AnneDalke's blog

When we moved to Costa Rica, we moved from the cities of Antigua and Xela (where we’d been living in Guatemala)—to a very rural area, some four hours (two of them on dirt roads) from the capital. We quickly found out that all the addresses here are given in relative terms (the directions to our homestay were to go “50 meters north and 25 meters west of Pizzeria de Johnny”). We left cobblestones for dirt roads, cramped streets for wide vistas (oh, these sunsets!).

But my camera’s on the blink -- in a place where repairs and replacements are impossible -- and I feel naked without it, unable to create an archive of what I’m seeing --and, implicitly, of what I’m thinking about what I’m seeing (I found this cow, for instance, tethered to a pole alongside the PanAmerican Highway in Guatemala; most of the cows here in Costa Rica are Brahmin, who look very different…)

Earlier this week, Marielos (who was born in a family of milk cow farmers, but now teaches English to tourists like me) told me why and how the primary industry of this area converted from "milking cows to milking tourists." Her report was that--although the work now is physically easier, and physically cleaner--it is otherwise “just like farming: You don’t get Sundays off. You have to work every day. And you have to be very attentive. If you don’t give the Nordamericos what they want-and-are-looking-for, they’ll tell their friends to stay away--and you’ll lose all your business. They are just as finicky as the milk cows.” (Of course I’m sitting there feeling particularly persnickety…)

Costa Rica is advertised as the “Switzerland of Central America”—less for the cows, I think, than because it is a country without a standing army, with universal literacy, with an enlightened outlook on ecology…so I came here expecting something far different from Guatamala. But the reality seems to me not so different. This is a poor country (the decision to lay down the army seems to have been less philosophical than pragmatic—a dearth of resources). The roads are terrible. The schools are poorly funded; many children don’t go beyond the primary grades. The population is still largely rural, and ecological consciousness—about water quality, about recycling, about sustainable usage of resources in general—isn’t common in most homes.

Though of course, Marielos’ description of the life of her husband’s family in Nicaragua—a small dark home w/ a dirt floor, lacking water and electricity—is a good reminder of that poverty—like everything else—is always relative. Shaye (who as always, has interesting observations and questions--for instance, about my altering her comments to reflect not her questions, but my own), asked recently about deciding whether the new is worth the disruption/change it will inevitably bring, and about the preconceptions you, I, and other estranjeros bring wherever we are. Are these folks poor? … in what sense…In what are their lives rich? I found one answer in a Costa Rican story, Abel Pacheco’s “Deeper Than Skin,” which highlights the relativity of the meanings of “poor” and “rich”:

Juan Chac was rich: he had an immense jungle, he had corn, he had a magnificent river from which he took silver fish.…Juan Chac had corn liquor, he had a woman, he had seven valient Indian children. To the Indian he was rich. To the white he was poor: he didn’t have rum or a car or neckties, and he never traveled…. Our understanding of such matters is also quite relative. The mistakes we are making are just hilarious. Here’s one example: on a long walk the other day, we came upon a faucet alongside the road, protruding from a big sign reading “AyA.” Our first interpretation was that this was a construction of “Alcoholics Anonymous” (we’ve seen signs for many chapters, both in Guatemala and Costa Rica), providing “agua” for former alcoholics. Then we read the sign—“Acueductos y Alcantarillaos”--and decided that it marked the entrance to a retreat center nearby for actuaries and accountants. Marielos eventually set me straight: “AyA” is the national water company; the name refers to “aqueducts and sewers,” and there are plenty of controversies about their handling of both clean and used water….

Speaking of labored (and inaccurate) translations: only yesterday did I actually figure out why I’m in Monteverde. I really just wasn’t getting this place--it’s such a jumble of Swiss hotels and dusty roads, not very attractive or pleasant to be in (though the morning light is wonderful!) But last night we went on a guided evening tour through El Bosque Eterno de los Niños (Children’s Eternal Rainforest)--and then I got it.

