Going to the Fair Guatemala Style

We got home from Guatemala on Sunday afternoon but I still have left over wit and wisdom to share. For instance, here's what happened the day after the last post:
Monday morning: September 14, 2009

When I went to check on mi pollos amigos this morning they were all gone, the huevos chickens as well as the comida chickens. The floor and cages were swept clean. Vamanos los pollos. :( When I asked about them, Christina said they had been for the family lunch on Sunday which made sense. They have a big family and active sociial life. Sunday is the only day our host family doesn’t cook for the students. The students always eat out on Sunday. But then at lunch Monday she told me we had just eaten my chicken friends. I’m glad she waited until after lunch to tell me and I’m afraid I have to say they were delicious. Maybe the moral of the story is to “eat only the ones you love.”

I have homework today but we are also going to the fair at la Plaza de Democracia in a couple of hours so I’m in a rush. Guatemala celebrates their independence from Spain on September 15 and they have already had about a week’s worth of parades and concerts. The biggest event of this event-packed week is the fair. Tomorrow is the Actual Independence Day and all of my fellow students had wondered if we got a day off from school but, no; instead we have classes as usual in the mornings then a “conference” on Guatemalan history in the afternoon. Then tomorrow night there is something happening in just about every corner of the town. We live closest to the Parque Central where I hear there will be bands playing. We picked a great time to come!

Monday evening report on the fair: Just getting to the fair was an experience in itself. We caught one of the microbuses that roam around town with a guy yelling out the destination. He talks so fast and I can never understand what he’s saying except for the one destination every woman would remember, the mall. For that one you listen for a rapid “ipper, ipper, ipper!” which is for the Hipper Pais mall. The best translation I have come up with is “Hyper Country”. Interestingly enough the anchor store was just bought out by Walmart and they even sport the familiar blue vests but with the “Hipper” logo. A small touch of home in a foreign country while proving once again how small our planet has become.

We climbed on a bus that a teacher from the school picked out for us. This took a little time because she had to find one that had enough empty space for all nine of us. The microbus is really just a van as opposed the the huge ones we think of as school busses. Both styles are referred to as "chicken bus." I have never seen an actual chicken on one of these but I have no doubt at all that people board them with an assortment of things including chickens. Just the day before I had held a woman's huge basket of tortillas for her because she had a second basket as well that she was carrying on her head as she walked. Beaven said our microbus was more narrow than the kind we rent for mission trips and designed to seat 12, tops. As we travelled toward the fair they kept stuffing people into the van until I started counting and one of the other students must have noticed because he told me: “25.” Just then another guy got on and my friend said, “26.” Except technically the guy wasn’t “on” the bus, he was standing and hanging to it with only his feet inside and the rest of his body out of the door. If this was what everyone calls a “chicken bus” there wasn’t room for even one more feather.

Once the bus got to the fairgrounds we walked about a mile or two past souvenir shows and fast foods stalls. It was starting to look just like the Texas State Fair.

On our walk we passed one drunk whose buddies each had an arm over their shoulder helping him walk home. It was so crowded that when they staggered towards me I realized that he was so wasted he might throw up on me and it was so crowded that I had nowhere to go to get out of the way. We kind of ricocheted off each other and they veered off to the side.

Once inside, it was even more like the Texas State Fair. There were lots of regional foods, especially the fried kind. One of the teachers at the school brought her niñitos, her grandchildren. They are about nine or ten years old. Miriam let them pick one ride to ride and the group very methodically checked every ride before the kids made a final choice. I took a great picture of Pancho just as the ride started. His face was priceless and I decided I wanted to figure out how to get a copy of the picture printed and framed before I left.

We visited an “Exposition" that was about 75 thousand buildings linked together with exhibit after exhibit after exhibit. It was incredibly crowded and after an hour or so the gringos all agreed that we had seen enough. But when I started looking for a door I couldn’t find one. That’s when I noticed that we were packed into the place like sardines and apparently Guatemala has no laws saying that you have to have fire exits in an insanely crowded place. I could see how folks could burn to a crisp if anything caught fire. After that realization, I was ready to vamanos. As much as we silently led the group straight ahead the building didn’t seem to have an end. We passed a few interesting exhibits of commercial kitchen wares. One difference between this fair and the Texas State Fair is how many commercial exhibits there were. There were a lot of computers, copiers, tools, building supplies and roofing materials. I took a couple of pictures of the kitchen equipment and even one of a blender exhibit that looked suspiciously like a Vita-Mix demo that I see every year at the Texas State Fair. When we finally reached the end of the building we had to walk a mile or so to the bus. Exhausted, we called the trip a grand success.

