A journey, for real!

Alchemy concept: That in any work you do, you are really working on yourself. My 70th birthday party was held at a family home in Berkeley in November 2000. The room was full of excitement, not only for my milestone birthday but because I would be boarding a plane at midnite alone for my first trip outside the country, only my fourth long flight anywhere. 

I had requested gifts for my birthday - a children’s book in Spanish - and many people had responded. I would be taking these with me to donate somewhere. My much-traveled younger half-sister drove me to the airport and left me off at the entrance. Immediately I found myself unsettled – nearly panicky - at being in a strange situation, not knowing “the ropes,” since I'd never flown much and never internationally - in the midst of so many people who didn’t look or talk like me, and who so thoroughly ignored me. This rather surprised me, because of my experience in doing counseling and parenting classes with Mexican individuals and families in California; on hindsight, I think it was only my second experience of being in the minority. And of course I had very little knowledge of Spanish. My intention on this trip is to take Spanish lessons and live with a Guatemalan family in Antigua for two weeks. I also want to check out projects in the area which might use the skills I have obtained these many years of working with families and children, and training teachers. I have been led to believe I would find several which would welcome volunteers. Because of my exposure at work in California, I anticipate picking up Spanish reasonably quickly, although I have never studied it. If I find a place which feels right to me, I might stay in Guatemala for awhile, leaving my house in California in the care of my daughter and her husband. All these thoughts are whirling in my head in the airports, in the plane.

I arrive in Guatemala City at 8 a.m. If you read the travelers’ advisory for Guatemala in the State Department webpages, you will be hesitant to travel to Guatemala for all the warnings of hijacked busses and robbed and beaten travelers, not to mention a variety of diseases. How much of this is real, I wonder? Although I had read this cautionary advice, I decide to be a little more daring than my scheduled trip with the Spanish program, which could have picked me up at the airport. So I had booked a room for the first night at a small hotel in Guatemala City. My first surprise is the heavily-armed guard at the parking lot where the driver and I walk with my luggage to get his car; the second is the rolled barbed wire surrounding the wall around my hotel. Other buildings have jagged glass embedded in the tops of walls. All of the little stores I pass are heavily barred. With all of these security measures suggesting incipient danger - what am I getting myself into? After I store my bags at the hotel, I call a taxi to go to the University Campus. Because of some blockading the driver has to let me off a few blocks away, but assures me that the direction I have to walk is “muy seguro,” However he warns me against walking on the other side of the street he is driving on. He agrees to meet me there again in three hours. So, here I am, off walking on my own to see the famed textile museum. 

The museum is beautiful, I have a lovely conversation with a Guatemalan woman wanting to try out her English, and the textiles in the museum are GORGEOUS, but I know I will encounter many during this trip. Conscious of time, I head back up the street to meet my mythical taxi-driver; will he return for me? And if not, what then? I’m a reasonably cautious person, but have stepped over the line a number of times in my life.  Hopping a train on the fly with a boyfriend in my 20s.  Buying a motorcycle when few women rode them.  The place where I live alone in California is a quarter-mile from the nearest neighbor on a dead-end dirt road. 

