Mama Zoila and Julianita

Apparantly there are people that have more kids than Zoila and her husband Julian, who have 14, but i haven´t ever met those people. Zoila and Julian´s 14 kids have since produced 35 grandchildren, half of which i seem to live with, though the ebb and flow of bodies in the house is like some frenetic tide.

This is in San Andres, Petén, where I´ve been for a week. Zoila´s family has a molino, or corn grinder that services much of the neighborhood, which is on a steep hill and overlooks the blue blue blue lake Petén Itza. It is important to add that people in San Andres are the earliest risers i have ever seen, some of them getting up at 3:30 in the morning, for no seriously apparant reason, other than they prefer it. So the Molino is no exception, and the first morning I thought a plane was landing in the yard at 5am, only no, it was the gas guzzling machine in a shed next door grinding up paste for somebody´s tortillas, with Julian at the helm.

Julian is quite small, hence the ¨ita¨some paste to the end of his name, though he has a pot belly and seldom wears a shirt. Zoila is bigger, and hardly ever leaves the outdoor kitchen with its steller view of the water and blackened walls from years of wood smoke. The people here make tortillas on the table rather than in their hands like in Xela, and when you live in a house with a molino, it´s tortillas three meals a day. No joke, almost like a religious thing. This stuff is filling! I guess that´s the point.

The kids have befriended me almost as fast as the adults have ignored me. The four, or is it seven? that actually have a bed in the house have names that I am only starting to know. Yorleni, Daríl, Ardeli, Donimar. We go swimming together down at ¨Gringo Beach¨where other spanish school students and volunteering whities from the park next door wear bikinis which the locals get excited about. There is a flooded, abandoned restaurant turned village dock that we fling ourselves off of into the warm water. Cement pillars left over from railings and other construction sit ominously under the water in a ¨sue for sure¨situation if we were in the states, but we aren´t. A piece of waterfront here costs about $1,000 US.

Zoila is very punctual with my meals. Instant coffee and tortillas and some kind of soup, or often eggs and beans. Yesterday, Erwin, a 12-year-old cousin and I ate lunch together at the table. The adult women never eat at the table, always in the smokey kitchen with Zoila which is clearly a hub of activity. So Erwin and I had the same caldo, a chicken broth that had potatoes and wizkeel (squash that is spelled something different but I don´t know what), and I look over and his has a chicken foot in it. And he´s chatting happily to me and just as happily eating the chicken foot clean of meat like it´s a corn on the cob.

From what I can tell, Zoila feeds about 15 people a day, and that´s a low estimate. I rarely exchange conversation with her or her daughters as they don´t seem to understand me when i talk and they also like to keep to themselves. Julian and I have had some meals together. Zoila brings him his food, and if he wants a different glass for his orange kool aid, she´ll fetch him that too. Not in a loving way, in a dutiful one. Julian and I discuss our respective pueblos, and every so often he´ll yell at the chucho (dog, which is a pet, but not treated so nicely) to get the hell out of the house. He sits back and rubs his belly.

I suppose everyone in the family is used to people coming and going. Gringos are not uncommon boarders, and there are two boys squeezed into the room next door (seperated by plywood that doesn´t reach the ceiling)that seem to cook in their room. They lock their door with a padlock. I have a feeling they aren´t family.

I can´t say it´s been a fuzzy, good time with this family. But it sure has been an interesting one. When else have I run down a darkened street with ten kids, including one aggressive kid that´s mute, past the evengelical church with it´s gospel singing, and ended up at the vista overlooking the lake and a sliver of moon? Only in Petén.

A Long Way Home is Right

So I´ve been thinking about ¨volunteer opportunities¨recently, which are thick like moscas to a porch luce here in Guatemala. You can live in a gringo commune and build a kitchen from tires or stay at a coffee farm and show women how to use Microsoft Excel. You can teach english to kids, or translate at a collective weaving shop. There´s plenty of talk about ¨helping the street children¨as well, a term which a friend of mine wondered about. Sort of like saying you were going to help the hobos....the term PC doesn´t translate here.