Years ago, I had a book called Walk When the Moon is Full, which I used as a guide to monthly night hikes with my children, through all the seasons. We never saw any of the wonderful things described in the book, but some of those nights were still quite magical for us all. Our walk last night had many of the same qualities: the silence, the surprising noises, the new things you can see, when you’re looking and listening carefully in the night. Our guide had the naturalist’s excitement—“ Isn’t this beautiful! We are so lucky!”—which added a certain spice to the tarantulas, prehensile-tailed porcupines, hawks, other birds, and sloths he spotted—and highlighted--for us in the trees. This morning we spent another four hours exploring Reserva Biológica Bosque Nuboso Monteverde (Monteverde Cloudforest Reserve) on our own—it was similarly magical: including our emergence out of the moss-covered drippiness all around into the sunlight of the @ the Continental Divide, from which we could see the Gulf of Nicoya (on the Pacific Ocean).

What is most striking to me, so far, about these reserves, is the incredible cacophony of different forms: talk about bio-diversity! And—along with this grand variety—the way in which all my known categories for making sense of such diversity are getting stretched and turned around. For instance: that two-toed sloth we saw is a member of the armadillo family(?!). There's a bird song that sounds like a machine--a machine made of metal. So many of the trees have fallen over, and regenerated themselves: I can't tell the difference between trunks and branches. And the canopy is filled with “air plants” (or epiphytes), which get all their nutrients from air, mist and rain. Perhaps the most remarkable plant we’ve seen so far is the “strangler fig,” an epiphyte which takes care of the problem of fighting for light this way: its seeds, disseminated in bird feces, germinate on another tree (of any species), and begin to grow on top of it, then send down vines that, over time, “strangle” its host.

In other words, what seemed to me such a peaceful place, on our entry to this area a week ago, now appears to be a battle: there’s an ongoing struggle over which plant can grow strongest most quickly: the tree growing up, or the vines growing down….and, really—whoever wins, and it seems mostly to be the “stranglers”--the stacking and layering of vegetation in these reserves is phenomenal.

Which leads me (of course) into all sorts of philosophizing. I’ve had some trouble finding Costa Rican authors whose work is translated into English. In fact, all I’ve managed to put my hands on, so far, is a collection of short stories put together for tourists like myself, called Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. The story I mentioned above came from there. Another one, Joaquín Gutiérrez’s “A Leaf of Air,” makes a symbol out of physical reality; it takes off from the epiphytes to a meditation on the nature of life. In the story, a young boy describes a gift from his girlfriend:

“This is an hoja de aire, a leaf of air,” she said as she gave it to me. “Hang it by a thread where there is a wind and watch the tiny breezes being born”…in a few days each of its smallest lobes had sprouted a minuscule little bush, with tiny roots….it occurred to me how terrible it was to have to feed so many little leaves while living only on air, and I took a razor and cut it back to a single leaf that would grow stronger…even then it managed to produce another shoot smaller than itself…

A leaf of air, a grand dream from which are born other smaller dreams and from these, others even smaller, until we come to the last of all, the tiniest, which is where the wind begins. That is what my life is like, old friend, like a leaf of air.

Transitions have always been very difficult for me (and seem to become even more difficult, more un-settling as I age and settle into the patterns of my life). Our re-location this past weekend, from Guatemala for Costa Rica, was no exception. I really did not want to leave Xela, our family and the school there. Landing in San Jose, Costa Rica was a real culture shock: it felt so cleaned up, so “smart”-looking--as though we’d returned to the USA.

But then we had a long (four-hour) drive from the capital up to Monteverde (half the trip on a road like the one that runs through our farm: nothing but potholes and the mud in between). And as we bumped our way up into the rain forest, looking across astonishing vistas, of mountains with rivers of clouds wrapped in their valleys, I could feel the weight of all the stories we’d heard and read and seen over the past six weeks, all the tales of Guatamala’s civil war, and its horrific aftermath, lifting; I felt so joyous to be entering such a beautiful—and peaceful--space.

I also wasn’t convinced that we’d find anything @ the end of this incredibly bad road—it didn’t seem possible! But eventually we arrived @ Monteverde, a very strange and uneven mixture of, oh--Colorado, Maine, West Virginia, Switzerland, along with some of the funkiness of New Paltz or Woodstock NY…. There are beautiful vistas and horrible roads; locals and tourists; lots of poverty and lots of large empty hotels. The mornings are astonishingly clear, and the light then is marvelous. But in the afternoons, the rain sets in, and the difficulty of living here seems to deepen proportionately….

