#1 – I have an irrational fear of bees. I don’t mind spiders, snakes, naked mole rats etc. but bees… no.

#2 – I will eat just about anything once (and typically enjoy it enough to have more). This includes bugs, alligator and puffin to name a few.

#3 – Depending on how you define ‘siblings’ I have been the youngest, the middle, the oldest, the only, the whole and the half at some point.

#4 – I am actually very shy. I didn’t speak until I was 3 and would hide behind my mom’s legs whenever going through the grocery check out. The checkout lady still knows me as the shy girl.

#5 – When I was born my name was Esther Laona. However, according to one parent I didn’t ‘look’ like an Esther Laona and with 10 minutes before leaving the hospital was renamed Brittany Esther. Looking at pictures I think Jabba the Hutt may have been more fitting.

#6 -The only thing of great significance my family can claim is selectively breeding a pepper, aptly named the Staddon Pepper.

#7 – I collect old toy cameras.

#8 – I deeply despise shopping; all types except grocery, school supply, and antique shopping.

#9 – When I was one and a half years old I ate a light bulb off the Christmas tree and swallowed it. Yes, the electricity was on. That was the second time that week my parents had to call poison control because of me

#10 – English isn’t my forte. Friends say I am fluent in ‘Brit-ish’ and my second language is English.

#11 – I love traveling almost more than life itself. I have visited 28 countries and have been on around 250-300 flights.

#12 – My nickname when I was younger was Rip. This derives from the tale of Rip Van Winkle and my ability to sleep anywhere, at any time, for however long.

#13 – I was nicknamed Brittany Brillo Head. That’s pretty self-explanatory.

#14 – On my mother’s side I have 37 cousins.

#15 -  I am 8” taller than my mother. She is vertically challenged.

#16 – I road-tripped-it to Alaska with my father and sister when I was 8. I learnt all about camping in the back of a truck and that sometimes the roadside was a better option than a junction washroom.

#17 – Anytime I use a vacuum I break it. It’s a sign.

#18 – I really hate socks. I would go barefoot everywhere if it was socially acceptable.

#19 –I always put a single chip in my burgers

#20 – My newt committed suicide by escapement. My cactus was killed by love (ie. over watering). My fish ate each other. My dog has epilepsy. I am a crumby pet owner.

There we are. Twenty completely useless facts about yours truly! If you write your own please feel free to leave a comment with a link to your site :)

Just as promised – myself with a camel! Okay, not quite as you may have been expecting but I had never seen a ‘yield to camels’ sign before!  Sure enough as you drove along some of the highways in the United Arab Emirates in the distance you would see a few camels scattered here and there. Little bit different than the herds of cattle you see here in Alberta!

Not being much of a shopper myself one of my favourite excursions from Dubai was going dune bashing – a type of off roading that has me even more convinced I must learn how to drive standard.

The Sheikh Zayed Mosque, located in Abu Dhabi, is the eighth largest mosque in the world and is home to the world’s largest chandelier and carpet. A spectacular piece of architecture to be certain.

With five hours left before flying home it was decided that seeing Dubai from the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa would be a good idea – words cannot describe how rewarding this last minute decision was. The Burj Khalifa currently holds the world’s tallest manmade structure record, standing at 828m – this of course also accounts for the 3m leeway of sway one can feel from the top when the wind picked up.

Thank you so much for looking! That is all for this summer’s trip images so we are now back to our regular programing so be sure to check back soon :)

I have since fallen in love with hummus and pita bread – which has led to a week long search for comparable items back home. For any Calgarians, Kalamata Grocery is the best so far however any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Enough of my chatter, here are a sampling of images from my first trip to Jordan.

Church of St. George. Madaba

Having not yet visited the Grand Canyon I can hardly put it at a relative scale but to step off a comfortable air conditioned bus into 44°C dry heat, and this view, it is hard not to have your breath taken away. The lowest nature reserve in the world.

Wadi Mujib. 410m below sea level.

Crusader Castle – Kerak. Al Karak

Oh Petra. If you ever have the chance you  must go. It is such an amazing experience despite the numerous other tourists. The variance in brilliant colours of the stones and the amazing architecture is something that will be impossible to ever forget.

