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?

p.s.

i seem to be taking myself very seriously in these last postages. a gesture at amusement next time. promise.

the triumvirate

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?

che

In my optimistic phase freshman year of college, I hauled my tentative derriere from the dorm to hear a speech by Inga Muscio, self-proclaimed feminist author and activist. I spent most of her speech allowing my mind to wander off to section dynamics and how to cultivate friendship, but I perked up when she started talking about the power of names. She focused on W. Bush, on how a trace of negative energy and power leaked to him with every mention of his name, no matter the context. She called him Arbusto (Spanish for 'shrub') to avoid the unintentional reinforcement of her own theory. I thought it was a bit extreme, but an intriguing idea: each time our name is mentioned it affects us and the world around us in some way.

Her idea came back to me today as I continued to push through Empire's Workshop. It's in the shimmer of certain names, their oily sheen or their beatific glow. Every time I read the words Oliver North I feel like I shrink inside my own skin. Bush's name produces a narrowing of the eyes and an occasional cynical burst of laughter as each mention confirms my feelings. The strongest impression I've gotten of late, though, came from Grandin's treatment of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I should almost say 'lack thereof.' In the whole history of Latin American resistance to U.S. involvement, the Argentine-doctor-turned-guerilla-revolutionary-turned-pin-up-boy-for-rebels-who-don't-do-their-research merited only one paragraph. And my reaction to that one paragraph only proved the wisdom of that choice. Guevara has become sheer magic realism. His name means something entirely different from what he actually did with his life. Have you seen The Motorcycle Diaries? I watched it for the second time last weekend. It paints a stunning picture of an honorable, gruff young man struggling as his idealism overtakes his ties to the bourgeois world in which he's grown up. The soundtrack is masterfully concocted and composed by Gustavo Santaolalla, the fellow behind Brokeback Mountain, which tells you a bit about its tendency toward sweeping. Have you walked into a bookstore in Central America? Every shelf is heavy with Che, Che, Che. He's grander than Fidel because he never calcified, and more immortal than Allende because he fought with guns instead of politics and therefore remained untinged by diplomacy. You read his name and sigh with the envy of any socially-conscious member of the upper middle class for one who followed his idealism through to its lowest common denominator, you see his face emblazoned on the red t-shirt or incongruously pasted across the rasta-colored flag and long for the courage to achieve the same glory, regardless of whether his life actually confirms the values he's come to represent. It Doesn't Matter. He is fiction. That is why, I think, Grandin spent so little time on him. A book devoted to exposing the uncomfortable scope of ugliness in Latin America has no room for such dewy hero-worship, but were he to try to ground Guevara's story in quotidian unmagic realism he would alienate a large portion of his readership. So Che gets his paragraph and then fades behind the Allendes and the Castros and the Pinochets and the Kirkpatricks and the Montts and the Somozas and the Sandinistas and the Norths and the Robertsons and the Carters and the whole mess of mixed figures that villainize and manipulate one another for months upon months. And I'm left running his name through my fingers, trying to decide if it's one that belongs on the world's lips.

There are things on my mind tonight. They're perching, some digging claws into tender bits of my medulla oblongata, others swizzling their feathers across the cerebral cortex. (And only Catherine will really ever be able to tell me if those are relevant brain parts or not. I just like the way they sound.) I feel like my mental capacities went into some deep, self-centered hibernation over the holidays, and have emerged only this week, hyperactive to compensate for their long slow introspection. Now they flit and flaunt on mangoes, on the "Good Neighbor" policy, on ceramics techniques, on recipes for mole, on Guatemalan celebrities and political parties, on pageantry and the top 2% of the population, on Pablo Neruda and how thoroughly I love him, on dreams ripe with meaning and those that linger more in realms of spectacle and shock, on tamalitos, on seasons, on value judgments and my judgment of their value, on the U.S. public education I received up to eighth grade... Will I sleep tonight? Only if I grant these thoughts some ballast, which is what I'm attempting here. This list is every bit as flitty as the thoughts that inspired it, though. Let me see.

