Tag: turkey

Emmy, Guatemala, and a Turkey!

Brendan Scott

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thanksgiving is a time for turkeys and families or since my Grandpa used to call me a turkey maybe it’s just a time for turkeys.  For the first time in two years, I was able to spend my Thanksgiving with a turkey . . . I mean family member.  Emmy, my little sister, traveled down to visit me and my students (I think she spent more time with them than she did with me).

Having family visiting me was a delectable, no wait that’s just how good the Thanksgiving feast was at my school.  Emmy and I went zip lining, hiked up La Muela (my favorite hike), and went to Antigua so we could summit a volcano and spend an exorbitant amount of time shopping.  Emmy is a shopaholic and I just wanted to spend time with her, so I obliged.  We weaved in and out of the artisan market as if we were skilled lab rats sniffing out the cheese.  Emmy filled her entire second suitcase with gifts, and not all of them were for herself!

Before I list all of the gifts that Emmy bought, let’s back up to our time in Xela.  Emmy stayed with the Figeuroa’s.  They have a beautiful house and Dani, my student who’s just a year younger than Emmy, graciously shared her room.  The Figeuroa’s have been great to me over the last two years, so it was nice for Emmy to meet them.  Upon her arrival they invited us over for dinner.  I’d forgotten to tell them Emmy doesn’t eat meat, I guess I’m the turkey, but she ate it anyway.  Later that night I baked a pizza and we played games.  It was a real blessing to have Emmy here and for her to have a beautiful place to stay.

While staying in Xela was nice, it couldn’t top our trip down to the coast where we zip lined.  Zip lining with Emmy was amazing.  Two years ago when she came down with my parents, the only thing she’d wanted to do was zip line, but the course we’d picked left us both unsatisfied.  So, I made sure we tried it again.  Emmy and Dani started off the day terrified for their lives.  I had to reassure Dani several times that she wasn’t going to die. Dani’s a turkey because she assured me she was going to die while we hiked up to the top of the mountain before we zipped down.  I think she thought the hike was going to kill her.  However, by the end of the trip they were so excited that the girls were trying to spit on cars as they cruised over the top of the highway.

Taking Emmy up La Muela was a blast, literally.  La Muela used to be an active volcano and what is left now is everything the blast left behind.  When she’d visited before, her hip wasn’t strong enough to do the hike.  I guess that’s what happens when you dislocated it twice.  Dislocated hips sure are turkeys.  Yet this time Emmy made it up to the top like a champ.  The view at the summit of La Muela is beautiful.  You can see all of mountainous Xela.  Sharom, another one of my students who hiked with us, kept saying, “I can see my house!!”  She also said stuff like, “I can’t make it.  I’m done. No, really, I’m done.”  What a turkey.  Fortunately she made it all the way up to the top.  Even though she said she’d never do the hike again, I’m pretty sure she’s proud of herself.  Seeing my little sister in one of my favorite places in Guatemala was a real blessing.

I think Emmy enjoyed the hike almost as much as she enjoyed playing turkey tag with my kindergarten class.  All of the little kids were hamming it up, or should I say turkeying it up while Emmy was around.  They love to show off how cute they are to new people.  And you can’t get much cuter than the kindergarten class.

When Emmy and I finally made it to Antigua I was ready for some brother and sister bonding time.  She was ready to shop.  She also wanted to see lava so I took her up Pacaya, the evil volcano that delayed my fight home last May.  The hike was easy, but the guide decided to take us to where the lava wasn’t flowing.  What a turkey!  We did get to roast marsh mellows but, it wasn’t over flowing lava.  I guess nothing is perfect.  Even though we didn’t get to see lava, my time with Emmy was perfect.  I’m glad my turkey season was graced by my turkey of a little sister.

A Tikal Thanksgiving

Brendan Scott

Bruce Cockburn, one of my favorite musicians, wrote a song about Night Trains, which was probably inspired by a trip he took. I wanted to quote the song, but it has nothing to do with Mayans or Thanksgiving, but I digress.

Anyway, I took trip on a Night Bus to Tikal, a Mayan ruin, for Thanksgiving. I have no plans of writing a song about it, but I do have to say one thing, one of the passengers sitting in front of me had an old boom-box cd player and was blasting, if blasting is the correct word, old 80’s soft rock. After that I had the song ” Eclipse of the Heart” stuck in my head for most of the day.

Strangely the horrible Bonnie Tyler song and not Bruce Cockburn’s song fit my trip, because the Mayan’s were known to follow the lunar calendar. Whenever there was an eclipse, they ripped the hearts out of their enemies in sacrifice to their gods. In fact, most of the gigantic temples in Tikal were built in correlation with the sun or moon.

As I walked around the ancient buildings, I kept wondering what it would be like to walk around New York a thousand years after it had been deserted. I saw in the 2009 September issue of National Geographic what New York looked like when Henry Hudson discovered it 4oo years ago. Check this issue out, because the urban takeover on the island of Manhattan is very similar to the jungle takeover in Tikal, except in the opposite direction.

 Manhattan, once a forest, now is a gigantic city and Tikal, once a sprawling Mayan metropolis, now is a gigantic jungle. During Tikal’s peak, it was the epicenter for much of the Mayan world. Now it’s a national park in the middle of the jungle. So, as you look at the pictures below try to envision Tikal as it once was, a thriving city. The temples were dyed red to symbolize life. The grounds were stone. It was immaculate. It was alive.

Yet, for the city to continue to live the Mayan’s believed that someone had to die. It was their circle of life. Blood was sacred, life giving, and so at one time blood spilled down the temples, as the priests ripped out the hearts of their unfortunate human sacrifices. Mayans believed that when blood was spilled in sacrifice to the gods life was renewed. Mysteriously something, maybe famine, war, or overpopulation, ripped the heart out of the Mayan culture leaving it dead. But because of the death of the Mayan culture, many Guatemalan’s make a living off of the national park. The Mayans understood the connection between life and death. Unfortunately they didn’t know about Christ, the man who broke the cycle and quenched the need for sacrifices. Yet, for me, walking around their sacrificial monuments pointed me to Christ, because they reminded me of the world’s need for a savior.