Frankly, this piece of writing is long overdue, and to be truthful, it has been sitting in my draft box for quite some time now. However, the time has really come to catch up with you. The difficult part is that I feel we've been out of touch for so long I'm not really sure where to start.
Currently, I am teaching American literature at Colegio Internacional de Guatemala. To say the least, the job has really been an eye-opener in terms of understanding just how profound the divide between the wealthy and poor here really is. Getting blackberry-obsessed sixteen year olds remotely interested in English literature has been a challenge to say the least. Perhaps it's just that they are sixteen, but more often, these sixteen year olds have never been exposed to their own countryside--the one in which infant mortality and respiratory diseases are among the highest in the Central America and the rest of the world, because open cooking fires pollute homes. Certainly, my students have seen the beaches, tourist attractions and grandiose Mayan ruins located in Tikal. (If you're interested, this is the incredible jungle where Episode VI of Star Wars was filmed with the Ewoks). But understanding just how cyclic the poverty in their country remains, or how desperately lacking the access is to healthcare in the highlands, is another concept entirely.
I have had the opportunity to enlighten a few of my 150 students by chaperoning their chance to work as medical translators with HELPS International--the nonprofit I have always been a part of with here. In March, I completed my 14th medical team, the last three of which were accompanied by my students. It is encouraging to sit back and allow them to experience their people in an entirely new way. They return to school enlivened, and determined to create change. They make me hopeful for Guatemala, knowing that they, quite literally, are the future. While adolescents now, they will become the country's stakeholders--those who eventually take over the family business and control the circles of money among the elite.
Really, my school has a variety of families; some kids are picked up in Toyota Corollas with the hub caps missing, others jump into Escalades with their armed body guards following behind in a Volkswagen Jetta. Fortunately, none of the kids at my school are sent there with body guards during the day, but it is not an uncommon practice at many other schools with other families. What most homes and schools do have, however, are small armies of housekeepers, gardeners or janitors. Experiencing the country's lower class serve the elite in friends homes still makes me uncomfortable. I suppose the discomfort comes from either my midwestern work ethic or my inevitable and unavoidable theories of the American dream, but it is different than having a cleaning lady come to help once a week. My boyfriend has a housekeep who came from the area in which their coffee farm is located, and who lives in the house with them. Sabina has her own room, but it is a humble space. She laughs and feels like the grandmother of the family, but having someone tell me "my breakfast was served" while I was living with them for the first month or so was strange. It is a constant reminder of the class divide here. And, of course, I am a de facto member of the upper class because I am both American and in a relationship with someone who comes from a wealthy family.
I can understand, however, just how easy it is to forget the realities of the country's poor. Aside from the dingy, dirty and dangerous half, the portion of Guatemala City in which I live is filled with restaurants and coffee shops and many of the houses mimic the beauty of Spanish architecture. I live in a fully furnished apartment with its own parking space. But the difference between my neighborhood and, say, Uptown Minneapolis is that I use three separate keys to enter my apartment, and its door lies behind two, tall security gates. Oh, and I can't walk to any coffee shops nor would I ever imagine biking or taking the city bus. The only time I walk anywhere is in the morning on my way to the school bus stop around six (that's right, I take the school bus with my students to school). Even then, there isn't a morning that I don't hear more than one car horn or that I am unaware of just who is walking within my vicinity. I don't have a fancy cell phone, nor do I wear jewelry that even appears expensive on my way to school. And this is the nicest part of town.
I love to escape to what I call "my Guatemala"--the highlands. I relate to those in the highlands in a simple, but more human way. There, people are more concerned about tortillas and firewood than the latest deal on iPods and Blackberrys; though frustrating and tragic, the simplicity is also refreshing. These experiences remind me to maintain my humility and remember where I come from. While I am sometimes discouraged by my students apparent lack of interest in my class, I go the highlands to remember that my life isn't so terrible. I don't plant corn by hand. I don't pick coffee for a living. Working as a medical translator makes my effort feel worthwhile and like I am part of a true change.
Showing posts with label Guatemala. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guatemala. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Morning Stroll.
During my seven minute walk to the school bus stop this morning, I was honked at by a truck-full (and I mean overflowing) of men, a pickup filled with vegetables, three cars spitting black smoke, and two motorcycles. I was "shht"-ed by three other men waiting for the city bus, and solicited for chocolate by a woman with missing teeth.
With the sheer quantity of men in the back of the pickup, that's nearly six men a minute.
Gross.
With the sheer quantity of men in the back of the pickup, that's nearly six men a minute.
Gross.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
A Letter to my family on Thanksgiving
The clock in Danny’s Dad’s car says it’s 6:47, but I’ve already been awake for two hours. Luckily, Danny was the one to get up at 4:15 to turn the water heater on this morning for a shower. A little old fashioned, the device takes half an hour at a minimum for our water to be lukewarm, but forty minutes is optimal for the production of a steamy stream from the showerhead.
Early as always in HELPS good fashion, we were slated to leave the office on a construction project today at 6:00. Of course in Guatemalan good fashion, we left at 6:40 and then stopped to fill the coaster, trucks, and our car with diesel at the gas station adjacent to the office. It’s now 7:08 and we finally hit the winding road to Antigua. As the four lane mountain highway twists upward, I’m bracing my computer into my knees to prevent it from slipping into the lap of Danny’s sister who is next to me beneath a blanket and a pillow and waking up just enough to worry about the stray dogs darting from the dusty ditch and into the road.
As this morning’s story goes, there are 120 families participating in HELPS’ preventative health program in Santa Clara this year. The idea is to combine all aspects of HELPS work together, and track the tangible differences made. So each family combines ONIL products (stoves and heat retaining cookers and water filters) with access to a monthly medical clinic (run by Danny), basic health and nutrition courses (to teach treatments for the common cold, flu, dehydration, etc.), and referrals to the larger medical teams if hernia surgery, etc. is required. Each family has made a Q200, or $25 contribution for their stove, and makes a Q10 ($1.25) contribution for every medical consult made. The money garnered in the clinic, then, is used to purchase medication for the patients who are working to keep their blood-pressure, diabetes, and so forth under control. In this way, Danny is able to manage many of the chronic problems the regular medical teams encounter. It’s really incredible to see the difference made when people are saving money, saving their lungs with a clean stove, and learning how to keep themselves healthy by washing their vegetables and hands.
The year is ending, and ten families in the program remain stove-less. To solve the problem, Richard Grinnell, HELPS Vice President, suggested the members of the office go and install the remaining stoves themselves. He also requested they also invite their families to come along.
The beautiful part of it is that everyone volunteered, which explains the caravan of people—mothers, sisters, in-laws and children—we’re following this morning. There are 30 people packed into the HELPS coaster and three other SUVs are in line with the bus. Normally a stove takes four people to construct and a team of 12 people usually completes 10 stoves in a day, but this is sort of a special opportunity for those who work in the office to share their work with their families.
With the number of people coming along, each group will have the chance to install one stove, but this will also give us the opportunity to spend time with the families receiving the stoves. We plan to have lunch with them, and take some time to understand the way they live in their drafty, usually dirt-floored dwellings. I always say your life changes when you’re invited into a family’s home in the highlands.
Mario, Danny’s dad volunteered for the project right away, and is this morning’s driver. The picking season at the coffee farm is in full swing, and so he is accustomed to traveling into the mountains twice a month. As I write here and the others two are curled up in sleep together, Danny and his dad are collapsing in laughter.
What’s astonishing to me, though, is that we were able to coerce Danny’s diva-sister, Adriana, and her docile boyfriend, Sebas, to come along. For me, who was introduced to the highlands at an early age—this trip is old hat, but it’s interesting to hear Danny explain to his little sister where we are, and to Sebas, what difference stove makes for the people and the environment.
Both at nineteen, they’re the kind of kids who rarely get out of the city and into the highlands. When you don’t take time to leave the comforts of the waiter-filled VIP movie theater where we saw Harry Potter last night, or the beautiful restaurants and comfortable western-like homes in the city, it’s easy to forget the humbling means of the people across the larger part of this country. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Of course, the other beautiful part about today is that it is Thanksgiving.
And it is a beautiful day. The rainy season ended a month ago, and the countryside is blooming. As we pass hillsides of pines and periwinkle flowers, this morning’s sun is streaming gold and casting shadows in incredible patterns across the limestone walls of the highway. Many of these walls have collapsed and spilled into the road as mudslides that have dried and now cast extra dust into the air when the wind picks up. Sun flowers, daisies and black-eyed susans are sweeping yellow flames between a patchwork of crops cut into the mountainside. If you look carefully enough, coffee plants sometimes peek through the cover of shade that blankets their careful growth and now, their berries will soon ripen red, lining their branches like the cranberry garland of a Christmas tree. The sky is absolutely blue, and volcanoes peak above the tree line of corn on the road ahead as a chicken bus cuts out in front of us and whizzes by.
But as I gaze across this terrain the never ceases to amaze, my heart is with all of you at home.
It seems to me that I could be spending today in no better way than I would be at home; because working on the stove project in the highlands is a way I can give of myself. Though family surrounds me here and we are stopping on our way home for a proper Thanksgiving dinner in Antigua, I miss all of you—you humor and your smiles and your jokes—because there really is nothing like our family.
But I have a much to be grateful for today. In addition to a proper and competitive education, I’m bilingual, have managed to secure a good job with higher pay than I thought I would originally earn, and I get to take high school kids into the highlands as translators with that job. Geeking out as an American Literature teacher and letting kids experience the highlands as I did when I was seventeen? The way I figure it, I’ve got the best of both worlds.
I have a beautiful apartment, have been able to navigate the unintelligible twists and turns of Guatemala City, and will be dressing up like a prom date—huge dress, hair, nails and all—at a fancy wedding this weekend. Not to mention the fact that I get to attend that wedding with my best friend instead of an awkward classmate who asked me to the dance because “I am nice.”
It is wonderful to spend my time every day with the one person I connect with on all levels, and who loves me for exactly who I am, and the way that I am. Danny has been an incredible blessing to me. He is a gentleman always. He holds himself at high esteem and expects the same from the people who surround him. He encourages me, and pushes me to be better, and is unafraid to tell me when I’m in a funk or being selfish. He keeps me grounded, and as I’m sure you all know, I need that sometimes. And sometimes I need that a lot.
I won’t pretend like these three months of adjustment have been easy. There have been breakdowns—one of which just happened to fall on the week that Gram and Mom arrived in the country. For me, there is sometimes a lot of self-induced pressure to fit in… to wear and say the right thing, to cook the right kind of food the right way. There are protocols in the social circles here to which I am still adjusting: what color ties are appropriate for a daytime suit or a nighttime suit and so on and so forth. “But it matches my dress,” is my argument, and his response is, “but you can’t wear a black tie for lunch, and cuff links are only appropriate if I’m wearing a tuxedo.” Guatemalan slang is like learning another language, and in a loud club it’s impossible to follow conversations—especially of the women. Also, I’ve finally been healthy in the last three weeks after battling giardia for the same amount of time. I’ll just say it was miserable and leave out all the pukey details.
But the other day, Danny asked that I stop comparing the way things are here to what is familiar at home; and I think he’s right. The onset of Thanksgiving, and his lack of empathy or understanding for the holiday had put me out of sorts. I had been trying to think of how to share the holiday with his family, but knowing we had this trip planned, had no idea how to cook a turkey and simultaneously work on stoves in Santa Clara. I had the idea to make Thanksgiving tomorrow, but no one would have been home to spend time experiencing the day. As a result, I was sort of feeling forgotten and like my boyfriend was making little effort to make the holiday significant. I felt like he forgot I was far away from the people I love on one of the most important days of the year.
However, after a short stint with my journal I realized that none of you would want me to feel that way today, and that you, as my family have taught me more than that. You expect me recognize and understand what I have in my life, and to share both my blessings and customs with those around me. You wouldn’t want me to be soured by my absence at dinner today.
But if I am really honest with myself, the only things currently missing in my life here—aside from fall weather and the change of the seasons—are all of you.
I have this great memory of the Sunday before I left for Guatemala in September. We were all standing around the kitchen like we usually do on family gatherings, and Thomas was being passed from person to person. Food was laid out, and the carrot cake was to be cut in a little while. I hooked up my computer to the boose radio in the kitchen and fired up the play list I had been feeding on in the weeks before I left.
So Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” rings into the background, and I turn up the volume. And suddenly I look over at Nick and he’s singing.
All the lyrics.
Though Lori is shocked at her son, Anna chimes in with the lyrics and there we were—together, singing and dancing in the kitchen like I used to do when I was kid.
And it was just a beautiful moment. Simple and pure, like our family and the way we treat one another. Full of joy and laughter and an embrace of our ever-changing paths. I’ve thought a lot about that moment since I’ve left, and it floods my mind each time the song comes on and I hear,
“ … I’ll be giving it my bestest, and nothing’s going to stop me but divine intervention,
I recon it’s again my turn to win some or learn some,
But I won’t hesitate no more, no more, it cannot wait, I’m yours….
Well open up your mind and see like me,
Open up your plans and damn your free,
Look into your heart and you’ll find love, love, love, love, love,
Listen to the music of the moment, people dance and sing,
We’re just one big family,
And it’s our Godforsaken right to be, loved, loved, loved, loved, loved…”
And if there is one thing I am absolutely sure of, it is that I am loved by all of you, even though we are what sometimes feels like worlds apart.
I recently watched a pirated version (bought in the best market in Guate) of Julia Robert’s new movie Eat, Pray Love. The story is Robert’s quest to find herself after a failed marriage, but foremost how to navigate a relationship with herself. There is a scene, where after four months in Italy, she arrives in India for another stretch of time, and is discussing her past with a Texan who has also arrived to meditate and practice yoga there.
In her moment of loneliness he says to her, “I know you feel awful, but your life’s changing… That’s not a bad thing, and you’re in a perfect place for it—surrounded by grace.” She replies, “But I really miss him,” and he says, “So miss him. Send him some light and love every time you think of him, and then drop it.” What he’s implying is that you’re never going to keep your life moving if your mind dwells in another place than where you are. And I decided I needed to stop dwelling in my own loneliness, and recognize my blessings instead. Because missing all of you is wasted energy; I would rather send you my love.
Texas man continues on, saying, “You know, if you could clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using to obsess over this, you’d have a vacuum and a doorway. And you know what the universe would do with that doorway?
He answers his own question.