Toonie sized beetle in the Siq leading to Petra. Please rest assured however I did not make this one dinner. If you aren’t sure what this is in reference to, when I was in Thailand last year I was asked what I wanted for my birthday dinner. In jest I replied, “bugs”, as you commonly see a variety of different roasted bugs in the markets. Sure enough, I got a plate of roasted crickets. I can assure you they taste significantly better then they sound.

The last turn at the end of the Siq before seeing the Treasury nearly met the expectations laid out in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! You can’t help but wonder how amazing a view this was when Petra was a vibrant city.

Although there was no time to attempt the full day hike, there were four crazy souls (myself included of course), who thought it would be a brilliant idea to climb the second highest path in Petra. Eight hundred steps in fourty-some-degree-heat. Entirely feasible! Although I will admit I was somewhat jealous of this dog about three hundred steps up.

The view however made the short hike more than worth it.

Thank you so much for looking! Next up Dubai (and me with a camel…)

Crusader era building. Caesarea

Stella Maris Carmelite Monastery. Haifa

Water tunnel to a spring outside the perimeter of the city. Megiddo

Mount of Beatitudes. Tabgha

Church of the Loaves and Fishes. Tabgha

Sea of Galilee at Church of the Primacy of St. Peter. Tabgha

This would be a first for myself – a tour bus renewal of vows! Congratulations Ivy and Tony!

Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation. Nazareth

Bethlehem

Lion’s Gate. Jerusalem

Western Wall. Jerusalem

Dome of the Rock. Jerusalem

Garden of Gethsemane. Jerusalem

Dead Sea. Israel looking across to Jordan

Church of the Nativity. Bethlehem

Church of St. Anne. Jerusalem

Below is just one image. Taken in the Siq leading to the old city of Petra, Jordan.

Well, it might have been planned a bit before this week, but due to being bitten by a certain travel bug I will be leaving for Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates tomorrow.  I promise I won’t leave a 200 foot sinkhole in the middle of the road this time. Sorry about that!

Please feel free to get a hold of me through my contact page as I will have internet access. I will be back on the 24th.

I leave you with this image of me as a camel jockey in 1996 (it was a short-lived career).  For all you dedicated blog readers I promise to try and take a picture of myself with a camel. Scouts honour!

I have been keeping a marvelous part of Guatemala from all of you. Colours. Everywhere there are the most brilliant and shocking colours – whether it be in the women’s huipils, the cuisine, or the landscape. Although black and white is just so wonderful for displaying textures which are so common and intricate throughout Guatemala the colours are breathtaking. So, expect to see a few smattering of colour images within this post.

I would now like to introduce you to one of my favourite elderly couples.  In the aldea of Tuixoqel, Doña Maria Dominga Gomez Perez lives with her husband and six children.  Twenty years ago they started a pharmacy in their home to aid their community and the surrounding towns. With loans through CAUSE Canada‘s microcredit program, Doña Maria has been able to purchase a wider variety of drugs in the city of San Marcos. Before leaving, they asked for a portrait of the two of them. I can’t recall precisely what was said, but what I said in English was translated first to Spanish by the interns and then to Mam, their native language, by one of the local CAUSE representatives. These are the images that followed. I can not help by smile every time I see them.

Don’t you just wish you could just grab a cup of coffee and sit down and discuss life with these two?

Doña Maria with her pharmaceuticals.

From Comitancillo we stopped in Veinte Reales where Don Cornelio, one of the CAUSE teachers, and his family live. It required a thirty minute hike across fields, up and down hills and across several streams but it was more than worth it to see these smiling faces.

I’m going to say it. Perfection is over rated. After taking the above images I showed the two kids the images on the back of my camera and this was the reaction – blurry as anything but I love it.

Before leaving, Don Cornelio’s wife and kids insisted on giving us a giant bag of ripe plums. I can not even explain to you how delicious they were. Absolutely delectable!

Doña Reina leads a leadership class at her home in Tuilelan – the primary topic this day was community leadership and savings.

Doña Isabella, one of the ladies in the leadership class, invited us to her home at the end of class.

Below is another of my favourite elderly couples. Don Desiderio and Doña Tecla reside in Todos Santos, Huehuetenango where they are a well respected family.  Prior to the escalation of violence during the Civil War Don Desiderio was the mayor of Todos Santos for two years.  In 1991 the founder of CAUSE Canada, Paul, approached Don Desiderio at the prospect of starting a nursery to help combat the growing problem of uncontrolled deforestation.  For seventeen years Don Desiderio spearheaded the project before being made director of Institucion Mam de Desarrollo Integral (IMDI) – providing potable water, pilas (device used for laundry and washing dishes present in most Guatemalan households), agriculture knowledge and health initiatives.

