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.