“FROOM! Rush in,” he says. “God would rush in… fill you with more love than you ever dreamed of. I think you have the capacity, someday, to love the whole world.
But you have to do the work.
Meditate.”
So that’s what I’m doing now. From day to day, I’m doing the work: throwing myself into conversations and situations outside of even my own comfort level. Outside of the Guatemala that I already know. I have an incredible partner to help me along, but I’m trying not to rely on him too much because I know I need to do the work of adjusting on my own. Foremost, though, I really am sending all of you my light and love at a constant. When any of you come to mind, when I wake up in the morning, when I am folded into the highlands of this beautiful country, but especially today, when I know you are celebrating together and full of joy.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Love,
Kelsey
Early as always in HELPS good fashion, we were slated to leave the office on a construction project today at 6:00. Of course in Guatemalan good fashion, we left at 6:40 and then stopped to fill the coaster, trucks, and our car with diesel at the gas station adjacent to the office. It’s now 7:08 and we finally hit the winding road to Antigua. As the four lane mountain highway twists upward, I’m bracing my computer into my knees to prevent it from slipping into the lap of Danny’s sister who is next to me beneath a blanket and a pillow and waking up just enough to worry about the stray dogs darting from the dusty ditch and into the road.
As this morning’s story goes, there are 120 families participating in HELPS’ preventative health program in Santa Clara this year. The idea is to combine all aspects of HELPS work together, and track the tangible differences made. So each family combines ONIL products (stoves and heat retaining cookers and water filters) with access to a monthly medical clinic (run by Danny), basic health and nutrition courses (to teach treatments for the common cold, flu, dehydration, etc.), and referrals to the larger medical teams if hernia surgery, etc. is required. Each family has made a Q200, or $25 contribution for their stove, and makes a Q10 ($1.25) contribution for every medical consult made. The money garnered in the clinic, then, is used to purchase medication for the patients who are working to keep their blood-pressure, diabetes, and so forth under control. In this way, Danny is able to manage many of the chronic problems the regular medical teams encounter. It’s really incredible to see the difference made when people are saving money, saving their lungs with a clean stove, and learning how to keep themselves healthy by washing their vegetables and hands.
The year is ending, and ten families in the program remain stove-less. To solve the problem, Richard Grinnell, HELPS Vice President, suggested the members of the office go and install the remaining stoves themselves. He also requested they also invite their families to come along.
The beautiful part of it is that everyone volunteered, which explains the caravan of people—mothers, sisters, in-laws and children—we’re following this morning. There are 30 people packed into the HELPS coaster and three other SUVs are in line with the bus. Normally a stove takes four people to construct and a team of 12 people usually completes 10 stoves in a day, but this is sort of a special opportunity for those who work in the office to share their work with their families.
With the number of people coming along, each group will have the chance to install one stove, but this will also give us the opportunity to spend time with the families receiving the stoves. We plan to have lunch with them, and take some time to understand the way they live in their drafty, usually dirt-floored dwellings. I always say your life changes when you’re invited into a family’s home in the highlands.
Mario, Danny’s dad volunteered for the project right away, and is this morning’s driver. The picking season at the coffee farm is in full swing, and so he is accustomed to traveling into the mountains twice a month. As I write here and the others two are curled up in sleep together, Danny and his dad are collapsing in laughter.
What’s astonishing to me, though, is that we were able to coerce Danny’s diva-sister, Adriana, and her docile boyfriend, Sebas, to come along. For me, who was introduced to the highlands at an early age—this trip is old hat, but it’s interesting to hear Danny explain to his little sister where we are, and to Sebas, what difference stove makes for the people and the environment.
Both at nineteen, they’re the kind of kids who rarely get out of the city and into the highlands. When you don’t take time to leave the comforts of the waiter-filled VIP movie theater where we saw Harry Potter last night, or the beautiful restaurants and comfortable western-like homes in the city, it’s easy to forget the humbling means of the people across the larger part of this country. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Of course, the other beautiful part about today is that it is Thanksgiving.
And it is a beautiful day. The rainy season ended a month ago, and the countryside is blooming. As we pass hillsides of pines and periwinkle flowers, this morning’s sun is streaming gold and casting shadows in incredible patterns across the limestone walls of the highway. Many of these walls have collapsed and spilled into the road as mudslides that have dried and now cast extra dust into the air when the wind picks up. Sun flowers, daisies and black-eyed susans are sweeping yellow flames between a patchwork of crops cut into the mountainside. If you look carefully enough, coffee plants sometimes peek through the cover of shade that blankets their careful growth and now, their berries will soon ripen red, lining their branches like the cranberry garland of a Christmas tree. The sky is absolutely blue, and volcanoes peak above the tree line of corn on the road ahead as a chicken bus cuts out in front of us and whizzes by.
But as I gaze across this terrain the never ceases to amaze, my heart is with all of you at home.
It seems to me that I could be spending today in no better way than I would be at home; because working on the stove project in the highlands is a way I can give of myself. Though family surrounds me here and we are stopping on our way home for a proper Thanksgiving dinner in Antigua, I miss all of you—you humor and your smiles and your jokes—because there really is nothing like our family.
But I have a much to be grateful for today. In addition to a proper and competitive education, I’m bilingual, have managed to secure a good job with higher pay than I thought I would originally earn, and I get to take high school kids into the highlands as translators with that job. Geeking out as an American Literature teacher and letting kids experience the highlands as I did when I was seventeen? The way I figure it, I’ve got the best of both worlds.
I have a beautiful apartment, have been able to navigate the unintelligible twists and turns of Guatemala City, and will be dressing up like a prom date—huge dress, hair, nails and all—at a fancy wedding this weekend. Not to mention the fact that I get to attend that wedding with my best friend instead of an awkward classmate who asked me to the dance because “I am nice.”
It is wonderful to spend my time every day with the one person I connect with on all levels, and who loves me for exactly who I am, and the way that I am. Danny has been an incredible blessing to me. He is a gentleman always. He holds himself at high esteem and expects the same from the people who surround him. He encourages me, and pushes me to be better, and is unafraid to tell me when I’m in a funk or being selfish. He keeps me grounded, and as I’m sure you all know, I need that sometimes. And sometimes I need that a lot.
I won’t pretend like these three months of adjustment have been easy. There have been breakdowns—one of which just happened to fall on the week that Gram and Mom arrived in the country. For me, there is sometimes a lot of self-induced pressure to fit in… to wear and say the right thing, to cook the right kind of food the right way. There are protocols in the social circles here to which I am still adjusting: what color ties are appropriate for a daytime suit or a nighttime suit and so on and so forth. “But it matches my dress,” is my argument, and his response is, “but you can’t wear a black tie for lunch, and cuff links are only appropriate if I’m wearing a tuxedo.” Guatemalan slang is like learning another language, and in a loud club it’s impossible to follow conversations—especially of the women. Also, I’ve finally been healthy in the last three weeks after battling giardia for the same amount of time. I’ll just say it was miserable and leave out all the pukey details.
But the other day, Danny asked that I stop comparing the way things are here to what is familiar at home; and I think he’s right. The onset of Thanksgiving, and his lack of empathy or understanding for the holiday had put me out of sorts. I had been trying to think of how to share the holiday with his family, but knowing we had this trip planned, had no idea how to cook a turkey and simultaneously work on stoves in Santa Clara. I had the idea to make Thanksgiving tomorrow, but no one would have been home to spend time experiencing the day. As a result, I was sort of feeling forgotten and like my boyfriend was making little effort to make the holiday significant. I felt like he forgot I was far away from the people I love on one of the most important days of the year.
However, after a short stint with my journal I realized that none of you would want me to feel that way today, and that you, as my family have taught me more than that. You expect me recognize and understand what I have in my life, and to share both my blessings and customs with those around me. You wouldn’t want me to be soured by my absence at dinner today.
But if I am really honest with myself, the only things currently missing in my life here—aside from fall weather and the change of the seasons—are all of you.
I have this great memory of the Sunday before I left for Guatemala in September. We were all standing around the kitchen like we usually do on family gatherings, and Thomas was being passed from person to person. Food was laid out, and the carrot cake was to be cut in a little while. I hooked up my computer to the boose radio in the kitchen and fired up the play list I had been feeding on in the weeks before I left.
So Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” rings into the background, and I turn up the volume. And suddenly I look over at Nick and he’s singing.
All the lyrics.
Though Lori is shocked at her son, Anna chimes in with the lyrics and there we were—together, singing and dancing in the kitchen like I used to do when I was kid.
And it was just a beautiful moment. Simple and pure, like our family and the way we treat one another. Full of joy and laughter and an embrace of our ever-changing paths. I’ve thought a lot about that moment since I’ve left, and it floods my mind each time the song comes on and I hear,
“ … I’ll be giving it my bestest, and nothing’s going to stop me but divine intervention,
I recon it’s again my turn to win some or learn some,
But I won’t hesitate no more, no more, it cannot wait, I’m yours….
Well open up your mind and see like me,
Open up your plans and damn your free,
Look into your heart and you’ll find love, love, love, love, love,
Listen to the music of the moment, people dance and sing,
We’re just one big family,
And it’s our Godforsaken right to be, loved, loved, loved, loved, loved…”
And if there is one thing I am absolutely sure of, it is that I am loved by all of you, even though we are what sometimes feels like worlds apart.
I recently watched a pirated version (bought in the best market in Guate) of Julia Robert’s new movie Eat, Pray Love. The story is Robert’s quest to find herself after a failed marriage, but foremost how to navigate a relationship with herself. There is a scene, where after four months in Italy, she arrives in India for another stretch of time, and is discussing her past with a Texan who has also arrived to meditate and practice yoga there.
In her moment of loneliness he says to her, “I know you feel awful, but your life’s changing… That’s not a bad thing, and you’re in a perfect place for it—surrounded by grace.” She replies, “But I really miss him,” and he says, “So miss him. Send him some light and love every time you think of him, and then drop it.” What he’s implying is that you’re never going to keep your life moving if your mind dwells in another place than where you are. And I decided I needed to stop dwelling in my own loneliness, and recognize my blessings instead. Because missing all of you is wasted energy; I would rather send you my love.
Texas man continues on, saying, “You know, if you could clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using to obsess over this, you’d have a vacuum and a doorway. And you know what the universe would do with that doorway?
He answers his own question.
“FROOM! Rush in,” he says. “God would rush in… fill you with more love than you ever dreamed of. I think you have the capacity, someday, to love the whole world.
But you have to do the work.
Meditate.”
So that’s what I’m doing now. From day to day, I’m doing the work: throwing myself into conversations and situations outside of even my own comfort level. Outside of the Guatemala that I already know. I have an incredible partner to help me along, but I’m trying not to rely on him too much because I know I need to do the work of adjusting on my own. Foremost, though, I really am sending all of you my light and love at a constant. When any of you come to mind, when I wake up in the morning, when I am folded into the highlands of this beautiful country, but especially today, when I know you are celebrating together and full of joy.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Love,
Kelsey
Friday, February 1, 2008
The Best Part of Waking Up... Or is it?
Two weeks ago, in the town of Santa Avelina in the mountains of Quiche (Key-che), Guatemala I met Josefa, as she turned her coffee beans in the sun. I was in the country translating with a medical team, and as the others were eating their lunch, I walked up the hill behind the school and struck a conversation. The beans were laid on tarps to dry in the sun; there was roughly a quarter of a football field in small, beige pellets. She explained to me the process of coffee trade as she ran her rastrillo, or rake, over the beans and lifted handfuls in various stages for my examination. “It takes roughly four days to dehydrate coffee,” she said in Spanish. “See, these have been out for two, and these have been out for three. Look at the difference in the skin.” Her family picks coffee cherries from the plants on their land, and their neighbors combined their crops in a joint drying effort. Several families in the area had procured the quarter football field on which I was gazing, and these families would have to peel the shells from the beans before selling them. The coffee is purchased from the grower by the pound. “Do you get a good price for your coffee?” I asked. Though puzzled by my inquiry, she replied, “Yes, seven Quetzales per bag.” In Guatemala, seven Quetzales is the equivalent of 90 cents. The latest Guatemalan coffee from Starbucks, called Casi Cielo, translates to “Close to Heaven” and costs $12.95 per pound. It comes from farms near Antigua, a beautifully ancient, colonial city. Though I am bias, most Starbucks employees couldn’t name the town nor explain where Guatemala is on a map.
The worst part is that Josefa is right when she says she gets a good price for her coffee. “Black Gold,” a documentary directed by Marc and Nick Francis from the United Kingdom, reports coffee growers in Ethiopia receive, at best, 23 cents per kilo or 12 cents per pound. Last month, the film was made one of Guardian’s top 10 Non-fiction films of 2007 in the UK and has been successful in generating conversation about Ethiopia and the coffee market as a whole. Ethiopia, the birthplace of the coffee bean, is the largest producer of coffee in Africa and represents nearly 67% of the country’s export revenue. In other words, more than fifteen million people in Ethiopia depend on coffee farms for income, but 50 cents per pound on a good day is hardly dependable. It is not to be overlooked that these numbers are only representative of Ethiopia and fail to mention the rest of the coffee growing world.
Tadesse Meskela, managers a union of farmers in Ethiopia and was featured in the film. In an interview with NPR he spoke of his farmers and a particular conversation they’d had. “Ethiopia grows the best coffee in the world, but farmers need to live a decent life,” he said; his farmers couldn’t guess the cost of a cup of coffee in the Western world. “Eighty cups of coffee are made from one kilogram of coffee. One cup of coffee costs roughly 25 birr ($2.90).” Therefore, a retailer makes $230 per kilo. Converting this to pounds, 160 cups of espresso in a coffee shop is more than $500. The farmers are paid a fraction of one percent of this revenue. But the farmers have no leverage to their sales. A trader will come to them and say, “I’ll buy your coffee for this much today,” and if they don’t sell their produce they earn nothing. The trader will not increase his price if the farmer decides not to sell his coffee because the trader is also invested in his own salary.
The trader’s price is based on the market price of beans. Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world and the national value of trade is roughly 140 billion dollars. Before its collapse in 1989, the International Coffee Agreement was a relative regulator of the world market. Since then, according PBS’s Frontline World, retails sales of coffee have risen 30-80 billion dollars per year since 1990. Because the prices are based on trade, the international price of coffee is established in New York and London, places that are driven toward profit. The retailers that buy coffee want ensure the earning of a certain profit after distribution and sales. Therefore they set the price of coffee according to their financial budget, and mostly ignore the budget of those who procure their product. This is where the largest problem lies. It does not matter whether Folgers or Caribou wakes you in the morning when price is concerned.
