We are going up to San Pedro, on Lago Atitlan, for a training in the Brain Gym – Pedagogia Basica – materials. The bus finally leaves at 7:15. We pick up two young Guatemalan women in Chimaltenango; along with the young man, Carlos, they will be our teachers. If I decide to volunteer with this project, I will assist them.
One of the girls settles next to me and I try to make conversation, but beyond “Como estas?” I don’t get anywhere. I notice that she is praying. She crosses herself when she is done. Wow, is this act that dangerous?
We ride without talking.
At a construction site on the highway, I watch the roadside vendors. A man stands beside the bus with a table heaped high with homemade sweets. They look very enticing, but I know Guatemalan dulces are REALLY sweet, and I haven’t eaten this morning. When he sees there are no buyers on this bus, he lifts the tray of sweets, folds the legs that were under it, tucks them over his arm and moves on down the road. A woman boards the bus with a basket of warm chile rellenos and tortillas; she moves down the aisle. I am tempted but don’t buy, and few others do. Another woman with an identical basket boards, announces her wares, then leaves. Only a young boy remains by the bus. He has a basket of commercial potato chips and other snacks. He looks about six, but is probably eight or so. He pulls a small wad of cash out of his pocket and counts it, then puts it back.
We finally arrive in Pana after 10 am. These young Guatemalans have never been to Pana before, though they live only 2 hours away. But they walk directly past all the enticing stalls full of market goods and look for the launch which will take us to San Pedro.
The girl I was riding next to, with whom I have exchanged only a few words, suddenly clasps me vigorously and laughingly says she is terrified of the lancha. The other girl says she thinks she will be sick. None of the three has been on a boat before; two of them (like me) cannot swim. They are giggling, but obviously nervous. But suddenly I am the “pro.” I reassure them all, suggesting that they breathe and that the girl relax her stomach and think of the boat as “dancing” (all this in stitled spanish.) I point to the lifevests overhead (which reassures me too) and off we go.
This smaller boat goes around the lake, instead of directly across, and I get to view the dozens of great homes around the lake as well as smaller houses clustered together, many of them rising almost vertically up the mountainsides.
San Pedro is not especially attractive. It is also very hilly. We wait near the dock for the project director. Lots of foreigners walk by; one a young man in dreads with a large tattoo on his arm. My companions don’t seem to notice. The director arrives in the typical indigenous outfit: woven falda and embroidered huipile, which the two young girls are also wearing.. She takes us through this rabbit-warren of streets and alleys, passing the restaurant where she explains we will eat (paid for by the project) and then we arrive at our hotel. The grounds are lovely with lawns, flowers, and big banana trees, but the rooms are minimal, though spacious enough. There is no Tv and not even a reading light. The man and I will each get a single room and the girls room together. 35Q – about $4.50 per night.
The four of us go out for our first afternoon in the town. They are all very accommodating to me; asking me which direction to take at each intersection, where would I like to go next, etc. I’m not sure why this is, but at first don’t think about it, just take charge. The young man is especially gentlemanly to me. They are all in their early 20s.
We look for a Mercado (market), which is prevalent in the two other Lake towns I’ve been in, but the outdoor stalls here hold only CDs, toys and other mostly plastic, commercial items. We finally end up walking out the road where we have been told there is a beach. We can see the lake below us, sometimes with people bathing and washing clothes there; in one or two places, small boats are tied up. I am thinking there might at least be a restaurante out this way, with cokes and a deck looking out over the lake. We walk and walk, AND walk and walk, on the dusty road, but no restaurant. At some point I stop to take photos of a beautiful finca with land stretching down to the lake. This lakefront area would cost a million per acre in Sausalito. No wonder extranjeros have built homes here and there. One of them captures my heart; white stucco with tile roofs, as is the style here, not too big, with a small balcony on the second floor looking out toward the lake, and wonderful vegetable gardens running down to the lake's edge.
I sit down on the unfinished upper floor of a house next to the road, my legs dangling, and look at that house and dream. I could have chickens, and a garden, maybe even a goat, though there don’t seem to be hungry children here as there were in Jamaica. But I’d have to sell my house in California - where my younger daughter is living - and possibly the land is too expensive even then. But "that's MY house!" I say to the three teachers. [And strangely, 2 years later it is!]
