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If you would like to send Levi and me important international news, please do! (iraftery at gmail.com and lpulkkinen at hotmail.com)

Kristin of Montague Mansion notoriety offered this tidbit:
Dustin Diamond, aka Screech from Saved by the Bell has, in order to save his house and maybe avoid doing more cameos in made for TV movies has made a sex tape that may or may not be sold to Larry Flynt. He has made the sex tape on purpose, I think it's called Screech Gone Wild, depicting a "kinky threesome with two women" and "something called a mister Sanchez" according to MSN news. That's a dirty Sanchez, I'm guessing, and it sounds weird when someone your father's age says that.

In other news, reports show that more Guatemalan women are being killed in Guatemala. The why and who are unclear to me.

This is a photo of one of Guatemala's many stray dogs. This dog here is being cared for by an Australian waitress in town with very long braids who has become a bit of a mama to many of the strays in town. (The photo of the kitten is there because it's cute.)

What to do with the dogs has polarized the villages surrounding Lago de Atitlan. Those who hate the perros complain that they are too numerous, that they climb onto restaurant tables to eat leftovers and that they hump each other in broad daylight.

But the dog haters don't just complain - they kill the dogs. Every three months, locals and a handful of gringos place poisoned meat in the streets. It takes about eight hours for the dogs to die, during which they vomit up their stomachs and intestines.

A few careful sniffers have figured out they shouldn't eat the meat. They include Missy, a black and white half Husky who won't be claimed and Perro, a boxer-pitbull mix who attached himself to Levi and me in San Marcos.

(Levi ineffectively tried to push Perro away by petting him and saying, 'Perro, shoo, shoo.' Perro, sensing a dog lover in Levi, stayed close, and Levi was positively thrilled.)

A few people have rebelled against the practice of dog poisoning. A veterinarian in San Marcos La Laguna offers free sterilization and free rabies shots to dog owners. Dog lovers in San Pedro are trying to offer similar services.

When I found out about this , I was appalled. But a wandering Quebecoise named Maxine told me that it could be worse - in a coastal Mexican village, locals gather one day a year to shoot the dogs on the beach. And Levi reminded me that without animal control in the United States, we would have a similar problem.

A dog poisoning is scheduled in coming days in San Pedro. As Levi and I walked to the market this morning, we wondered if the poisoning was today, as many dogs were laying about lethargically.

(This email bounced back from all Skagit Valley Herald people except for Marta, members of Levi's family and a few others. Therefore, I post it here.)

Dear families and friends,

Levi and i miss reporting. we miss writing and pressing unwilling people for details about their lives. which is why, this morning, we went on a mission to find out about the howlers of san marcos la laguna, a quiet lakeside town.

here´s what happened: levi and i were completely freaked out when, around 8 p.m., howling erupted from all over this tiny tropical village. at first we thought the new age people were to blame, then we thought it might be a cult. as the howling continued, we agreed it had to be a religious mob intent on breaking into our thatched-roof cabin and, most likely, killing us. levi put a chair against the door and to relieve our anxiety, we listened to ¨Meet the Press¨ on Levi´s ipod. I have never felt more soothed by the sounds of Dick Cheney´s voice, assuring us that there was plenty reason to invade Iraq.

The howling, magnified through loudspeakers, went on until about midnight and started up again at 6 a.m. come morning, i asked the hotel manager what had been going on -- this involved me doing an imitation of the howling and repeating ¨noches¨ -- but she denied having heard anything.

Levi and I headed to the small pebbled beach on the lake and found a very tanned woman in an itty-bitty orange bikini who explained. It turned out this woman was a former British journalist who had followed the hippie trail to San Marcos in the 1970s and had since retired to San Marcos. She explained that U.S. influence in the 1980s included turning Mayans into evangelicals. The government had associated Catholics priests with the guerrillas, and many people switched their religious allegiances to evangelical sects, which were pro-government and pro-business in Guatemala. Not surprisingly, Guatemala has become the least Catholic country in Central America, with just 60 percent claiming Catholicism and 40 percent claiming evangelism.