But what of fair trade coffee? The concept here is to cut out the middleman so the coffee passes through fewer hands before reaching the roaster and retailer. If growers follow fair trade regulations, they are guaranteed $1.26 for every pound of coffee procured. This helps, but farmers are still making less on one pound of coffee than 12 ounces of drip coffee costs a consumer. Additionally, fair trade coffee falls into the genre of a market of “specialty” coffee like Starbuck’s Casi Cielo and, according to PBS, only comprises two percent of this market.
So, if we stop drinking coffee altogether and boycott the major chains our problem would be solved, right? Hardly. In addition to unpleasant people everywhere, we would be adding more coffee to the world’s surplus. But it’s still a double bind. Though Starbucks and Caribou are the reasons these farmers have jobs, the coffee industry is also what keeps people like Josefa and her family in poverty in Guatemala, and leaves the growers in Etiopia struggling to send their children to school.
The worst part is that Josefa is right when she says she gets a good price for her coffee. “Black Gold,” a documentary directed by Marc and Nick Francis from the United Kingdom, reports coffee growers in Ethiopia receive, at best, 23 cents per kilo or 12 cents per pound. Last month, the film was made one of Guardian’s top 10 Non-fiction films of 2007 in the UK and has been successful in generating conversation about Ethiopia and the coffee market as a whole. Ethiopia, the birthplace of the coffee bean, is the largest producer of coffee in Africa and represents nearly 67% of the country’s export revenue. In other words, more than fifteen million people in Ethiopia depend on coffee farms for income, but 50 cents per pound on a good day is hardly dependable. It is not to be overlooked that these numbers are only representative of Ethiopia and fail to mention the rest of the coffee growing world.
Tadesse Meskela, managers a union of farmers in Ethiopia and was featured in the film. In an interview with NPR he spoke of his farmers and a particular conversation they’d had. “Ethiopia grows the best coffee in the world, but farmers need to live a decent life,” he said; his farmers couldn’t guess the cost of a cup of coffee in the Western world. “Eighty cups of coffee are made from one kilogram of coffee. One cup of coffee costs roughly 25 birr ($2.90).” Therefore, a retailer makes $230 per kilo. Converting this to pounds, 160 cups of espresso in a coffee shop is more than $500. The farmers are paid a fraction of one percent of this revenue. But the farmers have no leverage to their sales. A trader will come to them and say, “I’ll buy your coffee for this much today,” and if they don’t sell their produce they earn nothing. The trader will not increase his price if the farmer decides not to sell his coffee because the trader is also invested in his own salary.
The trader’s price is based on the market price of beans. Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world and the national value of trade is roughly 140 billion dollars. Before its collapse in 1989, the International Coffee Agreement was a relative regulator of the world market. Since then, according PBS’s Frontline World, retails sales of coffee have risen 30-80 billion dollars per year since 1990. Because the prices are based on trade, the international price of coffee is established in New York and London, places that are driven toward profit. The retailers that buy coffee want ensure the earning of a certain profit after distribution and sales. Therefore they set the price of coffee according to their financial budget, and mostly ignore the budget of those who procure their product. This is where the largest problem lies. It does not matter whether Folgers or Caribou wakes you in the morning when price is concerned.
But what of fair trade coffee? The concept here is to cut out the middleman so the coffee passes through fewer hands before reaching the roaster and retailer. If growers follow fair trade regulations, they are guaranteed $1.26 for every pound of coffee procured. This helps, but farmers are still making less on one pound of coffee than 12 ounces of drip coffee costs a consumer. Additionally, fair trade coffee falls into the genre of a market of “specialty” coffee like Starbuck’s Casi Cielo and, according to PBS, only comprises two percent of this market.
So, if we stop drinking coffee altogether and boycott the major chains our problem would be solved, right? Hardly. In addition to unpleasant people everywhere, we would be adding more coffee to the world’s surplus. But it’s still a double bind. Though Starbucks and Caribou are the reasons these farmers have jobs, the coffee industry is also what keeps people like Josefa and her family in poverty in Guatemala, and leaves the growers in Etiopia struggling to send their children to school.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Pistachios and Public Speaking.
Back in July, my grandmother called me and asked me - as I was still afresh from Guatemala - if I would like to be the January speaker for the St. Cloud Reading Room Society. Being that Gram is one of my best friends and she is head of the Speakers Committee, I obliged and only learned later I would receieve a stipend for my efforts. But as it turns out, this women's society has been around for some 100 years and made some big changes in the history of the little town in which I grew up. They began with a book collection for women near the end of the Civil War. While most would now consider St. Cloud the size of a suburb (and to this there may be relevance as it's almost entirely filled with things like Barnes and Noble and Starbucks), the local grocery chains prevail. Still, the downtown area is a far cry from the booming place it was back in the 20s. The origianl 44 women promoted literature among themselves, and Andrew Carnegie donated some $25,000 to the buildling of the St. Cloud public library that housed even a Shakespeare club in the late 19th century. While the original buildling was replaced in 1979, these women are responsible for the fact that I had a library in which to read when I was a kid. Reading, and well, old apple computers with word munchers.
A few weeks ago, I receieved an official letter signed, "Sincerely Yours, Helen Catton" in the mail. It cordially thanked me and breifly explained the meeting. The trouble now, is that January 10th is Thursday, and I'm alloted 45 minutes to speak and answer questions. And I'm the granddaugther of one of the leading ladies.
And I don't know what the hell I want to talk about.
I tend to let public speaking events fly slightly off the cuff - to write a "speech" for myself would be an excruciatingly long endeavor. And I supposed my casual attitude toward speaking events is probably the remnants of the speechie I was in High School. (I guess least 4th place in the State meet still does something for me, right?) This time - due to the duration of the talk - I feel like I should have some kind of direction. At the moment, though, I seem to have only directed my pacing between my desk and my kitchen counter, where I've opened a bag of pistachios - hoping the salt will do something more than make me thirsty.
But once I'm down to the nubby shells that I couldn't possibly pry open with my bare hands I'll have no other choice than to drink my water or go back to my book.
I'd like to be effective in my speaking as Tracy Kidder is writing. I'm reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, and while it's about Tuberculosis in Haiti, I feel like it's also about Guatemala. Kidder has the cabaility to infuse a reader with the feeling of traveling in a packed pickup through the mountains and their desolate, desperate confines. Babies living in shacks with TB are babies in Guatemala, malnourished and surviving on coffee because a mother won't lactate. Kidder underwhelms the nature of what he writes to effectively allow the reader to meet his text with his or her own sentiment. He is fantastic - and does well, what I seem to garble about Guatemala in my own writing.
Mostly I want to tell stories to these women. I guess it's time to begin scouring the journals again. I'm not out to hound some kind of message, but to talk about another place I tend to call home.
A few weeks ago, I receieved an official letter signed, "Sincerely Yours, Helen Catton" in the mail. It cordially thanked me and breifly explained the meeting. The trouble now, is that January 10th is Thursday, and I'm alloted 45 minutes to speak and answer questions. And I'm the granddaugther of one of the leading ladies.
And I don't know what the hell I want to talk about.
I tend to let public speaking events fly slightly off the cuff - to write a "speech" for myself would be an excruciatingly long endeavor. And I supposed my casual attitude toward speaking events is probably the remnants of the speechie I was in High School. (I guess least 4th place in the State meet still does something for me, right?) This time - due to the duration of the talk - I feel like I should have some kind of direction. At the moment, though, I seem to have only directed my pacing between my desk and my kitchen counter, where I've opened a bag of pistachios - hoping the salt will do something more than make me thirsty.
But once I'm down to the nubby shells that I couldn't possibly pry open with my bare hands I'll have no other choice than to drink my water or go back to my book.
I'd like to be effective in my speaking as Tracy Kidder is writing. I'm reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, and while it's about Tuberculosis in Haiti, I feel like it's also about Guatemala. Kidder has the cabaility to infuse a reader with the feeling of traveling in a packed pickup through the mountains and their desolate, desperate confines. Babies living in shacks with TB are babies in Guatemala, malnourished and surviving on coffee because a mother won't lactate. Kidder underwhelms the nature of what he writes to effectively allow the reader to meet his text with his or her own sentiment. He is fantastic - and does well, what I seem to garble about Guatemala in my own writing.
Mostly I want to tell stories to these women. I guess it's time to begin scouring the journals again. I'm not out to hound some kind of message, but to talk about another place I tend to call home.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Photos and Flashbacks.
Greetings! I know it's been a few weeks. Forgive me, I've been transitioning.. though unfortunately I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean anymore. I'm posting a few links to photo albums I've put up on facebook. Please let me know if there is any trouble accessing them.
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297261&l=5c641&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297350&l=6e708&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297425&l=78920&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297470&l=65184&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297150&l=4dfe3&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2235468&l=41822&id=13923075
--- And back to your regularily scheduled blog ----
I swear the toilet paper thing still gets me. Each time I change location, whether restaurant, apartment or my since graduated high school, I find myself looking for a trash can with which to despose of my used toilet paper.
... and then I catch myself and remember I'm not in Guate anymore. It's my daily reminder, that small thorn that digs into my skin.
Or there's the latin individual that I cross paths with in grocery stores, shoe stores, and on the sidewalks of Minneapolis. As I nearly crash into them turning my body around a corner, my first reaction to their dark feature is to say "perdon," or "permisso" (excuse me), but I catch myself again and realize I have no idea whether spanish is a language that they know nor whether they are actually of recent latin decent. Thus I avoid offense and say nothing, regardless of the chance that I might have offered warmth in a gesture.
I feel trivial in explaining myself to my peers, especially when questions like, "How much fun did you have your your... trip?" "What was the best part?" or "What is the biggest difference between Guatemala and the United States?" are my icebreakers to conversation. But I can't blame them for not having a context with which to relate.
I'm going back to it all: work, school etc., and sometimes it feels okay. But then there are moments where I feel as if I'll never be able to connect and function between my two worlds as they are so far estranged and so far have estranged me as a kind of no-mad to the human race. Everything is usually fuzzy, and lately I don't realloy know what I'm doing other than turning circles. And of course these circles will continue because as of yet, I haven't come up with what it is I have to do to feel normal again. Though, normal in the context of my life in the United States before these last five months is something of which I have no interest. Rather, I'm searching for a normal I'd found these last months among the real and devestating and joyful.
I can't begin to explain or say how much I miss the country of Guatemala. It frequently floods back to me and I can't often help but feel a little lost here. I can listen to Maná and I'm suddenly back in the recovery room in Uspantan with Juan or on the road up from Antigua with Alexa's mom in her blue Odessy minivan. Or I'm on the roof in Tejutla, my feet a dangle as my vendor friends discover me and from below and wave their love and greeting.
I recieved photos from a climb up Pacaya (an active Volcano in Guate) and it only took seconds to feel soaking wet and freezing all over again as we climbed it in the pouring rain. I can feel the knives my resulting cold laced into my throat. But we flew down that mountain's side, regardless of the mere plastic my camera was housed in and the slippery terrain. I kept trust in my own feet to keep me from the grounded rock and taunting mud. Yelling, "Caballo!" I screamed my falling fears into the misty distance before me and see my comrades ahead. They have already danced upon the mud slickened streams and I smile. Yet my description is faulty for its failure to convey a reality of pelting of rain on my face and its ability to keep my hair sticking to my neck and eyes.
Though my dampness followed me back to the town of Antigua and musty smells filled the old school bus's windows and blanketed air, I rested. And though I'd melted and ruined my shoes and knives laced my throat for weeks thereafter, I'd seen lava. And I will never live this as a repeated refrain.
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297261&l=5c641&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297350&l=6e708&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297425&l=78920&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297470&l=65184&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2297150&l=4dfe3&id=13923075
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2235468&l=41822&id=13923075
--- And back to your regularily scheduled blog ----
I swear the toilet paper thing still gets me. Each time I change location, whether restaurant, apartment or my since graduated high school, I find myself looking for a trash can with which to despose of my used toilet paper.
... and then I catch myself and remember I'm not in Guate anymore. It's my daily reminder, that small thorn that digs into my skin.
Or there's the latin individual that I cross paths with in grocery stores, shoe stores, and on the sidewalks of Minneapolis. As I nearly crash into them turning my body around a corner, my first reaction to their dark feature is to say "perdon," or "permisso" (excuse me), but I catch myself again and realize I have no idea whether spanish is a language that they know nor whether they are actually of recent latin decent. Thus I avoid offense and say nothing, regardless of the chance that I might have offered warmth in a gesture.
I feel trivial in explaining myself to my peers, especially when questions like, "How much fun did you have your your... trip?" "What was the best part?" or "What is the biggest difference between Guatemala and the United States?" are my icebreakers to conversation. But I can't blame them for not having a context with which to relate.
I'm going back to it all: work, school etc., and sometimes it feels okay. But then there are moments where I feel as if I'll never be able to connect and function between my two worlds as they are so far estranged and so far have estranged me as a kind of no-mad to the human race. Everything is usually fuzzy, and lately I don't realloy know what I'm doing other than turning circles. And of course these circles will continue because as of yet, I haven't come up with what it is I have to do to feel normal again. Though, normal in the context of my life in the United States before these last five months is something of which I have no interest. Rather, I'm searching for a normal I'd found these last months among the real and devestating and joyful.
I can't begin to explain or say how much I miss the country of Guatemala. It frequently floods back to me and I can't often help but feel a little lost here. I can listen to Maná and I'm suddenly back in the recovery room in Uspantan with Juan or on the road up from Antigua with Alexa's mom in her blue Odessy minivan. Or I'm on the roof in Tejutla, my feet a dangle as my vendor friends discover me and from below and wave their love and greeting.
I recieved photos from a climb up Pacaya (an active Volcano in Guate) and it only took seconds to feel soaking wet and freezing all over again as we climbed it in the pouring rain. I can feel the knives my resulting cold laced into my throat. But we flew down that mountain's side, regardless of the mere plastic my camera was housed in and the slippery terrain. I kept trust in my own feet to keep me from the grounded rock and taunting mud. Yelling, "Caballo!" I screamed my falling fears into the misty distance before me and see my comrades ahead. They have already danced upon the mud slickened streams and I smile. Yet my description is faulty for its failure to convey a reality of pelting of rain on my face and its ability to keep my hair sticking to my neck and eyes.