Anyway, I came back this morning from checking out the first mentioned on the list--the gringo commune neatly labeled ¨A Long Way Home.¨ The short story is that this dude spent his two year peace corps stint in San Juan Comolapa, a beautiful mountain town about an hour north of Antigua. They wanted a park for the kids, but didn´t have the money, so this dude went back to his college town (Ashland, Oregon) and made some money and recruited some good old boys like himself, and came down and built a soccar field. and a basketball court. and a gringo commune-house. and then a nice little house for him and his girlfriend with a fence around it.

his house remains the only one with hot water for showers, but that´s a minor detail.

I think what Americans, and probably Europeans and definitely Canadians don´t quite admit to themselves is that ¨volunteer opportunities¨in developing countries might be better categorized as ¨eco tourism.¨ At least in my experience here in Guatemala in the places I have seen so far, where money is contributed for room and board and the eager, fresh faced volunteer is arranged into some form of work, and definitely given some compromising living conditions, and generally begins to feel like they´re getting a ¨real¨look into the country.

Enter in day two at Long Way Home, where an alternative school is being built in a corn field. I was supposed to leave that morning, but the night before we celebrated someone´s birthday, and el jefe Matteo was seeing his girlfriend off for the final time, so there was partying all around and the good people of the community showed up on the back of a pickup truck and a gaggle of women in beautiful embroidery opened up pots of stewed meat, rice, mayo salad and tortillas and served the men first. The local tienda, owned by the gregarious and nosy Fidelia, must make a fortune selling litres of Gallo by the caseload solely to the volunteers.

But anyway, the next day. the commune (seven people in all, all below the age of thirty) was slathered in sun screen. The good old boys, three other Oregonians in their mid-twenties with differeing degrees of poor spanish, drank coffee and smoked pot. Someone gave me a pack of saltine crackers for later. And then we packed the truck with tools (which everyone was incredibly uptight about. apparantly you are supposed to buy your own, so no one wanted to share. The commune-idea, i would soon realize, was not really desired by most) and we were off.

I suppose at the school site, it´s fair to say we all had a ¨real¨day in the life of a Guatemalan, becuase there were thirty or so Guatemalan volunteers that came out to help. Short, sturdy men, they looked at us girls with the shovels and wondered. Some local police came by and examined the plastic handle on the pick axe I was using. They commented on how light it was and then looked at me quizically. Like I was sort of alien. Then one of them said something to the equivelent of: ¨The more you use this thing the better figure you´ll have.¨ He used his hands to make an hour-glass shape.

Matteo showed up on his Honda Motorcycle. He was wearing a black t-shirt emblazoned with ¨I got dumped¨, which I suppose was the truth. We were all working on a trench five feet deep and unyieldingly long, and I asked him about excavators. Like, didn´t Comolapa have any? Matteo said something about Che Guevera, who liked to work with the people. He also said something like, if the excavator came, you wouldn´t have any work to do. And he also said that the excavator was against socialist ideals. (All this from a Texan alcoholic with a propensity for lewd comments towards women. It might also be interesting to note that he, the Che lover, stopped digging almost three hours before any of us did. Said he felt accomplished and went home. Got back and he was drinking Jack and Coke in his back yard).

Lunch time was a high lite. The women arrived in a tuk tuk, one of those little, covered motorcyle get-ups with the same food as the night before.

The school, predicted to be finished in four years, is supposed to offer mechanics, crafts and other workshop type classes. It´s basically Long Way Home´s sole project to date, and besides the tree nursery and the tire kitchen, digging is the only project one can contribute to. One return volunteer, a smoke jumper from Oregon who braided his hair and wore a john deer hat, said he was over it. That he used to come down to hang out with Matteo, but now it was like he was at work. Volunteers must log 40 hours a week, and do some weekends. And he added, ¨if this school doesn´t work out, Matteo is going to have a sick sick house.¨

The part about no shower comes in here too. Because as we were all filthy by the end of the day, the sun set and the cold came in, and the only shower was a cold one. We all went to bed with Guatemalan dirt stuck to us like a second skin.

