de vuelta

I'm back in Guate. Home for nine months, and already I'm here again, albeit under remarkably different circumstances. My parents had already decided to visit Mexico and Guatemala while I was still working at Spark, and when I decided to leave they invited me along. Now I'm facing the daunting prospect of visiting for a week where I lived, loved, put forth all the energy I had and gathered countless stories and levels of understanding and depths of further questions for eight months.

I'm building stoves in Itzapa, the town where I spent most of my time as an intern. Today it turned out that Cesar, our master builder who was to teach us how exactly one constructs a stove, was ill, so we spent the day with the family, playing with Helen and catching up with Elena and Castulo and Yeimy and Greysi and Lester and Ana. In some ways it was perfect, giving me the spaciousness to see how they are, what is happening. In other ways I missed the direction that having a purpose would have given me. I got to see many of my students again, and hear some of their progress in English. In the afternoon I also had the privilege of helping Andrew, the volunteer who's teaching Acatenango (I believe), with his class on collective and individual nouns. Even some of the kids I'd never taught remembered me, which tickled my ego, but maybe the best part was being able to explain the concepts behind the lesson. English is so much drilling and practice that explanation is secondary, and sometimes even hurtful, depending on your learning style. But I love explaining things, coming up with examples and new ways to try to clarify a point, and so to finally get that chance was delightful.

Today was something of a day off, though, and even so I'm exhausted. It seems I'd forgotten in all but words how impossible it is to guard your energy here. In some ways I never want to leave, and in some ways I'm relieved it's not forever. All is aswirl. Memories--potent, visceral memories-- live overlapping with the days. The whole eight months are present at each moment. I've just finished reading Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively, and this one quote captured so accurately my sensation that I can't express it better. It describes the protagonist, Claudia, returning to Cairo some thirty years after World War II, where she'd been a war correspondent. On her return, she thinks, "The place didn't look the same but it felt the same... sixty-seven year old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once." Asi es la vida. I'm coming back from teaching my first class, waiting at the airport for countless volunteers, laying awake at night, tasting my first pepian, slowly emerging from my shell and talking with the families, walking around Itzapa, thinking in terms of lesson plans, interpreting Spanish, finding favorite places in Antigua, going to Christmas parties and meeting my students' mothers, learning to make tamalitos, crying in exhaustion and uncertainty, celebrating my students' passing grades, opening yet another class, training new English volunteers, buying and cooking food from the market, figuring out the chicken bus system and how to travel alone, juggling friends from elsewhere with volunteers with responsibilities with the drastic need to sleep more, drawing doves and fish and turtles for Helen, taking up and putting down tables, bracing myself for departure all at once. And at the same time I'm trying really hard to stay present. We'll see if it casts any clarity on where I'm heading or what I've been doing of late-- for the moment it feels almost like the last nine months didn't happen, and that's fine. I'll be back in California on the fifteenth, and that's fine too. I guess. We'll see.

madrugando

I have about seven hours left in Guatemala. It is 4.30, which is positively sleeping in by my standards of late, and as my brain will not still itself, I find myself here. Any incoherence I blame on the hour, and on my farewell to chapin beers last night-- oh Moza, how I will miss you. 

It seems like an appropriate hour for waxing philosophical, for approaching a summary of the whole experience, for articulating that something I was supposedly seeking when I came and whether I found it, but the truth is that since my farewells, from Santiago and Santa Maria last Thursday and from the Suy Siquinajay family and San Andres Itzapa last Friday, I've had a hard time convincing my mind to settle. The magnitude of the change I'm willingly adopting, the absurdity of once more leaving behind people I've come to consider family and starting, if not from scratch, at least from staggering uncertainty, and the fragmentation of my understanding of the world when it doesn't include a morning check-in with Doña Elena or bouts of drawing and imaginative flourishes with Helen the three year old or gossiping with Mayra and Alicia or chasing Nacho (who is evidently dating Alicia!) and Edgar and Erik during pausa or stealing moments of conversation with Lester during the lunch hour or harassing Yeimy about her homework or debating with Cástulo whether toads eat fish or fish eat toads (as I am Seño Fish and he has become Profe Sapo), has rendered my brain all but incapable of lingering on the same thoughts for more than a few moments at a time. Every so often a face or a moment will lock me into a slightly deeper ache, but it isn't resolving itself yet into anything I can really articulate. 