I eased my transition from Guatemala to Costa Rica (as Jeff says, “from a land with too many stories to a land with too few”) by reading three more books about Guatemala’s past and present: Huberto Ak’abal’s Poems I brought down from the mountain, along with two short story collections: Mario Roberto Morales’ Face of the Earth, Heart of the Sky, and Mark Brazaitis’ The River of Lost Voices.

Ak’abal’s selected poems are spare and beautiful: Rumi-like, Basho-like, they ask you to pause, just for a moment, and attend to what is:

Shadow:
little night
at the foot of any tree. These poems are examples of what, in contemporary Latin American literature, is known as contraconquista: refusals to submit to dominant cultural forms. One of the ways that Ak’abal’s poems allowed me “to be rocketed out of the cultural logic” that I know so well—not to mention the cultural logic of Spanish that I’ve been having such a hard time comprehending-- is in their reminder that there is no verb to be in the Maya dialects, where events are not so sequentially oriented in time and space. Shades of current understandings of the loaf of spacetime, the simultaneous existence of all-that-was/is/will be! As with their notion that “all is energy,” the Mayas seem to have anticipated some of the key insights of contemporary physics…

Morales’ stories get to the same place via very forms. They comprise a hybrid collection that actually attempts to model the totality of the “metizo ensemble” that is Guatemala. There are 24 fragments: pre-Columbian religious texts, testimonios of contemporary indigenous, directions for filming a documentary, excerpts from a military training manual, and fragments of a fictional plot about an Indian boy forced to fight in the Guatemalan army after his father is tortured to death.

What such una mezcla means is that Morales doesn’t flinch from representing all views—including those of the villagers who felt betrayed both by guerillas and religious activists:

Long ago the people lived happily here…until Catholic Action came and made us see…things like discrimination and injustice…because Christianity wants all to be equal….that’s when the repression started to come down upon us….

The army hasn’t lied to us…the guerrillas have….the guerrillas said, we are going to liberate you….We are going to take power for you Indians. And they didn’t do it…the guerrillas who go around saying beautiful things also kill—when they feel like it—people who refuse to give them food or go with them to the mountains…and they run away when the army comes… What I found striking was not only Morales’ willingness to take a controversial position regarding the sins of the guerillas, but his concomitant willingness to take the story of Guatamala’s huge social problems back to the time before the Spanish arrived: Pedro de Alvardo defeated the Indians in war because the Quichés were at war with other nations, and then those nations helped the Spaniards in their war to keep the Quichés from building an empire….division has been our misfortune….we Indians do not get along with one another… Just as striking is Morales’ capacity to imagine—and ability to argue-- that there are also (potentially!) some very good consequences to come out of the civil war: The ethnic groups, the towns, they are mixed together, and maybe that is good in the long run, so that in this way all of us Indians will come to understand each other. We will learn the languages of the others and be able to start building larger communities…. now we will have to look for apprentices…not just among Indians. It is time for the knowledge to spread and win other hearts…“the world is a trampoline for discovering other worlds.” So: that’s the concept I’m working with this week—using this world as a “trampoline” for discovering others. Rather than trying to reproduce, here, what I know best and am most comfortable with @ home, trying instead to jump off from the difference here into different ways of being in the world (or out of it!). This can take very simple forms, such as realizing that I really cannot be “at home” @ our homestay, and so must look for alternative spaces: internet cafes for the afternoons, bars for the evenings. What a trampoline that is, to give up the tightly-held pleasure I take in privacy, and seek out more public spaces to be in…

We spent our last evening in Guatamala @ a festival of poetry and music, in honor of two university students, René Leiva Cayax and Danilo Alvarado, who were kidnapped and killed in 1987—and whose deaths inspired the establishment of our school. It was an emotional night, with wonderful music, melodramatic recitations of poetry and very moving speeches by the students’ family members…

I left feeling quite full up, unable to take in all the currents swirling around me in that courtyard, and in the street outside: all the misery of this country’s history, all the poverty and corruption of its present, all the goodwill, searching, loneliness, outsidedness of visitors and travelers like ourselves--and yet all the hope embedded in this music and these words. Where does that hope come from? René and Danilo were very much alive last night, and continue very much alive in the work that the school does.