So in Guate, my intention is neither to hide, nor to place myself in danger by not paying attention. I arrive at the top of the hill way too early to meet my taxi driver . A green area across the street beckons but turns out to be a facade; just inside this is a blighted area, trees cut and stacked and abandoned buildings next to each other. As I venture up the block a soldier with another large rifle guards a gate, and further, a well-dressed man hocks one of the 12 watches on his arm thru the fence to another soldier. I turn the corner - the area is poor but not the "barrio" I've seen in movies - and I start to turn again to get back to my starting place, but notice a porn movie place down the block and a lot of men on the street, so go another block further and turn down a street where there are women and children. All along the wall that encloses the residences there are openings where little stores appear, selling this and that. It´s hard to tell they exist til you´re right on them. I finally get back and wait a bit in the starting drizzle, watching all the fairly-new cars drive by and the occasional bright red or multi-colored busses with people hanging off the backs and standing in the stepwell, and occ´ly bags and food on the top (referred to as ¨chicken busses¨) and then, after I´ve given up on waiting for the taxi and start wondering how one makes phone calls around here, here the taxi is and he takes me back to my hotel - hinting along the way that maybe we should go out to eat together. I of course decline. I go to my room and sleep, waking an hour later at 3pm. I want to go out to the other museums but hesitate, eager to be back before dark, and certainly not going to walk there, having seen such heavy security everywhere. But I decide I´m not staying in my room for the rest of the nite so I go out, only to run into two couples from Wisconsin sitting around a table in the ¨patio¨ outside my room (a little barren for that description.) We settle in to talking and I remain with them for several hours, hoping that we might go out to the "buen restaurante" described in my travel dictionary, but instead we get some dreadful American takeout, which menus are supplied by the guesthouse. One of the guys decides to walk for more beer and, eager to safely see a little more of this new city, I elect to go with him. We are waylaid in the lobby by a German couple who are "ostensibly" sailing around the world in their boat, but it is currently in Honduras and they have been sailing up and down the Rio Dulce for two years (an area I`m much interested in as there are settlements begun by ex-slaves from Africa.) I want to ask more about it, but they get into an argument with their ´guide´ and I go off with the Wisconsonian to get beer. No kids playing in the streets; the streets actually empty except for much barbed wire. The beer store is another heavily-barred hole-in-the-wall. The area´s rather charming except for this feeling of much-needed-security. When a group of soldiers in uniform with arms passes, my companion tells me there is a military installation on this street. My new acquaintances all go to bed early as they leave Guatemala in the morning. They have been at a school in the NW of Guate for 2 weeks....got tired of 5 hrs/day of study. Their homestay had been flooded during the recent hurricane and was still moldy. They had brought clothing along with them for the flood victims of Hurricane Stan, and spent some time digging people out and constructing latrines. Very interesting folks - 2 geologists and an environmental somethingist, funny and fun to spend time with. The third person was a Cherokee; he and the Swedish woman lived on an island in a lake in Wisconsin. To bed and up early to take a cold shower, unwillingly (the interesting shower-head water-heater doesn‘t seem to work,) and then the guy from my school, Probigua, is here to pick me up 2 hours early, so no breakfast. And off to Antigua! He tells me (in limited English) that we drive up into the mountains and then down to Antigua....and so we do........green, green everywhere except the shacks that immediately line the road....more tradtionally-dressed indigenes here, more children. One interesting area had a dirt wall that lined the highway (piled up from making the hiway perhaps) but into it were cut narrow doorways into the homes that were behind it....many people standing in these niches, watching the road. Muchas colores, mucha gente! And down into Antigua. No on-line photos had prepared me for this one-story town, all many-colored residences lining the streets....one continuous wall punctuated by ornately barred windows, and cobblestone streets....actually broken rock with squared stones in neat lines down the tire tracks. Lots of cars and motorscooters ricketing over this surface, but my guide assured me that the town is only 12 blocks square, so everyone walks. My homestay is on the far side of town, near my Spanish school, Probigua. I am rather nonplussed as we drive up the dirty alley to the gate. This leads into a courtway with three front doors off it. My hostess opens one and invites us into a courtyard with toilets piled in one corner, and then into her patio, which has plants and is cleaner. She introduces me to her children who smile shyly and ask my name, and then lead me up brightly-painted turquoise steps to my room...no English is spoken. The room is about 8´ feet square, with an ornately-barred window looking out into the courtyard and orange trees beyond....small and bare but pleasant; big bed, small table "for homework," shelves and hooks for clothing. And keys for all the doors. Here I am for two weeks. 

She shows me the rooftop where I can hang my washed clothes, and then down thru the small, rather dark kitchen to a back yard porch where I can wash them in a big tub. I see her work is cut out for her, with 4 kids. She leaves for church with the kids, and I retire to hang up my clothes and get my wits about me. Then a guy pokes his head in. At first I think maybe the husband but he is Hendrix, a young German who is also staying here (she hadn´t mentioned other students) and he tells me there are two others. He is actually going to another homestay that day, but I will see him at Probigua. He is studying Spanish so he can go work in a bank in Chile. Friendly but not able to be helpful about where I might find things. Then I leave to walk around town, having learned there is no food at the homestay today (and I haven´t eaten.) One thing I haven´t learned about is changing money so when I find a sweet restaurant with wooden tables next to ornately barred windows and tile floors (and 45" records on the walls, along with greetings in English and Spanish from former customers,) I am mystified at the process of changing a one hundred quetzal bill into the 21 somethings I seem to be paying........and leave unsure of what happened. But I don´t really care. They were nice folks, trying hard to be understood. Mea culpa. Then found this internet place to send an email, alerting my family that I had reached Antigua.......also a sweet place with tile floors and an arched window and wooden doorways... Estoy aqui! !!!!!

