Long. Interesting?

Trying to write about my experiances at the mountain school is really hard. There's so much, and it's hard for me to get across in writing. Also, I don't want to bore anyone.

The mountain school, a side project of the school I'm studying at in Xela is about an hour and a half outside of the city by chicken bus. It's in the middle of a bunch of fincas (coffee, ect.. plantations) and a few mayan communities. The two communities the school works with are made up finca workers who organised after the finca owners stopped paying them. Both were awarded the land they live on in settlements with the finca owners. This is super rare. Most of the families still work on fincas, and earn about $2 or $3 a day if they're lucky. The minimum wage in Guatemala for finca workers is about $5 a day (12 hour days), but it's rare that anyone gets this. I ate all my meals with a family in one of the communities. Intense. So far from my world that I can't even begin to describe it. 9 people lived in a house about the size of my apartment in Denver. There was one phone between the two communities.

I visited a finca that Starbucks buys from.. so weird. It was one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, and seeing all the equipment for processing the coffee was really interesting, but I also got to see the armed guards at the gates that keep families working 12 hour days. At the finca they told me that Starbucks pays a good price for the coffee,.but that the finca owner keeps it all and the workers don't see any of it. I said that Starbucks has a responsibility to buy from fincas that actually pay their workers. I failed to mention that I used to work for starbucks, and that I earned more in an hour than a family earns in a day. Later in the week I got to visit a finca that the workers occupied and now own themselves. Such a difference from the Starbucks one. So much better.

On a less important note, I spent a lot of time lounging, partied a little bit, and ate like a million mangoes. They were five for a Q. There's 7.5 Qs to a dollar. I made some friends and it's nice to know people now that I'm back in Xela. Took lots of pictures. Read stories to the kids in the community. Traveled to the nearest town the way the locals do it, standing up in the back of a pickup. Ate more mangoes.

Today was my first day of classes in Xela. I love the school. My teacher is making me talk a lot which is good, but hard. I'm learning a lot of the espanol, and possibly more about the political situation here. Ah, there's so much to write about. No time. Mas tarde.