Day 12: Guatemala City

When we arrived in Guatemala City yesterday, we weren't exactly sure what our agenda was. We only had one person we knew we wanted to contact and neither of us had ever met him, and the only thing we really knew about the city is that everyone told us to be extremely careful and not to go out at night. It's so bad here that apparently people are even known to steal glasses from each other.

No robberies yet though.

We were talking to the guy at the desk of the hotel we are staying at (ironically dubbed the Colonial Hotel, which is surprisingly nice) and it turned out that he often volunteered at a human development organization in town. Lucky us! He gave us the info, and this morning we walked over there. The people there were very nice and taught us quite a bit about the current state of things. They also directed us to some other good resources. One of the places was just a couple blocks away, in the Cathedral. As we walked over there, we noticed there was a whole gaggle of media folks outside the Cathedral covering a story about students and teachers standing up against government attempts to reform the educational system, in what is apparently a negative way. They were meeting with the Cardinal today. It seems that the Guatemalan Catholic Church plays a very prominent role in the the human rights struggle here, and liberation theology is apparently a strong interest of Susanna's.

Well, the Cathedral's human rights office was closed, so we decided to talk to some of these media people. They were very friendly and gave us lots of info. Tonight we are having dinner with some Guatemalan TV news anchor...I didn't catch his name...and we a lot more potential contacts to work with now.

I have to go now because we have a meeting.
More soon.