markets, mostly pictures

These shots were taken at the main market (Minerva) and the Friday market at San Francisco del Alto

The picture below is Lety from the project shopping with her baby (Brian bundled in the red and white blanket on her back.

On the right below is Hortensia (the main cook at the project) shopping with one of her regular vendors, a deaf mute. She has no trouble driving a hard bargain with hand signals and she usually is flashing a beautiful metalic smile. I don´t know how I missed it.

I love the markets in Guatemala in the same way I love New York City. It is crowded, noisy, dirty, smelly, and dangerous at certain times. But is so alive and so colorful, that it is thrilling and exciting. The markets are vibrant with colors of nature (tomatoes, bananas, mangos) and with the stunning indigeneous clothing of the lady vendors and shoppers. The markets are still the place that most of the people do their shopping for food, and a variety of other things.

The women are the vendors and the men, the workhorses, carrying impossible loads on their back, in carts, strapped to their heads. If you could lift the roof off of the market you would see an ant farm of activity. Everyone moving with grace and fluidity around one another, as if dancing: smooth and organic.



My market nightmare is that I, in my galumpish, Western way, will make a too jerky a movement into one of the beautifully dresses ladies who is carrying a bag of vegetables in each hand, and has a baby on her back, upsetting the 20 pound basket of tomatoes she carries on her head.


This lady walks her two goats around the market and, when she gets an order, milks directly into the glass of the customer. Possibly the freshest milk on earth.