Though my dampness followed me back to the town of Antigua and musty smells filled the old school bus's windows and blanketed air, I rested. And though I'd melted and ruined my shoes and knives laced my throat for weeks thereafter, I'd seen lava. And I will never live this as a repeated refrain.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Dazed Turning Left.
So my time at home has had its ups and downs. Frequently I am overwhelmed by the reality of our lives here and by the drastic change in terrain I am experiencing. Often I find myself wishing I could jump in my car and instead of driving along our luscious highway system, drive up the road from Guatemala City to Antigua and hide away in my favorite cafe instead of booting to Cariobou because its the only place in my hometown that's open past nine o'clock in the evening.
I spent the last 24 hours in Minneapolis, attempting to organize my life. It's working, but slowly. I've discovered that I still have a job at Barnes and Noble in the downtown area, and am interviewing tomorrow for a second job. I'm still homeless - but only for the summer. I was able to see my apartment for the fall and begin to organize myself and my decorating. I have options for a place to live this summer as well.. it's only a matter of choice at this point. But in reporting all of this to you, I'm realizing just how easily I've become to get caught up in our culture again. It's how I grew up, but in my return there are distinct actions I want to take differently. What a wonder this "culture shock" can be.
Yet, I'm sitting here in Caribou with my green tea and honey and my 14" ibookG4 and my journal and calander and all my ... stuff. And that in itself makes me remarkably and additionally sickeningly American. It matters not my nostalgia for the Spanish language and for fresh corn tortillas and black beans and eggs. My omellettes are back to egg beaters instead of real eggs, and my pan is greased with pam instead of real butter. While it feels wonderful to eat real vegetarian food again... it sometimes sickens me how many options we are allowed to have. Life would yeild significantly greater simplicity if we weren't to make so many choices daily. I don't want just a latte.. I'd like a triple, grande, sugar-free vanilla, soy latte. That was my phrase. And now I've returned and its not even good. Just give me black coffee please.
I believe one of the greatest moments that exemplified my new ignorance and awe at my own culture was driving today. However, I forewarn you that explaining this seems to make no impact or sense to anyone I've encountered thus far. I was getting off the freeway, waiting to make a left hand turn into the outlet mall today at around two. The turn light turned green and the silver Honda Accord ahead of me proceeded to wait another twenty seconds or so. Not wanting to miss the light, I politely tapped my horn for her attention. Apparently that's not an okay thing to do here. Following her through the intersection, she turned right into the next driveway, but slowed her car enough to let me pass her before making her turn. Looking to my right, she flicked her middle finger into the air and while I couldn't hear her, her mouth proceeded to make the words "fuck" and "you."
Taken aback by her intense anger, I was confused and not sure how to react. Though an angered response never stirred in me, I was left perplexed by this individual's ability to curse a complete stranger.
Forgive me, though, I should have prefaced this with the use of the horn in Guatemala. It's a liberal kind of idea, and never intended to insult. It offers an alert if someone is pulling up a little too close or not particularily paying great attention to the flow of traffic. A little toot into the air is accurate and normal and often just says hello. And a longer blast implies "Hello!" "Pay attention!" But never Fuck you. Ever.
Perhaps I was wrong in my transitionary state to have used my horn, but was it necessary for this complete stranger to go the extent to which she did to let me know I had pissed her off? Maybe she was having a bad day, but I couldn't break the urge to leave a note on her car, apologizing or explaining that I was in culture shock and had no intent of stirring anger or rudeness and so on and so forth. Additionally I had wanted to talk to her. But she had completely disappeared after I emerged from the gap a half an hour later.
In the long run of this story, my feelings have nothing to do with this peer of mine and her car. I feel more apalled by the ignorance this event has implied.
Perhaps I'm making blank assumptions, and yes I know the rhyme. However, if and individual is driving a shiny Honda, chances are you're doing alright. We were both headed for the outlet mall. Regardless of whether you are running an errand or out for an afternoon, you're still on a joy ride (myself included). And whether assumed or not, this deduction can generally be accepted because the majority of the United States is comprised hard working, educated, middle classed individuals who can afford to buy clothing at the gap. We're educated. In fact, we're required to be so by our government. We should kiss our constitution for that. We have to go to school as small children and never have the chance to work for our family's keep as a young person. It's forbidden by law to put young rigor to physical labor. We gripe about road construction, but we are not in a place where our roads are closed without reason for hours at a time. We are able to travel 70 miles and back in a couple of hours instead of a day. I am amazed, still, at the efficiency of our country. We are not in a place where a trip to the bank can easily last two hours, and often an individual does not accomplish all they need to in a visit. Usually their answers are given to them without logical reasons. I remain marveling at all the things a person can flush down a toilet here. We throw our paper and it just goes away, it dissaparates. No one sees the waste it actually produces each time you use the bathroom.
So try to worry less, because there are so many pieces of life that we will never be able to call hard in the scheme of the world. Breathe a little more and take more time. We're all rushing, rushing to get ahead, to finish school that semester early. But of what are we getting ahead? We're all stressed and disastisfied, but look around. Please.
I spent the last 24 hours in Minneapolis, attempting to organize my life. It's working, but slowly. I've discovered that I still have a job at Barnes and Noble in the downtown area, and am interviewing tomorrow for a second job. I'm still homeless - but only for the summer. I was able to see my apartment for the fall and begin to organize myself and my decorating. I have options for a place to live this summer as well.. it's only a matter of choice at this point. But in reporting all of this to you, I'm realizing just how easily I've become to get caught up in our culture again. It's how I grew up, but in my return there are distinct actions I want to take differently. What a wonder this "culture shock" can be.
Yet, I'm sitting here in Caribou with my green tea and honey and my 14" ibookG4 and my journal and calander and all my ... stuff. And that in itself makes me remarkably and additionally sickeningly American. It matters not my nostalgia for the Spanish language and for fresh corn tortillas and black beans and eggs. My omellettes are back to egg beaters instead of real eggs, and my pan is greased with pam instead of real butter. While it feels wonderful to eat real vegetarian food again... it sometimes sickens me how many options we are allowed to have. Life would yeild significantly greater simplicity if we weren't to make so many choices daily. I don't want just a latte.. I'd like a triple, grande, sugar-free vanilla, soy latte. That was my phrase. And now I've returned and its not even good. Just give me black coffee please.
I believe one of the greatest moments that exemplified my new ignorance and awe at my own culture was driving today. However, I forewarn you that explaining this seems to make no impact or sense to anyone I've encountered thus far. I was getting off the freeway, waiting to make a left hand turn into the outlet mall today at around two. The turn light turned green and the silver Honda Accord ahead of me proceeded to wait another twenty seconds or so. Not wanting to miss the light, I politely tapped my horn for her attention. Apparently that's not an okay thing to do here. Following her through the intersection, she turned right into the next driveway, but slowed her car enough to let me pass her before making her turn. Looking to my right, she flicked her middle finger into the air and while I couldn't hear her, her mouth proceeded to make the words "fuck" and "you."
Taken aback by her intense anger, I was confused and not sure how to react. Though an angered response never stirred in me, I was left perplexed by this individual's ability to curse a complete stranger.
Forgive me, though, I should have prefaced this with the use of the horn in Guatemala. It's a liberal kind of idea, and never intended to insult. It offers an alert if someone is pulling up a little too close or not particularily paying great attention to the flow of traffic. A little toot into the air is accurate and normal and often just says hello. And a longer blast implies "Hello!" "Pay attention!" But never Fuck you. Ever.
Perhaps I was wrong in my transitionary state to have used my horn, but was it necessary for this complete stranger to go the extent to which she did to let me know I had pissed her off? Maybe she was having a bad day, but I couldn't break the urge to leave a note on her car, apologizing or explaining that I was in culture shock and had no intent of stirring anger or rudeness and so on and so forth. Additionally I had wanted to talk to her. But she had completely disappeared after I emerged from the gap a half an hour later.
In the long run of this story, my feelings have nothing to do with this peer of mine and her car. I feel more apalled by the ignorance this event has implied.
Perhaps I'm making blank assumptions, and yes I know the rhyme. However, if and individual is driving a shiny Honda, chances are you're doing alright. We were both headed for the outlet mall. Regardless of whether you are running an errand or out for an afternoon, you're still on a joy ride (myself included). And whether assumed or not, this deduction can generally be accepted because the majority of the United States is comprised hard working, educated, middle classed individuals who can afford to buy clothing at the gap. We're educated. In fact, we're required to be so by our government. We should kiss our constitution for that. We have to go to school as small children and never have the chance to work for our family's keep as a young person. It's forbidden by law to put young rigor to physical labor. We gripe about road construction, but we are not in a place where our roads are closed without reason for hours at a time. We are able to travel 70 miles and back in a couple of hours instead of a day. I am amazed, still, at the efficiency of our country. We are not in a place where a trip to the bank can easily last two hours, and often an individual does not accomplish all they need to in a visit. Usually their answers are given to them without logical reasons. I remain marveling at all the things a person can flush down a toilet here. We throw our paper and it just goes away, it dissaparates. No one sees the waste it actually produces each time you use the bathroom.
So try to worry less, because there are so many pieces of life that we will never be able to call hard in the scheme of the world. Breathe a little more and take more time. We're all rushing, rushing to get ahead, to finish school that semester early. But of what are we getting ahead? We're all stressed and disastisfied, but look around. Please.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Twenty four hours from now I'll be in the United States.
Home tomorrow.
Holy cow.
More thoughts to come.
Holy cow.
More thoughts to come.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
martes. el 24 de Abril. 20:26
I see the realities of this country's poverty daily. Diario, one of the newspapers is sure to report the latest gang killing in zones one or three of the capital. Report it does with as varied vocabulary for gunshot, massacre, murder, victim, dead, and gunman as one can find within the Spanish language. It is a practiced habit among reporters here.
Rising early in the morning of any city in the country, any rural road, an individual encounters bundles of people - sleeping or passed out under old archways or waiting along a desolate path for a bus... or someone from whom to hitch a ride.
Women are whistled at and if one turns the right corner, it is easy to find the local whorehouse. In Cimaltenango, I have passed it may times as it lies along the main highway: CA-1. Such a highway that runs from the United States, through Mexico and thus further south. Among gallo signs are women's backsides in flourescent thongs. Their bodies are pinned to the cervezeria's side streeted doors and walls. Dusted and gaunt individuals stare from their plastic wicker chairs to the street, which often offers less entertainment than the strip club I pass on my way home every day. Gunshots lull children to sleep in my part of the city. But it seems a better situation than that of the capital city's Zone one - a place where entering will get you shot. Or, if you're lucky, only robbed.
Small villages along Atitlan's coast have been destroyed with the introduction of Marijuana and other sorts of coke and dope. Other places have been lucky to find streams of alcoholics... if you call permanently scaring your family and having other women lucky. Making your children work dirtily in the streets for money. Money used to supply your irresponsible and uncontrollable urge for the depressant that is the catalyst causing your rage to float to the surface. Meanwhile, your son's young, dolled face is growing up and he brings home less and less to you everyday. But he is working longer and harder, forgetting about school so as not to thicken his scars of anger and pain, of both the physical and the heart. A child should complain about homework and beg for an ice cream as he walks the cobblestone of Pana on a hot day.
Often a girl is lucky to be married early as she is out of the grasp of a father. Perhaps she will be given into a worse situation. But perhaps with a little grace, her husband helps her to escape the pain she's grown with.
It's a gamble, a toss up here. And while all are not so drastically troubled with abused situation, suffering is common to nearly all.
For it exists in other forms. It exists in hernias that result from years of wood's haul. Women and men trace paths walked along highways years of lives, by minute, hour or day. And the cycle continues as fathers teach sons. As they wear the same rubber boots, the work of the land is learned with a hoe in hand, made to fit such a small frame. Technologies of sprinklers irrigate families while women weave and spin and grind corn. While a stove is manned that requires a husband to bring literal tons of wod to its tiled sides, this carbon monoxide producting beast enduces burns to small hands. Yet tortillas and beans must be made so they might fuel the cycle with energy renewed. To let rest fall upon beds of lice and scabies, a coffee made with wormed water will comfort bodies that ache. Welcomed sleep will take heavy eyelids and greets souls of seven and seventy until stretches of dawn stream to fill the sky at five.
As I will remian forever an outsider, regardless of my linguistic capabilities and the length I might live among the places of this country, it is easy for an individual to desensitize themselves to such a reality. But I pray it doesn't ever become such a perspecitve. Two and a half weeks from now I return to that of the compfortable United States. Hell, even here I have my own room with a desk and fresh oranges and dried manogoes. I was called a mango the other day. In Guatemala, that's slang for beauty. I have Q100 to spend on this private room of mine. Q100 ($13) per night.
And this is without mention of any life I might lead in my own country.
Apparent most is my relationship with my friends here- those who are doing better than many. Friends who own cars, are putting family memebers through school, raising children, loving their grandaparents.
But really, they still struggle to get by every day. They cannot affort to have inconveniences and accidents. But regardless of what they might or may not be able to handle, their worlds still fall apaprt.
To see my friends: grown men with families and decent jobs sob and cry into each other's arms because there is nowhere else to turn, no money to borrow and broken hearted, their cries turn to God. This is an an aching my twenty years and college student brains do not have the the status to understand. I understand tears. I understand how to hug someone experiencing tears, but I have no capacity to comprehend money and what any individual feels when it runs out, or when someone you trust and love crashes and totals your car and does not have any money with which to pay you back. But nor can you pay for the damage as your son is grows, asking why you won't come home from weeks of work. Your wife is trying to finish school, and you're already working to pay off yet another car accident among the stresses and fear of losing this new and significantly more stable job.
I have no comprehension of cousins who refuse to help your grandmother stand and bring a bowl to her, while you're expected to bread win for the remainder of your family. Especially when they have scarce appreciation for the work you do and they care little for your presence among them. I have no power to understand why someone would wish they were dead so they wouldn't have to worry about money anymore. I have no comprehension for the weeks spent with HELPS teams being the only weeks you find happiness in your life.
Real tears from grown men, so desperate and with single chances within their lives. Single changes that when lost mean the loss of not only plans, but partial stability and hope for an upward stint. Yet never have I seen Alex nor Chori give up. Becuase they know they can't. Many nights, however, with our upcoming leave for the States and with the loss of companionship these months have built, have I seen sullen heads and tears without the prevail of a cheerer's laughter. It's not the kind of sadness that a best friend can turn to giggles with insults to an imbisul boyfriend or with the immature suggestion of a bodily function. It's a deeper kind of sorrow, a kind that whishes for better for their children, the kind of chance both of these men are trying to make in their lives.