One thread here's the political one. When I was in Mexico two years ago there was an enormously important election in the Senate and the House. The whole day it took place I haunted the library, refreshing my news pages at every opportunity, breathlessly awaiting the judgment I felt would come through. This time, this trip, it was the presidential election. I stayed home and planned a lesson. This was an election I'd followed with urgency at home, an election for which I'd wriggled through hoops in order to be able to vote, and yet when the day rolled around I couldn't be bothered to walk the fifteen minutes into town. I didn't even find out the results until the next morning, when my German friend and fellow volunteer, Barbara, informed me of what she'd found out the night before. The same was true for the day of the inauguration. My mom called from her post by the television, reporting her feeling of overflowing hope and tearful joy, and I had actually forgotten the significance of the day. I'm not sure exactly what this means. One possibility is that I've actually become stuck in here in a way that I never did in Mexico. I'm doing something that fills much of my time and my mind, gesturing at an actual concrete (if miniscule) change, and therefore less caught up in the pageantry (told you that word was on my mind) of politics. It's also a trace of cynicism, I blush to confess in this moment when the world is supposed to be flushed with a restoration of the right to hope. I've just picked up this book, Empire's Workshop, by Greg Grandin. Its thesis is that U.S. foreign policy was conceptualized and tested in relation to Latin America, that the foundation for our diplomatic interactions with Europe and Japan and our violent imposition of "order" in the Middle East was laid in our use of soft and hard power in our own hemisphere. It is not exactly inflating me with optimism. It has led me into two sweeping political conversations in the last two days, one in Spanish (which makes me absurdly proud) and one in English, one after coffee and one after kusha, the local firewater that gets served periodically in Itzapa. In each I found myself forced, if not into defense of the U.S., at least into tempering the disgust people feel at the mention of our country's name with some sense that it isn't all that way. Two points keep returning. One is that we are so enormous. The day a governor of any sort cannot know all his constituents is the day that power begins to corrupt, I think. As soon as the people in power cannot directly witness the outcome of their decisions, they start to disbelieve in the reality of the effects of their decisions, like kids slaughtering aliens in video games-- like Ender, convinced he's being trained in battle techniques only to learn at the end of his supposedly imaginary campaign that each triangle he blew up was a real ship and each circle a real planet. With a lack of accountability comes a lack of understanding that is born, not out of spite or inhumanity, but out of a genuine inability to comprehend the figures in terms of real lives, real poverty, real illiteracy, real hunger, real deaths. This is a crap excuse; it's no excuse, but it does make it a bit easier to imagine a politician as a real human being beneath the trappings and uglinesses of power. The other point is related to size as well. It's the homogeneity problem. Many of my fellow volunteers are from scattered regions. My first political engagement was with Dario, a curly-haired volunteer from Italy who's been traveling around Latin America for the last several months, and Irene, my housemate and fellow intern, who's from Spain-- Catalan, to be precise. They were both deeply surprised that I'd learned to question and even criticize my government in public school. Though I don't pretend to know every mistake the U.S. has made since it existed (oh god, the size problem in yet another manifestation-- I doubt the most gifted historian has the capacity for that information) I've been marveling at our misguidedness at least since first really learning about slavery in fifth grade. In those days I read history in a constant state of us vs. them, trying to ascertain which side held the virtue and which was to be condemned, dreading the possibility that California might have tottered between North and South in the Civil War, dodging any association with our 'dark past.' I have an even older memory of being in the front seat as my mom drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and saying "I'm so glad we live in a time when there aren't any more wars." I must have been six or seven. That would make it '92 or '93. Civil war was going strong in Guatemala, for damn sure, 30+ years after it had started. El Salvador would have just signed the pact to nominally end their civil war, though fighting would continue for another ten years or so. Bosnia and Herzegovina had declared independence, initiating (well, as much as one act ever initiates anything-- catalyzing?) absurd bloodshed in that part of the world. Israel and Palestine were doing their thing. The Rodney King riots went down in L.A. That was a tangent. Back to fifth grade, and onward to eighth grade. Mr. Butler had us engaging in debates for and against the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and I was supposed to argue in favor of it, and I came up with some brilliant point and felt myself split utterly in two: the victorious part that felt enormous satisfaction in my abilities and the horrified part that could see what would happen, what had already happened. Even knowing the outcome I could sit there in front of the class and make my point. It was the beginning of my enjoyment of playing devil's advocate, not just as an intellectual exercise but as an urgent desire to show that there are infinite sides to any story, to knock each and every speechmaker off of the pedestal or soapbox he or she had chosen. This battle to force some kind of dialogue came to mean a lot more to me than any specific political cause or issue. That's still what I'm doing, I guess. But I'm doing my research now too. It's haunting, and distracting from the present, and discouraging to watch one admired or at least respected politician after another (JFK? bye. Eisenhower? so long) lose my faith, but the fact that I had any faith to lose means something. Does that make some sense? It means I do defend the U.S., if very very hesitantly and carefully. It means I do want to come back. Just not until I have a slightly better sense of what it is that invites my return.

