C-mail; Vignettes of Guatemala

Howdy all!

I hope you have all had an excellent end of summer and smooth transition into fall. I got back from Guatemala a week ago where it felt like winter in California: rain, clouds and sun, except I could see my breath in the 8,000 feet plus altitude. But onto the summary:

1. Guatemala is awesome. It is an absolutely beautiful country, (green like Seattle and corn like Iowa). The country side is dotted with small villages hid among pine trees and corn fields. Instead of flat plains that the idea of corn usually inspires, Guatemala is rather rugged and is filled with hills, valleys, mountains and volcanoes (some active). I was living in the city of Xela which is at 8,000 feet of altitude. Xela is more or less the cultural capital of Guatemala. There are many "parks" and museums which serve as gathering centers for parades and any sort of celebrations. The indigenous population and culture of Guatemala is amazingly rich as well. Many of the Mayan women wear their hand woven and extremely colorful and beautiful dresses yet suffer discrimination for it. The history of the indigenous population is deep. Only recently have many indigenous people who once hid their identity now started to take an interest again in their culture and languages. (In the past, because of severe racism and views of the government against indigenous people, many parents forbid their children to speak any language except Spanish or to wear traditional clothing.)

2. I had an wonderful and valuable time learning Spanish at El Quetzal (pronounced "L-Kate-zal") in the city of Xela. Excellent, small family style school founded by an indigenous lady named Glenda. She really helped my Spanish and put down a solid foundation in terms of grammar and practical usage. I just hope I can keep it up enough between here and Caracas. If you would interested in learning or practicing Spanish, I would highly recommend Xela and specifically El Quetzal because the school and teachers are amazing plus I want to help them out. Shameless plug. I can get you contact info if you're ever interested.

3. As for the national food criticism, Guatemala gets a 4/5. Interestingly enough, this was the first Latin American country I had been that had tortillas. And somehow unlike the varieties I've had in the states, corn tortillas are really good there. In spite of the fact that most of the corn grown there goes out of the country, the corn products are abundant and very good. And beyond the staple beans, rice and eggs, they have certain dishes that are cooked and served in large leaves that look like they came straight out of the jungle. Excellent overall.

4. As for next steps, its off to San Francisco on the 26th for a apprenticeship orientation with InnerCHANGE. I'll be back on October 1st and from there, it's off to Caracas on the 8th!

5. Finally, October 4th is a day of prayer with CRM, (Church Resource Ministries) the mother organization of InnerCHANGE. I'll be taking the day to pray for YOU, so let me know how!

Alright, there are many details left to figure out still before I move on south, but thank you so much for all the encouragement and response and I'm sorry I've slow in returning messages. But I'll get there, eventually. I hope this finds you all doing just plain amazing and have an amazing October!

Press on for Joy!
Cameron



Many times in traveling or being in contact with different cultures, I've observed things that make absolutely no sense to me. But I have to remind myself that I don't know what people are thinking and feeling behind the action. Even bigger, I more often than not have no clue how God is at work in a place, person, or group from just a brief encounter. I find it disconcerting to only be able to observe and not know what to think or what to make of a situation without any informative commentary or concurrent processing. So, in light of that, the section below is written simply as observables; no analysis, no viewpoints or emotions. Just actions and words that can be observed. With that, here are some vignettes of Guatemala.

Guatemala by the numbers

Guatemala suffered a 36 year internal war where over 200,000 died in the conflict and nearly 1 million were displaced. In 1996, peace accords were signed and armed conflict stopped.

Currently, CACIF (a large trade federation composed of various companies and other organizations) owns about %80 of the land. The other %20 is owned by 15 families in Guatemala. The other 12.5 million people in Guatemala don't have much left over. (Or in the case of many field workers, their land is owned by someone else.) Also, geographically, the population is distributed such that %80 percent of the people live on %20 percent of the land.

1 dollar is 7.65 quetzales (pronounced kate-zal-ehs). 10 quetzales will get you three oranges, or a bag full of breads and rolls, or into El Fonde del Che for an evening of Andean folk music.

The Mayan "week" has 13 days for the 13 major movement parts of the body (2 ankles, 2 knees, 2 hips, 2 writs, 2 elbows, 2 shoulders and 1 neck). Multiply 13 by 20 fingers and toes and you have 260 days which makes the Mayan year.

