We gathered in an area near the Municipal buildings in Guatemala City after a short bus ride from the Sister Parish center in Zone 1.  We had stopped to buy two sheets of poster board to make something to carry during the march and began to put some words on them.  One would read "Saint Joan of Arc, Minneapolis, MN, USA, Sister Parishes, Saint Mark Evangelist, Tierra Nueva 2" and the other would read, "No to violence, Yes to Peace."  Juan carried the first one and the other was carried by several people during the march.  We were offered a large banner by one of the coordinators of the march that said, "Enough! We want Peace!"

Once we got started the chanting began and our well formed protest march skills kicked in.  What an honor to be standing with the Guatemalan people gathered here for a  principle that we believed in so deeply!  We saw a still drama against the violence against women that had been brought to our attention several times.  We felt the unity with the people there including, especially, the women (mothers) marching behind us that named silence in the face of violence to be complicity in the violence.

We marched down Sixth Avenue for about a mile to reach the Constitutional Plaza where, as the sun was setting, we joined a rally to sing the Guatemalan national anthem and another popular song that brought people together in a way that didn't need words to explain it.  What an experience!

See an article in El Periodico on the Peace March (a Guatemalan Spanish language newspaper)
(If you read Spanish, you might want to check this paper out from time to time for another perspective on the news.)

Here are a few of the pictures we took:
 

We hung together to make the posters. Was it going to rain?

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Juan carried the poster that proclaimed our Sister Parish relationship and Flor (just left of him in the picture) helped carry the big banner.

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We really got into this thing! Mindy, Nelson, Shannon and Brianna chanted with the best of them.

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Just behind us, the mothers who had lost children in the violence reminded everyone that silence is complicity.

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This group spoke eloquently of the violence directed especially at women.

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We came into the plaza just behind the fountain in it's center.

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The Cathedral had a dramatic presence at sunset. We later found the pilars at the front of the Cathedral to include the names of some 30,000 of the dead confirmed during La Violencia.

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This is a picture of the Constitutional Plaza during the rally after the Peace March.  We are behind the fountain - very difficult to see.  (This picture is from El Periodico.  Go to the link above for the whole article.)