After we got back home, Beaven and I decided that since he was WAY, WAY outside his comfort zone all day I should buy him a beer. Once we got seated at our table in the restaurant and took stock, I realized my camera was missing. My pocket had been picked.

I had kept my wallet in an inside pocket of my jacket just like the seasoned traveler but my outside pockets are huge and accommodating. The only trouble is that they’re accommodating to anyone who wants to put their own hand in there, too. We figure when I took that last picture of the kitchen equipment the flash alerted every pickpocket in the building. I certainly looked ripe for the plucking; I had a bright blue Columbia rain jacket on and a pink ball cap. Very stylish I thought, but I also looked about as white as I’ve ever looked in my life. The only thing lacking was a little neon sign on my forehead blinking: “stupid gringo here with camera in right coat pocket.” I gotta hand it to the guy, I never felt a thing. We were jostling and bouncing into everyone in Guatemala in that exhibit hall.

There was nothing to do but order Beaven a second beer and chalk it up to experience. The city erupted into a blaze of fireworks celebrating Independence from Spain over 125 years ago but I had a tiny suspicion there was also somebody out there celebrating their new camera.

Next Wednesday : a report on our trip to Guatemala’s Pacific coast. Did you know the country has two beaches? —one on the Pacific and one on the Gulf of Mexico. Very different, too. I will leave you with my last photo; downloaded just before we left for the fair. Not a bad adios to photos from Guatemala.

Living the Mayan Life

Sat afternoon update- September 13th ....Last Week

OK, now I officially don’t care if I ever learn even a word of Spanish because I’ve just seen something more remarkable and fascinating than any language, Espanol or English, could describe. This falls somewhere in the broad category that one picture is worth a thousand words. What I witnessed this afternoon would take far more words than you want to read to do the scene full justice. So I will try to be concise and you can color in the rest.

Earlier Saturday afternoon, I found Christine, the family cook, washing and readying a huge stone called a piedras para moler. It is made of a stone basin with a stone rolling pin, much like you would roll a pie crust, except this stone was for grinding. I thought she was grinding corn but it turned out to be unidentified soft vegetables. While she knelt there on the ground in the courtyard grinding this into a gooey blend, Berta would occasionally walk by and drop a few more spices onto the piedras, which Christine would incorporate into the grind. I think she called it mole but I’ve always thought of mole as chocolate based and this was more like a salsa.

Communication between Christine and myself is still going slow. Some of the problem is that Spanish is her second language, too, K’iche being the first. But mostly it’s because I’m still learning. Christina is always a good sport and slows down for me. A lot of communication right now for us is ESP and mostly we just pretend to understand each other. It is a little better talking with Christine than Berta because we have noticed that Doña Berta doesn’t hear well in any language. Not well at all.

Later that same day I noticed Christine was grinding something else. So I sat down on the ground next to where she was kneeling to watch her and this time it really was corn. I had already noticed a table in the courtyard where they keep dried corn and sometimes we’ll spot a pan of corn soaking in water to soften it. So I figured Christine was grinding the corn for our tortillas, which we have at every single meal. The family dog walked up to let me pet her and we had a serene moment there in the sun petting the dog and grinding the corn.

For some reason I decided to go look into the mysterious dark nook beyond the shower and bathroom. It’s where the living quarters end and there’s a very old wooden shack connected to the back of the house with a dark door that has just enough gaps in it to keep me interested. There is always the aroma of burning wood coming from there. I had heard cockadoodle-doos from there each morning with various other fluttering and peeps. I had asked once if that’s where our morning eggs came from and was told yes. I felt like that gave me some sort of permission to check it out. After I unlatched the rickety old door I had a time getting the door to shut behind me but knew it was important to keep the chickens from running away. It was dark but some light came from a gap between the roof and the ceiling, plus there was a light bulb. On one side of the room I spotted Marcos puttering about.