I had a good eight other streams of consciousness to dump at your feet tonight, but it's getting to be time to sleep, ballast or no. I'll re-read all this later and see if it makes any sense. In the meantime, I'll dream things I can't explain at all, which might be refreshing.

a poem scribbled in a cemetery in panama

Flood Tide

The flash

of light and dark fishes 

won't reach my feet.

They will flop

from the water flinging

droplets toward my lightfurred mammal

skin, spattering

eloquent reminders

of when I lived in salt water.

Up through

damaged banana leaves, across

the slatted floors of stilted houses,

the water

rises

tugging at my toenails.

It wants what I want: union.

Or so I say

until my legs can stretch

no further, and it

retracts its proffered hand.

treeeeeees

I've taken a nap, and now I'm in that submarine reflective mood that isn't a mood-- a state of mind with tentacles in melancholy and wonder, where the membranes between worlds seem impossibly thin. I'm in Costa Rica. The city of San Jose hadn't recieved my visit since I was eight, fleeing hom after the electric incident in Manuel Antonio. Really, given that association, it's a wonder I ever came back. The city's penchant for thwarting me continues, as upon my arrival I realized that the reason my card wasn't withdrawing money was because Union Bank was guarding my back a little too thoroughly. They had frozen my account, assuming that the online purchase of a plane ticket in Central America was highly suspect. The rigmarole I ran to get it sorted is a story for another time. Point is, I did get it sorted, and after a fairly minimum amount of navigational confusion I got to the Hostel Galileo, base of operations for my 24 hours in the city.

The city. It's big. It feels good around me, unwieldy and inexplicable like a too-long skirt or like a meadow that just pushed up mushrooms. Its denizens couldn't care lass what I do. There's none of the Antiguan tourist-fishing and none of the small town surprise at my presence, and this absence of any assumed right to notice me is blissful. I get to drift unmoored. Thus far this drifting has cast me toward the biggest huarache i've ever consumed (covered in peppery picante and salsa cruda), to the local AM/PM (sigh) to test the theory that Chikys get more unbearably delicious the closer you get to their Costa Rican Source (theory confirmed, though I might still prefer my Chocositas), to a small park with dark low tangled trees, dotted with a passed-out fellow or two, and with one hygiene-dedicated person bathing in the fountain (well, personal-hygiene-dedicated at least-- i doubt he was overly concerned with anyone else's).

This drifting finally parked me back at the hostel, at which point the nap took hold. When it relaxed its sticky fingers I thought to go in search of a new notebook, since I've finally filled the homemade flower-clad beauty Mom gave me before I left. Instead I found myself in a different park. On its outskirts was the Museo de Arte Costarricense, and though I had neither the funding nor the time-before-dark to enter, I roamed its outdoor sculpture. On the wall that contains these blocky carvings of kneeling men and women was strewn intricate graffiti, whorls of spray paint, faces showing signs of Picasso and Guayasamin and Mayan glyphs, clouds bearing eyes, fanged skulls, contextless words. I sat among them for a while, inviting those who would most appreciate them into my mind one at a time. When I finally stood, I followed their flow to the seemingly infinite stand of eucalyptus that spread behind them. Every hair on my arms tried its best to reach their stature as I floated among them (not as if in air but rather as though my feet were buoyant and supported by liquid instead of the tan bark path that actually held them up). It was love.

And here's the place for a flashback. This past Thursday, for the first time in the recorded history of GVI, the English teachers went to sports day in Santa Maria. It is always on Fridays, when we are teaching in Itzapa, but due to Christmas Party conflicts it was bumped forward to Thursday this week. I trailed a string of younglings into the campo, to a hillyish patch of grass near cornfields where they set up goals and play fierce football. In the morning I through a frisbee about with a series of the chiquititos, but by the afternoon I was tired enough to succumb to gender norms and sit with the girls making friendship bracelets. Soon 3 of my extremities were employed to anchor their creations, and we settled into the serious business of student teacher gossip. They'd pry, I'd tease (usually by turning their questions around on them), they'd protest or giggle, I'd crow, they'd return to prying. Finally the ever popular 'Do you have a boyfriend?' was trotted out. Being far from camp and the States' restrictions on kid-appropriate interactions, as evidenced by the full body hugs i'd been getting all day, I answered with a straight no. I'm not sure who suggested the alternative first. It could have been me, but if it was, they ran with it and soon, all the trees in Guatemala were my lovers.

