Just spent a week in Guatemala visiting my sister, Ginny, who lives there full-time. She is working for Manna (check it out on the web) and seems as happy as I've ever seen her, which is nice :) A week in a foreign country gives you a lot to think about; here are some of those endless impressions.
Guatemala City is both bleakly gray and exploding with color at the same time. The endless walls and roads, the barbed wire, the billowing clouds of exhaust, all seem to create a world of inescapable monochromatic monotony, and yet, color pops everywhere, blooming like dandelions in sidewalk cracks: it screams out in the graffiti I'm relatively thankful I can't read, streaks by in the multitude of buses clogging the streets with starts and stops and proud honks of their horns, dots the sidewalks in the bright woven traditional garb the residents with Mayan heritages wear normally on their way to peddle goods to tourists. Rushing through the streets of the city in the "safe" cab (as opposed to the not-safe kind, of which there are many), the feel of the city is that it is closing in on and around you, that outside the thin metal sides of this disreputable little car the world of the capital, poor, busy, overpopulated, vibrant, teeming, is clamoring to claim even this last little bit of space, and you better keep driving unless you'd like to be swallowed whole.
It reminded me a bit of Mexico City, but I don't know if that was just my endlessly-connecting brain searching for an analogy or an actual resemblance.
In the cab, the driver asks Ginny, our fluent fearless leader, about me and Cary, sitting in the backseat and smiling as we pretend to understand their conversation.
"Oh, they're my sisters," she answers.
He looks at us in the rearview mirror, and smiles, and switches to his English just to make sure we hear him. "Ah, how nice, obviously they're your older sisters...."
Cary and I look at each other as he continues the sentence, pouting in unison. Obviously?
Time to buy some wrinkle cream.
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Our first stop is Antigua, which is claustrophobic in a different way than Guat City. A well-preserved colonial city, it has lovely cobblestoned streets and blocks and blocks of 1 story buildings with brightly colored walls and intricately carved doors. It's laid out in a simply grid system, and it is undeniably pretty and charming. The problem is that everything is pretty and charming in exactly the same way. Walking in Antigua is like holding your breath and swimming across a pool underwater with your eyes open. You know you are making progress, but the walls and water all look the same, so you don't know how MUCH progress until your hand (or in one incident I remember with painful clarity, your nose) hits the wall. There's nothing wrong with a bit of beautiful sameness, especially when you're on a schedule-free vacation, but I never once knew where I was in relationship to anywhere else. Even when we'd stumble on a landmark, I would still try to turn the wrong way thinking it led back to where I thought we were. Thank God Cary has a better sense of direction and location that I do, or I might still be wandering up and down the streets hoping to have our hotel door magically appear like something out of a Narnia novel.
We did a walking tour and discovered the real pleasure of Antigua was in looking beyond. Heading down the street there would be a break in a thick wall and you'd catch a glimpse of a courtyard, lush and dimly lit and coolly tiled, often with a babbling fountain. After a day and a half of passing by La Merced, a church with a solid, yellow gingerbread house exterior, we paid 3Q (about 60 cents!) to go inside and wandered upon its famous fountain, shaped in the curving lines of a calla lily, large and stone and framed by bright bouganvilla vining over the brick walled enclosure. In our hotel, there was a hidden garden of sorts, a courtyard entered through a narrow doorway behind a blue fountain built to drain the endless rains of the rainy season (which, lucky us, starts in May). We sat there in the afternoon, sharing the space with a group of Christians finishing their year of international service and taking turns "testifying" about how their time in places like Uganda and Cambodia had taught them God's will through humility and love. The Christian mission is alive and pervasive in Guatemala; Ginny tells me they come not only to do good works but to gather the tradition-clinging Mayan population into the strongly Catholic fold of the Spanish population. I have thoughts about missionary work that might be suited for a different blog, but, for now, let me just say we encountered more Christians in Guatemala than I really expected.
In more secular news, we met a Trojan that evening, drinking in a Mexican-inspired bar. An alum of the USC dental school, he was there on a Doctors-without-Borders-style trip, wearing a proud cardinal and gold tshirt. He bought us Moza and had met Cary's sister-in-law's future family while living out in CA. Even without the internet's assistance, the world is a small place.
We spent that full day in Antigua without Ginny, who had to work. Back when I was an education minor, I never understood the argument for English-only education, and this one day confirmed those long-formed (and forgotten) beliefs. Immersion is effective, but it is also terrifying. I have no talent for languages. Ok, that's not true; I've taken Latin, German, and Italian, and each time got to the point where I could read and understand them with relative ease. When it came to speaking them, however, I was literally tongue-tied. My pronunciation was horrible and it made me self-conscious, and I got nervous, and lost all control of grammar and accent. I had to take speech therapy for three years to learn how to speak ENGLISH properly, for pete's sake, I don't know what I expected with non-native languages. Cary has a singer's ear and a good knowledge of French, so she could fake restaurant-level Spanish, and Ginny is really talented with languages, although she won't admit it. Certainly they would be the immigrant children chattering in English on the second day of their new school. I, on the other hand, would be the one who sat in the back and stuttered when called on. Obviously it's important to learn the language of the country you live in, and being bilingual is a tremendous gift, but throwing a child into a situation where they don't understand a single word seems to me a bit unnecessarily cruel and demanding. I wanted to be in the bilingual classroom of Antigua that day, is what I'm saying. And I think it only fair we ease children into their new culture; it puts more pressure on the educators to know when to raise the safety net and when to take it away, but the pressure should be on the educators rather than the children, in my opinion. ANYWAY, not knowing Spanish in Guatemala is definitely the challenge I suspected it would be.
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We took a shuttle bus from Antigua to Panajachel, which lies on Lake Atitlan. The guidebooks warn of highway robberies, but I never fet unsafe. The roads are steep and sinuous, and occasionally cross the normal divide to become 2 lanes with only one orange cone for a warning because of unrepaired landslides, but our driver was very cautious with his driving, and no vigilantes pulled up besides us with machine guns (people with overactive imaginations shouldn't read security warnings before traveling). When I was lucky enough to travel through Europe by bus after high school, I spent the whole trip staring out the windows, enthralled by the quaint villages and the occasional hidden castle nestled in a green mountainside like something out of a fairytale. In Guatemala, the same activity made me sad rather than fascinated. The landscape is steep and green and quite scenic, but all I could see was the gatherings of corrugated metal homes popping up on the horizon like a group of mushrooms in an off-season soccer field, the children pulling heavily laden and emaciated mules along nearly vertical hillside farms, and half-demolished storefronts lining the more commercial stretches of the roads. This kind of scenery made me sad, and being sad made me feel like a patronizing, entitled snob, and no one likes feeling like that, so I stopped looking. In some ways I'd be a terrible cultural anthropologist.
Speaking of, cultural music appreciation is definitely not my strong point. In honor of Mother's day, the shuttle's radio station was playing Mama-love music. One song was 9 or 10 minutes long, repeated the same 4 notes throughout, and contained not only a rap section but a good 4minute interval in which the artist literally cried into the microphone as he sobbed about his love and gratitude to his beautiful, devoted mother. It reminded me of a third-grade Mother's day project. And they played it THREE times in the 2 hour shuttle ride. Never have I wished for a heavy metal playlist on my Ipod more than I did by time number 2. I had to settle for BLASTING ADELE (yes, I am cliche--such a good CD!!) and trying to find my happy place.
All for now...soon: Panajachel and San Pedro.
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