It can take 4 or less hours to get to Xela from the capital on the chicken bus. 4 plus hours on a fancier bus. It takes about 2 hours to walk up to the natural steam baths on a mountain behind Xela. It takes about an hour to walk down.

There are 15 political parties in Guatemala. You can move on in a presidential election with only 23% of the popular vote. The 2 remaining candidates both have parties whose symbols are hands. One in the shape of a bird (think Napoleon Dynamite happy hands club), the other a fist.



Casa de los Migrantes (House of the Migrants)

Two years ago, the Guatemalan government built a facility for folks that had left Guatemala to come into the US illegally, but were captured at some point along the way and sent back. The commencing InnerCHANGE team in Xela has been visiting the facility for a while now and helping to organize volunteers for cooking meals. I got to visit the house one afternoon. I walked into a rather large room(in comparison to the rooms in the house I was living at and school I was attending) with bunk beds lining the walls. About thirty men were standing around. Except they weren't men by age. The youngest could have been no older than 15, the oldest no more than 25. We had happened to arrive at lunch time and half of the group was being called out for lunch. I was told that for some it had been a very long time since they left. If they are captured in Mexico, they have to wait for enough Guatemalans to be captured before they are sent back. When they arrived here four days ago, they had to give up their backpacks, belts and shoelaces. Today they were getting them back.

The next room over is for the women. About 20 young women were waiting here. Some were siting with small children of no more than 4. Everyone is waiting for their parents or relatives to come pick them up and take them back home. However, some of them won't exactly have a home to go back to. As it was explained to me, the trip north is very expensive (especially considering a significant amount of people in rural areas make no more than 2 dollars a day). Most of the people here either took out a loan on the their land, sold it to the bank, or if they were very lucky they might have sold their car. After finding a coyote (name for the guides) and paying upwards of $4,000 (some after they cross), the trip begins. By far the most treacherous part is crossing the desert in Mexico. As one of the volunteers told me about his trip, in his party of 20 people, 2 died and the rest survived on a gallon of water between them in the desert during the four day crossing. He also explained that the odds of making it past the border are very slim, just about %5. Yet, due to lack of work and lack of opportunities, the people in these two rooms tried. Now after an unsuccessful attempt, they are waiting for their parents to come claim them. Of course that assumes that they even notified their family. The volunteers explained that for some, the shame of being caught is too much. Instead of facing their fathers, they'll try their fortune away from the family. Some find a job, others a gang, others just the street. But for today, they're smiling with their shoelaces, belts, and free hands that don't have to hold up their pants any longer.

Raining on their Parade

I was lucky enough to be in Guatemala during their independence day, September 15th. The majority of the week was filled with parades, concerts, men selling plastic blue and white flags in the street, and general festiveness. On the afternoon of the 14th, I found myself in the "Central Park" (More of a concrete zone with trees and shrubs symmetrically scattered in concrete planter beds ringed with benches) watching high school marching band after high school marching band pass by on the street. (A note about the bands: trumpets, metal handheld xylophones, drums and nothing else. The music spanned everything from the Guatemalan national anthem to Nelly Furtado's Say it Right.) The doubled edged sword of being tall and being in Guatemala is that I could see everything without obstruction from the back edge of the crowd, but I also received a significant proportion of the attention that should have been directed at the parade.

After a short amount of time, I heard a bit of a thud behind me. I turned around to find an older woman in a blue sweater and black skirt on the ground. Another lady was taking her arm to help her up, but as she was a bit of a "gordita" (literally "little fat one", which isn't offensive there.) I took her other arm and helped to bring her up. The other woman and I helped her to an open spot on a concrete bench attached to planter. The other woman continued on at this point and I took a seat next to the older lady with the blue knit sweater. Her left leg was a little dusty but showed no trace of blood. She sat with her face in her hand for a number of minutes. The bands marched on behind the wall of people in front of us. She finally uncovered her face and brushed part of her graying but still dark hair slightly aside. "You alright?" I asked. She picked up her head and gave me a tired smile revealing two missing front teeth. She stared at me for an uncomfortable period of time and then returned her head to her hand. This process repeated itself a number of times. Finally after a number of questions on my part and very little responsiveness on her part (though the bands passing by made it difficult to hear) she finally decided to get up and go. Standing up, she tottered a bit and I helped to steady her. Grabbing my right hand between a few fingers and the thumb on her right hand, she lead me through the crowd. We were walking past the flag poles with disproportionally large flags looking more like sails on a mast when the national anthem started playing. She stopped, maintaining the grip on my hand and we stood facing the flags for the song. We were standing rather close to the flags and a number of officials of some sort were no more than forty feet in front of us to our left. Realizing I was in a rather conspicuous location, I tried to follow the lengthy anthem along with some openings and closings of my mouth, but I looked rather lost. Finally after a number of minutes, the song ended in applause and the old woman pulled me through the crowd while I stabilized her at key moments.