I am hoping that I will be possessed with an overpowering desire to chronicle when I get home, as there is much to be documented. For now, though, this'll have to do. I'm going to go see if sleep is a possibility. 

the other side of yesterday

Lest my late-night list of grievances paint the current state of my being as too grim...

Yesterday was el Día de Trabajo, the Guatemalan equivalent of Labor Day, and so I had an unexpected day to myself. I stayed in bed, reading a rather-too-admiring biography of Hugo Chavez and working on cards for my kids. When I finally rose, I tackled the daunting task of a dry-run of packing, to see if it will even be feasible to get everything home. After having established that yes, it would just barely be feasible, I decided clearly the challenge had been too small and what I needed to do was go to the Mercado de Artesanías and up the ante. 

First quest: get the glorious leather bag, the platonic form of purses, that my mom passed down to me fixed up. Its strap had finally buckled after 30-plus years of honorable service, unstitching around the bit that held it to the bag. So I wandered into the bowels of the market. Finding the shoes, I asked around, got misdirected, asked more, until an only-slightly-sleazy knight in shining footwear whisked me off deeper among the groves of clothing and hillocks of shoes. He deposited me in front of a small counter in front of a cavern full of old fashioned shoe molds, yellow leather sandals, an old fashioned pedal-pump sewing machine, smells of glue and leather, and Miguel Angel. Miguel Angel was to be the hero of the day. He stitched the bits, fixed the zipper, refastened the edges, and made a zipstop to keep the zipper from breaking again, and charged me 10 quetzales (less than two dollars), all while verbally abusing the claimants on a court show on his small TV about a mexican girl who'd convinced her boyfriend to fund her joining him in the U.S., then left him for a guy she'd met on the internet before leaving. Then he undertook to convince me to stay in Guatemala forever. 

After leaving his side, I rambled through as-yet-unexplored sectors of the market: the nylon rope sector, the garlic onion and dogfood sector, the flowers and candles sector. And then across the way to the artesanías market, where I proceeded to laugh and bargain with the women for a good hour. I think I could happily live in marketplaces. I would just have to climb up among the beams from time to time and look down on it all, or carve out a space among the empty stalls to reflect now and again. 

And speaking of the market, remember the herb lady from months and months ago? Her daughter (I think) has taken a shine to me, and every time I go by we talk about cooking and she tells me how to use herbs. This last time she suggested grinding parsley, cilantro and thyme to make a marinade for turkey. I wonder if it would work as well on tofu. Hmmm...

So yes. Life unfolds around and among the rusting forms of legislation. Today after I pick up a new volunteer at the airport (for the last time... YES) I get to go the quinceañera of Blanca, one of my students in Santa Maria. Things are okay. Really rather good. Here's to that.

no seas coche

for a while now i've been depending on the countdown. for months i've known a solid unit of time between me and my departure, a dependable (as much as anything along the time-space continuum can be dependable) fallback both for the days when i urge the time past and the days when i hold it as a buffer against the reentry into the US. As the units get smaller i've complexified the countdown to include probable details of the weeks and days that remain; planning out the time has been a major tool for coping with the altibajos of life here. i wield it against the loneliness that comes with watching the vast majority of my acquaintances come and go, and against the anxiety that still tinges my teaching experience, and against the despair that comes with the realization that no matter how much i do there is so much more that needs to be done, and against the frustration of sleepless nights. and now this bloody swine flu has interrupted almost every element of my plans. 

there was to be mexico. i had bought my plane ticket days before the first outbreak hit the news, with shining plans to see the km-deep cañon del sumidero in chiapas, and visit sergio and asela, the wonderful family i met in san cristobal earlier this year, and then wend my way up to mexico city to chase some much-needed catchup with my friend mique. clearly that one is now off the docket. i filled the travel-shaped hole in my heart with hopes of nicaragua, of working on a farm on the isla de ometepe and exploring granada and deciphering another accent. then ortega declared a 60-day preemptive health emergency in that country. there's the prospect of my catherine, katie and grace visiting, but i haven't heard a word from them since all this broke out (ladies, if you're reading this PLEASE tell me what you're thinking-- the not-knowing is driving me slowly insane). and now the 'rents dangle the possibility that borders or airlines might start closing and they might want me to come home early. and on some level it makes sense. it would be wretched to be stuck in guatemala so close to the end of the stay, to have missed the opportunity to get home because of stubbornness or a few days. 

