At 12:30 am I was startled awake by the downpour of rain. Paul was doing his overnight mantrek on the volcano. Madi, stuck her head up and yelled, “Dad is getting soaked!” Then she put her head back down and immediately went back to sleep. She didn’t remember saying it in the morning. It wasn’t a light rain, but more of an angry downpour. I hoped the rain would be short-lived, but this storm had stamina. It rained heavily for six hours. I was imagining the guys riding some kind of crazy mudslide down the mountain in their sleeping bags. Then I remembered they were in the crater, so it would be more like waking up in a muddy swimming pool. Don’t know why that made me feel better to the point I went back to sleep.
At 6:30 I got my early morning exercise (which I prefer to skip) running down the street after the garbage truck. They were early, I might add. I’m pretty sure the garbage dudes were laughing at the crazy gringo running down the street toward them in pjs with a shredded pinata and bag of garbage. That’s right, I have no shame when getting rid of smelly refuse.
In the morning Cali woke up grumpy because everyone else is off having fun but her. She wakes up content or hopping mad, not a lot of middle emotional ground with that one. The only thing that made her happier was that I didn’t make her wear her raincoat to school. She reminded me she hasn’t been a baby for a long, long, long time. I reminded her that there is nothing wrong with staying dry, at any age. She thinks she should have the right to get wet, like an adult. Oh boy.
On the walk to school we saw Kier’s shuttle driver. He asked if there was any more clarification for picking everyone up on the weekend. K was invited to go with her friends to the city for the weekend. One of her friends has a mansion there that has 8 bedrooms. Her friends were willing to pick her up from the bus station when she got to the city, but it will be too late for that. Even though Kier is a bit bummed she’ll miss the whole event, she came to the conclusion on her own that it didn’t make sense to try to squeeze that in. She has always had a level head on friend related stuff, she self-monitors well.
After I dropped Madi off at school, I went to the bookstore, traded in four books, got two more, chatted with the coffee-clutch group that is always at the cafe. A parent stopped me to set up a sleepover with Madi, who is always in demand.
When I got home Mia skyped me from Honduras. Then Kier came online. She was wearing lavendar scrubs and looking kinda…old and employed. They were in one of the check-up rooms. Kier took the computer out into the courtyard to tell me about yesterday. She had a little pack of children who followed her like the pied-piper and huddled around her while we skyped.
She told me that yesterday a man came in who had huge machete gashes on his upper arm. She and her cousin were sitting next to him and all of a sudden his arm started gushing onto her cousin’s coloring book. The nurses gave him something to apply pressure on the wound. Kier asked if she could watch them stitch him up, they said yes. She watched them clean the wound, but there was blood everywhere (more than she’s ever seen, I’m sure). She was starting to feel kinda funny, thought it was something she ate. Then the docs started to stitch up the layers of muscle and then skin.
At this point K said everything in the room started to turn grey and she couldn’t see and then slid down the wall. Maybe there was method in having her stand in the corner to watch. They got her to a bench in the hall and gave her a drink of water. Two nurses and three doctors made sure she was ok (how’s that for excellent care, I tell you). She was feeling a little embarrassed. But this little incident led to the nurses and doctors telling their story of the first time they passed out. They were saying, “At least you didn’t pass out in an operating room where you messed up the sterile environment, like I did.” The one doctor was telling her that before he decided to be a doctor a relative of his, who was a surgeon, allowed him to watch an open-heart surgery. When the chest was open this guy started swaying back and forth and one of the nurses had to pull him back because he almost fainted in to the body cavity.” They all had a good laugh about that and Kier felt much better. Nonetheless, she decided to work in the pharmacy for the rest of the day. Today she is going back for more blood.
Paul returned from the mantrek, tired, dirty, very sore, a few Q’s lighter, but alive. He said the hike up San Pedro, from the Santiago side is brutally tough. He has scrapes on his arms and legs. There is barely a path on that side, you mostly forge your own way. Mostly you’re climbing straight up, using hands and feet, leaning into the mountain. He said they managed not to get soaked because of the clever engineering they did with their tarp (which means they were lucky there was no wind blowing rain sideways).
During the night one of the guys had sandwiches in his backpack, but since it was raining, they had all their packs under the tarp with them. There was some kind of rodent that came in the night to eat the sandwiches. The guys who has done the hike 20 times before says they don’t have racoons but rather an animal that is slightly smaller than an opposom but looks like a rat. Lovely. Reminds of the R.O.U.S’s in Princess Bride (rodents of unusual size in the fire swamp).
They walked down the other side, the tourist trail side. They passed a group hiking up with the guide, and the guide was trying to get money out of the guys. I knew there were police-banditos and no-name-banditos, didn’t realize there were guide-banditos who would try to rob you in front of their tour group. The guys laughed at him (bandito humiliation) and kept on their way. At the bottom of the trail there was another little hut someone had set up. He said each person owed him 100Q, then he went to 50Q. He said if they didn’t pay he would call the Guatemalan government and the guys wouldn’t be let out of the country. Difficult to do when you don’t have any names. Then the bandito said the least they could do is buy him a beer. In the end the hikers decided to leave him with 50Q, just so he wouldn’t do something crazy. The youngest guy who was with them has hiked up the volcano 20 times, he didn’t give anything. But then again, he was the only one who had brought a machete with him (something the gringo guys didn’t happen to have in their camping gear).
The local people say one of the reasons there are so many robbers on the trail is to keep people from climbing the mountain. Rumors have it that the crater is where a lot of special plants, sometimes used for medicinal purposes, are being grown. The growers are a bit over-protective, shall we say. Glad I didn’t know that before they went. Paul said from the top of the volcano they could see all the way to the volcan Picaya, which is close to Antigua. That’s an active volcano we’ve climbed up twice. Even the guy who had been up 20 times before said he’d never seen it so clear at the top. Their sunrise was rained out, but they still had a good time. The guys took a pick-up to San Pedro, had lunch, then took a boat back to Pana.
Madi had trapeze practice after school. She walked over there with her teacher. Since we would have had to go into town anyway to pick her up, we went for supper at Circus Bar. It was a nice evening with the two girls except that Madi slammed her fingers in the saloon type doors and was in a bit of pain throughout the meal.
Cali’s frog blog: Yesterday I had lots and lots of fun. When I went to school we wrote down what did during Semana Santa. Then we had math. We are multiplying 2 numbers by 2 numbers but I don’t know how to do that. We are also doing objectives in subtraction which I also don’t get. Then I washed my hands and I got my lunch. Guess what was there, a spider in my lunch the size of the back of my hand. I screamed. My friend asked me what’s wrong and I told her there is a spider in my lunch, but she couldn’t see it. I dumped all my stuff on to the table along with the spider and then she screamed and said, “There’s a spider in your lunch!” Jonathan rushed over and smacked it with one of my containers. Henry said once it’s dead you have to flick it away and then blow on your flicker finger to get rid of spider germs. Those boys sure know how to deal with spiders. Then I ate my lunch in peace. We went outside and then we had computer class, then English. The English teacher was late so we played. Instead of English I painted my flower picture. After school I went to the family’s house. I hung my picture up in the tuk tuk to dry. Jose copied my picture because he loved it. Then we went to PanaSuper and got more frozen blueberries. I eat those as a snack on the way home, but only if we are walking. If we are riding on my mom’s bike I have to wait until I get home so I don’t get blue on her shirt. When we got home dad was back. He was sleeping in the hammock because he was tired from his walk. We went to Circus Bar for supper and then we walked home.