 Later in the afternoon: Still feeling very discombobulated and fatigued by the effort of speaking Spanish, but then not a lot of sleep last nite and not enough food today, off I go now on voyage of discovering this town....and hopefully at some point some dinner. Can´t make head or tail of the map, and noone I show it to seems to know how to read maps......so.......Yo voy! Estoy cansado. Tomorrow it will be my first day of school. Whooee! I don´t know if I will ever find this internet place again, but I guess yahoo would be the holder of any emails. 

Monday morning After writing yesterday I hiked back to my homestay for umbrella and flashlight so I could go see the evening parade I had learned about, and immediately got lost out in the boonies. This is a UNESCO ¨"international treasure" town and nothing can be changed. One can´t even change the color of your house without permission. So all the street signs, or most of them, do not bear the same names as the map. Muy confusando. And in the dark you can´t see anything (very few street lights) so it´s easy to get lost. However perhaps I am beginning to be known, here, as la vieja confusada (confused older woman) and some people are very helpful. The largest buildings in the town - one governing building and many churches - are two-story; so the impression of the town is small and low and endless, and many-colored. MANY indigines, on the streets here, so there are colorful costumes everywhere (the colonial ones are on the hotel staff), many motorscooters, more cars than you would think on such bumpy streets, some horse-drawn carriages for tourists. Flowers and weeds grow on the curved tile rooftops....many falling down buildings, sometimes at the back of stores. Well they are stores or "tiendas" but since they can´t have any signs other than a small one on the doorway, they feel more like hobbit homes....and then as you go to the back, there may be an open patio with the rear wall of an old church falling down at the back of it, and pigeons. You readers have probably been to other countries so I won´t belabor, but I am stunned at the beauty and the oddities and amazing contrasts (like the American man who just marched by singing Spanish songs loudly to himself)(and the woman in total indigenous costume and painted toenails.) If I can get myself to buy a camera (if I can safely use a credit card) there will be many many photos of this place as I find it endlessly enchanting, visually. Another interest for me is the culture of the shoe'shine boys. In the main park there are many things going on, but one is these young Mayan types....and some not young at all....going around trying to shine your shoes. 4 y.o., 5 y.o..... I watched one boy that age walking across the park, eyes open for customers, serious face....and then he saw a child of the same age with his rich-appearing parents, who were blowing bubbles for him so he could chase them. The face of the shoe'shine boy lit up for a moment as he watched the boy run back and forth, laughing....and then he got serious, shouldered the strap of his shoe-shine box, and hustled off. And then there is the man of 40, shining the shoes of some young punk with his baseball cap turned backwards..... I think I could write a thesis here. My first day of school today....8 to 12. My brain had gone into a coma by the 3rd hour. Confusado is my new word. However, my teacher (a Ladino woman of 50 perhaps,) is very much a liberal, so we conversed in Spanish (her 800 words, my 15, etc.) for an hour or so about the big AIDS problem in Guatemala. She teaches sex education in conjunction w. some American program here in the rural areas....she talked about how hard it is to get the women to even admit they have a body, much less touch it or protect it. Catholica. So from there it expanded to many social problems. Very good conversation, but not a lot of learning for ME to talk. But good. She is willing to go with me as a guide to Lake Atitlan on Friday, during the day; however I have a yen to stay overnite and she has teenagers and a husband, so.....we´ll see. I got a phone call at the school today from Camino Seguro, the project where I sponsor a boy in Guatemala City, wanting to sign me up to tour Casa Hogar (the group home) today.........I wisely suggested next week. I was surprised how tense it made me to keep up with the Spanish....and the homestay fed me nothing but fruit for bkfst so I was shakey by ten. But fine now, having gone out for eggs at the 10 am break. But that was a cautious lesson on how dependent I am on my food (also lost my calcium at the hotel in GC, but it may be recovered tonite, thanks to my teacher‘s husband who drives there often for a tour company.) I am realizing what a creature of habits and familiar place I am. 

So now I am off to buy a camera and take pictures.......so many bright and lovely places await and despite big high clouds, it is quite sunny and perfect temperature. But it could rain any moment, so I have jacket, hat and paragua (umbrella - I love that word “for water,” like “anteojos" - before the eyes, for glasses) with me. Yesterday I couldn´t wait to get home to my safe, comfortable, familiar ways of doing things - at least I am going to get another blanket, as I was quite cold at nite, and perhaps a better pillow, as the homestay and the hotel both had very lumpy ones. But today, I found myself thinking happily that I could live here.