Enjoy life by traveling!: Don’t eat this Guatemalan cheese wrapped in banana leaves!!!

This can affect you bad pain in the stomach and give a sleepless night, like I had it from Sunday to Monday.

I was on the coffee farm ‘Loma Linda’ near Retalhuleu expecting staying at first two months volunteering and, if I like it, stay longer. But after a few days I changed my mind. Why? Well, the first day I helped in a garden a man is developing, showing to the others that it is possible to work without chemical stuff. Great idea!! But after more or less two hours I had so much bites, unbelievable. Here aren’t mosquitoes, but flies which are a lot tinier and you can’t feel it when they bite you. Terrible! So I counted 48 at the left hand and 25 bites at the right hand! The second day I helped the same man with his worm project. We had to feed the worms which kept me busy like one and a half hour. He is producing fertilizer with the worms. People can buy that very cheap and use it instead of chemical fertilizer. The problem is, it is very heavy, so people prefer to buy a little bag of chemical fertilizer than carry a really heavy bag over hours to their land. And after this day, there weren’t something to do for the volunteers, so I was sitting every day in the hotel, waiting for….what I was actually waiting for? So I feel that I wasted time there doing nothing all the day. I decided to leave at the same time with the other volunteers Courtney and Ryan and head back to Xela.

Loma Linda from the Albergue

waterfall in the jungle of Loma Linda

But, I will tell a bit about ‘Loma Linda’. This community has about 120 families and is a lot bigger than ‘Santa Anita la Union’ and ‘Nueva Alianza’, for example. There are three camionetas every day going to Reu (Retalhuleu) and back. The first starts between 5 and 6 o’clock in the morning. They have a church and all of them are catholic Christians. Courtney (she and her husband already visited some coffee farms) told me, that you of course might have another religion, but then you have to leave the community. They don’t sell alcohol here which doesn’t mean that there aren’t people with alcohol problems. But these people have to go to Reu every day for drinking. Every family has a lot of children, somewhere between 5 and 12. Here is one school until 15 years old kids. Older ones need to go Reu to school. The families have different sources to earn money, some only life from their land, other also have a little store or a bakery or build furniture or are teachers or even camionetas drivers! This farm isn’t 100% organic; there are two groups, an organic and a conventional, which is almost 50\50. The day I arrived I asked if the land of the families is far away or not. Pascual told me that they are not far away, but some people have to walk 2 1\2 hours. Imagine that, if you want to start working at 8am you have to leave home at 5:30am. Then you have to walk through the rainforest up and down and in the rainy season it is very slippery. On the way back a lot of people carry fire wood, vegetables or coffee, I also have seen some with bamboo. What they have is a great waterfall very close, it is like 20 minutes walk, you can see some pictures. There is also a volcano very close, who is active and there is always volcanic ash on the street. Ok, that should be enough for today; soon I will tell you what I’m planning to do when I’m not working on a coffee farm! Enjoy the pictures!