by him. Well, ok..I may have actually crashed straight into him when I was acrobatically avoiding body-checking an old woman. I got close to the girl with the prettiest eyes, close enough for her to hear me.
The crowd was noisy, I had to almost shout: “Excuse me! Miss!”
She turned and looked around, only mildly confused, saw me and said with a smile: “Why hello! Another gringo!”
“You have the most wonderful eyes and smile I’ve ever seen!”
She looked at me, eye contact for a moment that seemed longer than a moment, and with her smile said: “and you do too, chico!”
I just about lost my balance again, but recovered and reached over the sea of people between her and I, the piece of paper in my hand, that scrap of paper with my hopes and thumping heart scribbled on it, 8 little numbers.
She stood up on her toes, reached and took the piece of paper, glanced at it and slipped it in her pocket. The crowd had gotten noisier. I shouted my name to her over the noise, and she shouted hers to me. She turned to keep walking, but then paused for a moment to glance over her shoulder and wink at me.
I definitely nearly lost my balance again.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Every single bit of this story is true, all the way up to the part where I saw her again.
The End.
——–
*I don’t know much of genetics or anthropology, but I’ll hazard a guess anyways. The indigenous people have brown eyes, so maybe in the world of eye-color-genes the brown gene is most dominant and the others are recessive.
I left Seattle last tuesday at 10:30pm ish, arrived at Barillas late friday night. Here’s a list of things that I’ve done since stepping off the plane in Guatemala City.
One of them is … FALSO! As the old song goes:
One of these things
Isn’t like the others
1. Eaten at Pizza Hut
2. Eaten at Pollo Campero
3. Played soccer..while having absolutely no spanish-soccer-vocabulary at all (with the exception of “GOALLL!”)
4. Made italian food for dinner
5. Driven country highways and a little town at nighttime, dodging people, boulders and buses
6. Not gotten sick from anything…with the exception of the oatmeal I accidentally dumped italian seasoning into. Mmmmm yum.
7. Watched a truck drive sideways (well, not completely, but pretty close to it. That rear axle was seriously out of wack.)
8. Taken ~500 photos
9. Used facebook
10. Acquired 5 (female) body guards. Yessir, one very safe gringo.
11. Read The Old Man and the Sea by Hemmingway
12. Switched to using Google Guatemala. I don’t mind it, but it’s not really by my own volition. Google is very persistent about it.
13. Become…EL MATADOR DE INSECTOS DE MALARIA (yeah you Guatemalan mosquitoes, you heard that right. BE AFRAID.)
I’m moving to a little town out in the sticks..of Central America.
Book list, in the order the stack sits in on my bedroom floor, with little notes when fitting
1. Scarne on Cards (my late Grandpa P.’s copy, with his notes. He was a poker boss), Scarne
2. Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
3. The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis (yes..Lewis again)
4. A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
5. The Applications of Elliptic Functions, Alfred Greenhill (I will go nuts, guaranteed, if I don’t have a math book on my shelf to study once in a while)
6. The World’s Last Night, C.S. Lewis (and again)
7. The Signature Classics (seven of his most popular books), C.S. Lewis (yeeeeah…)
8. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty
9. The Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway
10. Jesus and the Victory of God, N.T. Wright (Big thank-you to my friend Grant V. for the recommendation)
11. Bible, NKJV
12. Bible, Spanish (I have no clue what “translation.” It fits in my pocket though..win.)
13. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
14. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy (read it this summer, holy crap incredible. It’s actually a funny story, it’s my Christmas gift from Mom, and I wasn’t supposed to know she was sending it with me. I came across it in a used bookstore, and got very excited. You can figure out the rest)
15. The Blue Valleys, Robert Morgan
16. The Mountains Won’t Remember Us, Robert Morgan
PACKING/CLEANING/THROWING-STUFF-AWAY!
There are a few things I’ve been working on getting written these past few weeks and I may try to get one or two up before Tuesday. Maybe I’ll post one from Miami (layover on the way to Guatemala City)? Here’s a rough list:
1. The salvation of a century old Bohemian gypsy violin
2. Football (yes, I’m using USA-English here. Pigskin, first downs and hail mary passes, that football)
3. Old hearts breaking
4. The surreality of reality-setting-in
5. Batch of film pictures
6. Three languages every soul speaks
7. Facebook, and more importantly why I won’t be using it for a while
8. Why math and music are legit and photography rarely is
9. Coffee-mug-problems
10. A bittersweet farewell letter to two bicycles
11. Why I believe what I believe about life, the universe and everything (that one’s a humdinger. I really want to git’er done though, it’s long overdue)
12. Stitched-up panoramic photos
13. The most powerful lesson I’ve ever learned from a coworker
14. My short lived MLS soccer career (well..um..not really. but kinda.)
(Edit: two more)
15. Film vs. Digital
16. What it’s like to fly away from the city I’ve lived in for all of my 22 years (another humdinger)
Shoot, that list is longer than I thought it’d be (and there are yet more rough drafts laying around, too). Fourteen things–I’ll aim to finish them all by November. *crosses fingers*
My friend died a year ago.
The phone call I received at 8:30am one year ago lasted less than twenty words, and it’s etched deep and forever in my heart. I can’t say much more–I wrote about it some months ago, and what I wrote then for memorial day was all I had to say, and still is all I have to say, about that day and that phone call.