At the time it was largely a convenient dodge of a question whose ramifications I didn't really want to explore, but sitting underneath a rough-barked beauty this afternoon, tucked into a fold of its trunk, I started thinking they had a point. Trees feel good. They are reliably there when you need someone to witness your sadness and they can be the apex of glorious playfulness. They have roots and patience and loveliness to spare. You never quite know what they're thinking, but they hold you and things improve. This is how I peeled back the shell that I'd been building around myself in Antigua. Hopefully each leg of the journey will slough away another layer, and I will return having shed the things I don't need, ready to re-engage with the place and the people and the work on new terms.

fill in the blanks

I wrote this list while dangling (listlessly?) in a hammock in El Salvador last weekend. I could say that everything has changed since then, or I could say that everything is the same. Both would have a reasonable corner on truth. If I am being too enigmatic, then let this be a bribe to you to write to me individually.

What I Would Write A Poem About If I Had the Presence of Mind to Write a Poem

The S-shape of a long-spined dog from above
A push and pull that has stopped being of me and started being with me
Seeing others through the eyes of other others
Aches
Priorities
Small potted plants overgrowing their alotted spaces
People who plant plants in places too small because they like the way they look when they overgrow their alotted spaces
Whether or not I am one of those people
Whether the plants mind
What it means to transform, whether it´s worth it, and whether we have a choice
Why distance matters
Why we resist spinning
Why I don´t (or can´t) seem to
Hotsprings
Words vs. Thoughts
Underwear
Squash and its growth (in my affections, in the ground)
Sounds
Doors
The significance of sounds and doors in El Salvador tonight
How the most important part of being here isn´t being here (people, places, work)
Why so serious?
What it means to be self-centered (esp. w/ regard to the fact that it is ´good´to be centered and ´good´ to be yourself)
Circulation
Poison (bug bites, food, mental poisoning)
Music as territory
Rebellion
Bombas
Startlement
Fear
Desensitization
Peanuts
Pigeons
Leaves shaped like recognizable things
Seeing the virgin Mary in places she probably isn´t
Seeing ourselves in places we probably aren´t
Eggs
Influence
Intestines
The ways we tire
Want (origin: lack)
Competence
Belonging
Bells
Whatever happened to that voice poem?
Portability/ traveling light
Prophets/ prophecy
A surfeit of the sweetest things
Not knowing
why we crave understanding
Reputations preceding one
Worldliness
Otherworldliness
Interworldliness?
Written records
Accents
What we tell who.

anecdotally yours

I've recently been accused of thinking too much. This isn't a new concept, nor is it one I'd make any studied attempt to deny-- especially because if I did I would doubtless come up with so many justifications for my level of brain activity that I'd prove my accusers right. Such is life.

Still, the most recent suggestion led me to realize that I've gotten so wrapped up in my theories and predictions that I've entirely neglected to tell you any actual anecdotes about my time here. My friend and fellow volunteer Becca always has an anecdote. Always. My personal favorite is the time when, on November 5th, she asked her 5-6 year old kids if they knew there was going to be a new president of the United States. They chorused "siiiiiiiiiii" as though she'd been foolish even to suggest they weren't intimately familiar with U.S. politics, so she thought a follow-up question was in order. She asked who this new leader might be, and received a unanimous response: "El Hombrecillo de Jengibre!"

So now you know. Our next commander in chief will be the Gingerbread Man.

But anecdotes like that have not been dropping into my lap. Maybe it's because I work with older kids, not as prone to sacrificing their adolescent dignity for my gratification, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that I just haven't been looking right. Because here: I'm going diving. I'm dredging the last seven weeks, sifting through the silt, tossing aside the nonlinear or the conceptual or the mundane, dodging the temptation for little flourishes of extended metaphor like this one.

Last week in Santa Maria, we were learning about weekends. That might be a cruel topic to introduce on a Tuesday. Tough. We talked about getting up, eating breakfast, playing football, going to church, doing the dishes-- the stuff of weekly routine. After an hour and a half of this sort of thing, reviewing the present simple or practicing speaking by interviewing partners about their average weekends, it seemed like time to give them a bit of a break. I asked them, then, to come up with an ideal weekend and ask me whatever vocabulary they wanted to fill in its blanks. The first suggestion came from Zonia, I think, but soon they all took up the cry: Pizza. How do you say Pizza in English? No frets, thought I. I even tossed in a quick explanation that the word is Italian, so it's the same in all languages. Lest I get cocky, though, they ask another: How do you say ooch in English? Ooch? I didn't think I'd ever heard that one before. I imagined it was a word in kaq'chikel (this region's indigenous language), the name of some local delicacy or spice. I asked them to spell it for me. H. Okay, the silent H, fair enough. I could have guessed there would be one of those. U. Once more, quite logical-- I'm constantly battling their urge to pronounce up oop, so it's natural I should struggle in the other direction. T. Those hide before Cs and Hs often enough, at least in English, and everyone's always saying kaq'chikel is more like English than Spanish, so why not? I'm poised for the next letter. Moira, fellow volunteer, catches my eye from the back of the class. "Leslie. Look at the board." I do. Hut. Pizza. Of course. Nothing like the Mayan deep dish special. Caught exoticizing a bit, I was. It happens to the best of us.