Here @ PLQ, the teachers change students every week, and this week I met my match. Mi maestro was a painter and illustrator, a surrealist and political activist who was game for all my questions, of all denominations (when he presented my graduation certificate @ the ceremony yesterday afternoon, he said, “Anne, you probably have yet another question….? Your questions never end”).

We got off to a rough start: I started crying in an early lesson, because I couldn’t find the words I needed—not to be able to speak, for me, feels like death (yep, pretty melodramatic), but we soon got into a pattern that was very satisfactory for us both--my asking questions, his answering them, my responding, his responding in turn. I felt as though I was immersed in a river of words…

And I learned a lot, not only about how Spanish sounds, and how to speak It (poco a poco), but about the commercialization of Mayan life (the selling of their culture); about the materialism of the neo-pentecostals; about their focus on individual salvation (working w/ prostitutes and drug users), whereas (@ least a portion of) the Catholic Church—the activist portion—focuses on the larger social dimensions (largely economic and political) that lead to individual difficulties. I learned a lot more about strong figures in this region, like Che Guevarra and William Walker --two very different models for engagement in social problems here. (I was tickled/horrified to learn that “filibusters” were originally individuals, like William Walker, who attacked foreign lands for financial gain, without authority from their own government; only later was the term applied to the delaying tactics used in the U.S. Senate. So now I’m amusing myself thinking of my blogging as a (hopefully harmless/perhaps helpful) contemporary form of filibustering: an account of my (entirely unauthorized!) adventures in a foreign country, for educational purposes--and hopefully for social good…)

OTOH: one of the most disorienting things about Spanish (for an English speaker like me) is that it really doesn’t use pronouns very much. You generally start off your sentences with a verb, and build the person into the verb ending. Blogging is a way of putting me first again…

So, we’re off now to Costa Rica (which people here say is “just like America”). I’m feeling very reluctant to leave Guatemala now; there's a lot here that's gone pretty deeply inside me.

We arrived in Xelaju smack in the middle of the yearly celebration of the fiesta of Our Lady of the Rosary. At first we were confused—we knew about the fiesta of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in December, and this seemed to be the same…

But it wasn’t. Our Lady of the Rosary (who is always holding a baby) differs from Guadalupe (who is not); Guadalupe differs from the Virgin of the Conception, differs from the Pieta. Each is of course an aspect of Mary, the Mother of Jesus; and yet each is distinct (like each of us, different in each phase of our lives, yet all those phases—and phrase transitions—form something continuous that is a self…)

I’ve been amused that, in all the images I’ve seen of the Queen of the Rosary, the Child seems to be trying to free himself from her embrace. There is a popular tradition here that the Virgin Mary stayed here because, when she went traveling through America, the Child fell asleep when they reached Guatemala. In 1821 the leaders of the independence movement proclaimed her Patroness of the new nation; she was declared "Queen of Guatemala" in 1833.

She’s got a curious counterpart—San Simón or Maximon—an amalgam of Mayan and Christian forms, dismissed as “Judas” by the Catholic Church. When we visited the pueblo of Zunil this weekend, it was very striking to go from the huge church in the central square where Mary was worshipped, to the small dark space in an alley nearby, where San Simón sat similarly behind a bank of candles, and similarly received his worshippers, who performed similar rituals. Both sites were places of petition: for assistance, for a break, for grace, for hope…

For me, these places of worship formed very striking contrasts to the self-authorization –-the trust in the capacity of self to make a difference--that I’ve noticed in the conferences I’ve been attending here. Of course I’m used to attending conferences—what else constitutes the life of an academic? But the conferences @ our school here in Xela are something different entirely. I’ve been to half-a-dozen in the past two weeks. In none of them has a speaker used notes; all of them have spoken directly from their own experience, which carries an authority that it’s very hard to challenge: an authority of struggle and suffering and fear and resistance….

What interests me, of course, is how the change was made, from the pueblo to the conference room, from the campo to the organzing committee, from a position of obedience and expectation that those more powerful will care for oneself and one’s family, to the realization that one must act on one’s one. Some of the camposinos we’ve heard speak have spoken of the inspiration they got from the Bible: one organizer said that the day the people in her pueblo received ownership of their land, she felt like Moses, leading the slaves out of bondage. But how the move is made, from being a petitioner, to being an actor, I don’t quite see. Perhaps it’s sheer desperation….