Marcos is a tiny little old man who is very stooped over in his old clothes who shuffles around the courtyard and into various rooms of the house. He was never introduced to us and I had to ask Christine his name. He doesn’t eat in the kitchen with us as the other family members do. He appears to have a mental deficiency but I can’t tell how much. He doesn’t talk to us but when I hear him talk to Christine I noticed he has a speech impediment that would make him hard to understand even if you knew the language he was speaking. No one has told us anything about who he is; whether he’s a family member or just someone in need that they care for. He spends a lot of time sweeping the place and taking trash out, shuffling around bent over a full 90 degrees at the waist. The mystery room seems to be the place he spend most of his time.

On the other side of the room were two cages full of chickens. Christine came in to explain. One set of chickens, the fat brown ones, were for eggs.



The other cage held skinny white chickens with sparse feathers. These were for comida – to eat.

In the center of the room on the concrete floor was a small fire made of the tidy wood sticks I’ve seen sold in the market. They burn down into perfect coals. Over the fire was a giant pot full to the brim with something bubbling.


“Pappas”, Christine explained, “para cena.” Tonight’s dinner. Then there were two smaller pots on the ground set against the coals. “Frioles,” Christiane explained. The old world equivalent of a crock pot.

Just then two of the un-caged roosters began to fight and Marcos shuffled over to calmly separate them.


So now I know the majority of our food is cooked over a wood fire in the back shed. Our morning eggs come from the brown hens. And I’m not sure what I will do if I’m presented chicken for dinner. Except that the poor little dears looked so cramped and unhealthy, maybe I would be doing them a favor to help send them to chicken heaven. As I walked out and carefully latched the door I felt like I had been accepted into the inner sanctum, even though I had invited myself. I had seen something I never would have ever lived to see had I not come to this city, to this family.

Back in the courtyard, as I watched Christine heave and roll the heavy piedra to grind the corn I couldn’t help think how fast she could do this with my Cuisinart back home.

But I think there’s more than efficiency going on here. Both Christine and Berta are proudly Mayan K’iche. They both wear brightly colored traditional blouses called huipils and skirts of rough lengths of woven cloth wrapped around their waist and tied with yet another brightly woven length of cloth. Neither has ever had her hair cut and they wear it in long braids, sometimes with bright ribbons entwined in the braid. Christine wraps her braids up with brightly colored cloth but Berta leaves her braids down.

The next generation down--Berta's daughter and son and grandkids all dress in contemporary style. We can tell whenever the youth are home because the CD players are going full blast—so loud that we hear only the bass thumping in rhythm, vibrating through the stone walls. I can’t help but wonder if there was one conversation around the dinner table or maybe several conversations where Berta’s daughter announced her independence from the old ways. This family seems fairly well off by Xela standards but living the simple life out of tradition. I wonder what this town and this house will look like in 30 years. I’m glad I’m getting to see it now.

Week Two in Guatemala-

*** I have far more to write about that usual so I’ve decided to stop at around 600 words, which is the length of most or my postings. I will end up with more postings than weeks I’m out of town so I’ll still be posting about Guatemala long after I’m home in two weeks. But that should also give me a couple of weeks off to rest and come up with new adventures……….

If anyone had ever told me when I was young that someday I would sit around in the evening with Beaven and conjugate verbs in another language I would have told them they were crazy. Or that we would get a bang out of reading “501 Spanish Verbs” together. Or that we would actually pay money to go to a poor country do this. I found myself telling Beaven tonight that all Jesus had to do was hang there on a cross; nobody made him conjugate a bunch of verbs. That would certainly have made the story more remarkable to me.

The Espanol is going slow. Maybe I’m too old for this. Mi maestra, Ana Hernandez, is patient and competent. She listens to me attentively, absorbing the many things I have to say while gently correcting an accent or gender error. It’s hard to wrap my thick tongue around the melodic rhythm of this musical language. My favorite word, just for the way it sounds, is “alguenes veces.” It only means “sometimes” but I love to hear it. “Etonces” (“then”) is another one that sparkles in my ears. Ana used to teach Kindergarten which makes her a perfect teacher for somebody like me. Now that she’s moved to teaching Spanish she wants to learn one of the Mayan languages, K’iche, and is taking classes at the same school in the afternoons. She says her job opportunities will grow if she can speak K’iche. After about the fourth day of getting to know each other she mentioned how hard it is to learn K’iche and I just had to laugh in glee that now she knew how I feel.