To Antigua, and beyond

Traveling on Sunday mornings has to be the best. No one is in a hurry, buses aren't packed and the chicken bus vendors are out in force. This morning at Minerva, the market around the bus station hadn't even really picked up yet, though it was almost ten.

I asked for Antigua, and got ushered to what must have at one point been a Linea Dorada bus (first class), but had since been banged around a little bit more, the overhead reading lights were smashed, and there were little plastic stools in the aisle to accomodate overflow. We stopped at every little town.

As per usual, never a dull moment. The man sitting next to me was eating churasco, and once he was done he reached across, opened the window and through out his styrofoam plate. Meanwhile the whole bus began to stink like sewage though there was no bathroom. People began to hold their nose. It took me a minute to figure out that a poor sick little kid had gone in his pants a couple seats down, and his parents were desperately trying to clean him up with newspapers.

The kid hung across his dad's shoulder looking glassy eyed (and he wasn't young, he was probably eight). His dad ended up ripping an extra shirt up for rags. The kids' mom looked miserable.

Eventually, with new pants on, the boy fell asleep and we descended into the warm valley that is Antigua. More about that later.

The price of my ride was actually pretty equivelent to my Linea Dorada trip from Guatemala City to Xela, so I suppose I was paying for character.

Chichicastenango, the man with the dentures and the shoe shine boy

Saturday night, after a bottle of rum, Madeline, Tommy (spelt and pronounced ¨tomy¨here) and I decided to meet Sunday at a reasonable hour (8:30am) and take a bus three hours to Chichicastenango, the market town to rival all market towns (well, considering the markets at Momostanengo, San Francisco del Alto, and even Xela´s Democracia, you might easily rival it).

Sunday, we straggled together, got fresh squeezed OJ in a bag and made it to Minerva station more like 9:30, where the red chicken bus with flames on the side was supposedly leaving by 10am. Tommy promptly disapeared and Madeline, on a quest for something hot, reported that he was stationed at the fried chicken stand, eating chicken, potatoes and rice. Madeline is a pharmacist back in Australia, and has certain standards that we make fun of her about. To her benefit, she is the best disenfected salad chef I have met in Xela. (First step, douse everything with chlorine. Next step, wash the chlorine off with purified water. Next step, repeat. Finally, pat dry). When she brought back two styrofoam cups of something that looked like coffee but tasted like sugar (Guatemalans have an intense case of diabetes. Once you visit, it´s pretty easy to figure out why), she screwed up her face and said she would never eat street chicken, she wasn´t about to get Salmonella. (remember this for later on, when I describe the best meal of my life). She promptly went and bought a hot dog complete with cabbage and hot sauce. Apparantly not all meats are the same.

The bus didn´t leave for another hour, just sat there and an endless stream of vendors came on and off: Fruit in a bag, soda (affectionately called agua), little candies, big candies, prepared sandwiches, tamales, tortillas, peanuts with hot suace, pens that came with a little pen demonstatration, and caramel.

The man with one and a half legs that sat behind me didn´t smell so hot, and he wasn´t improving with age. But as Tommy said, if you have only one and a half legs, you have somewhat of an excuse for not washing. I on the otherhand, he continued, needed to get over my homestay´s constant lack of shower water, (currently the kitchen is a pile of rubble where someone has been digging into the tile and dirt for some long lost bit of plumbing) bite the bullet and pay for the public bath. Or something.

A little old man sitting in front of Madeline wanted caramel. He bought a piece for 1 Q, and tilted his white cowboy hat. Then, looking furtively from side to side, he reached into his mouth and pulled out his dentures and stuck them into the breast pocket of his jacket. Automatically, his whole jaw sunk inward, like a sinkhole. He put the candy into his mouth, and looked out the window, sucking on his cheeks.

