Right, while my photos (hopefully) update, I will (hopefully) update as well. I'm going to talk mainly about the finca (farm) I went to on Thursday, as it was truly a wonderous experience. In contrast, Friday sucked. But, as a very wise man has just reminded me, I'm on an adventure...it is just that sometimes I'm on the adventure I don't want to be having. Thursday I got up at 6 and we piled into the mini-van for the almost three hour trip to the finca. Tim, our guide, works at a place called Café Consciencia, and the point of his org is to help these collective farms get and stay on their feet. To give you an example, the farm we visited has a 10 year mortage of $250,000 at 12% interest, with only a one year grace period when they started out. The farm had been abandoned for over 10 years, and they basically needed to start from scratch, building their homes, clearning the land, establishing new coffee plants. This on top of the fact that most of them had just spent 10 years or more in the mountains, fighting the government and military. Needless to say, they haven't paid their debt off. I'll talk more about one of the campesino's reactions later on. I rode in the front middle death seat, thanks to my ever present motion sickness. The death seat was made deadlier by the fact that it was lacking a seat belt, an innovation which caused me to ride in the back on the trip home. We were greeted by Gloria, who's nombre de guerro was Teresa. Everybody who fought as a guerrilla had a different name at the time. Gloria was very young when her father was arrested and ¨disappeared¨ by the police. She and her family fled to Chiapas. She and some other youth returned when she was 14 and joined the movement. She was a guerrilla for 10 years. She told us about how it affected her life, and the first piece of evidence for her was the fact that she didn't have her first child until after the fighting had stopped. Gloria told us about the equality between men and women during the fighting. She said that, for example, men would rotate with women cooking. I asked her if the equality from the fighting has translated into more equality now. On her finca, it has. She cited the fact that on their cooperative, there are 32 votes, one for each adult. This is incredibly important and compelling, as on many fincas, and indeed, throughout history, the one-vote-per-family model has been the means for the disempowerment of women. I admit, I was pressing her pretty hard (though politely) partially due to my own experiences, partially due to conversations with my maestra, who argues that there has been a lot of talk in Guate, but not a whole lot of action when it comes to greater equality. We can get more into that later. Despite my reservations, Gloria convinved me that this finca was probably pretty progressive in that sense. In addition to the 32 votes, there are women on the executive board and, in her house, her husband does some of the reproductive labor traditionally associated with women (cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids, ect.) After the ¨conference¨(Guatemaltecos love this word and use it for the most casual meeting or conversation on any subject political), Gloria, wielding a machete, led us around the finca. After seeing her carry the thing, I think I understand why her husband helps out around the house. The finca is cooperatively owned, but about a year ago (nine years after they gained possession), they divided the plots and now each family farms a separate plot, or several small plots, some on flat land, some on hills. They still pool the final product and divide the earnings. The finca is also organic, and they use specific plants to help keep away different blights and refresh the soil. In order to achieve the ¨shade grown¨ part of the shade-grown coffee, they also plant bananas, which protects the coffee plants and, of course, offers a second product for sale...organic bananas. When I went to get a shot of the ¨trunk¨ of the bananna ¨tree¨ I stepped into a pile of hormingos enojados, red ants which promptly started masticating my leg. I learned that banana trees, which aren't actually trees, take about six months to grow to maturity, offer fruit once, and then die. Also, angry ants live in the rotting leaves. The finca has built two lookouts, one of which seemed a bit shaky to me. They are trying to get into eco-tourism in order to boost their profits, as the coffee growing is difficult and not always entirely profitable. Tim on the ride home told us a little bit more about the fair trade movement from down here on the ground. Of course, fair trade is a big deal in Seattle, and one of the largest fair trade coffee roasters is located there. In fact, they had just been down visiting Santa Anita a few days before we arrived. So basically, for those who don't know, fair trade is an international movement that is actually based more in Germany than in the states, at least from the coffee perspective. They've set a ¨fair trade¨ price for coffee, tea, chocolate, and other products. The deal is that you pay a bit more, and they guarantee that the people who are harvesting the product are getting a fair wage. There are a few problems. Firstly, the cost to be fair trade certified just jumped to about $700 a year. On Santa Anita, this means they need to pay this in addition to the fees to get organically certified and in addition to their loan. Second, companies like Starbucks buy a very small portion of fair trade coffee, and subsidize the extra expense through the purchase of non-fair trade coffee. Thus, though you may buy a cup of ¨fair trade¨ coffee from Starbucks, in reality, you aren't guaranteeing that the workers are gaining a fair wage for their work. Thirdly, the price for a pound of coffee has been the same...I think $1.30 or so, for ten years. That all being said, I can guarantee you that I won't be drinking anything but fair trade any more, after having visited this place and heard their stories. After the walk around the farm, we had a second conference with another former guerrilla, this one a man. Unfortunately, my fellow travellers were asking stupid questions but, since I had dominated the first conference, I let it lie. Suffice it to say, this is an incredibly progressive group of people. They fit the profile of guerrillas in the larger historical context. Most of the started fighting because they saw wrongs perpetrated against their families, or they recognized that the stranglehold large landholders had over the country was completely unjust and the reason for their poverty. When they were given the opportunity, they purchased a farm collectively, because they recognized from their experience in the war that working collectively was their best chance of success. Likewise, they've joined the fair trade and organic movements because they see the future. They took the lesson they learned in the war and have applied them to their own lives. Hence, women with votes. I have tried very hard the entire time I've been here to listen to the whole story, and not to apply my liberal Western standards and conclusions. On the way home I was talking with a former priest who moved down here in 1980, in the midst of the worst violence, because they thought their daughter would be safer in school here than in the States. More on him later, but the point is that he told me stories of people who joined the movement because it paid better than normal work, or because they had personal vendettas. This complication of the narrative, on top of the mind-blowingly affirmative experience on the farm has served to remind me that the point of my studies is to complicate the narrative, instead of making broad generalizations that suite my own needs. Many of the young, passionate, liberal people down here want very much for the guerrillas to be heros, and many of them are. The government and military perpetrated some truly horrific actions, killing up to 200,000 Guatemalans. The agreements of the peace accords of 1996 still haven't been fully implemented. But, with the work of the people on the farm, people like Hilda, the Mayan woman who is helping to empower other Mayan women, and with the work of people like the maetros in my school...Carlos the future lawyer, Edna the single mother of four who divorced her abusive spouse and still is given a hard time for it, and is more motivated than anybody I've seen, Olga, the owner, who sponsors scholarships for young girls with proceeds from the school...I truly have hope for the future of this country, despite the negative news from Amnesty and other organizations. As a closer, the other former guerrilla told us what would happen if the bank tried to foreclose on their farm. They are fully aware that the terms of their loan are not fully just, especially in comparison to other farms. They fought for social and economic justice once, and they'll do it again. He said that they wouldn't leave that farm alive and, trust me, I believe it.