The road between our village and the closest town is about 40 minutes of twisting gravel and mud. Every rainy season, there is this part that washes out in a big landslide. OK, maybe two or three parts. Anyways, when this happens, a team of about 50 villagers with hoes turns out, and they pile all the landslide dirt back up where the road was. It lasts long enough to get the microbus over it until the next big downpour.

Imagine our surprise and joy yesterday, when the microbus stopped halfway to town and we were forced to walk a few hundred yars to other waiting microbusses. Joy? Yes indeed… because the town was working on the landslide area once again. But THIS time, they were fixing it BEFORE it broke (gasp) and, better yet, they were doing it with concrete! A concrete road, this far out in the boonies? It’s amazing. Sure, it’s only about 60 feet long, but that’s looking a gift horse in the mouth. The important part is that it’s built right, and won’t wash away in the next big rain. And, like all the work here, it’s getting done with jelq’ab, or Mayan teamwork. The villagers from the area pitched in the labor, and somehow the COCODE Don Tomax talked the Mayor of Santa Eulalia into donating 150 sacks of concrete. I’ll have to keep that in mind, if any of my latrine projects get rolling.

Unfortunately, this sense of collaboration isn’t present in all the communities here. Since there can be no traffic over the concrete for a few days, and it’s a one-lane road, for the time being there isn’t access to our village. Emily was talking to our neighbor, though, and found out that there actually IS a back road, but almost no one is using it to get around the construction. Why? One of the tiny villages it goes through is now charging a toll, a “construction season special.” Can you believe that? It’s another example of the greed and self-centeredness that sometimes sneaks out and makes it so hard for Guatemala to pull itself up by its bootstraps.