Guatemala

My sisters, Yvonne & Carolyn, are leaving for Guatemala tonight. We started talking about taking a trip together last summer before we found out Yvonne’s cancer was back. Then we thought she would die by this summer. She got better with chemo, and now the cancer is back and growing rapidly. I purchased the tickets before we knew that she needed to go back on chemo. The doctor said it’s OK for her to go on this trip, but can’t start the chemo until she gets back as it will kill her immune system and make her extremely sun-sensitive. I tried to talk her into canceling the trip as I care far more about her life than about the money, but she said no. I do think she’s worried, though. The pain in her left shoulder is acting up again and the big, hard lumps of cancer are back.

Apparently Yvonne & Carolyn had a discussion about the trip and decided they needed to make it clear to me that this time, they didn’t want to sleep on any floors or the ground. When I responded, “Of course not! Are you crazy?” they reminded me that they had, in fact, done these things with me on other trips. They were swapping stories of how I made Yvonne sleep in the corridors of an overnight ferry and then sneak into a vacated room in the morning to shower after the ship had docked in Santorini, Greece. And Carolyn said she could top that story. I made her sleep on the cold, hard ground, with no sleeping bag between the borders of Malawi and Mozambique. The next day we got a lift in a truck with the convoy traveling the “gun run,” the corridor through war-torn Mozambique that was escorted by the army in the hopes of avoiding a guerrilla attack or land-mines. I’ve toned my traveling down a bit since then. This trip will be tame.