This kind of suffering they have chosen to endure with hope.
There is an equal suffering it takes for a father to leave his country for another, where all is foreign and his language isn't spoken and a pig farm provides a tin roof and broken down home for comfort. This is the kind of suffering I will never have the capacity to grasp, nor never will have to endure.
This other suffering is the kind of suffering this man's son feels when he feels he's failed the opportunity his father suffered to give him. The pain he will feel to look into his eyes knowing he's lied and broken others, but experiencing the love his father has without regard for his faults.
I might continue this broken soliliquy, yet this exemplified cycle will require that I continue long on until morning with the determination and exemplified vigor these people have for their suffering. They suffer with the hope that a moment in their lives might come when they won't be worried and hurt and suffer to get by. Even if the relief begins for seconds and disappears, they suffer with this hope.
This kind of situation is unlike the strife of many because most others, especially in my country, have options. There are options for food, health, school. But when these are removed, spirits begin to break and cycles offer no option but to incite broken paths.
I could take pictures to bring to you and to show you, but they are only images. Images that may have been scalded onto my heart, but remain that of an image to you. Perhaps it will move you.. but how far? How far have I been moved?
Rising early in the morning of any city in the country, any rural road, an individual encounters bundles of people - sleeping or passed out under old archways or waiting along a desolate path for a bus... or someone from whom to hitch a ride.
Women are whistled at and if one turns the right corner, it is easy to find the local whorehouse. In Cimaltenango, I have passed it may times as it lies along the main highway: CA-1. Such a highway that runs from the United States, through Mexico and thus further south. Among gallo signs are women's backsides in flourescent thongs. Their bodies are pinned to the cervezeria's side streeted doors and walls. Dusted and gaunt individuals stare from their plastic wicker chairs to the street, which often offers less entertainment than the strip club I pass on my way home every day. Gunshots lull children to sleep in my part of the city. But it seems a better situation than that of the capital city's Zone one - a place where entering will get you shot. Or, if you're lucky, only robbed.
Small villages along Atitlan's coast have been destroyed with the introduction of Marijuana and other sorts of coke and dope. Other places have been lucky to find streams of alcoholics... if you call permanently scaring your family and having other women lucky. Making your children work dirtily in the streets for money. Money used to supply your irresponsible and uncontrollable urge for the depressant that is the catalyst causing your rage to float to the surface. Meanwhile, your son's young, dolled face is growing up and he brings home less and less to you everyday. But he is working longer and harder, forgetting about school so as not to thicken his scars of anger and pain, of both the physical and the heart. A child should complain about homework and beg for an ice cream as he walks the cobblestone of Pana on a hot day.
Often a girl is lucky to be married early as she is out of the grasp of a father. Perhaps she will be given into a worse situation. But perhaps with a little grace, her husband helps her to escape the pain she's grown with.
It's a gamble, a toss up here. And while all are not so drastically troubled with abused situation, suffering is common to nearly all.
For it exists in other forms. It exists in hernias that result from years of wood's haul. Women and men trace paths walked along highways years of lives, by minute, hour or day. And the cycle continues as fathers teach sons. As they wear the same rubber boots, the work of the land is learned with a hoe in hand, made to fit such a small frame. Technologies of sprinklers irrigate families while women weave and spin and grind corn. While a stove is manned that requires a husband to bring literal tons of wod to its tiled sides, this carbon monoxide producting beast enduces burns to small hands. Yet tortillas and beans must be made so they might fuel the cycle with energy renewed. To let rest fall upon beds of lice and scabies, a coffee made with wormed water will comfort bodies that ache. Welcomed sleep will take heavy eyelids and greets souls of seven and seventy until stretches of dawn stream to fill the sky at five.
As I will remian forever an outsider, regardless of my linguistic capabilities and the length I might live among the places of this country, it is easy for an individual to desensitize themselves to such a reality. But I pray it doesn't ever become such a perspecitve. Two and a half weeks from now I return to that of the compfortable United States. Hell, even here I have my own room with a desk and fresh oranges and dried manogoes. I was called a mango the other day. In Guatemala, that's slang for beauty. I have Q100 to spend on this private room of mine. Q100 ($13) per night.
And this is without mention of any life I might lead in my own country.
Apparent most is my relationship with my friends here- those who are doing better than many. Friends who own cars, are putting family memebers through school, raising children, loving their grandaparents.
But really, they still struggle to get by every day. They cannot affort to have inconveniences and accidents. But regardless of what they might or may not be able to handle, their worlds still fall apaprt.
To see my friends: grown men with families and decent jobs sob and cry into each other's arms because there is nowhere else to turn, no money to borrow and broken hearted, their cries turn to God. This is an an aching my twenty years and college student brains do not have the the status to understand. I understand tears. I understand how to hug someone experiencing tears, but I have no capacity to comprehend money and what any individual feels when it runs out, or when someone you trust and love crashes and totals your car and does not have any money with which to pay you back. But nor can you pay for the damage as your son is grows, asking why you won't come home from weeks of work. Your wife is trying to finish school, and you're already working to pay off yet another car accident among the stresses and fear of losing this new and significantly more stable job.
I have no comprehension of cousins who refuse to help your grandmother stand and bring a bowl to her, while you're expected to bread win for the remainder of your family. Especially when they have scarce appreciation for the work you do and they care little for your presence among them. I have no power to understand why someone would wish they were dead so they wouldn't have to worry about money anymore. I have no comprehension for the weeks spent with HELPS teams being the only weeks you find happiness in your life.
Real tears from grown men, so desperate and with single chances within their lives. Single changes that when lost mean the loss of not only plans, but partial stability and hope for an upward stint. Yet never have I seen Alex nor Chori give up. Becuase they know they can't. Many nights, however, with our upcoming leave for the States and with the loss of companionship these months have built, have I seen sullen heads and tears without the prevail of a cheerer's laughter. It's not the kind of sadness that a best friend can turn to giggles with insults to an imbisul boyfriend or with the immature suggestion of a bodily function. It's a deeper kind of sorrow, a kind that whishes for better for their children, the kind of chance both of these men are trying to make in their lives.
This kind of suffering they have chosen to endure with hope.
There is an equal suffering it takes for a father to leave his country for another, where all is foreign and his language isn't spoken and a pig farm provides a tin roof and broken down home for comfort. This is the kind of suffering I will never have the capacity to grasp, nor never will have to endure.
This other suffering is the kind of suffering this man's son feels when he feels he's failed the opportunity his father suffered to give him. The pain he will feel to look into his eyes knowing he's lied and broken others, but experiencing the love his father has without regard for his faults.
I might continue this broken soliliquy, yet this exemplified cycle will require that I continue long on until morning with the determination and exemplified vigor these people have for their suffering. They suffer with the hope that a moment in their lives might come when they won't be worried and hurt and suffer to get by. Even if the relief begins for seconds and disappears, they suffer with this hope.
This kind of situation is unlike the strife of many because most others, especially in my country, have options. There are options for food, health, school. But when these are removed, spirits begin to break and cycles offer no option but to incite broken paths.
I could take pictures to bring to you and to show you, but they are only images. Images that may have been scalded onto my heart, but remain that of an image to you. Perhaps it will move you.. but how far? How far have I been moved?
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Breathe. Just once for me.
With the end of this week came more than a great relief for me. It was likely the least pleasant upon my arrival in this country. But with that said, and the fact that I was PR photographer for the week, it is over, I have taken enough pictures of Ronald McDonald and I can move on.
What never ceases to amaze me, however, is the ability for one's life to be changed by the work an individual can do in this country. With the intent to come and do and be, often we end up changed beyond what we could ever give in a physical manner to the people I encounter.
Without divulging ridiculous detail of my woe, I will say that my entire day was changed by an eleven year old boy this week. Walking camera in hand to the clinic, I had a mind to rid myself of all the stickers and stuffed animals and pencils I have been carting around in my bags for these last four months. Gosh, has it really been that long?
Walking toward the clinic, I heard... "Good. Morn. Ing. How. Are. You?" and I see this kid giggling at me as I grin and respond. Sitting next to him and inquiring the other English he knows, we strike up a conversation (as he continues to laugh at the fact that I look weird and can speak spanish). Poco a Poco (little by little), our little circle grows to encompass nearly every kid in the area and their mothers. Using Spanish as a transitive, we began to swap language. My English for their Katchiquel- a Mayan language comprised of clicking and deep throated kinds of words, which is transitively nearly impossible to pronounce. Mind you English and Spanish have a similar makeup and tonal quality. Most Mayan languages do not even have a written alphabet and pass the language on generationally. Thus, there I was, the awkward blonde girl surrounded by natives from Solola laughing nearly so hard they are crying as, I nor the others can pronounce either language.
But it isn't so much the fact that I only remember two words in Katchiquel meaning donkey and cat. It's the sentiment and the guts (in Guate we say Huevos - eggs) that this eleven year old had to just say hi in my own language. There is little more to be said than that. The entirety of my day and ultimately my week was drastically changed by someone I will never see again.
It's about taking time and I believe that is the only secret. Take time to feel crappy and take time to laugh. Don't let life get so caught up that you can't even breathe. It is amazing how often we must forget and relearn such things in our lives. But ultimately when we rediscover the satisfaction and peace this pace injects into ourselves, I realize how these people live to be 90 years old and continue to work their land until they end in rest. They've got it figured out far more significantly than our society of things does. I've been robbed twice since I've been here. Things are replaceable, but the serenity of the air in the morning is gone every time the sun passes to its full rise.
What never ceases to amaze me, however, is the ability for one's life to be changed by the work an individual can do in this country. With the intent to come and do and be, often we end up changed beyond what we could ever give in a physical manner to the people I encounter.
Without divulging ridiculous detail of my woe, I will say that my entire day was changed by an eleven year old boy this week. Walking camera in hand to the clinic, I had a mind to rid myself of all the stickers and stuffed animals and pencils I have been carting around in my bags for these last four months. Gosh, has it really been that long?
Walking toward the clinic, I heard... "Good. Morn. Ing. How. Are. You?" and I see this kid giggling at me as I grin and respond. Sitting next to him and inquiring the other English he knows, we strike up a conversation (as he continues to laugh at the fact that I look weird and can speak spanish). Poco a Poco (little by little), our little circle grows to encompass nearly every kid in the area and their mothers. Using Spanish as a transitive, we began to swap language. My English for their Katchiquel- a Mayan language comprised of clicking and deep throated kinds of words, which is transitively nearly impossible to pronounce. Mind you English and Spanish have a similar makeup and tonal quality. Most Mayan languages do not even have a written alphabet and pass the language on generationally. Thus, there I was, the awkward blonde girl surrounded by natives from Solola laughing nearly so hard they are crying as, I nor the others can pronounce either language.
But it isn't so much the fact that I only remember two words in Katchiquel meaning donkey and cat. It's the sentiment and the guts (in Guate we say Huevos - eggs) that this eleven year old had to just say hi in my own language. There is little more to be said than that. The entirety of my day and ultimately my week was drastically changed by someone I will never see again.
It's about taking time and I believe that is the only secret. Take time to feel crappy and take time to laugh. Don't let life get so caught up that you can't even breathe. It is amazing how often we must forget and relearn such things in our lives. But ultimately when we rediscover the satisfaction and peace this pace injects into ourselves, I realize how these people live to be 90 years old and continue to work their land until they end in rest. They've got it figured out far more significantly than our society of things does. I've been robbed twice since I've been here. Things are replaceable, but the serenity of the air in the morning is gone every time the sun passes to its full rise.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Lady in Red.
So after waking at four thirty this morning to photograph traditional easter parades in Antigua, avoiding and being trampled by crowds all day with my camera fastened to my hand, my body decided it wanted nothing to do with a nap. Blech. So instead of delightfully finding myself in the varied stages of sleep, I thus am fastened to the computer of my hostel very much in a daze.
I thought I might touch on something of a lighter subject than that which has been lately previous. Cat calls from Guatemalan boys. As a kind of disclaimer, I will say that getting whistled at on an hourly basis in the street is less than pleasant and I've learned to tune out the kind of clicking, shushing sound males make. However, sometimes these events prove to be particularily funny.
I'm not entirely sure where these boys think they're going to get using broken English to hit on us. Especially when it involves, "Hey Baby, or Pretty Lady, Barbie or Canchita (blondie).. etc. etc." I'm not sure how it would be deemed impressive to talk to someone, or how they might believe they are going to get anywhere with that kind of manner. Show me some intellect from less than a block away and a little eye contact and you MIGHT get aconversation out of me. Additionally, I'm sure you're more of a poet in your own language, whether it be Spanish, Quiche, Pokemchi etc. However, if you're between the ages of 12 and 17 as is frequent, kiss your hopes goodbye. But to note a particualrily humorous instance, Laurie and I were walking down the streets of Antigua three or four weeks ago, looking for a hostel to say in during Semana Santa (Holy Week). As we avoided eye contact from a pickup filled with teenaged boys, whistles here and there provoked a mere "...BYEEEE.." from one of its cargoed bodies. That was all the high pitched, toady voice had to offer. Something tells me he meant to say "hi," but we giggled and continued down the road.
Additionally, when we were in Panajachel last week, we were walking down to the water front, and a 13 or 14 year old tuk tuk driver (which is a small go-cart like taxi) leaned out his window and said, "Hi Barbie.. I like your underwear." Both on the verge of rage, Laurie and I decided it was better to burst into rampant laughter at the absurdity of the sentence. Not only were we sure that no one could see our underwear, we were also particularily sure that he had no idea what he had just said to us. Not to mention the fact he was probably 14.
Yesterday, while wearing my gap product red shirt walking down the road I was called Lady In Red. No allusion to the song of course. The word Red was written on my shirt as such: INSPI(RED).