After an IED claimed his body and life here on earth, it was months before I could sleep right. Nightmares? No, and I thank God for that. I honestly don’t know if I could’ve handled nightmares without spiraling downwards with utterly crippled emotions and mind. I simply couldn’t sleep right. I would try to stay at school and do homework, but couldn’t focus; I don’t mean that I wouldn’t, or didn’t want to..literally I could not focus. Months passed, and than one night I slept and woke up rested.
That was the single most bittersweet morning I’ve known in my life so far.
Some time later, one night after a long week and one particularly long day, I was still awake in the early morning, really troubled.
Joe believed and understood more than I do and likely ever will who God is, what redemption is, and the both heart-crushing and soul-saving beauty of the death of God himself, in human form as the carpenter’s son. I knew that Joe was in a better place.
Somehow I didn’t have peace about his death though. “Why the hell wasn’t that me?” I would ask. I could’ve joined the army, I could well have been in that Stryker instead of him. He was married and wanted to help troubled kids after he finished in the army. Joe White was larger than life.
I didn’t have peace.
That night, restless and painful, I sat on the deck stairs looking up at the stars as the wind spoke through the trees, and peace came.
Peace came.
Like the small wave that reaches just further than the rest, to where you’re standing, cool fresh salty water splashes over the tops of your feet cleaning off the sand, and it comes far enough past your heels to even wash away the footprints behind you.
Peace came.
Joe loved and he loved with more depth and soul and power than most folks will ever imagine could be..except for the folks that knew him. Those who knew him knew that there must’ve been something bigger, something else. It was something more, oh you bet it was something more: it was god. Full, real love–something so damn big that it doesn’t fit in this universe, but sometimes when someone actually realizes it, gets it, and decides to live by that, when you meet and come to know one of them, you catch a glint of this light, a blinding beautiful shimmer. That was Joe. His life shone with a glimpse of eternity.
I can’t write anything else, but I want to put something else here: notes he wrote. I copied these off of his facebook account, and they’re some of the most moving things I’ve read in my life–because he poured himself into what he wrote, and he had a lot of soul to pour into things. Some of them are also some of the funniest things I’ve read in my life.
I’m going to have a Rockstar, today, for Joe. He always had one in his hand–everybody’s got their vices, his was Rockstar. At the end of the day was it even a vice? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. You should have one for him today, too.
—
BOB! go to sleep.
Tuesday November 18 2008
at first i considered him a mouse problem (i’m assuming he’s a dude mouse because i’m uncomfortable with the thought of sharing the room i get naked in with a female). anyway anyone (even if it is a mouse) who steals cookies that my girlfriend makes for me is a problem. but he just helped himself to them like his mother never taught him manners. so i trapped him under a pillow one night and punched it as hard as i could (it was on my couch and i’d rather get rid of a couch pillow then have mouse guts all over my hand.) i heard something pop and thought it was the mouse but i’m pretty sure it was just my knuckles now because when i lifted the pillow he was no where to be seen. i took it as a sign to leave him alone (well more like i didn’t want him thinking i was a problem and bite my johnson off while i was sleeping at night… well sleeping anytime really i’m not sure why i put at night.. whatever. i have serious ADD) so i named him bob and told him to help himself to MY cookies. i’m such a nice guy. i’m sure bob’s forgiven me for trying to turn him into mouse sauce with my fist. at least i hope he has. i am sharing my cookies after all.
—
Simple?
Monday April 7 2008
God is good. God is merciful. God is faithful. and God is love. sometimes it’s just that simple. everything else is only matters for the brief moment it is relevant and then disappears for the rest of God’s eternity.
This hung out in the “photo” page for a while, it’s time to let it stick for good.
(from a few weeks ago)
Observation #1: when sleepy, it is very easy to misplace things and very hard to find them.
Observation #2: coffee helps this. It helps a lot.
…now I’m off to go slog around the office to find where I left my coffee mug.
This may take a while.
It seems that in Western culture (well–Seattle culture, the only culture I’ve lived in) that us people–humans–we define ourselves by three main things, in varying proportions:
1. What we do (hobbies/sports maybe)
2. What we make/contribute (could be nine-to-five?)
3. What we own
I’m not sure what to think about that, more will follow. I have this knee jerk reaction that I’m either missing something, or that there’s some wrinkle in the way things work, and there should be something more to how folks..ah..well…are.
“There’s always that one guy [in the boxing club] who’s willin’ to run..willin’ to run hard. That guy’s gonna win.”
-Coach B.
Note: you don’t have to watch out for that guy if you are that guy.
This song is so incredible. It has been hanging out on the “song” page for a while now and I’ve decided it just deserves it’s own post. Is it not so much of life? No matter what you believe, I bet something stirs deep inside when you hear this song.
Taking what I can see from where I am, I’m convinced this is a great part of all that really matters: one day after another, each day a step closer, closer to love, to god, to others, each day one step closer.
One Step Closer by U2
I’m ’round the corner from anything that’s real
I’m across the road from hope
I’m under a bridge in a rip tide
That’s taken everything I call my own
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
I’m on an island at a busy intersection
I can’t go forward, I can’t turn back
Can’t see the future
It’s getting away from me
I just watch the tail lights glowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
Knowing, knowing
I’m hanging out to dry
With my old clothes
Finger still red with the prick of an old rose
Well the heart that hurts
Is a heart that beats
Can you hear the drummer slowing?
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
To knowing, to knowing, to knowing