but here's the thing: it is all bureaucracy. everything that scares me, everything that stands in my way, is officials on various levels trying to cover their own asses from being blamed for something that is outside of human control. i am not scared of the flu because it is useless to be scared of a virus; they follow their own rules, spread where they will, and rarely pay much attention to the limits we think we place on them. but people. shutting down borders, quarantining, canceling flights, forbidding handshaking and cheek-kissing and going to school and so on... none of it is irrational and of course you would be haunted if you had the power to place those limitations, didn't place them, and then saw a spike in cases of whatever it was you were trying to limit. but i can't dodge the impression that this is a massive game of evading blame, of making a show of safety in order to keep governmental/institutional hands clean. 

i suppose it is unforgivably selfish that i should resent a virus for impeding my travel plans when it has taken lives. so be it. i am a little bit heartbroken that all this fear-based legislation and information has interrupted at least two of the things the thought of which had kept me going these last months.  and i can't help wondering where it ends, whether i'm being wise or buying into the system of control through fear, whether playing it safe isn't depriving me of glorious adventures. and yet the thought of sitting for days in quarantine, or worse, of somehow not being able to return home for weeks or months, haunts me enough that i'm not ready to take unnecessary risks. i hate it. i really really hate it. and i don't know what to do.

sometimes poems work better than prose.

The View of Point Reyes from Guatemala

A sweep of shoreline
known crevice by crevice
and old trees stretching tall quiet limbs to the sky
(and each drop in those clouds
might have trickled through
my fingers, or evaporated
from my pores)
expands beyond the photo's edge.

It's been six months since it was real to me.

My current horizons cramp
and buckle, bearing too much weight.
Miserly, they bargain: no sunset without
the shadow falling on
uninsulated homes
of corrugated steel, no tree
left to grow longer
than until its wood comes needed,
no body close
without the squelch
of looming separation.

I scrabble for beauty among the drifted trash,
and find it
amply
but mingled always with pain:
bold textiles binding twisted limbs,
an eye of water waiting
to be blinked out by its crater's dissolution,
smoke scratched into the sky
by burning garbage, open fires,
the US' cast off engines,
at the same time scratching years
off lungs.

When I go back
to salt-glazed rocks, deep roots, a generous sky
I fear
I'll be the hungry proud
rejecting charity, resenting
the open-handedness of nature there
when elsewhere she is found
so tightly clenched.

mangos, crises and emo

Mangos de leche leak. A glaze sometimes, sometimes a congealed tear like sap, seeps from beneath their green and yellow skins. Today I slid a nail beneath one of those tears and pulled it from its resting place, depositing it instead on my tongue. It tasted like pine needles distilled in honey, and resisted being chewed.

The mangos de leche are pinier in general, less sweet and more fibrous. Eating them is more like coaxing juice from a mass of threads than it is like taking a bite of fruit. No one cuts mangos here; you peel them from the stem down, leaving a little bit of skin for a handle at the bottom-- by the time you get there you're so sticky you don't mind grabbing the gnawed-upon other end and peeling the bit that remains. The little mangos dulces are yellow orange and sweeter, with more self-contained flesh-- they're more like champagne mangos at home. The big red-green ones I haven't tried yet. I don't think they're really in season. And then you have jocotes, the mango's scarlet siblings, similarly composed but juicier, and sourer, and tiny, about the size of a small plum.

And for a minute last weekend I actually believed I had grown tired of mangos.

This was part of a wider-reaching crisis. A series of frustrations (with teaching, where I feared I was burning out; with the administration, whose workings I've had too much time to study; with the social structure of temporariness and mandatory civility; with with the feeling that folks around here lose faith so quickly despite months of work to gain confidence, etc) and triumphs (extracurricularly, while traveling, meeting glorious people, having fuuun and realizing it was the first time I'd felt free and light in months) and sickness (three times in the last three weeks, after going nearly six months without missing a day of school) and thoughtfulness pushed me to the point where, on Friday, home with a fever, I was about ready to cut ties with the program and travel for the next two months. It was real; I was ready. 