Life back in Dona Berta’s casa, revolves around the food. Like our rooms, the kitchen is tiny. When we sit at the table there is no room for anyone to walk anywhere. Berta gets her students seated (there is also 30 year old kid here named Michael) then takes her place while Christine gracefully tends to the food.

Christina appears to be an employee but she is here at la casa from the time we wake up until we retire to our rooms after dinner. She keeps a few tamales and some tortillas warm on the flat top of the stove. The stove top is a flat clay ceramic surface that covers the entire range like a gigantic griddle. There is a tiny door under the right side of the griddle where she puts the firewood.

Strangely enough, the wood fire doesn’t make the kitchen hot. There is also two other stoves in this tiny room. One is gas and where Christina scrambles our eggs in the morning. The other is used for storage: inside on the oven racks and atop the range. I don’t know if it works or not.

Berta presides as the hostess but all the cooking is done by Christina. Both ladies are so short I keep trying to measure them against my own five feet and as near as I can figure neither of them are more than four feet ten. Christina may be 4'6”. Berta and Christina are both Maya K’iche and will sometimes lapse into that language. It sounds totally different from either Spanish or English and I can understand why it is hard to learn. It has a lot of guttural sounds and clicking. I laughingly call it chicken noises but actually it’s beautiful to hear.

I love walking around this 500 year-old town and noticing how well-swept the ancient cobblestone streets are. I love that Beaven can navigate his way as though he had grown up here. I love finding new treasures like the Mennonite bakery that’s only open on Tuesdays and Fridays. I love the idea of being able to speak another language; of having options in communications, that if the mood suited me I could rattle off in Espanol. I love the idea of speaking Spanish but I’m afraid that is not the reality quite yet and my resolve is being tested.

What I’m having trouble with right now are two things: It’s blinking hard to learn stuff when you’re 60 years old. And I have never made much of a secret that I really don’t like the food in Guatemala. I try to be thankful and certainly offer thanks at every meal although I now offer a silent PS: “Please help me enjoy this food.” Apparently this is one of God’s little jokes: to call me to this place then test me in my weakest spot. And, so far, I’m failing the test.

I think I have discovered something about poor countries. When it comes to how much things cost, it seems like “people” are fairly cheap and “things” are costly. Labor is very inexpensive here. There is a spot near our route to school where there’s always a guy outside washing a car for someone. The streets are kept swept by old men with their heads down trying to get through the day. The camionettas (microbus),rather than post a huge sign announcing their destination, have a young man in every bus leaning out the window hollering the final destination, “iipper!, ipper!, ipper!” (for the shopping mall named Hipper Pais). These young men move fast and appear to enjoy moving fast. Ana tells me it is free to see a doctor for a diagnosis but horribly expensive to have tests. (Aha! Because tests involve “things.” ) An X-Ray, blood test, prescription drugs or surgery require the patient to pay themselves. And those things are not much cheaper in Guatemala than in the US.

Is this the Kingdom of God? Where things are valued more than humans? It's something to think about.

Next Week: Living the K'iche Life and the following week: Celebrating Independence Day in Guatemala

Faith - Parts One and Two

I'm posting what I have so far since it's the last internet time I'll have until Wednesday afternoon. The school offers internet connection but I'm doing most of the writing in my room.

Faith : “ Not Knowing and Still Going”

Sunday night 7 pm. I have a feeling I’ll be getting to bed pretty early here. For the next three weeks I will be living just about as primitive as you can get. The bathroom and shower are across the courtyard about 75 feet from where I sleep at night. There’s no heat or air-conditioning in the room and one single light bulb that couldn’t be over 60 watts. There’s no closet and one electric outlet. No internet, no phone, no TV. And there’s barely enough light to read by. So, when the sun goes down, I probably will, too.

First I have to explain that Beaven and I asked for separate rooms at our host family’s house. He’s all “early to bed and early to rise” while I prefer going to bed much later and having some time alone at the end of the day. This works out OK in a five-room house with three TVs and four computers but I couldn’t face sharing one room with him for three weeks in Spartan accommodations. And it turned out to be a wise choice because the rooms here are about six feet by eight feet with one ancient old- fashioned double bed and about 3 square feet of floor space. Each one of us practically takes up about three square feet of floor space alone. We’ve both fluffed out quite a bit since we married 40 years ago.