Then there are three days (not four as we’d first thought) of trainings each morning in an open air shed off a main street, reached through a tin gate. The trainers are the project director – a 30s-ish attractive, slim, light-skinned woman – and a rather short, lythe, Mayan man in his late 20s with long curls and one day, a Che t-shirt. He was also featured in the video, practicing the exercises with some children; at one point barefoot.
After the first day, I had realized these young people can’t understand my Spanish at all, even when I take time and care. So the first morning, I hunt for a Spanish teacher. I also want the chance to compare another teacher’s style with my teacher’s, which I think has been part of my learning problem. She does SO much of the talking! Two schools are very attractive and fully booked. Each has a lovely room to work in which overlooks the lake. I pass up several which are also laundries or tiendas, and find one which can give me a teacher that afternoon. I ask for three days, but have to cut it to two when we decide to return home on the afternoon of the third day. They are very accommodating and I like the teacher who is assigned to me very much. He tells me, among many other things, that the land that I was looking at is not THAT expensive….maybe 100 thousand quetzales.
The trainings are grueling for me, but I can understand 90% of the man’s Spanish as he speaks clearly. He also watches my face a lot while he’s talking, perhaps because I am the most raptly attentive in the group of 15 or so, perhaps to gauge my comprehension. He seems to be a lovely person, very caring about the kids’ challenges in learning here, due to the constrictions of their early environment as far as development of left/right hemisphere coordination (what this training is about.) Children are often on their mothers’ backs for a good bit of the day (I have seen 4 year olds being carried in a sling while their mother walks some distance.) They don’t crawl much on the bare ground of the campo or the dirt floors of their homes. I have only seen one tricycle since I’ve been here.
The grueling part is the constant attention it takes for me to understand all the Spanish, and my desire to respond to this material with which I have some experience and much interest. I am a little panicked on the first day when we all have to introduce ourselves and say why we are here, but I get through this with some of the words I learned to describe my job in Spanish back in California. A few times I attempt to ask a question or respond in some way, but as I usually meet uncomprehending looks, I stop.
The second morning I talk to the trainer for a few moments during the break, giving him some feedback about his giving mostly corrective responses – no positives – to each young teacher who volunteers to learn during the day, and then ask, “Me comprendes?” He says (in Spanish), “well I do, because I’ve been a teacher of Spanish in the past; I don’t know about the others.” It has never dawned on me that that might be the difference in the response I get from one person to another in Antigua – the level of familiarity with foreigners’ accents and speaking-styles.
The other trainer speaks much more rapidly. As modern as she looks, she draws a complete blank when I speak, but the third morning I talk to her about the similar exercises I used when I taught neurologically-handicapped children 30 years ago. She seems to understand but because I now think she won’t, I am nervous and stumble over and swallow a lot of words, compounding the problem. Ah well.
But I love the exercises, the focus of them, and the accepting philosophy behind this program.
I take the 3-hour training in the morning after breakfast with my companions, where I notice, again, that both the girls pray and cross themselves before eating. We also eat lunch together in this restaurant where noone else ever goes. The food is really minimal in taste, and a little dry, in general, for me; but it only costs $3.50 per meal. (20-25Q.) However, my companions and I are warming up to each other; the girls dare to ask me questions, and I ask about their families and their schooling. These three are high-school graduates, ready to teach children, but one of the girls is taking additional classes at the college in Guate City. Two have already had their own class, as practicantes. I ask about behavior problems. The man (20, but dressed in clean sport-shirt and slacks, with a long key-chain from his belt) says he had them at first, but not later. I can imagine he takes charge in class, as he does with his harem of three women – arranging food for us, conducting our decision-making about food or where to go, except when he defers to me, graciously.
I learn that two of these three responsible young people (19,20 and 23) are eldest children, the other is the eldest at home now, with five younger siblings. I am also an eldest.
They do something else while I am in my Spanish class, trying to figure out why my Spanish is incomprehensible. In the evening after dinner, on the first nite after training, the young man and I talk about music and listen to his. He loves what he calls Trance and I call Dance Hall, though I can’t keep up with the names. It is my favorite, too. We end up dancing on our narrow terrace that runs outside the rooms and overlooks the gardens.