After pushing through some more crowd and garnering a number of side glances, we reached another seat in the park and I gestured for us to sit down. The bands kept circling the park, but it was a little quieter at this location. At this point, I was determined to learn the woman's name. "Como se llama?" (What are you called?) She looked at me, raised her lip and looked away. I tried again. Same response. I waited and tried, tried and waited, but the best semblance of answer I got was "Pollo" (Chicken). She then confidently asserted "soy embolada" (I'm drunk) with a large smile and quickly laid her head against my shoulder and picked it up just as quickly. "Where do you live?" I asked and was answered with a blank stare. "Where do you live? I want to help you get home." Again nothing. So we sat and listened to the cacophony of at least eight different bands playing at once as they made their way around the park. I tried a few different times asking for her place of residence but nothing came of it. At one point she stood up and snatching my hand again, set off. We walked to the northwest corner of the park, but were confounded by the crowds and rib shaking bass drums (she had indicated she wanted to see the bands) and were forced to retreat to different bench circling a planter. I tried again to ask her where she was going or where she lived. She returned the question to me with an interested look. "I live over there" I motioned. She pleaded with her eyes and asked "Can I you take me with you?" "Its not my house, I'm just staying there. Another family owns the house and I can't take visitors in with me. But where is YOUR house? I can help you get there." And as with so many times before, she gave a blank stare and turned away. This process repeated a number of times only to be interrupted by some folks handing out flyers for pain relievers. By now, nigh an hour and a half had passed since the woman had fallen and it was dark. Her condition had not changed in the least. I had appointments very soon and was likely to be late as it was. I folded the pain relief flyer into a paper airplane, handed it to the woman, and asked as clearly as I could if I could help her home one last time. Again, the raised lip. I took her hand, explained I had to go, silently prayed over her and left. Her head turned down again as I got the last glimpse of her aging gray and black hair as I walked off. The bands played on.

Cristo Viene

The bed was put together and moved into the right position amid the row of double and triple bunk beds. There was nothing else to do, all the trash was swept up and the whole place looked much better. I bid my farewell to my building partner and to Juan Francisco, the retired evangelical pastor in the wheel chair who had opened up his house for any and all street kids and shoeshine boys with out homes.

Walking out, I heard a bit of commotion to my right and saw one of the older boys picking up rock from the street. He placed it under his coat and held it in place in his armpit. I hurried over and found Byron, the older boy who had just picked up the rock, approaching Jaime, his tormentor. Jaime held a toy gun (which they sell for very cheap in the street and could look rather authentic in a dark alley) that apparently he used to shoot Byron. Somehow I managed hurry over and put myself between the two. Byron strode down the street always facing Jaime. I could only tell Jaime's position from the direction of Byron's face. Jaime apparently stood still and wasn't moving. I asked Byron quickly what had happened. Except my words didn't carry what I meant; for possibly the only time in the trip, my spanish just plain wouldn't work. Byron got the gist of my inquiry and spouted out his complaint. Jaime had shot him with the gun and the projectile had nailed Byron no more than a fingers width away from his eye. "Look!" he shouted and pointed to the spot. I looked and stammered "No,... no... estoy bien," (which means "No no, I'm fine." instead of my intended "No, its fine.") At this point we had walked past Jaime and were nearing a corner. A few steps later, Byron still facing his antagonist, dropped the rock. We stopped, talked a bit more, (my spanish came back to me at this point.) and after asking for some money which I told him I didn't have, he took off. I yelled out "Paz a ti" and turned to go home. I came down a road I had never taken before, and found a view of the mountain side across town. On top of a house or church or some sort of building, the words Cristo Viene, were placed above it in large letters. Cristo Viene, Christ comes.