Over the course of the weekend I realized I needed to talk to Neil, to see if--well-- reform and not revolution was possible. There is a part of me that is wistful for the revolutionary outcome, but ultimately my sense of responsibility to my kids and to Elena's family and to Neil are more important than my disillusionment or my yearning for fully-fledged destinationless wandering. I shall sate my appetite for adventure on weekends, and over Semana Santa (when friend-and-fellow-intern Traci and I intend to summit Acatenango overnight) and on the as-yet-unspecified week I'll take off in May as a consolation prize, and when Catherine and Katie and Grace make my life all shiny by coming to visit toward the end of my stay. And regarding burn-out, Neil and I are looking at ways to ease the workload. At the moment we have nine classes, six of which meet twice a week, and eleven 1x1 or small group students a week. We desgined the schedule when we had 2 long-term volunteers and, more often than not, one short-termer. Now we're teaching them all among the two of us. So we're looking at combining two classes or letting the lowest-level class improve their Spanish literacy before coming into the English world, something they sorely need to do. More than any true prospect for hange, though, the realization that Neil wants me to stay and is willing to provide support to make it happen is the big factor here.

Meanwhile in the communities the daily melange of bizarre and tragic continues. Some things make you want to laugh until you realize what exactly you'd be laughing about. For instance. The emos are recruiting. Cars of kids from the capital city, with hair grown long to cover one eye, are making like missionaries and actually paying Itzapa kids to go emo. These smalltown kids (who've probably never heard Dashboard Confessional in their lives) are growing out their hair. They're cutting their wrists with safety razors and proudly displaying the wounds. They're advocating gay marriage, but not in a careful or culturally sensitive way, more because they know it will shock; they're managing to attach one more stigma to it by associating it with the rest of their borderline-religious dogma. And on Monday a local self-proclaimed emo 19-year-old boy kidnapped two girls, one 7 and one 9 years old, and tried to rape them. They were found in time, but he escaped, and hid in his aunt's backyard under a pile of sand. When people from town found him and were threatening to burn down the house to make an example of him, he pulled a dagger on his mother and said if he was dying she would die with him as punishment for having brought him into the world. And now all of this is muddled together in the minds of people who have no real base of comparison. I tried to talk to Elena about it today. She asked if there was anything like this in the States, and I talked about how emo is mostly an identity, somewhere between fashion/music taste and lifestyle choice. It tends to be exclusive in its way, I told her, with nothing of recruitment and really no established views on anything except general disillusionment with the world at large. I mentioned that cutting is a symptom of a psychological condition and an addiction; I didn't take on gay marriage with this very Catholic mother of six for obvious reasons. But I did stress that by recruiting for "emo" these kids were missing the point of having an individual identity, doing something totally counter-productive: by polarizing people into cultish followers of emo and those disgusted by the actions done in its name, they were causing the suppression of all departures from conventional roles. Now Elena is pressuring her heavy-metal-loving son Lester to cut his hair short. Anything abnormal is being linked to evil. And I can talk about it, encourage little bits of dialogue, but against a gasoline-wielding populace and centuries-old senses of self preservation that's about all I can do.

So. Mangos to drown my sorrows. Good thing I'm not sick of them.

levity is overrated.

and i'm breaking my promise. tough.

here's something like a poem. it doesn't have a title yet.

The lamp on the table

rests on the head

of a wild-eyed victor pushing a dominating

foot into the chest

of a flail-armed midget.

The pose (like Shiva

subduing the black dwarf

or any nameless

conqueror striding intentionally careless

across the ribcages he's laid bare)

is universal, the detail

excruciating:

nails in the arms of the fallen

so his agony can be adjusted,

made fresh against the slow accustomization

of the witness;

the lightbulb haloing

the upraised fist

sturdy boot

pressing apart

the sternum from its ribs.

I feel it.

The pressure around my 

own chest (building)

leaves no room

to doubt why that gesture

is one of domination.

Enough light

to distinguish supposedly sturdy white bones

seeps in around the boot's treads

west to east, against the tide of sunrise.

Whose boot is on my chest?

What desert seafloor 

spreads itself

beneath the light's probe, and

what does the bulb halo?