Like many chauffers on public transit, when our driver left Minerva he drove like the road was his superhighway, and the rocks that crumbled down and sat in the road from the surrounding cliffs were his personal obstacle course. It was a rough ride. The most exciting part was when, because of roadwork, the road became one lane for two, opposite lanes of traffic. Our speedy bus was passing everybody, trucks, cars, cement carriers, and then an oncoming car would force the driver to throw on the brakes. We flew around, the bus ground down to a slower forty miles an hour, and the oncoming car passed by.

It costs about 25Q to get to Chichi, which is situated northeast of Xela.

When we arrived, the helpful center of tourism helped us find a budget hotel that had a hot shower (I try to wash on weekends), with an owner who saw Tommy and laughed ¨We´ll get in an extra bed for the fatty.¨ Being called fat, or gordo, here is not supposed to be a diss. The man looked at Madeline and I laughing and said, somewhat apologetically, ¨fat like me! fat like me!¨

There is a beautiful old church in Chichicastenango, and on Sundays, there are pilgramages up a local hill where Mayans burn copal and sacrifice roosters. Madeline and I took one look at the wooded bump that at home on the east coast I would be psyched to run up, and said ¨thanks but no thanks.¨ Something about being mugged once doesn´t exactly get you roused up to try for it again.

People selling their crafts at Chichicastenango know tourists. A lot of them know english ¨Hey! I got what you want!¨and, as the woman who sold me a piece of embroidery (and who personally escorted me to the ATM machine because she knows a tourist never comes back) said sort of in jest, ¨Americans like our textiles, but they don´t like our prices.¨

The market is a wooden framed, tarp covered affair, and it begins and ends at the church where there are buckets of flowers, burning incense and old ladies swing tin buckets of smoke around. Here, kids, hell even the women patting tortillas over gas grills, ask for 5Q if you take their photo (wouldn´t you?), and a little kid with a grubby shirt decided he was going to shine Tommy´s shoes, no matter how many times Tommy said no. Tommy was wearing skater sneakers. The kid´s shoe shine kit had stickers on it, like some sixth grader´s social studies binder. Finally he slunk away.

The middle of the market is dedicated to food. We finally settled onto a picnic table deep in the dark belly of the market spread with crafts, vegetables and burned CD´s and had fried chicken, fried papas, rice and tortillas. The tortillas were the fresh kind, sort of crispy on the outside, soft in the inside. The kind you could eat and die right after and feel satisfied with life. Madeline didn´t get chicken, she got a caldo of tough beef with potatoes. And I, after initially spitting out my chicken in a flash of reading-too-much-Lonely-Planet-Panic (¨it´s just fresh,¨ Tommy assured me. He had already ordered another piece. ¨It´s cooked, it´s just so fresh.¨) I forgot about any salmonella worries, and boy was that good. Like you could imagine your mom making if you were from the deep south sometime in the 50´s, and your brother had just wrung a chicken´s neck the hour before, I was licking my fingers.

That meal cost 22 Quetzeles, almost the same as our three hour ride. There are a lot of things that cost inbetween 20-25Q here. (inbetween 2-3 US dollars). I bought shampoo (the smallest baby bottle) that cost 30Q. Sometime back last week I went out to the new gringo bar and paid 20Q for a mojito. And then, on some nights, when it´s somewhat late (anytime after 10pm) and I take a six minute taxi ride from the center of town to my house, that´s 20Q as well.

Pictures to follow. Especially the one where Tommy holds up a Mayan mask over his face. And the whole family of mask vendors does the same.

On mascots

I still can´t quite figure out dogs here.

There is this dog that lives in a certain part of sidewalk in Zona Uno. I think he must have chosen his favorite restaurant, and stayed out in front. He´s sort of shaggy and dirty and stray. He doesn´t flinch when people step over him, but then again, that´s most dogs. They´ll lie down anywhere, like in the gas station parking lot in front of the diesel can.

There are dogs at night on most streetcorners attacking giant bags of trash.

Kids smack dogs over the heads with sticks.

And then there are dogs that Guatemalans put leashes on and take for walks around the neighborhood.

Hugo and Maria are planning on getting a new puppy. I asked if they would get it neutered. Hugo said something to the effect of ¨it´s not natural for a dog not to have sex!¨and then Maria said ¨We don´t want puppies. That´s why we´re getting a male.¨ Obviously.