Whew. That was harder than I expected. I'm going to take refuge in something truer, less convenient, and probably more familiar to those of you who've corresponded with me over the years.

Yesterday I finally went to my first barbecue. Barbecues are meant to be a Friday tradition, an initiation of new members and an opportunity to mingle with the whole crew, but due to various chaotic elements beyond GVI's control the last seven have been canceled. We've been meeting instead in various restaurants, taking over massive blocks of tables, welcoming newcomers and hearing speeches from those perched on the edge of departure, ossifying into the furniture where we sit and into the people we know. I was looking forward to the first real barbecue, largely because of the mingling element. I'd apparently entirely forgotten who I am. Do I like mingling? Is there any part of me that takes pleasure in a room full of half-strangers sniffing around, establishing the degree to which they will like or dislike one another, comparing ethics size or adventure girth like they were some more bodily sings of superiority? Fortunately, I had beautiful ingredients that let me bury my fingers and my social being in them. The barbecues become potlucks of sorts, so I'd managed to span Antigua in search of the components of tabbouleh. I actually found bulgur, in a little deli behind a chocolate shop called Chocotenango (cleverly named after Jocotenango, the next town over.) I sought green onions in the supermarket, and then headed over for the covered-ish market for the rest of my fresh goods. Tomatoes and limes were easy, as was parsley and a cucumber. I was getting a bit worried about spearmint, though. I'd asked at three stalls piled high, one with chiles and cilantro,  one with oranges, one with bell-like peppers that made me feel sheepish for having bought mine in the supermarket, and each woman overlooking her vegetables pointed me onward. Finally the woman who sold me the cucumber and five small oblong tomatoes suggested one particular corner. I rounded it to see a tangle of herbs over my head, deep and musty like the most aromatic of tumbleweeds, scored down the middle to create a niche for a woman. She was white-haired, had about five teeth, and spoke almost unintelligible Spanish. She seemed more a part of her plants than the world of the market, stabbed as it was with cascades of leather belts and chains of pirated DVDs and plastic detritus and shouts of recognition and teenagers multitasking, making out over the counters of their parents' stands, and reggaeton weaving through the whine of off-kilter musical Christmas lights. Her curtains of herbs warded off the tumult, and I recognized myself exoticizing again, and I didn't much mind. I was half waiting for her to mutter or murmur or muddle some cryptic key to my future, some incantation or riddle whose import would only be revealed months or years later, but I left charmless, with a simple Que le vaya bien. Her power came clear only when I installed myself in a corner of the kitchen where the barbecue bustled, evading conversation as I slivered onions and cubed cucumbers and constricted my fingers around limes, living through my nose and my nerves, banishing the people around me to the sphere of the random market and wriggling into the peculiar calm and order of cooking. The tabbouleh turned out pretty well, too.

Que les vaya bien.

A Second Set Of Roots

Things are settling into place, snuggling down into certain grooves and suggesting with their body language that they do not wish to be disturbed. I´m teaching more solidly-- the learning curve still curves, but I´m moving into that less steep section where I can predict pretty well which things will improve and which will be a challenge. I have an internship, officially now, and hence a sense of stability that promises to last until May. (Is it odd that I reveal this information buried amid other mundanities? It´s not that I´m not pleased, just that in retrospect it seems kind of inevitable, already knit into the shape of my days from the beginning.) I´m developing favorite places to eat or sleep or internet. While preparing a lesson for tomorrow about the vocabulary of daily routines, I realized I actually have one. I get up at six. I leave for school at seven and get there between eight and eight thirty. I eat lunch at twelve or one, depending on whether I´m in Santa Maria or Itzapa, and I leave for home at a little after four. I´ve joined a gum where I tend/intend to go after school three or four times a week. I eat dinner at seven. Bedtime fluctuates, but it´s the only total variable in the pattern of my days.