N.B.: When I was complaining in class this morning (as usual) about verb forms--in this case about the reflexive verbs—-and trying to dismiss the need to memorize them by saying that their world was a small one—my very smart teacher said, “No, these are very important verbs: because they express the capacity of the self to act. They are far more significant than those verbs that describe the self being acted upon.”

This past summer I co-directed an institute for K-12 teachers called “Science and a Sense of Place.” We used as our logo an upside down map that quite graphically called into question our sense of ourselves existing, as Northamericans, @ the center of the universe. So it was a delight to me to see, displayed on the walls of our school here, both that map and the Peters' projection which is a more accurate representation of proportional area than is the Mecator map I grew up with.

I seem to be in the midst, here, not only of re-centering my own sense of self (making my own traumas less central to what’s going on in the world), but also of thinking about how the self learns to alter the self, to find a place that allows both self-authorization and a commitment to the needs of others.

Well, I hit a wall this week with my Spanish: started Friday’s class with all sorts of approbation for the good stories I write, and ended it by failing an exam on the irregular pretérito. I’m used to a quick student, and a good student, so all the difficulties I’m having acquiring a new language @ my age and station have me pretty flummoxed—I feel like such a failure!

Of course this experience has got me re-thinking what it means to be a student (and realizing in my gut just what it feels like to be not a good student/not to be able to perform as I’d like/as I think I’m expected to). I found some comfort tonight in the textbook I’m using--Dos Mundos--which makes a nice distinction between the subconscious process of language acquisition, and the conscious process of language learning. The design of the book is based on research showing that adults can acquire language subconsciously, as children do; that they acquire parts of language in a predictable order (that can’t be changed by deliberate teaching); and that the main function of conscious learning is as monitor or editor …

Practically, what this means is that formal knowledge of grammar doesn’t contribute to fluency; that we learn to understand before we learn to produce language; that it takes time for speech to emerge; and (most important for me) that we all make mistakes: “The willingness to accept approximations is absolutely essential to the process of language learning”; “you must guess @ meanings!” Language acquisition will only happen when we relax, and speak up—and it happens best in a community …

Shaye had asked how we might bring the new into our lives without disrupting what we want to keep, and suggested that one way of doing so might involve expending less energy on ensuring external security, recognizing that we all are—can be—internally secure. She was talking about the large population of the poor in Guatemala—What keeps them so poor? What old ways do they cling to, that prevent this from changing?—but her questions struck me as also describing my own situation, facing the new in this country that seems so much like the bottom of the world: how much am I clinging to what I know (for instance, this blog, as a way of staying in touch w/ those I know/who know me), and how much am I blocking, thereby, new ways of speaking and interacting in the world, with those who speak Spanish?

Shaye spoke of my being “more present" in recent postings, and other correspondents have written of the same thing. Those characterizations seem not-quite-on to me (that is, I don’t quite recognize myself in them), because I am so often feeling not-present, or—perhaps more accurately--multiply-present in so many different worlds simultaneously, as I talk w/ you all over the ‘net, with Norwegians @ the dinner table, with other Spanish-studying students from all over the world, with Guatemalean ex-guerillas in the mountains, with whatever thoughts are arising out of my own unconscious (oh, these dreams-away-from-home!!), and with whichever author I happen to be reading @ the moment…

For example: I’m still working my way (VERY slowly) through Brian Greene’s book on space, time, and the texture of reality, The Fabric of the Cosmos --and being blown away, bit by bit, before bedtime each night, or before arising in the morning, by Greene‘s description of a world (it happens to be our world) in which

The over-arching lesson that has emerged…is that human experience is often a misleading guide to the true nature of reality….much of what we experience physically…turns out not to be the reality of the world….

The smallest, indivisible constituents of matter…are composed of a tiny filament of energy…

Extra dimensions might be so tightly crumpled that they’re too small for us or any of our existing equipment to see, or … large but invisible to the ways we probe the universe…the reality we have known is but a delicate chiffon draped over a thick and richly textured cosmic fabric…the entirety of human experience …left us completely unaware of a basic and essential aspect of the universe…even those features of the cosmos that we have thought to be readily accessible to human senses need not be.

quantum mechanics shatters our own personal individual conception of reality….our universe is not local …. intervening space…does not ensure that two objects are separate, since quantum mechanics allows an entanglement…to exist between them…

The need to abandon locality is the most astonishing lessons arising from [contemporary physics]. By virtue of their past, objects that at present are in vastly different regions of the universe can be part of a quantum mechanically entangled whole….

