Taken from the road to Sebep. I did the trip on a dirtbike with a backpack full of school supplies a few weeks ago. No badge or golden star for it; and that’s alright by me.
photography
Stairs
You can screw over a native people so that a few ruins are the only reminder of all that they once were, but you can’t keep the masons from doing their thing. They continue to build damn crazy stairways. This is for you, Mayan stone workers. Keep it up.
Carlos and Denis
Jorge and the Canche
Ice cream kid
Carlos the doctor and Milca the nurse
Denis the doctor
Cool courage
If you’re trying to be cool you’ve already missed the boat; the fire inside to have courage is the thing itself.
So is that if and only if or exclusive or?
What other picture could go here but Teddy and Muir
Flying
It would be so much cooler with an engine and wings and cockpit and one of those awesome bush-pilot headsets, but this one time a while ago sneakers-and-shorts-shod on a dock at sunset was good enough.
Brag: this is a self portrait.
Forgetfulness
Sometimes I forget that for work I get to ride a dirtbike around on a crazy old rocky highway through mountains between towns to hang out with poor kids and give them school supplies. Did I mention that’s actually for work?
There’s always stuff to whine about here, but for now I settle for beer with my crackers and cheese.
And it just so happens that there’s a store just down the street that sells Guatemalan beer and Guatemalan corn chips. Not good old crackers and cheese, but close enough and maybe better really.
And yes, when Profe Jorge and I ride around on the motorcycle we do sorta look like a couple of Mormons. They call us milk and chocolate.
Old pics
So a few years ago I got this brand new Lenovo laptop and decided that windows is for chumps, I’m going Ubuntu all the way.
So I installed Ubuntu, dual booting with Vista.
Then I decided that’s for chumps, real ballers nix Vista and use powerful Linux for EVERYTHING.
That’s where I found out why real ballers are real ballers (and why I wasn’t quite baller)…
This is Wes, one of the mechanics at the bike shop I worked at.
Nice shades breh.
For the record Wes also got the ultimate compliment from the local grom squad: “sweet kicks man.”
Nuff said.
I wonder if he’s still styling the white Tarmac.
This was my daily morning bus trip to UW. Shot with a camera phone out the back window of the bus towards Bellevue, and towards the sunrise (dur).
Complex Analysis. This was one of my favorite classes ever. The prof was legitimately crazy, absolutely brilliant, really scary at first, and more than any (but one) prof I’ve had he truly really cared about us students despite having to teach us little piddly raisins easy stuff compared to type of wild and deep things in math he deals with daily. And being a crazy old codger he somehow was one of the only profs I’ve had who really treated everybody equal. And in a bar fight this guy would lay fools out (did I mention he’s an ex-Navy-fighter-pilot?).
Old phone pictures are like Cliff notes for chapters of life, aren’t they?
Conclusion: always have a phone with at least a decently good camera.
The heart of the Polaroid camera lives on.
Families
Two of the families that have children in the sponsorship program, the Lorenzo León family and the Rodríguez Méndez family. One of the families doesn’t have a father, and one of them has basically nothing and not really enough money for food. The other family has a little bit more than nothing, and still not really enough for food.
Also, I’d forgotten how white I am. Dang.
May festival: part three
Here’s the wrap up May Festival (La Féria de Barillas) pictures. So many great photo opportunities, and way more importantly I’m starting to learn how to not bring along my camera sometimes. In the Féria the town showed all it’s colors, the ones I like and the ones I don’t like. So many parts of Mayan heritage and equally so much trying-to-be-western, so many fat men who’ve never ridden a horse wearing cowboy clothes and so many malnourished children in expensive parades. So many smiles, too.
I’m somewhere between right and judgmental gringo and wrong.
May festival: part two
