Hello from Guatemala City!!

Yesterday I arrived to the supposedly "newest and best" airport section in Central America... I guess I was too busy to notice because I was focusing on getting my backpacking gear on my back without falling over. I swear some people wear watching, just waiting for me to slowly start tipping.
Once I went outside of the customs/luggage area I finally saw the little "Center for Global Education" sign and then I headed over to meet up with a few of the other participants that had already arrived.
I got to sleep a little on the plane, but once we got to the guest house where we're staying and became acclamated, many of us passed out on our temporary beds... I finally slept for a few hours.
Lunch and dinner were both big, filling meals...and very good, at that. I definitely have got to skip dinner tonight because breakfast and lunch today filled me up so much.

They gave us our orientation today and then we went to La Casa Crema, which is named after the White House. There we also went into one of the famous cathedrals of Guatemala City.
Following this, we traveled to the main garbage dump site of the city. This is a very impoverished area where many people are self employed, working with recycling and the trash as a whole just to make a small living. It is interesting because virtually there is no recycling in Guatemala, but people living in the garbage dump area collect things such as plastic, then take those items to plastic mills to get money, for example.
There we went to a type of school and recreation center that began 20 years ago, started with 15 youth and now has 400 youth as students. The school was inspired because of the mass amounts of children who were collecting garbage in order to make a living for their family, but by doing this full time they were not getting an education. Now the four teachers at this school offer support, education, recreation, and an emotional outlet to displaced children, children without support, children previously expelled from school who cannot enter back into the main school system, pregnant adolescents, teens who never attended 1st grade and on for example... The school works with the youth in order so that they can still work, either in the mornings or afternoons, as long as they come to classes daily during the half of the day when they're not working. If the students continue this throughout their years and complete their education, they can get a job with the City, working with various City gardens. The students can also choose to go on to a university.
Essentially, just being there for the hour that we were, I can tell you that this is a truly amazing and genuinely successful grassroots organization that has, and continues to, empower those who were born into an area that has been labeled one of "asassins and thieves."

After this we drove many miles to a higher part of Guatemala that is inhabitated basically all by the wealthy. There we saw huge, luxury apartment complexes, mega malls, gated communities, Sears, TGI Fridays... riches and globalization to the T.
Talk about polar opposites.