You down with entropy?

I hereby officially announce that I've decided to re-invent myself as a B-girl. Pei is helping me perfect my moves. Check out my signature song here.

But I digress. Pei and I are chillin' (literally) on a remote university campus in the mountains above Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, where we feel a little bit less like tourism development consultants and a little more like our parents just shipped us off to the crappiest summer camp ever. We eat in a mess hall that is just one song away from girl scout camp. Girl scout camp with only slightly more testosterone (read: only 4 members of our 24 member team are male) and a helluva lot more beans and tortillas. I'm all about checking out the local cuisine, but beans and tortillas three times a day has already started to get old.

Enough of the petty stuff. We have electricity most of the time and now we even have hot water in the showers, so really we can't complain too much. In other news, we are learning by sink-or-swim how development consulting really works. Or doesn't work.

Pei: As the only person here who knows absolutely nothing about tourism coming into this project, I've been acting rather hilariously as a crisis management/disaster response expert. My crisis management group is kind of the renegade team that everyone has to wait for at night to have dinner with because we've been meeting with every crisis management representative here at the Lake. Hearing about freaky disaster and crime stories everyday, but seriously, Lake Atitlan is pretty amazing. But anyway, I'd really like to not talk about tourism for a second. Jessie has assumed the new identity as B-girl Jessie, and we will be working on some badass dance moves. (Yeeah.. that's what we mean by REMOTE) Keep you posted. If the power stays on.

Jessie: Today I spent an hour sitting in an underground pit that used to be a traditional Mayan sauna listening to an old Mayan guy tell me in Spanish about how NGOs don't help anyone except for the people who run them, and in fact they are often doing harmful things to the environment in their naive attempts to make things better. This is just a small piece of the puzzle that my team is trying to put together - how do we identify what community-based tourism is, and how do we encourage communities to adopt the principles we identify in order to make their tourism operations more sustainable? We are visiting lots of communities around the lake to take a look at what they have going on and interview some key stakeholders. On Friday we are going to gander at the town where people go to re-align their chakras and practice their yoga positions. Today's visit was to the place where people go to get cheap drugs and/or study Spanish in outdoor garden schools. Two days ago we went to the town that has put into action a true community-based operation, right down to the women's weaving cooperatives and the tree-planting tours. What a mix. I have no idea how we're going to sew this all up into a cohesive presentation, let alone some sort of deliverable product. But I have to say, this is a pretty cool experience. Even with all the beans and tortillas.