The drive back from Copan is pleasant and uneventful. We stop once for a bathroom break and to let one of the group off to make his way by some series of local busses to Tikal. We also stop for dinner about half-way at a decent restaurant with delicious limonada con soda (lemonade is made with limes down this way) but I am so broke by this point that I order only 2 tamales, and have to borrow a bit to cover that. As we drive in the dark I find myself saying, “Ah it will be wonderful to be HOME…” and then realize that I am thinking of it this way, which feels rather nice. And it is wonderful.
Although the weekend was full of realizations and information of various kinds, I think two things stay with me strongly: 1) the importance and pleasure of speaking Spanish well enough to really talk to people. 2) Guatemala outside Antigua (and outside of Guatemala City) doesn’t seem nearly as dangerous as the guidebooks and various information on the internet has led me to believe. THAT is important for any future traveling around that I do. I am also left this morning with the wonderful and well produced CD from the Garifuna man we met, Aurelio Gota (Gotay?) The music is very fast (I believe it’s called Punto, the music and the dance) and vital and his voice is wonderful, and the songs are in the Garifuna language. What a trip! And did I say that my teacher and I are going back to Livingston for the annual Garifuna celebration in Noviembre?
And then the week goes by in its usual way, and this weekend I leave Antigua to visit my new Subud acquaintance from Norway who lives outside of Panajachel, in a shuttle-bus with three young women, (including one who had traveled to Rio Dulce with us,) my Spanish teacher and her tour-guide husband - having decided not to go it completely on my own, plus they gave me a slightly better price than the other agency – $20 roundtrip. It takes nearly three hours to get to Pana, one more than I thought. I had forgotten how beautiful the drive to Lake Atitlan is – through agricultural areas almost all the way. Fairly large farms - though they appear to be mostly family-owned - in the flat valley, and then smaller ones on the sides of the hills as we get up into the mountains: primarily cabbage, and corn, with some lettuce and some coffee. Once we get to Pana, and let the three girls off at their hotel, my teacher insists on walking with me to help me find the truck that jitneys people up to San Andreas, where my friend lives. Actually this turns out to be a big help as Pana is larger than I remembered, and is having ITs pueblo celebration this weekend – with thousands of people in the streets. I’m not particularly concerned about taking the “jitney” up to San Andreas, though it’s an open truck, but Milvia wants me to call her on her cell as soon as I get there to let her know I have arrived safely. When the truck finally shows, on the unmarked street corner, I hop in with two young women in traditional dress, and then one after another a man with a big sack of something, a boy holding a flat of eggs with his mother and his little brother wrapped in her big shawl, several other women and men with some other parcels, show up and climb in. I had chatted with the first women while we waited, and told them I was visiting a friend in Pana (in part, cautiously, to let them know someone was waiting for me), and I greet all the other arrivals, help to load a bag in for the old man, and complement the boy on his sweet “big brothering.” This is all natural for me to do, but I am aware of my actions as possibly easing my being there, and I think they do, tho I did hear the word “gringa” at one point. Then we take off.
I was a bit nervous that this would be a wild ride up a steep hill with dropoffs (one of my big fears) but actually the area along the road is richly green and pleasant, not especially steep and it is beautiful looking back at the lake. Various passengers rap the side of the truck and get off or on at various points. When one man gets off, he picks up his big machete off the floor of the truck and takes it with him. If I had been really worried at any point about the potential for being robbed, I might have worried if I’d seen this; but actually I was quite comfortable from the beginning. I am a little surprised there are not more greetings and adios’ between the people, although they are friendly about jostling into each other as the truck goes around sharp corners, and at one point a woman grabs my leg to steady herself and we have a nice warm non-verbal exchange. After about 20 minutes we arrive in San Andreas Semetabaj. I had some thoughts that it would be a tranquil Mayan country village, but the street are wide and paved with interesting fit-together blocks of concrete, there are quite a few tiendas, restaurants and so forth, there are lots of people in the streets, there is a new parque, already somewhat littered, and there is water flowing into the street from the mountainside (and last nite’s rain.) Nonetheless it is quiet in comparison to bustling, touristy Pana. I had not had any response to my email telling her I would be coming, but she had expected me the week before without any communication between us (before I decided to go to Rio Dulce, instead,) so I was pretty sure she would be there waiting for me. Just in case, I have taken some extra money so I could ride back down to Pana and spend the nite in a cheap hotel if need be. I follow her map carefully but manage to get slightly lost anyway. A nice well-dressed man walking with his kids sets me on the right road….which