Usually though, when they realize I too can speak their language, they toot a different horn. Aside from the suave, "free translation.com" usage, cat calling women is an actual problem in this country. What's startling is at such a young age men are taught the macho motiff and taught often by their fathers how to treat (or all too frequently mistreat) women. They are sometimes sent to "become men" as soon as they enter teenage years. What's socks the wind out of me even more, is that women are taught to be passive about this abuse. No one ever fights back, regardless of a situation of a drunken husband or endangered children. Often, the fear of not surviving is too great. And thus whistling and the maltreatment of women continues. It lies in the conditioning of children as young boys are not taught that this kind of manner is a disrespect to women and their own mothers in turn. I know that if my younger brother would think of treating any kind of female in that manner, he would be pummeled personally to the ground by his older sister. The kind of education toward opposite gendered relations is so drastically different here. It is not that nothing is taught to young boys and they don't know any better, but rather they are shown what to do and how to treat women. And because I am a woman living here in Guatemala, I too, continue to walk down the street and ignore the honks, hoots and hollers, knowing there is little I can do right now to change the cycle.
I thought I might touch on something of a lighter subject than that which has been lately previous. Cat calls from Guatemalan boys. As a kind of disclaimer, I will say that getting whistled at on an hourly basis in the street is less than pleasant and I've learned to tune out the kind of clicking, shushing sound males make. However, sometimes these events prove to be particularily funny.
I'm not entirely sure where these boys think they're going to get using broken English to hit on us. Especially when it involves, "Hey Baby, or Pretty Lady, Barbie or Canchita (blondie).. etc. etc." I'm not sure how it would be deemed impressive to talk to someone, or how they might believe they are going to get anywhere with that kind of manner. Show me some intellect from less than a block away and a little eye contact and you MIGHT get aconversation out of me. Additionally, I'm sure you're more of a poet in your own language, whether it be Spanish, Quiche, Pokemchi etc. However, if you're between the ages of 12 and 17 as is frequent, kiss your hopes goodbye. But to note a particualrily humorous instance, Laurie and I were walking down the streets of Antigua three or four weeks ago, looking for a hostel to say in during Semana Santa (Holy Week). As we avoided eye contact from a pickup filled with teenaged boys, whistles here and there provoked a mere "...BYEEEE.." from one of its cargoed bodies. That was all the high pitched, toady voice had to offer. Something tells me he meant to say "hi," but we giggled and continued down the road.
Additionally, when we were in Panajachel last week, we were walking down to the water front, and a 13 or 14 year old tuk tuk driver (which is a small go-cart like taxi) leaned out his window and said, "Hi Barbie.. I like your underwear." Both on the verge of rage, Laurie and I decided it was better to burst into rampant laughter at the absurdity of the sentence. Not only were we sure that no one could see our underwear, we were also particularily sure that he had no idea what he had just said to us. Not to mention the fact he was probably 14.
Yesterday, while wearing my gap product red shirt walking down the road I was called Lady In Red. No allusion to the song of course. The word Red was written on my shirt as such: INSPI(RED).
Usually though, when they realize I too can speak their language, they toot a different horn. Aside from the suave, "free translation.com" usage, cat calling women is an actual problem in this country. What's startling is at such a young age men are taught the macho motiff and taught often by their fathers how to treat (or all too frequently mistreat) women. They are sometimes sent to "become men" as soon as they enter teenage years. What's socks the wind out of me even more, is that women are taught to be passive about this abuse. No one ever fights back, regardless of a situation of a drunken husband or endangered children. Often, the fear of not surviving is too great. And thus whistling and the maltreatment of women continues. It lies in the conditioning of children as young boys are not taught that this kind of manner is a disrespect to women and their own mothers in turn. I know that if my younger brother would think of treating any kind of female in that manner, he would be pummeled personally to the ground by his older sister. The kind of education toward opposite gendered relations is so drastically different here. It is not that nothing is taught to young boys and they don't know any better, but rather they are shown what to do and how to treat women. And because I am a woman living here in Guatemala, I too, continue to walk down the street and ignore the honks, hoots and hollers, knowing there is little I can do right now to change the cycle.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Update.
After reading my last few entries, my father suggested I give you an update on the woman who had trouble during our outreach last Friday. She was stable within the first 24 hours of the incident and upon her daughter's arrival several hours later is doing fine. She was transfered to the Guatemalan hospital in Tejutla and was still doing well upon our leave on Sunday morning.
Things like this, however, cause a person to realize the fragility of one's life. Aside from the Carpe Diem cliche, don't forget to tell those who give you energy and reason their vitality to you. Irreplaceable experience and skies, though often brevities, are integral to our moments.
Things like this, however, cause a person to realize the fragility of one's life. Aside from the Carpe Diem cliche, don't forget to tell those who give you energy and reason their vitality to you. Irreplaceable experience and skies, though often brevities, are integral to our moments.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
So it's already published..
There is little I can do, now that I've posted that poem...
But it's really terrible.
I guess you own the good and the bad, right?
But it's really terrible.
I guess you own the good and the bad, right?
Dust as catalyst.
So all of you know that I'm more of a non-fiction writer than I ever have been a poet. Actually, I'm admittedly a terrible poet and thus am not entirely sure why I even believe this post will be of any kind of merit. But I'll cease my blubbering and get on with the show. I just cared to be sure there was a proper disclaimer before you read any further.
It has no title, and is barely legible in my moleskine as I wrote it traveling through the mountains from Tejutla. Criticsm is welcome.
There are paths along the highways
that I've never noticed before
Others who have walked the stretch
I ride
Men, women carry worn wood
along the equally etched trail
barely able to stand
with their back's load
I wonder,
if there are churches everywhere
why God seems sometimes to lack Grace
It's hard when you're on the inside
- but then I feel the wind,
or whitness the
brilliance
of the sun's show of color
behind the largest volcano I've ever seen
Those loved are at my side:
those who have been far away for months,
And those who will too soon be far
But put your worry aside
and live your life,
show love
-empathy
-energy.
For there exists a spirit in which
partaking guarantees that which is human
I'm surrounded by dust,
covered actually,
as all my belongings
A coating of brown
mud for my toes
onces the rain washes over my nakedness
Have you ever noticed
how the dust settles on everything
but the flowers?
... or the way shadows play on walls
in morning?
So I'll stay here in my happiness,
and let other things drift away
For now I'll see in me,
faces that,
eventually,
will no longer be clear
as time envelops
and we, as elipses,
move along..
It has no title, and is barely legible in my moleskine as I wrote it traveling through the mountains from Tejutla. Criticsm is welcome.
There are paths along the highways
that I've never noticed before
Others who have walked the stretch
I ride
Men, women carry worn wood
along the equally etched trail
barely able to stand
with their back's load
I wonder,
if there are churches everywhere
why God seems sometimes to lack Grace
It's hard when you're on the inside
- but then I feel the wind,
or whitness the
brilliance
of the sun's show of color
behind the largest volcano I've ever seen
Those loved are at my side:
those who have been far away for months,
And those who will too soon be far
But put your worry aside
and live your life,
show love
-empathy
-energy.
For there exists a spirit in which
partaking guarantees that which is human
I'm surrounded by dust,
covered actually,
as all my belongings
A coating of brown
mud for my toes
onces the rain washes over my nakedness
Have you ever noticed
how the dust settles on everything
but the flowers?
... or the way shadows play on walls
in morning?
So I'll stay here in my happiness,
and let other things drift away
For now I'll see in me,
faces that,
eventually,
will no longer be clear
as time envelops
and we, as elipses,
move along..
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
A Mayan Morning.
So after hearing complaints that I hadn't written in quite some time via email and a phone call from my mother, I've decided it was time once again. I apologize that I have made very little effort to write to all of you in the past few weeks. Adequete writing time simply evaded my life for a short while. I've just returned from a medical team in Tejutla, San Marcos. We had a great week and an indescribeable vew of Tajumulco (Ta-hu-mool-koo), the highest volcano in Central America. Waking up to breakfast outside with such a skyline makes a person truly believe they are among the luckiest in the world. It makes me wonder if the people who live there realize just how beautiful their land is. However, I imagine that perhaps, too, people are all alike. Just as in the States some know this kind of beauty and some just let it pass them by like scenery on the highway. These mountains were cold at night, and I understand at 45-50 degrees a night, all at home in Minnesota were surpassing me in warmth. Ironic, is it not?
Another added perk of the week was the addition of my dad to the mix. A long time veteran of HELPS, he made his thirteenth trip with me. Translating for him and two of his dental classmates for the week, we ran into very little trouble until a woman had a panic attack while outreaching on Friday. We've had time to catch up and catch coffee, catch dinner and shop a little in these last few days in Antigua. Yesterday, we took a trip to Lake Atitlan off of the coastal town of Panajachel (Pan-a-ha-chel). Brilliant blue waters and the surrounding of three other volcanoes kept us company in our boat for the day. What is interesting about the lake however, is at approximately the size of Lake Millacs in Minnesota, there are several small communities that have developed around its shores. Each village has their own dress and traditions, wholly different from their neighbors. Warm spots emerge in various places around the lake from the volcanic faults in the area and many bathe in it's clarity. It's magestic. I could take the entirety the afternoon to tell about these places, but if you google Lake Atitlan, you're likely to come up with great photos.
Dad and I have had fun, too, with out photo competition. It's fair game as we own exactly the same camera. So one evening this last week we climbed to the roof of the hospital to shoot the fire of the sunset. Perhaps I'm just biased, but though I won that night, he definitely out shot me yesterday at the lake. Where I had two or three frameable shots, his were fantasic. He caught a fisherman's wooden boat in the shadow of the Volcano yesterday morning that I just couldn't surpass.
Tomorrow, I leave with the other four staff members to spend a few days in Panajachel again. We have a few days off between now, Semana Santa (Holy Week), and the next medical team. It will be good to spend time together as drastically our time here becomes more limited, and we begin to realize the reality of home is merely a few weeks in the future. All of us have become overwhelmed with melancholy in the last week. Within the next two weeks we, the staff, will be four, then two weeks after, three.. and so on and so forth. We're beginning to realize that our life here is not forever and light is beginning to shed upon our lives in the States once more. It's not been a joyus dawning to know we will never be together in the same manner again.
I relize many of you cannot wait to hear my stories and see my pictures. But I realize that I can. I love you all, and do miss you, but there are certain pieces about life here, that are simply more rich than I've ever found in the United States. Home is not a place of volcanoes and cool mornings, sunny afternoons. I've come into myself here, and more into the realities of humanity than I could have ever found in the protected falsity of the "American Dream." This dream is one, to which all have a right, but few in the scheme of the world ever have the opportunity to experience.
I mentioned earlier that while outreaching Friday, a woman began to panic from the feeling of the anesthetic in her mouth. With severe periodontal disease, we were going to remove all of her teeth so she might have a denture made. She was 50 years old with a weathered face of 85. As a consequence of her panic, her heart condition (that she was not taking her medicine for) emerged and caused more than severe palpatations. Increaing difficulty in her breath and a racing pulse caused panic in us all. Twenty minutes away from the hospital, my Dad helped the woman to the truck and jumped in next to her. He left me and his assistant to take care of the instruments and tell the other 20 people waiting in line that the days was over.
Sensing my panic, and knowing the face that my dad held (which was the kind of face I've only seen when his parents had been rushed to the hospital), I handed toothbrushes out to the rest of the people around, feeling helpless as a mere translator. The small gym we were working in cleared... for a few minutes. At the sensation of a tap upon my shoulder, I found all the mothers who had evaded the line and headed for home. They'd returned to say thank you, and one by one, children and their parents hugged me and asked that God bless me, my father and the work we had done. These were people who had not been treated that morning. They told me they would wait for the next medical jornada (journey) and wait to see me there. Bending down to let small children hug my neck, I was given their gift of calm. They understood that what will be, will be.
This kindship toward those strange is something infrequently found.
Such a remarkably simple idea it is, to stop worrying. It is easy to forget just how little control we actually have over the course of our own lives. I was not put into a family of blessings by my choice, nor was I not born to a farm here in Guatemala by my power. I make series of decisions, but have very small influence in the scheme of their outcome.
I was told this week that the Mayan people's dwelling places was one room beacuase their lives took place outside. When the Spaniards came with their "civilized ideas" of property and God having a house within that property, the Mayan people thought the Spaniards were crazy. Just as incense sticks to the ceiling of God's house, prayer gets stuck among the rafters with the stale perfume. God, was instead outside, in the mountains. Space among sky and air was the mecca for their prayer. God is outside of a dwelling, of a holding place, of the comfort of normal. God is in that which is beyond us. As wood and limestone churches are created by that of man, how can we believe this thing called a church can contain all that he desires for our lives? Naive and silly, I feel this people of 4,000 years past fancies a more sensible idea than our younger, "educated" race could have begin to foster as of yet. I understand these Mayan people, and the face of God that dwells outside of a catechism. To leave and to surround oneself with what is uncontained and unfamiliar, is more of a God than I've ever found in the walls of even the most beautiful and ancient churches.
Another added perk of the week was the addition of my dad to the mix. A long time veteran of HELPS, he made his thirteenth trip with me. Translating for him and two of his dental classmates for the week, we ran into very little trouble until a woman had a panic attack while outreaching on Friday. We've had time to catch up and catch coffee, catch dinner and shop a little in these last few days in Antigua. Yesterday, we took a trip to Lake Atitlan off of the coastal town of Panajachel (Pan-a-ha-chel). Brilliant blue waters and the surrounding of three other volcanoes kept us company in our boat for the day. What is interesting about the lake however, is at approximately the size of Lake Millacs in Minnesota, there are several small communities that have developed around its shores. Each village has their own dress and traditions, wholly different from their neighbors. Warm spots emerge in various places around the lake from the volcanic faults in the area and many bathe in it's clarity. It's magestic. I could take the entirety the afternoon to tell about these places, but if you google Lake Atitlan, you're likely to come up with great photos.
Dad and I have had fun, too, with out photo competition. It's fair game as we own exactly the same camera. So one evening this last week we climbed to the roof of the hospital to shoot the fire of the sunset. Perhaps I'm just biased, but though I won that night, he definitely out shot me yesterday at the lake. Where I had two or three frameable shots, his were fantasic. He caught a fisherman's wooden boat in the shadow of the Volcano yesterday morning that I just couldn't surpass.
Tomorrow, I leave with the other four staff members to spend a few days in Panajachel again. We have a few days off between now, Semana Santa (Holy Week), and the next medical team. It will be good to spend time together as drastically our time here becomes more limited, and we begin to realize the reality of home is merely a few weeks in the future. All of us have become overwhelmed with melancholy in the last week. Within the next two weeks we, the staff, will be four, then two weeks after, three.. and so on and so forth. We're beginning to realize that our life here is not forever and light is beginning to shed upon our lives in the States once more. It's not been a joyus dawning to know we will never be together in the same manner again.