With routine comes a sense of belonging so subtle it´s almost subconscious. The hint of recognition in the eyes of the ladies at the lavandería or the formula of each morning´s greeting ritual with my classes lull me into a timeless feeling, a feeling that my stay here is temporarily eternal. I´m rooting. As soon as I start realizing this, though, an old inspecific longing settles on my shoulders and slips between my ribs. It won´t be satisfied by going out with large groups of fellow volunteers, and it won´t be satisfied by sleeping more, and it won´t be satisfied by spending more time on lesson plans and preparation. It has been allayed by the presence of Celeste, my Portland-afiliated lovely friend with whom I´ve had the sort of generous-hearted and ample conversations filled with stories and tangents and self-analysis that haven´t proved possible yet in this community where every social event is open invitation and most information conveyed to one will reach anyone. Between buñuelos and music exchanges, among fountains and cobblestones and sweet potato burritos and wineglasses filled with living fluttering goldfish, we´ve guided our observations and impressions and deligthed in the exchange. She was the one to diagnose this pesky longing of mine. She told me what I wanted was a second set of roots.

It´s true, of course. When I think of the (dare I say) best periods of my life thus far, it seems I´ve always had at least two worlds, two pools of friends or sources of intellectual stimulation or projects or adventures on the horizon. It affords a kind of multidimensionality-- many levels and kinds of friendship, many ways of engaging the brain, many different channels for hope or frustration or pride. Being here, where so many people are transient and don´t need to forge lasting friendships, where the permanent ones view me as a passing thing, makes it a challenge to discover more outlets for the kinds of connection or effort or conversation I covet.

It does seem the urge to get away usually announces a need to commit more firmly to the place I am. So I´ve assembled a bit of a to-do list, which I will not write because that might jinx it. But it exists. This I guarantee.

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.

The Affair As It Stands Today

I think I'm falling in love with teaching, not in the sweeping romantic at-first-sight way, but in the halting and uncomfortable way that more often actually happens. I am nervous thinking about it, and spend an enormous amount of time planning for it though I know half the equation is outside my control and no amount of preparation will take into account all the variables. Just before our encounters I feel a deep panic, a sense that if I just sprinted for the door I could be rootless, uncommitted and unafraid (conveninetly forgetting that when I was thus unattached I yearned for something to push against). In the first days only a sense of obligation to the people who brought us together-- my parents for instilling in me a huge value for education, Catherine and Grace and Katie for being my first comrades in independent travel and therefore my fellow in learning that it gets easier and proves to be worth the discomfort, the Mexico crew for teaching me ways of getting to know a place, my Whitman loves for constructing my first full home away from home and camp for letting me live in the strongest communities I've ever known, and of course Stazh for setting me up on a blind date with teaching in Guatemala. For these people I stayed, though I left my first lesson tearful and afraid on a level deeper than perfection or commitment. As I've recounted, the next lesson left me somewhere entirely different: exalted, full of hope and satisfaction, optimistic with that first giddy bloom that is physically incapable of sustaining itself. Now each lesson it is uncertain whether I will leave thrilled or crestfallen-- but I'm getting better at timing, at gauging my classes' needs and abilities and adjusting as I go, at gathering a ballast of understanding so each new development doesn't submit me to a fit of aimless spinning, and even when I spin I am reasonably confident of regaining my course. (I was in a river kayak on Lago Atitlan this weekend, ergo am physically very conscious of the disorienting effects of spinning).

So all this means I'm readying myself to commit, to settle down with teaching, to acknowledge our awkwardnesses and our imperfections and to proclaim that it's worth working through. I spoke to Neil on Friday about the possibility of an internship. It's only talk at this point, but he sounded tentatively excited and said he'd speak with Doreen, one of the director-type figures, this weekend. I've yet to find out the result. I suppose I'm in the waiting-by-the-telephone phase in a way. I feel fairly peaceful about it at the moment. Though our relationship is tumultuous, teaching and I are doing okay. I don't think it's a heartbrteaker. I haven't much of an idea where we're going, but I'm shyly looking forward to finding out.