Don Desiderio and Doña Tecla are now retired and dedicated to working at home growing milpa, apples, and peaches.

One night while returning to my hotel I turned around to see Bobby, the local dog, stopped under a streetlight after following me that far from the interns’ place.

That’s it! A small sampling of the experiences and sights I had the pleasure of having in Guatemala.  I could not have enjoyed myself more and hope someday (soon) to return. Thank you for taking the time to read these posts.

To end – one of my favourite images.

Being 5’8″ I am not particularly tall here in Canada. In Guatemala however, I noticed a distinct height difference between myself and the local people. The average man likely stood 5’2″ and the women closer to 4’8″. You would have thought I would have learnt my lesson after smoking my head on several door frames and clothes-lining myself on ropes holding tarps up in the market but quite apparently I didn’t. To add insult to injury one of the hostel’s definition of a bunk bed was stacking two single beds on top of each other, secured by a single nail in each leg. Although resourceful, I could not admire this handiwork with the recollection of the first morning waking up to my head greeting the upper bunk.

A third year class of women met in Vista Hermosa – at this point of their education they were able to read aloud from newspapers. Spanish is their second language as Mam, a Mayan dialect, is their first. I will see if my next post if I can post a sound clip as it is quite an interesting language to listen to.

I was followed around this classroom by several young boys who were quite enthralled with my camera – this young fellow however was more content listening to the women read.

Class would typically start with a game or exercise. In Don Adelfo’s class ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ was the game of choice.

Thanks for looking! Feel free to check out CAUSE‘s site for more information on their programs.

Upon arriving in Guatemala I was greeted by the CAUSE Canada interns and representative at the airport and so began a seven hour cross-country adventure from Guatemala City to Huehuetenango (pronounced Way-way-ten-ango and more fondly referred to simply as Huehue). Being an enthusiastic road tripper the prospect of such a long car ride wasn’t too bad. So began my first experience of transportation Guatemala style.

To give you the best description of Guatemalan roads let me start by giving you some basic math. The driving distance between Guatemala City and Huehue is about 260km. As mentioned, the time to cover said distance is seven hours. So take 260km and divide it by seven hours and this will give you an average velocity of 37.14km/h. Yes. 37.14 (I hold on dearly to this point one four) clicks. We crawled from the capital to Huehue. The bumpy-caked-in-with-fog-while-passing-chicken-buses-on-blind-corners-while-going-through-police-checkstops ride was a good taster of what was to come. While traveling to the more remote towns to attend leadership and literacy classes I became quite accustom to my head ricocheting of the Mitsubishi’s windows. Anywhere else it might hurt right?

Here is a small clip just to give you the slightest idea of how the trip went. Unfortunately this portion of the ride was missing the barrage of merengue and mariachi on the radio – my deepest apologies that you miss this integral part of Guatemalan transportation. (You may not want to watch this if you have a tendency to become motion sick)

The second mode of transportation is the infamous chicken bus, locally known as a ‘camioneta’. In every town there is guaranteed to be a lineup of brilliantly painted old American school and transit buses with lights flashing and the most ridiculous horns you have ever heard blaring.  For approximately $1.25 for an hour of travel you can go practically anywhere. Now, you are not simply paying for the trip but also the experience – which makes it so worthwhile. At the bus stations vendors will flood onto the bus offering all types of delicacies or health products, and individuals may come on to beg for money. One particular man scrambled onto the bus just as it left the terminal and started to give a rather lengthy speech. With my rudimentary Spanish I understood little of what he was saying and eventually just started to watch Xela go by outside my window. Several minutes later I turned my attention towards the front of the bus just as he lifted his shirt followed by a rather large piece of gauze and lo-and-behold – intestine! I now wish I had paid more attention to what was being said.  Only on a chicken bus!

Now for the true reason of what took me down to the country of Guatemala. CAUSE Canada has been working in the western highland regions of Guatemala for over 20 years empowering and improving the lives of the indigenous people through water and health, forestry and more recently microcredit and women empowerment programs. Primarily operating within the departments of San Marcos and Huehuetenango, Mam women are given the tools to establish small businesses and become leaders within their communities and to their children.