We are spending the entire day together the rest of the time so it’s not like we’re going to miss each other. After all these years we know three feet of floor space with one small bed and different hours would probably lead to something we might spend a lot of time in prison over.

So here I am in my tiny room and he’s next door in his tiny room and I think we will survive. Maybe not even just survive but thrive. Because we’ve learned a whole lot in the last two days. For one thing, we’ve learned how little it takes to make us happy. And once you get that figured out life becomes a piece of cake.

I’m listening to it rain and cocooning. And I’m loving it. It’s seven o’clock at night and I have nothing else in the whole world to do. This should be interesting.

We may lose a bit of weight here. The school is about three blocks away—down and then up a steep hill with cobblestone streets. Everything we’ll need is within walking distance but we will have to walk to get it. We were so busy today with travel I think we only had one meal and a couple of snacks.

The place we’re staying is really a compound. If you’re like I am, the first thought that comes to mind when I think “compound” is the Kennedy family in Nantucket. Erase that thought. Replace it with a massive wooden door that opens only with a lock. There’s a concrete driveway through the big door with enough room to park the family car. Beyond this is a square area with doors on the perimeter and an open courtyard in the middle. This arrangement is the norm here. When you walk down the street all you see is walls and a door here and there. There is no way to tell what the house looks like beyond the front wall and I’ll bet people can live next door to each other and never know anything about what each other’s house looks like.

Inside the courtyard, there are about 4 or 5 rooms in a row with locks on the doors. This is where the students stay in their scholarly little cells. As near as I can figure it, we’re the only students here right now. Berta Oroxm is the matriarch of a family that occupies the rest of the building with its many doors leading inside and above to the second floor. Berta and her husband appear to be maybe slightly older than we are. I understand she has a daughter who is a doctor and has two teenagers. We haven’t met them yet but we have seen the two cats and one shaggy haired little dog.

Berta herself is just adorable. She’s short and round with the beautifully weathered dark brown face I’ve come to love. She wears the traditional thick skirt and huipil, a traditional blouse. But it’s her hair that is the most magnificent. She has long braids, on one each side, but with a beautiful blue ribbon entwined in each braid. Somehow the ribbon also follows her neckline between the braids. I’ve never seen anything like it and would love to get a picture of her to show you.

Monday night- Faith Part Two:

After one day of school I am totally brain dead. Nobody told me it would be this hard. I walked out in faith and stepped into a very big hole. Spanish by immersion means nobody speaks to you in English. Ever. Well, maybe if you look extremely pitiful, but rarely.

Class was from 8 a.m. to around lunch time (Almuerzo) then after lunch I went with a group of fellow students on one of the planned activities to help reinforce our Spanish. Did I mention Beaven and I are the only people over 30 in this school? He stayed back in the room to rest. We went on one of the city busses, also known as a Chicken Bus, to a small Mayan village called Zunil. I have no idea where it is because I couldn’t find my map when I was packing. Anyway, I managed to get myself into a very complicated situation at a Mayan cooperative—don’t ask, it’s a long and boring story. Let me just say I bought a jacket. Some little Mayan lady is going to make it especially for me. I hope. I now have to figure out how to go pick it up and you don’t have enough time, patience or love for me to hear the whole whiney story. Let me just say if you ever see me wear a red jacket in a woven Mayan design, you’d better tell me how great I look.

Oh, and I have HOMEWORK. Which I have to go do now so I will close. This is the UN-fun part of having faith in the unknown. Sometimes when it becomes known it’s hard.

Oh, but PS: Beaven and I spent a half an hour sitting outside watching lightning in the distance over the mountains and listening to the family in the kitchen. That part was easy and fun.

Stewardship

I’m having a little trouble coming up with something to talk about today. I’m packing for Guatemala like I’ve never packed before. I’m packing for Cold Weather Guatemala. This is a major change of technique since every year when we go at this time we go to the low-lying area where it's usually about a hundred degrees and my biggest worry is heat stroke. For those trips I wish I could wear shorts but since we are a church trip, more modest attire is always the code. Now that I’m not representing Jesus and can wear whatever I damn well please it turns out we’ll be in the mountains and it will be cold.