Some logistics, for those among us who like that sort of thing: On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I teach in San Andres Itzapa, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm in Santa Maria de Jesus. The English teaching load is distributed (in ever-changing configurations) among Neil (the program coordinator, to assign a title that may or may not be official, and most constant figure in our constellation), me, Kavin, and Liv. The latter two will be leaving soon, alas, but before they do Neil's grasping some much-needed vacation, so we're to be on our own for the next two weeks. I'm looking forward to the opportunity of flinging myself full-bodiedly into teaching, leaving behind any opportunity of second-guessing for at least this two-week period because I don't imagine I'll have time. Each class we teach is a bit different. There are morning and afternoon groups with different kids, so each kid attends a half-day with us and the other half either in government school or working at home, depending on the day. In Itzapa, we have the same two groups on Mondays and Fridays, and then two groups on Wednesdays that take Spanish literacy and other subjects with other volunteers on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. In Santa Maria we have the same two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our smallest group is eight; the biggest could be more than twenty if everyone showed up on the same day, but when attendance is almost entirely self-motivated and kids are needed for work in their families' fields and homes, it's harder to enforce and the bigger classes rarely have more than fourteen or sixteen kids. They range in age from 12 to 20, and are grouped more by ability than age. Some lesson plans can be used in more than one class, but when one class is reviewing the alphabet and "Hello, my name is Sulmi. What is your name?" and another is learning about expressing opinions about their classes (with all the vocab of subjects and tastes that implies), more planning is definitely in order. Neil works his derriere off to keep us prepared, suggesting activities around which we can structure whole lessons, forming the syllabus, and training us during lunch hours. His experience and his attention to the needs of our classes have done a lot to orient me inthis world, and while I quietly kill the hidden hopes I had of teaching poetry or incorporating creative writing elements into my lessons, I fill the space they leave with more practical goals of creating a base of understanding, of motviating these bright and curious kids to keep coming to a school that is both entirely superfluous to their basic survival and invaluable in terms of exposing them to playfulness, to classrooms that don't revolve around copying off a board, to lateral thinking (maybe, hopefully, please) and a freedom to try things-- speaking, writing-- even when the result isn't perfect that I am learning along with them.

I still have reservations about teaching English. I've read a bit too much postcolonial theory not to recognize the trouble with teaching the language of a world power to a community who will probably only ever come in contact with it in the service sector, pampering its tourists, or emigrating to its cities and farms and laboring to maintain its standard of living. I got my first teenager trying to sell me pot in the center the other day, claiming in broken English that by not buying I was insulting the country he loved, and I almost started crying at the thought that this bitter boy might be an example of how my kids end up applying what I teach them. U.S. language textbooks and their focus on the vocabulary of toursim, of exchange rates and ordering in restaurants and asking for directions, would be almost entirely useless here-- unless you invert all the dialogues and train your students to wait tables and answer guests' complaints, and even that assumes that these kids will leave subsistence farming, and maybe implies that they should. Ultimately I have to fall back on the realization that they choose to come to us, that I'm offering something they decide if they want or not. The subject is only part of the bargain. The difference between our casual, multi-approach classrooms and the strict copy culture of the government schools, the chance we emphasize to learn that the teacher is not the ultimate authority and that your peers make excellent resources, the time to play football (soccer, whatever-- I'm getting used to it) or jacks or to arm wrestle with your teachers (I took on and beat two wiry fourteen year olds the other day, one arm after the other, and am still rather proud) are the side benefits of the program that might ultimately be more important than the subject matter we convey. Yeah. Because despite my theoretical doubts, I feel pretty good doing what I'm doing. Teaching is sor of like flashing the possibility of other worlds at your students, murmuring that the knowledge we offer can change the way they look at the world or live their lives, giving them a sense that there's a lot in the world to know, and if it seems cruel to plant the seed of a longing that might never be fulfilled, what else has education ever really done for any of us, at least the ones who like it? I don't think ignorance of what we're missing has ever made us happier, really. I dunno. I am sure there is plenty more where these ramblings come from, and I'll probably scribble more of them down eventually. Til then....