I relize many of you cannot wait to hear my stories and see my pictures. But I realize that I can. I love you all, and do miss you, but there are certain pieces about life here, that are simply more rich than I've ever found in the United States. Home is not a place of volcanoes and cool mornings, sunny afternoons. I've come into myself here, and more into the realities of humanity than I could have ever found in the protected falsity of the "American Dream." This dream is one, to which all have a right, but few in the scheme of the world ever have the opportunity to experience.
I mentioned earlier that while outreaching Friday, a woman began to panic from the feeling of the anesthetic in her mouth. With severe periodontal disease, we were going to remove all of her teeth so she might have a denture made. She was 50 years old with a weathered face of 85. As a consequence of her panic, her heart condition (that she was not taking her medicine for) emerged and caused more than severe palpatations. Increaing difficulty in her breath and a racing pulse caused panic in us all. Twenty minutes away from the hospital, my Dad helped the woman to the truck and jumped in next to her. He left me and his assistant to take care of the instruments and tell the other 20 people waiting in line that the days was over.
Sensing my panic, and knowing the face that my dad held (which was the kind of face I've only seen when his parents had been rushed to the hospital), I handed toothbrushes out to the rest of the people around, feeling helpless as a mere translator. The small gym we were working in cleared... for a few minutes. At the sensation of a tap upon my shoulder, I found all the mothers who had evaded the line and headed for home. They'd returned to say thank you, and one by one, children and their parents hugged me and asked that God bless me, my father and the work we had done. These were people who had not been treated that morning. They told me they would wait for the next medical jornada (journey) and wait to see me there. Bending down to let small children hug my neck, I was given their gift of calm. They understood that what will be, will be.
This kindship toward those strange is something infrequently found.
Such a remarkably simple idea it is, to stop worrying. It is easy to forget just how little control we actually have over the course of our own lives. I was not put into a family of blessings by my choice, nor was I not born to a farm here in Guatemala by my power. I make series of decisions, but have very small influence in the scheme of their outcome.
I was told this week that the Mayan people's dwelling places was one room beacuase their lives took place outside. When the Spaniards came with their "civilized ideas" of property and God having a house within that property, the Mayan people thought the Spaniards were crazy. Just as incense sticks to the ceiling of God's house, prayer gets stuck among the rafters with the stale perfume. God, was instead outside, in the mountains. Space among sky and air was the mecca for their prayer. God is outside of a dwelling, of a holding place, of the comfort of normal. God is in that which is beyond us. As wood and limestone churches are created by that of man, how can we believe this thing called a church can contain all that he desires for our lives? Naive and silly, I feel this people of 4,000 years past fancies a more sensible idea than our younger, "educated" race could have begin to foster as of yet. I understand these Mayan people, and the face of God that dwells outside of a catechism. To leave and to surround oneself with what is uncontained and unfamiliar, is more of a God than I've ever found in the walls of even the most beautiful and ancient churches.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Apologies for My Brevity
So after procrastinating entirely for two weeks, I decided the only way for me to catch up with all of you was to merely open a new blog entry and write. However it's a thing that is significantly easier said than done. As I spend more time here and my life becomes normal, I find myself writing less and less and forget that all of you have no idea what I am doing. Thankfully, after four medical teams back to back, I have a week long break. I decided to spend it mostly on my own to make a short trip to a town spoken highly of. I've been in need of a break for a while and have a newfound respect la Jefa (the boss), Megan Albertson. She's been doing this for nearly three years now and keeps going with stamina I've seen in few people. I thought I had a high tolerance level for a rapid lifestyle, but I must admit I was tired after four trips. It is refreshing to be away from everything HELPS for a week and have time to just be and spend time in a new place.
I arrived in Xela (Shela) or Quetzaltenango (kate-saul-ten-an-go) on Sunday and was taken to la casa de Doña Hilda, a woman in her seventies who reminds me much of my Grandma Rosie. Her decor (sp?), mannerisms, even the aging radio in the kitchen are uncannily similar. She travels the ten or twelve blocks to church by foot in the mornings and uses a gas stove to make sure I always have too much food on my plate. Though Doña Hilda's house is her own, it is always filled with a bustle. Aside from myself, she takes other students from the school and has two young tenants as well. Additionally her children and gradnchildren are constantly dropping by for meals. It's bustling and she alway comments that I haven't eaten much (especially because I don't eat meat), asks whether am going to church with her in the morning, and how quickly I need to leave for my next endeavor. She never lets me touch the dishes and makes cauliflower much like my mother's.
It's good to see the middle class of Guatemala as well. In contrast to an earlier entry, ít does exist, though in a significantly smaller quota. I've now had the opportunity to talk with people spanning from the villages to the ritzy part of the country and am beginning to develop a much larger scope of the life here.
We spent our last medical jornada in Solola, approximately three hours from the city and a half an hour away from Atitlan, a beautiful lake for which the country is known. My father and I will be there for a day while he's here. However, not to travel a tangent, the team from Oregon who stationed themselves in the city of Solola also manned what we call a stove team. This stove was developed by a man who previously traveled as a McGyver (mechanic) on medical teams and was searching for a solution to prevent so many of the chronic eye and lung conditions and burn cases the plastic surgeons see. Often children burn themselves in fires while their mothers are cooking and find their hands or arms fused shut and disfunctioning. This stove however, costs the family 23 dollars to purchase, and our teams come in to install them with the people.
I was able to go out on a stove team one day last week and work with four middle aged men not so unlike my father. Within twenty minutes of our day, they were already concerned for the kind of man I might love and marry. It's nice to know someone is always watching out for you. A couple of them shared my enthusiasm for cameras and gave me a few pointers as well. These men and I had the rare chance to actually go into the homes of families and know them well. Out of 14 cinder blocks, a few pieces of aluminum, gravel and limestone we create two stoves that cost significantly less to use. On average, these stoves save the woman of the house seven years per year worth of time they would have spent gathering wood or manning a stove. The ONIL stove burns on sigificantly less fuel than a typical house stove and therefore gives the head of the household more time to spend on other endeavors. Most families in the villages live on approximately three to seven dollars a week, and this stove saves much of the money the might have spent on wood.
The smiles on the faces of people recieving the stove are undescribeable. We joke and attempt to speak a few words of Kachiquel, the local dialect with them. The children are excited and giggle and wrestle for the gringoes (white foreigners) in their house and their mother beams with excitement and care for her new appliance that burns cleaner air through a chimney out the roof and relieves the family from smoke in the kitchen. It is beautiful work.
I've also been translating more frequently and have found a new love of words in the Spanish language.
Se quiero ustedes mucho.
I arrived in Xela (Shela) or Quetzaltenango (kate-saul-ten-an-go) on Sunday and was taken to la casa de Doña Hilda, a woman in her seventies who reminds me much of my Grandma Rosie. Her decor (sp?), mannerisms, even the aging radio in the kitchen are uncannily similar. She travels the ten or twelve blocks to church by foot in the mornings and uses a gas stove to make sure I always have too much food on my plate. Though Doña Hilda's house is her own, it is always filled with a bustle. Aside from myself, she takes other students from the school and has two young tenants as well. Additionally her children and gradnchildren are constantly dropping by for meals. It's bustling and she alway comments that I haven't eaten much (especially because I don't eat meat), asks whether am going to church with her in the morning, and how quickly I need to leave for my next endeavor. She never lets me touch the dishes and makes cauliflower much like my mother's.
It's good to see the middle class of Guatemala as well. In contrast to an earlier entry, ít does exist, though in a significantly smaller quota. I've now had the opportunity to talk with people spanning from the villages to the ritzy part of the country and am beginning to develop a much larger scope of the life here.
We spent our last medical jornada in Solola, approximately three hours from the city and a half an hour away from Atitlan, a beautiful lake for which the country is known. My father and I will be there for a day while he's here. However, not to travel a tangent, the team from Oregon who stationed themselves in the city of Solola also manned what we call a stove team. This stove was developed by a man who previously traveled as a McGyver (mechanic) on medical teams and was searching for a solution to prevent so many of the chronic eye and lung conditions and burn cases the plastic surgeons see. Often children burn themselves in fires while their mothers are cooking and find their hands or arms fused shut and disfunctioning. This stove however, costs the family 23 dollars to purchase, and our teams come in to install them with the people.
I was able to go out on a stove team one day last week and work with four middle aged men not so unlike my father. Within twenty minutes of our day, they were already concerned for the kind of man I might love and marry. It's nice to know someone is always watching out for you. A couple of them shared my enthusiasm for cameras and gave me a few pointers as well. These men and I had the rare chance to actually go into the homes of families and know them well. Out of 14 cinder blocks, a few pieces of aluminum, gravel and limestone we create two stoves that cost significantly less to use. On average, these stoves save the woman of the house seven years per year worth of time they would have spent gathering wood or manning a stove. The ONIL stove burns on sigificantly less fuel than a typical house stove and therefore gives the head of the household more time to spend on other endeavors. Most families in the villages live on approximately three to seven dollars a week, and this stove saves much of the money the might have spent on wood.
The smiles on the faces of people recieving the stove are undescribeable. We joke and attempt to speak a few words of Kachiquel, the local dialect with them. The children are excited and giggle and wrestle for the gringoes (white foreigners) in their house and their mother beams with excitement and care for her new appliance that burns cleaner air through a chimney out the roof and relieves the family from smoke in the kitchen. It is beautiful work.
I've also been translating more frequently and have found a new love of words in the Spanish language.
Se quiero ustedes mucho.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Yellow Balloons.
Thursday morning brought market day in Uspantan with my friends and I. Walking the few blocks into town and into the hazy maze of blue tarps overhead and bags of chile powder, sixteen cent calalillies and live chickens everywhere, we were covered in confetti by children within minutes of our entrance. Running into a peace corps member, he said he´d been in the town nearly a year and still ended up with colorful paper in his pants in the market. All would consider the giggles and joy a happy event, but no one noticed the man sleeping facedown in the cement of the sidewalk that morning.
Opened mouthed and breathing heavily, he seemed to be sleeping deeply as if he´d done so in the very same spot most of his life. His pants were torn and falling off his legs, which were rivals of the Holocaust survivors of 1945. His black hair, matted and greasy was an unkempt mop above his guant face and tattered, purple exucuse for a sweatshirt on his back.
Hours later, after a local breakfast of eggs, beans and fresh coffee for as little as three dollars, he appeared again. Awake this time, I could see his mentally handicapped state as he aimlessly meandered through the confetti stand and stared at raw chickens in their freshly slaughtered cases. His dark eyes held no light behind them and an emotionless expression was painted upon his brown face. His pants were falling off his waist as the elastic was worn and he had no shoes for his blackened feet. He carried a deflated, broken yellow balloon in his hand. He walked slowly past me, but lacked any kind of dilliberance in his step.
The following day, he found me again. Donning the same clothing, he sat hugging his legs upon the cobblestone road, rocking slightly. His sunken eyes were fixed on the bright yellow of the corner fruit stand. His wrinkled balloon, which I now realized was trailing its shredded blue leash of a ribbon was clasped tightly like a teddy bear.
I shuddered deeply for the third time as I walked past him.
How many opportunities does it take us, as a human race to act upon common sympathies and emotions? I left school to work with medical teams, and I see a man in the street and walk by him three times before I spent a single quetzal, which in terms of dollars is the equivalent of sixteen cents. Recieving only an empty stare as I asked if he wanted fruit, he was handed a bag of pineapple. Yet I gave him no money thereafter. I had 100Q in my pocket, which is far more than many have - particularily this man of 30 something. While this human being had lunch for the day, I had ample money left over. Who would feed him next time? His state hardly allowed coherence and cetainly no means to care for himself. Yet people walk by. The woman with the fruit stand had undoubtedly stared at his face for some time before I walked into their presence. He needs to be clothed and taken care of and loved. These are pieces of human dignity that need no sort of earning. These are all things that I´ve been handed in my life. Yet I walked away, only having spent sixteen cents. I did not do more, and perhaps am as guilty as the people who see him day after day and walk by.
Saturday, many of the team members hiked to a magnificent waterfall on the side of a cliff in the mountains adjacent to the town. We rode in the back of a pickup back to the hospital. He found me again. In the middle of the highway along what would have been the yellow line of the road, sat the man and his yellow latex companion. The cement of the road was his chair as chicken busses whizzed past his unsensing face, inches from catastrophe. One of the local women with us, shook her head with a chuckle and lightly told me he was, on the most basic sense, the village idiot. My heart broke.
Opened mouthed and breathing heavily, he seemed to be sleeping deeply as if he´d done so in the very same spot most of his life. His pants were torn and falling off his legs, which were rivals of the Holocaust survivors of 1945. His black hair, matted and greasy was an unkempt mop above his guant face and tattered, purple exucuse for a sweatshirt on his back.
Hours later, after a local breakfast of eggs, beans and fresh coffee for as little as three dollars, he appeared again. Awake this time, I could see his mentally handicapped state as he aimlessly meandered through the confetti stand and stared at raw chickens in their freshly slaughtered cases. His dark eyes held no light behind them and an emotionless expression was painted upon his brown face. His pants were falling off his waist as the elastic was worn and he had no shoes for his blackened feet. He carried a deflated, broken yellow balloon in his hand. He walked slowly past me, but lacked any kind of dilliberance in his step.
The following day, he found me again. Donning the same clothing, he sat hugging his legs upon the cobblestone road, rocking slightly. His sunken eyes were fixed on the bright yellow of the corner fruit stand. His wrinkled balloon, which I now realized was trailing its shredded blue leash of a ribbon was clasped tightly like a teddy bear.
I shuddered deeply for the third time as I walked past him.
How many opportunities does it take us, as a human race to act upon common sympathies and emotions? I left school to work with medical teams, and I see a man in the street and walk by him three times before I spent a single quetzal, which in terms of dollars is the equivalent of sixteen cents. Recieving only an empty stare as I asked if he wanted fruit, he was handed a bag of pineapple. Yet I gave him no money thereafter. I had 100Q in my pocket, which is far more than many have - particularily this man of 30 something. While this human being had lunch for the day, I had ample money left over. Who would feed him next time? His state hardly allowed coherence and cetainly no means to care for himself. Yet people walk by. The woman with the fruit stand had undoubtedly stared at his face for some time before I walked into their presence. He needs to be clothed and taken care of and loved. These are pieces of human dignity that need no sort of earning. These are all things that I´ve been handed in my life. Yet I walked away, only having spent sixteen cents. I did not do more, and perhaps am as guilty as the people who see him day after day and walk by.