is actually just a double-track trail down off the paved road, some 500’ to a gate with the sign “Casa del Luz” – the name on her map. I knock at the locked gate and after a moment her face appears……..I am lucky she is there because she HADN’T gotten my email and has no idea I was coming. It takes her a few moments to adjust. So we spend the rest of the day and evening together and a good bit of the next morning. I am rather low-key this weekend, fighting off a cold, but for some reason I do very little talking, and she does the majority – talking in particular about her studies for many years now, even when in Norway, of the Mayan Calendar, the Popul Vuh, and various things associated with it. She has sought out Mayan shamen in the Lake Atitlan area, and at an earlier time in Mexico, but doesn’t think too much of most of the ones she’s met because of their focus on blaming other people for the ills that befall one – i.e. black magic. However she has read the work of some Mayan man who became a professor in Mexico, studying and writing on the Popul Vuh (which he said was not a correct translation of Mayan words) which she gravitated to very much, and she has given lectures on the topic in Norway several times. Her vision as she was building her Casa del Luz was that it would be a place where people could come to learn about these things, that she could arrange contacts with local Mayan shamen and visits to villages, particularly for the great numbers of Norwegian visitors that come to Pana and San Andreas because of her Norwegian neighbor and another Norwegian woman who runs a Hospedaje in San Andreas. But I tell her I know several people in Chico who might be interested, as well. Her place is gorgeous. The land it’s on is not large, but there is a lovely lawn-and-trees area just inside the gate, and two houses which were evidently shells when she arrived, but are now just lovely, fairly simple – somewhat Santa Fe/Taos-looking – homes. Very like the style of most homes in Guatemala, but a little more grand, and she has added wonderful pine wood-framed windows (instead of the metal ones other people use) and beautiful paneled doors. The houses both face the gate, one more-or-less behind the other, and there is about 30’ between them. The view from one house is the lawn/garden (with a big pine tree as a centerpiece) and from the other, higher by 15’, over the wall to the coffee finca beyond and across to the mountains that surround the lake 15 miles away. VERY lovely, and her furnishings simple and very beautiful. She has quite a few citrus trees of various types, banana trees, excellent avocados (I haven’t found any good ones in Guate this time of year,) and passionfruit. I have seen the vines many times, in Berkeley and elsewhere, but never have seen the fruit, much less tasted it. The inside of the fruitskin is spongy/fibrous, but within this is a bed of sweet seeds, not unlike a pomegranate, and you crunch the little seeds inside them. Since I had been a bit interested to hear about the orphanage that her Norwegian neighbor has started here in San Andreas, she tells me that it has been funded by various Norwegian organizations, who give a lot in Guatemala, and that it houses eight children who are cared for during the week by one Mayan woman with an aide who stays for the weekend when the main woman goes home. The Norwegian woman who started this is married to a Mayan man, and lives next door to my friend with her husband and four Guatemalan orphans, in a rather lovely turquoise eight-sided concrete house. Her husband’s relatives live in three or four shacks on the property. S. also tells me that there is a more traditional Mayan village a mile or more up the road and that we can walk up there to see it next time I come to visit. My friend has also looked into other projects in this area and says that in general many seem to get started, with great will and enthusiasm, but that few continue; those that do seem to involve more Guatemalans than gringos. She seems to think that many projects just let the government off the hook for taking care of its own people, a philosophy shared by some of my Chico friends. But my thinking is that it is very expensive and requires a lot of expertise to get these projects started: perhaps the best “compromise” is to have NGOs start them, and train people (learning from the locals as well, of course) with the expectation that the government will take them over in time, and certain monies or trades will be locked into that prospect. However, I have to say that doesn’t even happen in the US….witness the program I worked for for four years which foundered and had to change its really useful focus after the initial funding by the Prop.10 organization, in order to fit into government guidelines for MediCal funding.
So we sit in the garden and then the house, and she talks and talks and I listen. Then we walk down into San Andreas to give me a “tour”. I can’t say the town impresses me much, though it could have its days. It is a rather dark and glowery day today. And the restaurant we decide on is only so-so, but relatively inexpensive. We also walk up to the town cemetery which surprises me in having no statuary of any sort – just rectangular cement boxes with names and dates on them, painted turquoise or rose or white with LOTS of plastic flowers, and some little raised dirt mounds where children are buried. Nevertheless a lovely place with an overgrowth of every sort of plant. Next - back to the lake, and home again.
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