Culture and History

May 20, 2007: the election campaigning has started already – headed for September. At 10:15 am a cavalcade rolls through tiny Santa Ana. About twenty cars, each identified by something orange (balloons, signs, tshirts) and many signs on its sides. The usual loudspeakers, music, a few bombas set off…..drivers jumping out, setting up the launcher, setting the charge, running a short distance away, boom….and then in the sky, a second boom…..repeating the process once or twice. Then putting the launcher back in the truck to drive on, chasing the calvalcade. This one was for General Molina, a candidate for the party identified by a drawing of a raised fist and the word URGE. He was standing in the back of a new pickup with orange balloons all over it, with his wife. He actually looked rather handsome, competent, and nice. And as far as I could see, no secret service. Definitely no policia. 

5/30/07 And finally, after nearly nine months here……!!....Something may happen. I spoke to the director at San Cristobal el Bajo about consulting with them and she wants me to see this mother tomorrow morning. She also agreed they could use help in the prepa (preschool) classroom. I had to wait 40 minutes, standing outside her office, looking at the view, wondering about their water system, before she spoke to me. Evidently I didn’t make myself clear and she thought I was waiting for the other teachers. So there’s a hint, for the start of my project: be sure I’m clear about things and being clear. And of course more than half the time I’m just faking it in Spanish. I wish I were comfortable admitting I understand so little. And I’m starting to work in the special ed classroom at San Pedro, thanks to my Spanish teacher’s friend, and taking some motivational stuff there this morning. And I have permission from Fred to do all this, because we now have four teachers and I'm really not needed in those classrooms. And there’s something of an opening at San Juan because that director wants to start a program, and this would demonstrate need. I think I could convince her to do a parenting training (maybe group but I’m not ready for that) and maybe an infant stimulation group. Then borrow the materials from Felipe (I thought I was just in there for fun.) I’ve spoken to Sandra about hooking this up with F. E. but she thinks better not (not sure why; she’s going to speak to someone.) And through Francisco maybe I could get an AA person up to San Juan for the group she wants. Or perhaps someone from the F.E. AA group. So all this would fit my individualist/ do things now personality, and yet I tried to make it more structured and connected to F.E., if only to require people I see to sign up there first. I know I’m gong to end up spending money, adopting people, etc. I hope not.

Sometimes – watching HBO at my house, walking on the street with motorcycles going by, sitting in the internet shop, buying groceries at the gringo food store, sitting in my writers’ group, or having lunch at a nice café – it’s easy to forget that I’m in Guatemala……although the movies have Spanish subtitles, the motorcyclists don’t wear helmets, the rest of the folks in my internet shop are young Guatemalan boys playing videogames, and my lunch today was with the four young Guatemalan teachers I work with. But it hits home that I’m in a “third-world” country when we go to San Juan, today, to visit a family, walk down a rutted, trash-strewn alley to a wooden gate in a wire fence which opens to show a rain-washed cement patio leading to a dark cement house, much of it open to the air, and the roof – like so many – just corrugated tin, with openings everywhere under the roof. A young boy asks what we want, his clean school uniform in sharp contrast to his surroundings. Two other children wave and rush up to talk to us. They are a young girl who is in my kids’ group - she is a little shy with me – and a young boy in the older group whom I always watch because his face is so appealing; beautiful, with high Mayan cheekbones, dark-lashed eyes……….something about his manner is so slightly-tough or restrained on the surface, and sweetly shy underneath. I am so moved by all these kids and their difficult lives. I am so touched when they recognize me. 

Guatemala reveals itself slowly. I have been somewhat disturbed by reading The Long Night of White Chickens…..which paints such a dark and negative picture of Guatemala, of course during the long time of violence, here. But he paints, also, a negative feeling about Guatemalans, themselves; almost as though something in their nature could have brought about this time of silence, betrayal, and viciousness. My Guatemalan writer friend comes by my house to talk about his emerging book and says, without my mentioning this book or my thoughts about it, that he wants to get out of Guatemala again; away from this place where there has been such ugliness. He tells me friends of his were tortured and murdered during that period. This story from him makes the history I know even more personal and apparently more wide-spread, since he and his friends lived in the Capital. Somehow I had thought the massacres and torture and uprootings that existed in the highlands – evidently unknown to Antigua-dwellers, according to my Spanish teacher and my expatriate friend, (although she said, “We didn’t know; we didn’t WANT to know”) – was the only period or place of horror since the conquest. In the long history of Guatemala there were of course earlier times of terror……..the conquest, certainly, the herding of indigenous people into small aldeas like the one I live in now, the civil war in the 60s - started by soldiers angered at the placement of troops here by the US, to train to fight in Cuba, as I understand it from him, and then the massacres in the 80s. And there were natural disasters, notably in the early colonial period…..devastating earthquakes, Volcan Agua’s deluge….and later earthquakes, and the hurricane that destroyed lives in October of 2005, just before my first visit here. Layers and layers. Perhaps some of the joy I sense here in people is just the joy of being alive in a time in which these things are NOT going on. I think of the way the earth recovers after a natural disaster, and even a war. Sometimes it takes years but the spirit of life recovers, plants grow up from the overturned soil, flowers blossom, and seeds drop to sprout again.