In the first literacy class we attended in Chemal there were three older children who were quite enamoured with the idea of having their photo taken. Upon asking their names it was learnt the girl was Reina, her twin brother, Samuel (aged 8), and the younger boy’s name was Aldolfo. When further inquired about the youngest girl’s name, Reina just looked at us and shurgged saying in the most exasperated tone, “who knows!”. So here are Reina, Samuel, Aldolfo and Who Knows.

I let Aldolfo (above) try his hand with my camera – I would say he has quite the eye!

Meanwhile, their mothers were inside with younger siblings learning their numbers. The teacher would come around the classroom and have each of them read the numbers, spell them, and write them down.

A second class in the region offered loans of Q500 (about $70) to the local women to grow their businesses.

One of the primary businesses that the women had started in the department of Huehuetenango was potato farms. The money was primarily used to buy fertilizer and seeds and the potatoes were then taken into the larger towns such as Quetzaltenango to be sold.

Several of the women also helped to grow their huipil weaving businesses. The huipil, or blouse, worn by indigenous Mayan women in Guatemala vary by region. Even between aldeas thirty minutes apart there may be a different style, colour or pattern. One huipil may take up to two months to make with skilled hands working three hours a day.

More images to come in a later blog post. I even promise to include a self portrait and a story about a particularly low doorframe – sometimes not being the height of the average person around you can be a bit of an inconvenience.

Not only do I have a tendency to switch tenses three times in a sentence (which really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise seeing as I was dubbed ‘Queen of Run-On Sentences’ in Junior High Grammar class and can easily write an entire paragraph void of any useful punctuation), but I also love sharing useless little details. So in short, bear with me.

I write this with the snow falling outside (yes, it is May and snowing in Calgary), my dog curled up on my lap with his head bobbing along with my sporadic typing, a cup of decent coffee in front of me, a tiny bit of chocolate to help me forget about the snow, and Dala playing in the background.  A little escape for the editing and emails I have been working through.

On May 1 I boarded a plane with a one backpack and camera bag.  Now, I have come to realize there are different packing strategies for international travel and believe I should elaborate on why I chose the one I did. They are as follows:

1.’In Case’ Method.

This method is highly employed by my family in the form of hard shell suitcases. You can easily pack enough clothes to wear a different set everyday for a month without once having to do laundry, just in case wherever you are traveling runs out of water; you can leave enough room to bring an entire artisan’s stand of textiles home, just in case you forget about a distant relative with a mean ability to hold a grudge when buying souvenirs; you can bring the hospital equivalent of a medicine cabinet, just in case someone may contract a severe case of car sickness – or dengue fever; and the kitchen sink – just in case of course. This method however does not work when traveling on chicken buses (stories to follow in additional posts).

2. ‘Bottomless Pit Optimization’ Method

I really don’t know what it is about duffle bags, but when using them I can only envision the scene from Mary Poppins as she first arrives at the Banks’ household and begins pulling out all sorts of oddities. Organization is overrated. You always know whatever you may try to stuff into it will fit. This method is similar to the ‘In Case’ method but is geared towards men (just an observation).

Exhibit A: Representation of packing methods 1 and 2 used in New Zealand by a North American family. Please don’t judge the shorts and socks (or the hair as that is a sensitive topic).

And last but not least….

3.’Backpacker’ Method

I used this method for this recent trip. It includes going to the local outdoor store and purchasing a backpack that fits the following thought criteria a) “it is big enough, I won’t be bringing that much stuff” b) “it looks inconspicuous enough that I shouldn’t be held at knifepoint for my two pairs of dirty socks” and most importantly c) “it is on sale.” Upon trying to pack said backpack however you come to realize that what was termed a ‘necessity’ 30 seconds previously is now an expendable luxury. Packing becomes a giant budget game in which hygiene, comfort, and traveling fully clothed do battle for that 30L of space.

After cinching the top and buckling the straps I couldn’t help but, with three years of Biomedical eduction behind me, look at the final product and say “Behold, a perfect anaerobic environment.” (For all you non-science nerds this means ‘without air’). Below is a photo taken with my phone using my miniature schnauzer as reference. Coming from an ‘In Case’ method family this is one of my greatest accomplishments and shall be going on my resume.

So began my trip to Guatemala.

I had the absolute pleasure of traveling with CAUSE Canada interns photographing their current project of women empowerment through literacy and leadership classes. Here is a small sampling of the images. More to come accompanied by some interesting tales!