March 4th, 2019
We got up to catch an 8:30am shuttle from Antigua to Xela (Quetzaltenango). We signed up to do one week of Spanish class in Xela. We will stay with a local family for our lodging and meals. We are starting our class tomorrow and are supposed to arrive at our homestay early afternoon today. However, we ran into a pretty big delay that was totally unexpected. We were driving along, just the 3 of us and our shuttle driver when all the sudden we came up to a roadblock. At first, we thought it was an accident that was blocking the road. As we got closer, we realized it was blocked purposefully by large rocks, truck tires and other vehicles.
We rolled up literally right when they were blocking this road (the main road to get to Xela). There were police (like 2) that were on the same side of the barricade as we were. Our driver got out and talked to the officers to find out what was going on.
We were in the middle of a protest over land boarders for these villages. We were told that the police tried to go in and stop the blockade but were quickly overrun and do not have adequate police force to go against the protestors. I think during this whole time we were stuck I only saw maybe 4 police officers total. There were people talking over megaphones and had apparently told all the towns’ people to close their shops. Nothing around us was open for food or drinks. Poor Taylor had not even had breakfast before we left Antigua. We were kind of nervous about the situation but I was happy that the townspeople around us did seem to be pretty calm, and we were told one of the people on the megaphone said they did not want violence. I was also thankful that we had an English-speaking driver so we could have an idea what was going on. We also were in a private shuttle instead of jammed packed on a local chicken bus, and for that I was also grateful. Our driver tried to talk to the people at the barricade to let us through because he had tourists and this was bad for business/economy etc. They did not budge though, and he said that these were local farmers who did not understand about tourism, business, economy etc. He said they don’t care, or know anything about tourism and only want to bring attention to their problems in regard to land borders. So, we sat and waited. Minutes turned into hours. No one knew when the roadblocks would be cleared. They had also blocked the road behind us so we had no way to go forward, or to turn around and go back the way we came. We were literally trapped in the road with hundreds of other cars. Our driver was able to talk to a local store owner who allowed us to go in and get some drinks and use the bathroom. Then the owner locked the doors again after us. We were all hungry and finished eating our snacks that were left over from our volcano climb which consisted of smashed crackers, warm cheese, and a few almonds with a dot of peanut butter. Our driver was hungry also and we shared our few snacks with him. After 6 hours went by and it started getting dark we got our sleeping bags out and got prepared to spend the night in the car. Then all of a sudden our driver got a phone call and told us we need to hurry and gather our things and we were going to walk on foot over the barricades to a different bus that was not trapped and would take us somewhere else. We had been hearing gun shots throughout the day that our driver at first told us were fireworks (I don’t think Brendan and Taylor believed him but I was optimistically telling myself they were indeed just fireworks). They were not close to us, but in the villages in a valley below while we were on the road above. When our driver wanted us to hurry and gather our stuff he admitted that we had been hearing gunfire in the villages below and needed to get to the next shuttle. We quickly gathered our things and abandoned the shuttle and followed our driver on foot. The other bus was about a mile and a half away. During the mile and a half there were numerous road blocks we crossed over on foot. That was the most uncomfortable part of the day for me as when we crossed over the road blocks, many people were yelling and there was more commotion. Nobody around us had guns which made me feel better, but one guy we saw from afar had a ski mask and machete which was kind of weird… I just kept looking down at the step in front of me and talked to myself that we were going to be okay. I prayed and kept thinking once we got to the next bus everything would be fine, and we would be out of the situation. We finally got there to discover the next shuttle bus was in the same situation just a mile and a half behind where we were. The road was still blocked in both directions. Now we were in a larger shuttle with 4 other people but still trapped. As we tried to make sense of why we just left our one shuttle to go to another one in the same situation, traffic FINALLY started moving. Seven hours later the road blocks were cleared. We drove past large trees that were on fire that were used to block traffic and we finally were on our way to Xela again. I think we were all HUGELY relieved to be through all the barricades. Around 8pm we arrived at our family homestay. The shuttle took us to their front door where our host, Mom Bilma, was waiting for us. She said ‘Shanti??’ Even though I did not know this woman the sound of a friendly voice saying my name felt like the biggest relief in the world! I knew at that moment that we were safe, and the stressful events of the day were over. I gave Bilma a huge hug and told her we were soooo happy to be there. Bilma and her husband Jorge, and their dog Oliver warmly greeted us and welcomed us to their home. Right inside the door, Jorge asked us from this point forward to only communicate in Spanish. In my head I was thinking “OMG I need like 10 minutes to decompress before I start trying to communicate in a language I have never even taken a class in”. We all did our best to go along with it though, and were thrilled to know they had kept dinner waiting for us as we were all so hungry. We gobbled up everything fairly quickly and excused ourselves to bed after a long day. Although I really felt like I could use a bottle of wine to calm my nerves a bit we crawled into bed and rested in preparation of our first day of Spanish class the following day.