Now, Greene refuses to engage in what he calls the sort of “gushy, loose and overstated talk” that insists on “everything being connected to everything else,” that we are “all entangled in one universal whole,” since “everything emerged from the same something,” and all now-different places “were the same place way back in the beginning.” He insists, instead, that we recognize how extremely delicate quantum connections are….

I’d say, nonetheless, that his careful adumbration of quantum entanglements works quite effectively as a metaphor for--a way of articulating--my understanding of the complex interconnections, here, between history and the present, between the richness of this country and the poverty of its people, between what happens in the U.S. and what happens in Central America, between my life and work and friendships in the Philadelphia area, and ditto, ditto, ditto here….

In such a universe, what can it possibly mean to “be more present”?

This statue in the Parque Centro America, in the center of Xela, commemorates the work of a political activist, “the favorite daughter of Xelaju,” Elisa Molina de Stahl (Doña Elisa, as she is known here). According to my teacher, there was a great uproar in Xela when Rigoberto Minchú received the Nobel Peace prize; everyone in Xelu thought that it would have been more justly awarded to Doña Elisa (but had not been, because she was wealthy, and Minchú had suffered…)

Just a prelude to a collection of my favorite-so-far quotes (some of them are awful; all of them represent some puzzlement, some tension, between what we know-and-what-we-don’t):

From our orientation to the school:

“To kill the fish, you must take out the water” (Rios Montt’s argument for destroying villages, in order to stop the guerilla movement). From a conference on the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua: “It was prohibited to be young in Nicaragua at this time.”

“The people are never wrong. They just pass the bill.”

“We need to change the way that people just think just their own profit; ask instead how many people can benefit from this project.”

From a talk about “the rebel radio, La Vox Popular”: “We learned in the road as we went along.”

“I passed the test for for a strong voice: the voice of the guerilla.”

(On learning to read aloud:) “The meaning would lose itself without the pauses.”

“We had to think about different formats, since the problems remained the same. We had to change the program while saying the same thing.”

From Jeff: “The corn is higher than the houses.”

“I don’t think they have zoning laws in this country.”

From one of my teachers: “El matrimonio es el bano no se piensan.”
("Marriage is a (cold?) bath you haven’t thought about.”) Guatemalan slang and sayings I found in a newspaper (literal meaning followed by interpretation…) El que entre la miel anda algo se le pega ("something sticks to those who walk in honey," or people take on the habits of those around them).

Lo que de noche se hace, de día aparece ("what is done in the night is discovered in the day," or secret deeds always come to light).

Llevar bien puestos los pantalones ("to have the pants firmly in place," or to be in charge).

Aplanar calles ("to flatten the streets," or to wander aimlessly).

Estar como los ocho cuartos ("to be like eight rooms" [=like a house chopped up into small spaces] or to be very angry).

And finally: the first paper I saw after we left Antigua, EntreMundos (Sept/Oct 2006), carried a story in it about Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, which tickled me very much. (I think I got it translated more-or-less right.) It said that “According to many interpreters, Asteroid B-612 is the colonial city of Antigua Guatemala, because it was there that the author recuperated after suffering an accident taking off in his airplane from Guatemala City on a trip to Nicaragua, after landing for fuel. It is said that it is Antigua, because it is the only city in the world with three volcanoes, two of them active, exactly the description of the asteroid. The rose of the same asteroid is probably an analogy with Antigua, described as the city of the rose.” I don’t know whether I believe this, but it makes for such a nice story!

We went on two amazing trips the past two days, both high in the mountains. The first was to San Franciso, where the whole town turns into a mercado, in fact, into the largest market in Latin America: there were cows, goats, sheep, pigs, turkeys, chickens, cats for sale—along with sewing machines (the era of our grandmothers) and pirated CDs. In front of the church there was a drummer of the old-fashioned kind; seeing all the penitents lighting candles, to the sound of that drummer—I wasn’t sure what religion/what era I was in. (My family had warned me against taking ANYthing that could be stolen, so these photos of the market are thanks to Erik, another student on the trip.)