After swimming with the retired reporter and picking her brain (¨Frankly, darling, I´m retired. I try not to get my head into these things¨), we headed to the Moonfish Cafe to ask more people. But just as we were getting the juicy stuff, a small group of local and gringa woman ran by with machetes, determined to catch a purse snatcher. When I mused aloud that it was a funny form of justice, a French hippie woman snapped at me that the Guatemalan police couldn´t give a care about San Marcos.

Anyhow. Enjoy the photos. I included two of Antigua -- pretty and dull -- to show you what I meant when I said that Antigua reminded me of the north side of Dublin on a sunny day. Maman and Dad: please forward this onto Hana and Rob. I don´t have their emails at my fingertips. A public thank you to my parents who have been so helpful after I got all my money and credit card stolen, not to mention my skirt slashed opèn with a razor blade.

Bisous bisous,

Isolde

San Marcos was crazy. This photo was taken about an hour before we started hearing the evangelicals from all over the small village chanting. Levi and I spent half the night wondering if we were hearing a cult, but locals later informed us that the indigenous peoples in San Marcos switched their allegiances to evangelism during the war. It´s a U.S.-style evangelism favored by the government. During the civil war, many Catholic priests in Guatemala sided with the guerillas, and many people joined evangelical sects out of fear. In San Marcos, there are about six evangelical sects, that have about 10 parishoners each. At night, they howling (or singing, the hotel manager tried to convince me) to compete with each other. The howling is magnified by speakers and, with the wind and dogs barking, makes the town feel haunted.

I have so many thoughts and so many observations in just a few days of being in Guatemala and Levi has to go to the bathroom, so I have to make this quick. In short, Levi and I arrived in Guatemala City on Thursday morning and took a terrifying ride into Antigua, which the guide books promised would be the Paris of Guatemala. Not so much. It´s more like the north side of Dublin on a sunny day. There are some colonial ruins to visit, including a huge church that this fallen Catholic bee-lined to. (What is it with self-hating Catholics needing to visit churches? My uncle Jean-Paul´s ideal vacation is spent visiting churches, and he HATES the Catholic church.)

From Antigua, we took a chicken bus (a garrish, brightly painted, retired U.S. school bus) into Panajachel, which was supposed to be a cheap ride in but ended up costing me a skirt, a debit card and about $100. Why? A seemingly nice Guatemalan woman sitting next to me sliced through my skirt with a razor to access my money pouch.

Feeling disprited, humiliated and poor, we ventured into Panajachel. (Levi was short on quetzals and the local bank machines had no more money to offer, and I, of course, had nothing.) Given our chicken bus experience, it was a fitting day to arrive -- a US citizen was nearly lynched by a mob of 40 locals who said he had raped an 11 year old Guatemalan girl.

In Pana, we stayed at a small hostel called Hotel Sanchez, where a Maya woman cooked vegetables over a stove and a mother hen clucked about the courtyard with her baby chicks in tow. So cute, right? I thought so until about 1 a.m. when I was reminded that, where there are baby chicks, there are daddy roosters more jet-lagged than you. They will crow at 1 a.m. They will crow at 3 a.m. They will crow until they can crow no longer, until it is time for you to get out of bed. I was reminded of farm camp in the fourth grade, when a classmate of mine replied to the rooster´s crows with, ´´I want Chicken McNuggets!¨

Sadly, something bad happened at Hotel Sanchez, though what was unclear. The wonderfully kind Maya woman was sobbing later that night, and in the morning, the older boys hung around the courtyard, some kicking stones, the others with their hands in their heads.

On Sunday, we arrived in San Pedro, where there are bare-footed hippies, more evangelical churches than Lynden, and, of course, many Maya people. Here, everybody speaks Spanish poorly -- the locals and the tourists. It´s a bit nice, really, though also pretty confusing.

The evangelical influence is overwhelming, but so too are the number of malnourished children we come across. And though everyone seems to think that the Maya people are very friendly -- don´t get me wrong, most are -- there´s this sense that we´re really in their way. Spray painted on the wall by our hotel are the words, ´Gringos go home.´

All right. Levi really has to go to the bathroom now and has given me more than just stink eye. I´m being unfair, really -- Levi has been a wonderful traveler and companion and we´ve had so many laughs in just one week.

Soon, I will have photos and you won´t have to peruse these ramblings. Much love,

Isolde