My mom is in Guatemala. I've been looking forward to her visit for months now, for the chance to show her the world I've joined, for the real conversations with someone who knows me and brings out the best in me (most of the time, and can usually tolerate or call out the worst in me). The richness of her stay here, though, is exceeding my expectations. With her usual way of inspiring trust in near-strangers, she has elicited the life stories of Doña Elena (headmistress, in a way, of the Itzapa school) and her daughter Greysi, the one a phoenix story (appropriately enough, since the Latin American branch of GVI is called Phoenix anyhow) of a heavy-drinking and heavy-handed husband woken up to the injustice of their dynamic by a token human rights course that was part of his police training, whose subsequent lenience freed her up to start a woman's group, meet Dom, and help found the first GVI project in this part of the world, the other a suspended story of an education put off by pregnancy, a cheating and hot-tempered father-of-child, booted from her life, and a beautiful little dictator being raised by the whole family so her mother can return to secretarial training. Among the uncovering of these stories my mom has reinvigorated my own teaching, which was growing a bit formulaic in my exhaustion, by demonstrating the drilling techniques she learned in the teacher corps and reminding me of the way those drills build confidence, soothe rowdy classes, energize tired ones, and are even kind of fun in their way. Talking with her has helped me iron out some incoherencies in my way of being here. And now, as I battle the worst stomach demons I've encountered since my arrival, she is covering classes for me so that I can take the time to recover.
One of the greatest moments of amplification we've had since she's been here was when Yeimy, another of Elena's daughters, invited us along on a surprise visit to her aunt's. We started up the hill behind our little school, passing the small stores filled with Tortrix and sodas and the houses selling chocofrutas and the throngs of street dogs. First we saw Chay Balam, one of two or three government-certified schools in Itzapa. It's the only one that allows its kids to come in indigenous dress, rather than requiring the purchase of costly uniforms with too-short skirts and unrealistically white shirts, and the only one that teaches Kaq'chikel, the local Mayan language. It still requires far too much copying, absurd amounts of homework, and English taught by not just non-native speakers but essentially non-speakers-- I got my hands on one of my student's tests and it was riddled with errors before she'd written a word. Still, this is the school I hope my kids are attending. Yeimy herself went to high school (well, the equivalent, from age 16 to 20) there, between 6 and 10 pm every night. As we walked by, some familiar faces peeled away from the crowds of recently-released younglings and joined my mom and Yeimy and I as we left behind the bricked street for a narrower, water-runneled dirt road/path hybrid and started to climb in earnest. The path got narrower and dustier, threading between tiny cinderblock houses and patches of ground punctuated by dried corn stalks in neat rows. It isn't the season for corn, so it didn't need to be a desolate sight, but this year's erratic rains and subsequent failure of the bean crop adds an extra dose of emptiness to the bare plots. As we came to the top of the ridge we saw all of Itzapa sprawling around us, the houses of clay bricks and corrugated iron and plastic, the trash-choked stream they call a river, the horizon hazed by more trash burning and by open cooking fires that are eating up the forest. The volcanoes gave the whole view a majestic sweep, and there were pine trees standing magnificently on one hill, and the wealthier, more Spanish part of town (which is where our school stands, which surprised me with its basicness when I first arrived but which begins to seem like the bloody hallowed halls of academia in relative terms) were painted bright turquoises and reds and salmons, and to block up our speechlessness, I made some inane comparison between Itzapa and San Francisco, on account of both being cities built among the folds of hills, and my mom commented on the scene's beauty. It's there. There's a lot of it. What should we have said? Do we express some form of sympathy for these families with six or seven kids living piled between two sheets of plywood or corrugated steel? Surprise to see the face of Luis Giovanni, one of my brightest and best-dressed students, poking his head around the corner of one of the less substantial houses? The welling indignation that this is real, that I'm not among the pages of National Geographic of peering through the windows of a poverty tourism van, that I know these kids' names and pronunciation abilities and high five intensities and classroom personas, that they're brighter and more motivated than many of my middle school classmates were, and that they are, at least when they're at school, happier than many of my friends? Or do we seek similarities, the way cities on hills leave us breathless? Do we watch the clouds leaving shadows on the fields and marvel at the strength of men with bundles of wood larger than they are suspended from harnesses that run across their foreheads and let them support their burdens on their backs, at the balance of women with balled bright cloth or baskets or ugs of water on their heads? We did some of the latter, romanticization as politeness, but mostly fell silent to absorb it all, as Yeimy told us a few things: this is my aunt's house (a relatively ample two-room cinderblock house with an impeccably swept dirt yard punctuated by what looked like a sage bush and a few small fruit trees); she is working all day; my cousins Ana and Jairo (two of my students) eat lunch alone here; this other part of town has no running water and as such the women go to town to do their washing; Itzapa is growing as these lands are inherited and sons who can't find work elsewhere come back to wring what living they can (clay bricks drying in a backyard, avocadoes sold by Lorena, another of my students, outside her family's door) from the ground they have.
The walk brought home to me the three-element balancing act I'm attempting as a way to understand the world. There is the lyrical, an old fallback of mine, finding loveliness wherever I can in a solitary attempt to remake the world in a softer light. There is the political, trying to see the forces that have created the current situation and to imagine how those forces might be altered to create change. There is the daily, the interpersonal, the insistence on maintaining personal dignity and respect regardless of circumstances, the conversational. The last is where my sense of influence lies. I endeavor to understand the political, and I can't help seeking the beautiful, but any kind of force I exert myself is going to need to be on the interpersonal level. That is the one thing that has held fairly solid for me since I first started really thinking about these things as they related to me, sophomore year of high school.
In only moderately related news, I think I'm back to my kindergarten ambition of wanting to write and illustrate children's books when I grow up. Eh?
