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?