Then this morning we got up @ 5 to travel high on another mountain, to a town called “La Cumbre de Esperanza"--The Summit of Hope. Our school organized this trip, and we were told that it was a “medium hike.” Medium, maybe, for the other 20-years-olds who were with us; I wasn’t sure I would make it (I expect the very high altitude had something to do with this…)

What we made it to, finally, was a Mayan shrine (where our guide told us how the Mayans believe that all is energy—shades of quantum physics!), that this place was chosen because it was full of energy. We went on to another site, which had served as an encampment for the guerillas. Our guide had himself become a guerilla @ the age of 14, after his father had been tortured. He told us stories for well over an hour (and we were freezing; we were above the clouds, and before he was done, the clouds had swept in and covered us). These were stories about sleeping on the ground in wet clothes, going without food for days, hiking up and down mountains with 100-pound packs…trying to bring about change in his country—a change that consists now of what he called “a small space for peace and freedom.” ( Here are photos of this excursion.)

You know, living in Guatemala—even in this very comfortable middle-class home where we are staying—is nothing like those stories, but it is sort of like camping out. For instance, water and electricity are very expensive, and must be conserved. We shower—quickly! in not-very-warm water—once a week. We use bottled water—sparingly!—to brush our teeth. We only flush the toilet when there’s something solid to flush. And we never put used toilet paper in the toilet; it goes in a trash can nearby. Doing laundry is also difficult, so we wear our clothes several days running.

What we’re finding, of course, is how little we really need to live on; how much simpler our lives might be; how little of what we think of as essential we really need (an example: our bed is short on pillows; but our laundry bags of dirty clothes work just fine). We’re getting around quite a bit without a car; we walk a lot, and public transportation is plentiful and frequent (it largely takes the form called “chicken buses” by gringos: the chickens go outside, on top, along w/ bicycles and all luggage). Of course you have to be an insider to know where to pick up the bus, and where to get off; on several recent trips we’ve been amazed by the varied combinations of how-we-got-somewhere and how-we-returned.

OTOH, along with—really, as a deep compliment to--realizing how simply we can live—how simple life really is—we are just beginning to get a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg, concerning the complexities of life and history in this country. Not quite visible in this picture are the leopards @ the top of this Catholic façade. Another great example of syncretism, of the incorporation of one culture into another. Earlier this week we attended a conference conducted by two Nicaraguan community activists, whose pueblo has a new initiative called Hijos de Maize (Children of the Corn). They told us the history leading up to the Sandinista revolution and counter-revolution. As just one example of how complicated this story is, they explained that the contra-revolution was actually begun by the Sandinistas themselves, who attacked their own leaders for “becoming the new rich,” for taking a great deal of wealth to themselves, and forgetting the poor for whom they’d led the struggle in the first place. (Then, of course, the US took advantage of this situation, to sponsor an anti-communist campaign that had disastrous results. But) the beginnings of the contra-movement were clearly good ones.

Ditto the complexities underlying any plans for progress in this region of the world. There are such strong traditions here—especially around preserving conventional ways of farming—that really can not contribute to an escape from poverty. Yet all the progressive movements want to hold on to these traditions. “Children of the Corn” is a prime example: maize has always been important to the indigenous people here (one of the speakers said, “corn represents us”). This group chose their name to signal their intention to hold on to that connection. As the speaker said (roughly translating here), “I am glad I am educated. I have the clarity to analyze the situation in the world, and can attend political assemblies. But there is a struggle: it is tempting to leave the land, to do educated work. We address this by calling ourselves “Hijos de Maiz”: it’s a new project, but we do not want to forget our traditions. Life is moving forward, but we do not want to take this opportunity to abandon the cultivation of the land.”

But I’m just not seeing how the forms of sustainable agriculture that are practiced in pueblos around here can help this country move out of poverty. Is this problem—and its answer--simple or complex ?

Ann wrote about how the security of something familiar gives her toddler the ability to go farther afield: “An anchor, and then a metaphorical string to find the way back to the anchor.” And she suggested that “purity” might serve, for some, as such an anchor. Her really interesting question was what to do if such an anchor isn’t available, if you can’t be pure (because you are of mixed blood), or can’t feel safe (because your home or community life doesn’t allow it). Those are certainly the conditions in which the indigenous here live. One answer (for us? For them?) might be that, since neither absolute purity or safety is possible, we all learn to live more comfortably with the fact that we are mixed. And can never ever really be safe.