Claudia, one of my teachers, said she doesn´t let her she-dog out of the house. ¨Maybe she can have puppies once¨, she says generously. ¨But no more!¨

The Presence of Guns and the Finca Santa Anita

¨I was going to the bank,¨says a guy named Dave on a hike at the finca de Santa Anita where I went this weekend. ¨And there was this sweet little old lady in front of me. And at the door, they put you through a metal detector, and this old woman takes a silver pistol from her bag and hands it over to the guard. He put it in a box, and she went in. Just like that.¨

I thought this vignette summed up a little about Guatemala, where not very long ago, whole villages were armed to the teeth to combat government-perpetrated genocide. The banks are guarded by police with long shot guns. Bars are sometimes gaurded, trucks with any kind of worth on board are gaurded, and most of the time, men in uniform are just hanging around, not guarding anything. But they have guns too. And the finger of these men is always right next to the trigger.

And then there are the men with guns on top of Mount Baúl, (the hill of trunk, strangely named in english) the mountain/park in Xela. Those men are scarier, and three of them robbed my friend Madeline and I on Friday afternoon. Nothing like a gun waved in your direction to make you realize how little you care about cash, phones, cameras. And nothing like a gun waved at you to realize how quickly you´ll relinquish control.

Luckily, these dudes just wanted something of worth, and they gave me back my earrings that my cousin Carolyne had brought me from Turkey. (Sorry Cayo, guess they look cheap). They tried to get off the ring I´d made at the Maine College of Art a couple springs ago, but it was stuck on and anyway, not worth it either.

Later, I eyed the family heirloom engagement ring that a girl from NYC was wearing at the finca this weekend. ¨I´d take that off if I were you,¨I said. ¨I know, I really should,¨she said sheepishly.

I guess you don´t get it until you get it.

At the The Finca Santa Anita, a cooperatively owned coffee and banana plantation, the treasurer, Sergio, had half a finger missing from his part in the campesino movement. His trigger finger. He didn´t talk about it. Willy, the guy that brought us there, a guatemalan who told his parents he was guiding hikers in Pétan back in the early nineties and instead was helping the guerillas out behind volcan lacandon, said Sergio wouldn´t talk about the war because he was sick of talking about the war.

¨He´d rather talk about the coffee finca, and what they´re doing to have a better future.¨ Talk he did. Boy does that Sergio talk. Doesn´t even mind that you only half understand spanish.

The finca is owned by 32 families, though they don´t farm it together. They each have a part of the property, and the families bring in their coffee harvests seperately. Santa Anita does have its own school, library, store and eco-tourism hostel, which is all part of a plan to diversify (here you go dad) the plantation. They have a permit to export only unroasted coffee, and it is sent to a fair trade, organic coffee company in Madison, WI. The bananas go even less farther afield, being sold domestically only. During the off season, when the harvesting is all done (now), the community harvests wood to sell. Our group split up to eat with different families for the night´s dinner. Most of them live on five quetzales a day. The current exchange rate is 7.7 Q to 1 US dollar.

Murals are a big thing at the finca, and we helped paint one. The members are all unabashedly Che Guivera fans, and his face or movement is painted everywhere.
¨You´ll notice,¨says Willy, who has a son back in Madison, WI, where he lived for 12 years, ¨that all the pupils painted in that mural are left handed.¨
This is of course, not by accident. ¨Izquierda, siempre izquierda!¨Willy likes to say, laughing.

The small pueblas in the state of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala´s western highlands, were badly hit in the thirty plus year civil war. Many of them were guerrilla sympathetic, and were especially flattened in the 1982-1983 era of Rios Mont, a dictator that wreaked most havoc among indiginous people and who even the Reagan administration saw as too right wing for his continuation as president.

Willy is promoting a documentary that I saw last week, all about the finca Santa Anita, the community members´part in the civil war, and history about the civil war itself. It´s called Voice of a Mountain, and it´s quite good.