It is a heavenly night. There is a strong wind coming from the lake, but it is just cool, and rather intoxicating as it rustles the big leaves of the banana trees and blows my hair. The stars are out. The girls arrive home and sit on the benches, watching us. We finally get one girl up to learn to dance Cumbia from the guy. We have a pretty good time.
The next nite is too cool to be outside. They elect to visit in my room – the guy brings his boombox in to play music, and I get out the pack of cards I just bought to avoid going to bed early, as I did the night we arrived. The young man spends the rest of the evening entertaining all of us with card tricks, jokes, stories, and various games. I want to suggest Hang Man, and it’s the next one he comes up with. We are all finally on a teasing level with each other, and have a pretty good time together.
The trip back on the third day is delayed when the girls want to go see the woman trainer’s house. Decisions are being made in rapid Spanish around me; I have no idea what’s going on, but just go with the flow. Eventually they are back and we walk up the steep hill to where we’ll meet a camioneta to go back to Antigua. The lake is evidently too choppy for a lancha. Although it does remind me of San Francisco Bay on the Oakland side, it doesn’t look that bad to me. But we reach the top of the hill and a bus is waiting at the corner. After we hop on I remember that camioneta is the local name for chicken-bus, which I have promised myself NEVER to ride back from Pana, since I’ve heard such horror-stories from my Spanish teacher about bus carcases over the side of the roads. The driver gets on. He is dark, young, lanky, and wild-haired. He looks as though his day-job is running drugs, and as though he could be on them at the moment, but he turns out to be a reasonably careful driver, and cautious with his bus. We drive around the lake and go through San Juan, which is really beautiful. I would like to come back here to explore this town.
The driver gets out to open the hood and put water in at the bottom of the climb to Solola. Once again, he stops while we are in the middle of the climb uphill, and his assistant jumps out to add a bucket of water to the steaming engine. I have always been afraid of cliffs, so I keep my attention assiduously to the landward side of the climb. At one point I can’t avoid noticing there are some steep drop-offs to the left, and there – God testing me on this fear, too – when we approach a sharp turn, which requires the bus to move to the outside of the grade, a huge concrete truck meets us coming around the turn. We have to stop right when I wish we could get out of this area - the cliff seems so close and nothing to stop us careening off - and then back up enough to allow the truck to make a turn on the Inside of the hill. We then have to approach the turn, and once again back up toward the edge of the cliff to make the hairpin. It is truly grueling for me, my stomach is in a painful knot, but I just keep breathing and look at the hillside, and eventually we are through it.
I am always enchanted with the job of the bus assistants, who hop off at corners to see if people are headed down the street for the bus, and swing back on while the bus is moving. They also help people with their packages, take money, somehow remember on these packed buses who has paid and who has newly arrived, and generally keep things moving and let the driver pay attention to driving. I like that a lot. But I am amazed, when a woman gets up while the bus is moving and walks toward to front to get out at the next stop that this assistant opens the door of the bus and climbs the ladder to get her parcel from the top, while the bus is going at least 30 mph. She gets off, the bus starts up again, and the assistant emerges from the back of the bus where he’s gotten down the ladder and through the door at the back.
We are often three-to-a-seat on this chickenbus; at one point the dirtiest man I’ve ever seen gets on and sits next to me. He begins a conversation with me in very clear Spanish. Where have I been, where am I going. I talk with him the best I can until he starts asking where my husband is. At this point the young teacher I’m traveling with whispers to me “Don’t talk to him.” I am never rude, but diminish the conversation. Eventually he gets off.
And eventually, three hours later, we arrive in Chimaltenango. The girls get off and go their separate ways, with hugs all around. The young man and I walk for blocks and then hop the bus to Antigua, as my Spanish teacher and I did a few weeks before, arriving at the back of the Mercado (and a bathroom) at about 6:30 p.m.. We part company after we agree I will NOT try to help him prepare materials for the next training in Antigua tomorrow, and instead get ready for my quick trip to California for a family funeral.
I buy a few things at the Bodegona, mochilera still on my back, and then opt for a tuk tuk home. This private if bumpy lift costs me more, to go ten blocks, than a 20 mile trip on the crowded bus.
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