This time we’ll be staying in Quetzeltenango, also called Xela. Beaven has been obsessively checking the weather as usual and the predicted highs in that city are in the 60’s with lows at night in the 40’s. And we’ll be staying in an unheated home. It’s been six months since I’ve been even slightly cold but as near as I can remember I should pack sweatshirts, gloves and jeans. And I’m sure when I come home in three weeks I’ll know the Spanish words for all that stuff.

Not much more exciting than packing stories here today so I will talk about money, instead.

September is upon us and that can mean only one thing in the Presbyterian Church: Stewardship sermons. I imagine Baptists and Methodists do this, too. Every year at this time the church gets geared up to receive pledges for the coming year’s budget.

The church has gotten all sensitive about asking people to “pledge” to give a certain amount of money to their church. They worry about offending folks by asking them to be dependable in this support. Instead of calling them “pledges” they call them vague things like “estimates of giving.” I grew up different. You pledged to help out and your word was your bond. "Back in my day", as Grandparent talk goes, people pledged and kept their pledge. I had an uncle who died and left a bunch of serious money to a charitable organization instead of me. In getting his affairs in order I asked the bank’s trust department if they could pay off Uncle Harry’s pledge for the rest of the year. They asked if he had signed his pledge card. I checked with the church and they came up with the card and sure enough he had signed it. To the bank, this became one of his debts that Uncle Harry's will decreed they pay off.

This is the way I’ve always looked at stewardship in the church. It’s just understood that if I can’t make it the church will have to adjust, but I need to make every effort to cough up the cash if I possibly can.

But this will be a hard stewardship season. It’s not just business as usual. In our congregation we have a few people out of work and one family that I know of that had to give up their house. Even as the signs of better days are starting to appear in the news, we’re looking at a budget that is in the red as of July and likely to get worse and we're facing the job of coming up with an estimate of what we think we’ll have for 2010. Not a fun job.

The older members of our congregation still remember about 20 years ago when we hit a snag. That year, Roland Adams got up front and talked about being behind on our bills and then took off his hat and we literally passed the hat to come up with some dough.

The funny thing to me is the way folks remember this story. Some remember it as a negative thing and others as a positive time when we realized that we could cough up extra money fairly easily when we really need to.

Presbyterians usually like to act real refined and pretend like money isn’t important. We prefer to talk about time and talents, instead. As purists, we get into the whole meaning of the word “Stewardship.” And the best explanation of stewardship I’ve ever heard came from John Williams, the current Chaplain at Austin College. He’s famous for his stewardship explanation. He even takes a dry erase marker and draws stick figures in his explanation.

In Scotland years ago, the most valuable asset a family could have was its herd of pigs. John would draw a few little piggies wandering around in the pasture. To protect the pigs from wolves and thieves, the owner would keep them in a pig sty (drawing a circle for the fence around the piggies) and hire a warden to watch over them: the Sty Warden. Supposedly, that’s where the word “steward” came from.

The point would be that stewardship means to protect our assets from danger, whatever they are. The church has come to appreciate that just about anything can be an asset: the Sunday school teachers, the musicians, people who mow the lawn or maintain the building, those who reach out to the needy and who preach the word of God. It's not always about pictures of presidents, but those help.

I heard a sermon on stewardship years ago that was fairly forgettable except for one illustration. The preacher defined one form of stewardship as tipping well in restaurants. I had never thought of tipping as stewardship but I’ve recalled this idea just about every time I’m offered the opportunity to be generous in a tip.

I was reminded of this lesson last week in one of the eulogies for Ted Kennedy. His son said he thought his dad had forgotten some money on the counter as they were leaving a hotel room. Kennedy told his son what back-breaking work it was to make beds all day and how the lady who made their beds was probably supporting a family.

I know a lot of people don't have any money right now. But the ones that do have something beyond rent and food get the great luxury of deciding what to do with their money. And I always sign the pledge card even though they don't have a space for that.

No pithy final paragraph. If I come up with one later, I’ll add it. I have to get back to packing. Next week’s blog should have interesting comments on adapting to primitive living conditions with Beaven. It will be interesting when I tell him he can't use the tap water to brush his teeth.