Good Thing There Are Iraqi Frenchmen in Chimaltenango

Hi guys,

All continues to go not as planned in Guatemala, but hey you know those interview questions when you have to come up with kick ass stories for which you aren´t culpable, well I have more now.

Everythings going great with the survey. In the last month we´ve seen more of this country than most Guatemalans see in their lives, we´ve seen natural beauty to match Eden, and I can at least hold multi hour conversations in Spanish even if I still sound like those the equivalent of Chinese grocers in the Sunset. It looks like we can probably get 1000 of these surveys, including about 6500 people probably (since each ones about a household and households are pretty big).

But then on Saturday one of our backpacks got stolen on a bus. Which really was rather unfortunate seeing as it was valuable out of all proportion to its size: money, wallet, credit cards, drivers licence, passport, camera, USB backup, journal, master copies of all of our documents, shuffle, two pairs of glasses, books, oh yeah, and our computer, with a bunch of our data. It really was a nice little moment stopping traffic there and yelling at the bus driver in Spanish for not locking the back door while hundreds of people swarmed us to take part in the melee. Thank God there was this autoshop owner there who it turned out was an Iraqi who´d moved to France and gotten citizenship then wandered over to Guatemala to fall in love and run a mechanics shop while living off the fortune he made on US defense contracts to make guns for Israeli soldiers. Oh yeah, he was Catholic.

So now we´re leaving Guatemala a little early because we can´t do the last third of our work (entering data in Excel, ohsomuchfunyouhavenoidea) without our computer. But we´ve still made quite the run of it. Suffice it to say I´ve definitely never spoked so much in my life nor been this unstressedout in all of college. Quite a good little country for me. Like Andrew I´ve had quite a few other random adventures, throwing myself off of bridges and spraining my back, talking politics and drinking Cuban rum late into the night with Jesuit priests in no electricity little villages where the people speak 8 different languages, etc. But those until later.

Glad to hear that everyone is at least alive and more or less well. Miss you all.

P.S. Andrew you owe me a copy of the book, which you´ve owed me for about a year now so it´s really gathered interest and you probably owe me all of your articles you´re writing down there now as well. Oh, and Stegner´s Angle of Repose is amazing. I love Stanford, everyone should read it.