The deepest reason that I'm traveling and studying in Central America this semester is to keep my husband company, as he clears his head from 25+ years as a corporate lawyer, and looks for a way to open for what's coming next. Learning Spanish, exploring new cultures, seeing new landscapes, meeting all sorts of new people—these are just media. As far as I’m concerned, the real purpose of the trip is for him to find a space to work on what he wants to do, and for us to work on our marriage, to figure out together what this next phase of our life might be like, what qualities it might have, what shape it might take.

So it’s been pretty unsettling for me to see how much this trip has brought to light my own particular weaknesses: my deep need for security, my discomfort with newness, my anxieties about being unsure what what’s up, what I’m expected to do in unanticipated situations.

This weekend was a difficult one for me. We left Antigua, where we had been studying for three weeks, and took a bus through the mountains to Quetzaltenango (known locally as Xela), the second largest city in Guatemala. It sits in a valley, entirely ringed by mountains—including two volcanoes, one of them active. The trip was uneventful, and shorter than we’d expected (less traffic and no construction on a Sunday morning). But we got to Xela four hours before our school opened, six hours before our host family would be ready to receive us. We spent most of that time hanging out in Café Bavaria, a large, spacious, light-, plant- and photo-filled restaurant. For several hours, a small band--one bass, one guitar, and marimbas—was playing. Their music was SO sad; I couldn’t stop crying—and wondering what I was doing here.

Things got worse as the day went on. Our family picked us up in a van packed with about 12 people (not much room for us, much less for all our luggage!)--and took us along on a visit to see a new baby, and more extended family. After a few jokes about our poor Spanish and their nonexistent English, we really weren’t able to hold a conversation, couldn’t understand anything that was going on, were hesitant to eat the food…

I hated it. i felt so impolite, so awkward, so CLUELESS. I am realizing how very much I need--if not to be in control of the situation--at least to know what’s going on, and how to act. Seems as though that’s generally not going to be possible on this trip, and I’m having a hard time coming to terms with that fact.

The school where we’re studying for the next three weeks is very different than the one we just left. San Jose el Viejo in Antigua was a very beautiful and very tourist-y sort of place, where lots of older (=my age; fifty-ish) Americans and Europeans come to brush up ontheir language skills—as well as quite a few younger ones who are also there to adopt Guatemalean babies.

Our new school, Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco, is a very different place, with a much younger clientele. There are about 40 students here now; only one other is 50ish; the rest are in their twenties. The school was founded to commmorate the lives of two student martyrs, and it has an explicitly political focus. The walls are covered with posters like “Killer coke (the black death of capitalism”). The first morning our orientation began with an overview of the history of Guatemala (including the 1954 CIA-led coup that led directly to the atrocities of a 36-year-long civil war). Then we watched a documentary about the exhumation of clandestine graveyards, the identification of bodies, and the construction of a memorial to the disappeared. This afternoon there was a conference with Sandinistas from Nicaragua. There are also daily trips into the countryside, to learn more about people’s lives there (this morning we had our first ride on a chicken bus, followed by a ride on the back of a pick-up truck--shades of my childhood!—to Santa Andreas, a Mayan town in the mountains.

We are under the impression that we are getting at least a little bit further under those closed walls that make us feel so outside this culture—though we have lots of questions about the simplicity of the story that we’re being told: what role did Mayan culture play the military takeover—and in its continued support? How might inclinations and needs for strong leadership contribute, from the ground up, to structure of oppression?

Another sharp difference about our new school: At San Jose el Viejo, in Antigua,we met with our teachers in individual “cubículos.” Although we could hear one another’s mistakes and laughter, both living and learning there were very private affairs. At PLQ, the teaching is explicitly Freirean—learning not just to know, but to change the world. The lessons are one-on-one, but they all take place in the same large space. There is a much stronger sense of this activity as a public one, for the public good. I suspect this helps with the language learning: it becomes less a private arena for error, more an open public search for a shared means of expression—and shared work in the world.

Now THAT I’m comfortable with!