Saturday, many of the team members hiked to a magnificent waterfall on the side of a cliff in the mountains adjacent to the town. We rode in the back of a pickup back to the hospital. He found me again. In the middle of the highway along what would have been the yellow line of the road, sat the man and his yellow latex companion. The cement of the road was his chair as chicken busses whizzed past his unsensing face, inches from catastrophe. One of the local women with us, shook her head with a chuckle and lightly told me he was, on the most basic sense, the village idiot. My heart broke.
Friday, February 9, 2007
Middle class?
It amazes me slightly, how a few minutes on AOL instant messenger can change the course of your entire day. It was refreshing to hear news directly from home yesterday and to talk with friends long missed. Valentine's Day is this next week. What? It just dawned on me yesterday. I hear many of you are dealing with subzero temperatures and for that, I feel for all of you. In contrast to popular belief as well, I have hardly a tan. When I'm in the villages I have to remain covered and in the city I am often inside. So sorry, but I probably will not be a nice brown that is assumed. Besides, that's not at all what I'm here for. I just keep hearning it in messages and thought I might set the record straight.
I've been reading much lately. The Little Prince is something I'm appalled I've never read by now - but it was absolutely refreshing. I just started Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff, and it is absolutely hilarious. A memoir author origincally from Canada, he reminds me of David Sedaris. It's nice to be able to cross some of these books I've been meaning to read off my list of things to do.
I will be leaving Guatemala City again on Sunday morning. This time the we're headed to Uspantan, a mountainous village with a drastically more temperate climate. My job for the week will entail the surgery paperwork for each patient who comes through the OR. A good friend of mine, Becky, typically does this job and makes sure all is filled out to code. School has called her back to her master's program however, and thus I get to care for this large job. Additionally I get to organize and count each paper for each patient that will come through the hospital doors in this upcoming week. Which means I will be the grand owner of 2,000 pieces of essential paper. I'm slightly nervous about the whole thing and will likely call Becky half way through the week. Even still, I'll keep my fingers crossed and enjoy the idea of having an official task. I'll hopefully get to translate some as well.
As for these last couple days we've spent in the city, Laurie (roommate and fellow staff member) and I have been spending time with friends we've met here. Alexa is a translator for helps and will be working with us on many of the teams through May. Her mother is from Ohio and her dad is from Guate, and thus she's a dual citizen of both countries. It's been wonderful and she's been showing us around the city and welcomed us over to her house. She graduated from the German school here in October and is interviewing with many colleges for the fall. I remember the process well. This morning she took us to Cafe Barista and I had one of the most amazing cappucinos I've ever tasted. She brought us to an antique store that her friend's mother owns, and I couldn't help but think of my own mother as she would have loved to put the entire place into our own home in the States. Perhaps I get my love of old things from her. We also stopped by Alexa's grandmother's house and chatted for a time. She's a charasmatic little woman with frizzed brown hair and tons of stories. She spoke of growing up in Guatemala, the government and her own interest in medicine. She was very interested to know what we've been learning and was appreciative of our time here. Greeted and bid goodbye with kisses and hugs, it reminded me much of my grandmothers back home and made me want to stop by their similar homes for a visit as well. I guess that will have to wait until May.
It often amazes me, the distinct difference between the villages and the city. Seeming to be the difference between a place like Minneapolis and a shanty town, the drastic division of wealth is apparent. People either have more than my middle class family or nothing at all. Knowing what I have at home and how little many have here, it often makes me feel guilty for being comfortable and riding in nice cars with friends in the city. I have to remind myself that I spend more than half of my time on a cot in a sleeping bag. But doing the little math of which my mind is capable, I also realize the two bags, pack and camera I carry around this country with me could feed more than one Guatemalan family for a year in the village. It's distorted, the balance here. There really is nothing equating the middle class, either you're comfortable or you have nothing.
My time here often has its ups and downs. For as much as a person can expect, you never realize that sometimes being away is hard and lonely. But then the moments happen where you whitness a birth or a burst of colored flowers sprouting over an enclosed wall or a little child latches to your hip and kisses you as you bend over to ask about their day. It changes everything. I often catch myself thinking, even when things aren't ideal, that I must be one of the luckiest individuals on the world. I'm making the time now, to do what many wait until their middle ages to do. Regardless of the bad that sometimes creeps in, I feel assured in the feeling that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be in this particular moment of my life.
I've been reading much lately. The Little Prince is something I'm appalled I've never read by now - but it was absolutely refreshing. I just started Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff, and it is absolutely hilarious. A memoir author origincally from Canada, he reminds me of David Sedaris. It's nice to be able to cross some of these books I've been meaning to read off my list of things to do.
I will be leaving Guatemala City again on Sunday morning. This time the we're headed to Uspantan, a mountainous village with a drastically more temperate climate. My job for the week will entail the surgery paperwork for each patient who comes through the OR. A good friend of mine, Becky, typically does this job and makes sure all is filled out to code. School has called her back to her master's program however, and thus I get to care for this large job. Additionally I get to organize and count each paper for each patient that will come through the hospital doors in this upcoming week. Which means I will be the grand owner of 2,000 pieces of essential paper. I'm slightly nervous about the whole thing and will likely call Becky half way through the week. Even still, I'll keep my fingers crossed and enjoy the idea of having an official task. I'll hopefully get to translate some as well.
As for these last couple days we've spent in the city, Laurie (roommate and fellow staff member) and I have been spending time with friends we've met here. Alexa is a translator for helps and will be working with us on many of the teams through May. Her mother is from Ohio and her dad is from Guate, and thus she's a dual citizen of both countries. It's been wonderful and she's been showing us around the city and welcomed us over to her house. She graduated from the German school here in October and is interviewing with many colleges for the fall. I remember the process well. This morning she took us to Cafe Barista and I had one of the most amazing cappucinos I've ever tasted. She brought us to an antique store that her friend's mother owns, and I couldn't help but think of my own mother as she would have loved to put the entire place into our own home in the States. Perhaps I get my love of old things from her. We also stopped by Alexa's grandmother's house and chatted for a time. She's a charasmatic little woman with frizzed brown hair and tons of stories. She spoke of growing up in Guatemala, the government and her own interest in medicine. She was very interested to know what we've been learning and was appreciative of our time here. Greeted and bid goodbye with kisses and hugs, it reminded me much of my grandmothers back home and made me want to stop by their similar homes for a visit as well. I guess that will have to wait until May.
It often amazes me, the distinct difference between the villages and the city. Seeming to be the difference between a place like Minneapolis and a shanty town, the drastic division of wealth is apparent. People either have more than my middle class family or nothing at all. Knowing what I have at home and how little many have here, it often makes me feel guilty for being comfortable and riding in nice cars with friends in the city. I have to remind myself that I spend more than half of my time on a cot in a sleeping bag. But doing the little math of which my mind is capable, I also realize the two bags, pack and camera I carry around this country with me could feed more than one Guatemalan family for a year in the village. It's distorted, the balance here. There really is nothing equating the middle class, either you're comfortable or you have nothing.
My time here often has its ups and downs. For as much as a person can expect, you never realize that sometimes being away is hard and lonely. But then the moments happen where you whitness a birth or a burst of colored flowers sprouting over an enclosed wall or a little child latches to your hip and kisses you as you bend over to ask about their day. It changes everything. I often catch myself thinking, even when things aren't ideal, that I must be one of the luckiest individuals on the world. I'm making the time now, to do what many wait until their middle ages to do. Regardless of the bad that sometimes creeps in, I feel assured in the feeling that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be in this particular moment of my life.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
La Tinta, A Place Nearly As Hot as the Fever I Ran
I've spent the last week in the middle of the jungle. We had a six hour bus ride with more than half that across a dirt, mountainside road. I'm impressed that more vehicles don't fall of the side off these cliffs. One slip of the wheel at nearly any moment and we would have sidelonged in various gorges, catching trees and barbed wire fences along the way. From the moment we stepped out of our air conditioned buses, it was over 90 degrees with Minnesotan humidity until we took the buses back up the dirt road and neared Coban, further north of our location. The bugs were twice as large as you'd ever find in the states. Giant lizards rambled around with horns and green skin. Moths were beautiful and larger than my fists, I found a praying mantis crawling up a wall and scorpions crawling out of my suitcase. Thankfully I avoided being stung.
Sunday night, I started running a fever. By Monday evening all was full fledged. I was running a 102.2 temperature and managed to sleep for almost 48 hours solidly. I was wheezy and coughing and overall in miserable shape until midday Wednesday. However, I avoided an IV by drinking water by the liter. Dropping into the swing of things halfway through the week was slightly difficult for me. By this point, most have developed their position of work for the week and I was starting from scratch. I had ample reason to float for the rest of the week. I spent some time attemtping to translate in the dental clinic and popped in and out of the medical clinics as well.
One of the highlights was watching the marvelous Paul Schultz work. A plastic surgeon from St. Cloud and the father of a dear friend of mine, Meredith, Paul can put people back together like I´ve never seen before. I watched him work on a severe cleft lip and pallate Wednesday afternoon. One and a half year old Oscar suddenly had a new face, and I can´t even describe to you the look on his mother´s face when he came out of surgery. A woman in her young twenties who spoke only Kekche, a native dialect, she couldn´t speak and just kept looking. Awestruck at her son´s closed lips and with another newborn baby on her hip, she stayed near him for the next several days. It was entirely joyful to see Oscar squeak and dribble food from his mouth a day later. He had to figure out how to eat all over again. I can´t help but realize how close to my own age his mother was and how frequently that is the case. A little girl from the village asked if I had a boyfriend and was shocked when I told her I was twenty and flying solo. That doesn´t happen in the villages here. You get married and have a family, and hope that your six or eight children make it past year five.
Because of one person, this little boy´s life will be so different. The work Paul does makes me crave the ability to impact others in an equally drastic manner. I just don´t think that I could live with myself in the states if I had to perform lyposuction and breast implants the other 345 days of the year when I wasn´t in Guatemala. But this man literally puts people back together. He can give a man who´s fallen in a fire and fused his hand shut, functioning fingers again. We´re even built with extra tendons in our hands, which, when transplanted into a faulty digit, create new opportunity for movement. It´s amazing, and while I´ve always been sure of my study, his work makes me consider other paths. The question was poised to me recently if I´d ever considered the medical field. I gave my blanketed no, I was satisfied to solely watch. However, I suddenly am not so sure.
I´m beginning to realize I´m learning much more than I ever anticipated I would. Of course I subconciously knew that would happen. It´s amazing what happens when you have a crappy week out in the field. I was in a wretchedly hot environment for a week. Sweating while sitting at eight o clock in the morning is not my idea of a great time. Yet I spent a week there. The difference is that I had the option to leave. These people living in literal shanties, don´t have that option. That´s the difference between my situation in La Tinta and theirs. I have hot summers as well, but I have a functioning stove, an air conditioner... My six membered family lives in three separate locations, and my gradmothers add an additional two. We have floors. We have vehicles. We have ice. Now place these eight people in a tin walled, eight by ten foot space and you have the dwelling place of my individuals I saw along that dirt road this week.
And as we passed by in our air conditioned busses, and the gringos (slang for Americans) took pictures out the window, people ran down the road and families smiled out their dimly lit doorways. Dirt covered kids with torn tshirts or no tshirts at all, played with each other in the street and waved us on, grinning.
Sunday night, I started running a fever. By Monday evening all was full fledged. I was running a 102.2 temperature and managed to sleep for almost 48 hours solidly. I was wheezy and coughing and overall in miserable shape until midday Wednesday. However, I avoided an IV by drinking water by the liter. Dropping into the swing of things halfway through the week was slightly difficult for me. By this point, most have developed their position of work for the week and I was starting from scratch. I had ample reason to float for the rest of the week. I spent some time attemtping to translate in the dental clinic and popped in and out of the medical clinics as well.
One of the highlights was watching the marvelous Paul Schultz work. A plastic surgeon from St. Cloud and the father of a dear friend of mine, Meredith, Paul can put people back together like I´ve never seen before. I watched him work on a severe cleft lip and pallate Wednesday afternoon. One and a half year old Oscar suddenly had a new face, and I can´t even describe to you the look on his mother´s face when he came out of surgery. A woman in her young twenties who spoke only Kekche, a native dialect, she couldn´t speak and just kept looking. Awestruck at her son´s closed lips and with another newborn baby on her hip, she stayed near him for the next several days. It was entirely joyful to see Oscar squeak and dribble food from his mouth a day later. He had to figure out how to eat all over again. I can´t help but realize how close to my own age his mother was and how frequently that is the case. A little girl from the village asked if I had a boyfriend and was shocked when I told her I was twenty and flying solo. That doesn´t happen in the villages here. You get married and have a family, and hope that your six or eight children make it past year five.
Because of one person, this little boy´s life will be so different. The work Paul does makes me crave the ability to impact others in an equally drastic manner. I just don´t think that I could live with myself in the states if I had to perform lyposuction and breast implants the other 345 days of the year when I wasn´t in Guatemala. But this man literally puts people back together. He can give a man who´s fallen in a fire and fused his hand shut, functioning fingers again. We´re even built with extra tendons in our hands, which, when transplanted into a faulty digit, create new opportunity for movement. It´s amazing, and while I´ve always been sure of my study, his work makes me consider other paths. The question was poised to me recently if I´d ever considered the medical field. I gave my blanketed no, I was satisfied to solely watch. However, I suddenly am not so sure.
I´m beginning to realize I´m learning much more than I ever anticipated I would. Of course I subconciously knew that would happen. It´s amazing what happens when you have a crappy week out in the field. I was in a wretchedly hot environment for a week. Sweating while sitting at eight o clock in the morning is not my idea of a great time. Yet I spent a week there. The difference is that I had the option to leave. These people living in literal shanties, don´t have that option. That´s the difference between my situation in La Tinta and theirs. I have hot summers as well, but I have a functioning stove, an air conditioner... My six membered family lives in three separate locations, and my gradmothers add an additional two. We have floors. We have vehicles. We have ice. Now place these eight people in a tin walled, eight by ten foot space and you have the dwelling place of my individuals I saw along that dirt road this week.
And as we passed by in our air conditioned busses, and the gringos (slang for Americans) took pictures out the window, people ran down the road and families smiled out their dimly lit doorways. Dirt covered kids with torn tshirts or no tshirts at all, played with each other in the street and waved us on, grinning.
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