Seño Leslie Strikes Again

Teaching is frightening. Standing in front of a room full of people who have no particular obligation to listen to you or to need what you offer, holding forth on topics whose importance you believe in but acknowledge is subject to debate, prodding and snuffling about to find the most palatable way of presenting a language so that it seems useful, rewarding, and worthy of effort, all the while listening to your own internal monologue and realizing intimately how underqualified you are... It is humbling, to say the least. That said, this week had a decidedly upward trend. On Wednesday I had my first observed teaching session, in which Neil, my mentor (and the brilliant inducer of Scottish-Guatemalan accents in all our students), watched to give me some feedback. I was terrified. I had little or no appetite, I obsessively checked and rechecked my lesson plan in every spare moment of the day, and as I began I sunk my teeth into the tears that approached and instructed them firmly to STAY PUT until the lesson was over. They did, but barely. It was raining, which is dreadful in any class but worse in a wall-less classroom with a tin roof, as it sounds a bit like falling through a steel drum being flicked with rubber balls. And of course my lesson plan was largely speaking-based, involving a lot of drilling and some conversation, and I could hardly hear the kids in the front row, let alone the back. I stumbled through, rotating from table to table and doing essentially minilessons with each group, thanking the teacherly powers that be that I had two assistants to try some dialogues with the tables I couldn't reach. When they left I hunkered down in the corner and ushered out the tears that had so considerately waited til then. I spent the night wondering what I was doing here, whether every day would inspire such deep panic, whether I could even maintain two months worth of such frustration and uncertainty. Neil had reassured me, told me I'd handled the rain well and, when he saw how shaken I was, said my nerves hadn't shown, but I couldn't argue with the adrenaline crash that sent me to sleep at nine that night.

Then Thursday came. I was to teach another afternoon class, this one on telling the time. Now, telling the time and I are not traditionally friends. Telling the time gave me more trouble in elementary school than multiplication tables and the difference between right and left combined. Telling the time still eludes me despite three years of wearing an analog watch. And yet. This lesson was a dream. I could see problems as they come, I could joke with the kids and still regain their attention, I could give instructions they more or less understood, and even when I made mistakes (which I did, amply) I didn't freeze or melt but stayed more or less in my usual demisolid state of matter and came up with solutions. I was GIDDY afterwards.

And now I'm cutting myself painfully short, without telling you about climbing the volcano Pacaya and touching lava with a stick yesterday, or talking for two hours with a friendly gentleman in a cafe this morning, or about seventeen other stories well worth telling. I must scurry off to join the day's adventure (the nature of which is still a mystery), thereby perpetuating my writable experiences. Secretly, my dearly beloved friends, I do these things for you.

Ish.

chapter three: in which things take shape

There are seven spidery plants in pots in front of me, sticking out tendrils to explore the thick stone windowsill. It seems odd to have a computer with internet between me and the plants-- I'm already getting used to life incommunicado, and all these avenues for communication are quite overwhelming. This last week... was a week. 

On Monday I made my first appearance in Itzapa, one of two towns where I'm teaching. I climbed up on the roof where the laundry and the corn dry out with Neil, my mentor-figure and near-twelve-hour-a-day companion during the week, so he could smoke a cigarette and get me oriented. I greeted the cows to the left of our classroom, the volcanoes dominating the horizon, the other part of the school across the street swarming with kids in a mix of traditional woven skirts and t-shirts, jeans and embroidered blouses, rain boots and leather sandals. Our first class was (is) a group of moody teenagers, Lester (the death-metal son of Doña Elena, whose house hosts a bit less than half the school) and his friends and a trio of almost silent girls. And now this is tempting me to give you a profile of each of my classes, which would be a truly daunting undertaking, since we teach different kids in the mornings and the afternoons and from day to day-- ultimately we have about eight classes worth, six of which meet twice a week and two of which meet once a week. They're grouped by ability rather than age-- one class varies from 14-20.  The most basic class is starting with 'Good afternoon. My name's Leslie. What's your name?' 'My name's Mayra. Nice to meet you.' 'Nice to meet you too.' The most difficult class is currently circling, since it might be receiving new members soon. We've talked about sentences, about housework, about colors and birthdays and clothing and classroom supplies, and all my concerns about the imperialism of teaching English to an already-impressively-bilingual population melt before the double blast of the practical concerns of passing school and getting a job and the instant affection and enthusiasm these kids show me. Half the girls in my afternoon class in Santa Maria were giving me hugs before they knew my name. The littler kids, the ones taking math and spanish literacy and learning that verbs are to be conjugated, will lean on me and coerce me into playing sharks and minnows and ask me to read them stories and offer me maracas for wee musical interludes.

And now I'm realizing I really should have selected some sort of organizing principle before I started writing today, because the flurry of things I want to record will not take turns. I think I'll have to leave it sketchy for the moment. 

As for the ten million dollar question (How long will Leslie stay in Guatemala?) the answer is a minutely changing thing. Teaching scares me still. There's a constant lining of anxiety in my belly, a thin uncertain sense that I'm a fraud sliding by on Spanish speaking and some degree of rapport with kids that will vanish when they realize I have no idea what I'm doing. There are also moments when I feel like I'm doing the perfect thing, that I love these kids instinctively and fiercely, that I could, if teaching comes to fit, stay here for a long long time. We shall see.