Jungle Healer

If our visit with Dona Nico the healer for humans was special, then equally so was our day with Danny Diaz, a healer for the earth with his replanting project on a tract of land adjacent to Lake Sac Peten. 

Danny left Guatemala during the country’s long civil war because, he explained, it was not a good place for an outspoken young man. He moved back in 2004 and purchased 65 acres that had been cut down first for lumber, then later for growing corn and cattle grazing. Since then he has been painstakingly rebuilding the rainforest.

While trekking through the renewing jungle we had all kinds of adventures: seeing snakes and monkeys, searching to scare off poachers when we heard the “whack, whack” of a tree being illegally cut (he says they're never caught, they are like ghosts), and even finding Mayan pottery shards at a likely burial site.

But best, and inspirational, was putting small Spanish Cedar saplings in the ground. If we’re lucky, maybe half will make it.

It was a great day!  Here are some additional nature shots Jim took there and elsewhere ...