Imagine this: you’re a mile deep into a city you’ve never been to before, lost. You’ve been walking for about 3 hours with three of your teammates. One of them is dehydrated and blacking out, while the other two are the only ones with an international data plan so they’re ahead navigating through the city. How did we get here and how did we get out??
It was our first Sunday in Guatemala. We were eager to explore and leave the base. We heard from fellow squad mates about a huge thrift store and a cute coffee shop. We saw pictures and got addresses and were very excited to get to experience what everyone else was talking about! That did not happen, but that’s jumping ahead of the story.
So we jumped on a van that Sunday morning to Chimal. I traveled with three of my teammates, only one of which had been to Chimal before. On the way there, we got to have a conversation with our van driver and learned about him, his family, and his life here. When we got to the city, we had no idea how to get from where we were to the thrift store. We asked our van driver and he directed to another bus that actually took us directly to the thrift store! Thank God! We shopped there for an hour or two before we were ready to find the coffee shop, Monkeys.
From the directions we had, we marched towards the coffee shop. Little did we know, we were heading in the wrong direction from the second we left the thrift store. We walked beside freeways, through the full parks, down sketchy streets, and stopped at ring stands. No matter how far we walked, the coffee shop was no where in sight. We walked so far we ended up in a different town! The further we walked the more exhausted we got. After the third hour of walking, the second sketchy street we almost walked into, and the one teammate blacking out, it was time to find a tuktuk. So we all piled into this tiny vehicle and asked them to take us to the mall. There was a food court and tons of stores. It’s a place that makes you completely forget you live in Guatemala. We rehydrated, got food in our stomachs, and headed back to the base, never actually finding the coffee shop we heard so much about.
This story is funny to talk about in retrospect. Every time we actually make it to Monkeys Coffee shop now is so much more enjoyable because we don’t get lost on our way there! Thank God for making memories, and for coffee shops that actually exist.
