This morning, Nas Palas came knocking on my door to borrow my saw. This happens somtimes, because my saw is one of the best in the village. Not because it came in my official Peace Corps Toolkit (TM), but because I took about an hour and sharpened the darn thing. The locals all thought I was nuts sharpening a SAW, but he who laughs last laughs hardest.

After I finished my breakfast, I went outside to see what he was up to. Here is a picture of Nas and Galindo making a planotierra, or “earth-flattener”. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of things in the Guatemalan highlands are still done the old fashioned way since it’s so steep in these mountains that heavy machinery doesn’t work well. There are no tractors for plowing; they do all their agriculture with a hoe. Likewise, there are no bulldozers (with one rare exception) so sites are graded by hand.

Once they’d finished two planotierras, they called a bunch of guys to help them work. They are starting work on a house down the hill from us, for his eldest son Ixtup (who is working in the US). Here we see the Mayan Bulldozer in action: two guys pull it, and one guy steers it from behind. I asked Nas if they ever used a horse to do the pulling, and he looked kindof baffled. The Mayans don’t have a cultural history of using draft animals, and I certainly don’t know anything about workhorses, so I settled for just telling him an anecdote about how our grandfathers used to plow with horses back in the 1800s. He always likes to hear those sorts of stories.