Saturday, January 31, 2009

Fantasy and Reality

Well so not ALL dreams come true. I lived for seven months in the house of my dreams (photos at left). In the evenings and early mornings I sat on the circular balcony of my bedrom, watching sunrise and sunset, watching the tiny fishing boats out for their daily catch - the fishermen standing in the boat no matter how rocky the waves, throwing out nets or getting their catch with a pole - and listening to the myriad of birds in the 100 trees in my yard. All this was worth the difficulty of living a mile or more outside of town, walking the road thick with mud or dust, getting tuktuk's to drive me or taking the local pikop home with piles of groceries, training my German Shepherd pup to ride there with me, and living without tv or - worse yet- internet. But I did all that and would still be doing it, except that the landlords came home from Italy this first month of the new year. So now I have moved into the house - closer to town, and with internet - of the man I became involved with in the last post, who has simply become a good friend, and my jefe in the project I am working with here, from whom I am learning many things about helping children with learning problems. 
Since I have been here I've developed something of an obsession for learning about the period of the war here in Guate, especially as it affected people right here in my chosen village. While the brunt of the violence took place in the Ixel Triangle, North of here, a reign of terror existed for many years in most of the indigenous villages - of which San Pedro was and is one - perpetrated by members of the community for personal as well as ideological reasons. It is a story that has been repeated in one way or another over time, in Africa, in Germany, Bosnia and other countries....where old grudges, power struggles, and ideological differences can erupt into violence, or can be used to manipulate people to turn against one another. I have spent much of my life trying to understand "man's inhumanity to man," so I continue to pursue that interest here.....to see how this could have taken place in this small pueblo in the fairly recent past. And I continue to meet really remarkable people who are part of that story.