Work

Once again, it's been a while since I rapped at ya. Since that has become more the rule than the exception, I guess I should stop commenting about it. But I do appreciate those of you who keep checking in every once in a while even when the site goes for a couple weeks without updates.

Outside of work, there hasn't been too much Guatemala-centric excitement of late. Your correspondent has been filling his weekends with movies that people in America saw five months ago and occasional dinner parties with fellow gringos. But that's the same stuff he'd do in the US, so it doesn't seem worth reporting on.

Work has been a different story, though for reasons of the potential for reader interest and reasons of not wanting to get fired for blabbing about work on the internet, I generally can't go into too much detail here.

The big exciting news, which was on the front page of the paper here Thursday, and thus has a pretty firm foothold on "unclassified" at this point, is that my boss's boss is coming to town. For some reason, he feels it necessary to visit Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, and Mexico, as well, although we all suspect that Guate is the driving force behind the trip. I'm not to tell you much more beyond what's in the press release, but I will divulge that a visit from the Big Cheese tends to send an Embassy from "busy" into "bonkers" mode.

Prior to the arrival of full-scale bonkers mode, I had been working on some other projects for the economic section of the Embassy, which gave me a couple chances to get out and about. There was a weekend trip to the south side of Lake Atitlán, which is one of the loveliest spots in Guatemala, but has already been thouroughly described in these pages. On previous tourist trips, your correspondent did not visit any of the temporary shelters built to house the residents of entire towns that were destroyed by mudslides in Hurricane Stan. That has now been rectified.

The other, shorter trip I went on was to the small town of Pachalum. This is a town of only about 10,000 people -- except about half of the male population now lives in the greater Newark, NJ region. An interesting place, and one day perhaps the double-top-secret report of the visit there will be declassified, or obtained by the New York Times in a Freedom of Information Act request. I'm sure the loyal readership will manage to wait. In the meantime, enjoy the above picture, taken on a previous trip to Santiago Atitlán, demonstrative of the fact that no matter how long one lives in Guatemala, he may never tire of seeing people carry crazy stuff on their heads.