Toasting marshmellows in the plancha at the nieghbors:

My no hunting sign in my coffee finca/plot:

A bee swarm on the sunflower:

The view from on top of one of the temples.

Tikal is the most famous site of Mayan ruins in Guatemala.

Then the coffee needs to dry after washing. They do this by spreading the seeds out on large patios in the sun. Every so often, the beans need to be turned/raked, which creates lines in the coffee, its kind of like mowing the lawn. Then the coffee is packed into bags and stored in a wear house until it can be shipped to another place for quality control and exportation. In most cases, the toasting and grinding of coffee takes place in the consuming country and not at the cooperative.

After the coffee is depulped, it sits in large concrete tubs to ferment for 36 (?) hours. The fermenting gets rid of the slimy residue still left on the bean. After fermenting, the beans are washed and seperated in long canals of water. Better quality beans sink and move slowly down the canal and lower quality beans float and move quickly down the canals.

Then the coffee cherries are de-pulped, seperating the coffee beans from the fruit. The fruit pulp and sent to concrete tubs to be composted with worms.

Coffee is grown as a small tree/bush in the understory of a forest. The coffee beans are the seeds inside red berries, called coffee cherries. Coffee pickers go around with baskets tied around their waste and are paid by the 100 lbs of coffee beans they pick. Another volunteer compared picking coffee to blueberry picking, which i think is pretty accurate, although the coffee cherries aren´t that good to eat plain (they are pretty sweet though).

Then the coffee is weighed at the coop before being processed.

Each bag of coffee is inspected for garbage, leaves, underripe cherries before it is compiled together to be depulped and processed.

The drying patios and beneficio, more about this later.

The warehouse where we store the coffee.

The office building

Sorry for the lack of posting!

The volunteer we visisted works with a turtle hatchery. We got to help release baby turtles into the ocean. Sorry for the dark photos, the baby turtles are sensitive to light so we could not use a flash.

All the volunteers in my part of the country went to the beach for the weekend. A volunteer is working there is a sea turtle hatchery. The weren´t any directo roads to his site, so we had to put our car (a volunteer´s boyfriend´s pickup) on a ferry and sale through the mangroves.

You probably saw from my past post that my room desperately needed to be painted. The design is from my library at college.

Leechy and Anivo goofing.

Me painting.

Leechy with the broom.

This little girl was actually oblivious to the others behind her.

So soon after I captured my spider from the bathroom, the entire town got the impression that I liked bugs. The night after I captured the spider, one of the ladies I live with came into my groom and with giant grasshopper. The night after that, two kids (Anivo and Leechi), who I had never seen before, knocked on my door with a soda bottle full of bugs. From then on, they came by every night with knew bugs. They also brought a snake, a lizard, and a crab, and the group grew from the two of them to about 10 kids at one time. Thankfully after we pinned them up, and I made a rule that they can´t bring bugs that we already have, their visits have gone down to a couple times a week.

Even another volunteer in the town about 1-2 hours away, heard about it from the bus driver in her town. The driver said, ¨I heard the new volunteer likes bugs.¨

My friend, Leechy, who missed out on the first photo expo.

Me and my bugs.

From left to right: Esmeralda, Jessica, Anivo (Ah neev vo), and his little brother.

The kids with the bug collection.

My family´s dinosaur duck, called a Gonzo.

The spider (actually a whip scorpion) that lives in my bathroom. I told the lady, ¨Fijese que (Guatemalan for Listen here), I can´t drop my pants with that thing crawling around in there.¨ So I captured it. I showed it to her, and she says, in a very serious tone, ¨Why did you capture the small one?¨

Here´s some pictures of my house in my new site. I moved in in early November. I live with a 78 year old lady and her two daughters. I´ll move out to my own place in Feb.

My new address is:

Stephen Zelno

Cuerpo de Paz

Retener En: Oficina de Correo

Mataquescuintla, Jalapa 21007

Guatemala, Centro America

Me and my family on the last day.

My host mom, my neighbor, and me with the Ambassador to Guatemala!

The Sustainable Agriculture trainees

Me and the Jackolantern we made.

Me and the Jackolantern in the dark.

My host brother Oliver and I went around scarying the other volunteers with the Jacklantern. He sat on my shoulders and held the Jackolantern, and we were both covered in sheets and walked around to the other volunteer's houses and knocked on their doors.

This is a picture of us scaring our neighbor.

The Kite we made for the Day of the Dead.

Overlooking Antigua. And the volunteers and our spanish teachers.

River of Lava

Roasting marshmellows over the lava. You can't see it, but there is a river of lava right over the rock I'm standing by. It was like standing in an oven, it was so hot.

Climbing up the volcanoe.

Running down the GIANT dune of ash.

The volcano

Here's the family I stayed with. And another picture of my two host brothers who were missing in the bigger family photo.

Here's some photos of a cave in the tea coop.

We visited volunteers in Coban, a department/state in the northeast. Here's pictures from one volunteer's site, a tea cooperative.

Casa Santo Domingo is one of the nicest hotels in Guatemala. Half of it is a 5 star hotel, the other half is the ruins of an old monastery.

San Simon is an evil saint. He was a god that the Mayans worshipped. When the Spaniards came, they couldn't pronounce his Mayan name, so they called him San Simon. The people worshipped him in secret for a while, and now there are a few shrines of him in Guatemala where you can go and give offerings of alcohol or cigars in turn for a selfish wish. This is my statue/amulete of him. It is suppose to protect me from my enemies.