the home-carrot dangles

Amid all this talk of teaching and life decisions, my more mundane daily living situation has been neglected. This is not because there is no story. In fact, it has been something of a saga already, and sagas merit chronological recounting (with lots of parentheticals). So I will start again at the beginning, four weeks ago.

The morning after arriving in Guatemala, I set out from the hotel, flanked by Neil and Sophie (intern) and Kavin (fellow English-teaching volunteer) and Rachel (non-English teaching volunteer), to walk to the neighborhood where we volunteer types live. We split off in twos or threes, one authority figure per group. Sophie brought me through the front gate of number 15, Colonia Candelaria, and into the saint-bedecked front room. Before I could absorb the sheer quantity of religious iconography, I was face to face with Cristina, a diminutive woman of sixty-some years, with expressive drooping eyes and a welcoming smile. She showed me my room, diagnosed my Spanish abilities as better than average, and sent me out the door again to get oriented over breakfast (which, incidentally, included plantains and was delicious). Not until that night did we get further acquainted. Over dinner (which was overseen by a doleful hairless Virgin and a devious angel more Cupid than Gabriel, who I later learned had been named after one of Cristina's ex-boyfriends) I learned that Cristina's third son, Jesus Alfredo, lived and worked at home restoring church saints when he wasn't studying interior design or vindicating his mother's wreck of an ex-marriage. She had discovered her husband was cheating while she was pregnant with Jesus. Definitely a faux pas. They divorced, and she relied on the state's questionable health care provisions to give birth to the son she decided to name after the one reliable man she had encountered in her life. Then she died in childbirth, according to the doctors, and returned to this mortal coil by some unspecified not-quite-miracle. I could tell this woman was going to be an experience in and of herself.

She proved to be so, weighing down each meal with chicken (she could never cook without meat, she claimed, so this was our venn diagram pocket of overlap) and depressing stories about this relative with cancer or that near brush with sexual harassment and how nothing but her faith got her through. When she told me her coworkers used to call her la Mujer de Hierro, Iron Woman, I was not in the least surprised. But while the size of her personality and her meals threatened to overwhelm me on a twice-daily basis, I liked her. I have a thing for quirky independent women, and when I managed to break into her ample monologues we had some good conversations picking common ground out of two wildly different lifes. I was genuinely sad, then, when Doreen (one of the program director types) informed me that Cristina had been asked to leave her house by her landlord and would be moving 3 km across town in a week's time. Since it's GVI policy that all volunteers live in the same neighborhood, I would be relocating to a new house and a new family. I bade farewell to the gold-winged angel over my bed (a bit more grounded than the front room cherub, despite her lofty position) and stripped my pictures from the walls I could almost reach when standing in the middle of the room with both arms outstretched. I walked a half-block up the street, turned, turned again through a park studded with Greekish statuary and couples engaged in vigorous kisses, and wandered into Dina's sprawling family and house. I'm still not sure who's who here. I think that in this two-floor house with hivelike compartments there live Dina, her three kids, her aunt and uncle, her grandmother and her grandfather at least, but there is a steady stream of other family and friends visiting, and I can't tell who is supposed to be taking care of who, who is here to keep the widowed-young Dina company and who she's supporting with her generosity. WHen I got here the house was also home to Olivia, a short-term volunteer helping Neil and Kavin and me with English teaching, so I moved into a little downstairs room to while away the days until Liv moved out. Of course it didn't turn out feeling that way. Though the room was tiny and dark, with only one window that opened into the house and was constantly being peered into by Dina's daughters Karla and Diana, it was warm and quite cozy and nestlike, and Liv took to visiting me in the evenings so we could prep for lessons and listen to music aloud (a revelation after weeks of headphones) and have some brilliant rambling conversations of the sort that only happen when there are no time constraints and no atmosphere and no particular need to be anywhere else. It was luck that this housemate figure should be Liv, a spritely music-conscious eighteen year old from England with curly red hair, a mischeivous sense of humor, and artistic abilities we blatantly exploited for our lessons. So the week passed. Last night she moved out, though thank the powers that be she is in Antigua for another week and volunteered out of the infinite goodness of her heart to come in and support me during Neil's second wake of vacation, which I would have been tackling singlehandedly otherwise, since Kavin returned to London on Friday.

So last night I moved into my third room of the last four weeks (fifth if you count California and the hotel) and I am smitten. Yellow walls, four wide windows framing the dormant Volcan Agua, a tiered set of shelves from which I've draped earrings and throughout which I've stacked my clothes in bright piles, a glorious double bed, and a sense of enveloping privacy that makes me open and relax in a way I'd been missing like I miss the ocean. I stayed in to place my things last night, read some White Teeth, recreated a simpler version of an ofrenda for el Día de los Muertos (which was yesterday, involved a vibrant cemetery and giant kites, and will have to wait for another time story-wise), and woke up feeling like after weeks of hurtling nonstop through new adventure after new challenge, I finally had a chance to catch up with myself. My introverted heart is happy, and my instinct for a place that will feel like home is tingling warmly and steadily. What's more, it's probable that this is the very room my dear Stazh inhabited on her first foray to Guatemala, which gives the ballast of history and closing circles to the situation. I will tentatively suggest that this saga has a hopeful end.