Palm Sunday in Guatemala City

Guatemala is famous for it's processions during semana santa.  Antigua is the most well known, but the historic center of the city also puts on quite a show during the 4 Sundays leading up to Easter.  This Sunday, Palm Sunday, there were two major processions working their way through the streets of zone 1, past the presidential palace and the main cathedral.

Blast Fishing Interviews

I spent the last 2 weeks doing a rotation with our Regional Mission doing an investigation into the current situation of blast fishing in the Bahia de Jiquilisco.  During the 1st week I interviewed a different key actors, including doing about 45 interviews with former blast fishermen who answered all my questions about eplosives.  The main type of explosive that has been used most recently was the chlorate bomb (seen below, though that one is made of dirt), but they'd used dynamite, C4, TNT, grenades, and even reassembled landmines.  The use of blast fishing has decreased a lot in the past several years, but is still an issue in the bay where is has significant impacts on the environment and on human health, generally due to amputation of the throwing hand.

Conference call in the field

Dried fishing being loaded into the back of a pick-up truck just in time for semana santa

British Ball and Lava

March 2nd was the annual British Ball and this year's highlight was the fact that without even trying, Amy (in blue) won the costume contest with her amazing resemblance to Adele.

Photobomb! oops

Starting on Sunday night, Volcan Fuego started having increased activity and as the sun set, you could even see lava from the balcony of my apartment.  Sunday night was the only lava night, but the rest of the week there was a lot of smoke and ash coming from Fuego.

Water Quality Sampling on Lake Atitlan

After coming back from a week+ of work and weekend travel, I turned around and went back up the inter-american highway to Lake Atitlan last Tuesday to check on a water quality monitoring program that I manage.  The trip was a blast back to grad school as we headed out on the lake at 6AM for a morning of water quality, zooplankton, and cyanobacteria sampling.  Lake Atitlan is one of the deepest lakes in Central America (about 325M at it's deepest point), and we were sampling down to the bottom for some of the profiles.  We finished up the day by taking some sampling from a small sewage treatment plant.