The last week has been full of goodbyes, in words and in heart. My last washing of dishes on the roof where we lived, my last view of the green hills, my last afternoon tea time with the 7 and 10 year old girls I lived with. Presentations of my preliminary findings with the staff, preparing me for the work ahead as I write my final report and preparing them to receive it in August. Lunches and breakfasts with the handful of people who became friends here in Nebaj.
There is something about leaving a place that brings to a point all the sweetness it has accumulated over the weeks. My heart is full with the grace that was given - my grandaughterly friendship with Siliva and the cake and coffee she always gave me, friendship with Maria that will hopefully endure the distance, the extravagant hospitality of the 7 year old I lived with over tea and cookies every day over work, the abundant generosity of families in communities nestled in these hills.
Yet my heart is even more full to be going home - to the one I love most and life together, to family and friends, and the beauty of full spring in the Northwest. It is time to be again with Steven, to create stories and life together with you all.
The months ahead will be full of reflection of this time as I listen to an analyze my interviews, ponder and write about the truths that can be found in them. Yet they will also hold dinners with my husband when he comes back from his work in the Missions with stories and photos, running on country roads, getting to know the people of Whitefish...come and visit us, we'd love to have you.
May 19, 2010
May 18, 2010
maize
I'm hoping to plant some corn when I return home, let it take root and become a way for us to enter into the connection between life and earth that is so explicit here. Here, where every member of the family participates in bringing their own sustenance from the land - planting maize, shelling frijol, shooing chickens from the kitchen, grinding chili for soup, even the five year old who carries the corn masa on her head back from the mill to make tortillas for lunch. There is a beautiful clarity of our dependence on the earth in this way of life, something that is easy to forget in the land of supermarkets and parking lots and prepackaged food.
It is not an easy way of life. There is much that cannot be romanticized - constant labor, the potential for sickness or calamity to shatter the delicate balance of life, the inability to send your children to school . There is a reason these communities who have historically grown maize and frijol and a few vegetables are eager for the chance to grow snow peas for the supermarkets of London, a reason they replace their plots of maize with coffee plants - "pista*" it is called, "cash." When I ask them why they plant these crops, the answer is so obvious to the tellers - there are not many choices in how you will make your living here, no one asking you in grade one if you want to be a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer. Export is a way out of the day-to-day subsistence they have endured for too many years.
So I leave with paradoxes - I who am so smitten with the local consumption of food, faced with the reality that export is the best option for a step out of poverty for these communities. Yet these families continue to cultivate their own food sources, clear the fields from where their three meals a day are harvested. I believe there is something to be learned in this, even as markets make our economic interdependence inevitable. A posture of reverence for our dependence on the land, a humility to the earth as a partner in life, endowed also with the Image of God and essential to our living and working and waking. May my life as I return to the corner of the earth I call home reflect this more every season...
*is this even how you spell this word? not a dictionary use...
It is not an easy way of life. There is much that cannot be romanticized - constant labor, the potential for sickness or calamity to shatter the delicate balance of life, the inability to send your children to school . There is a reason these communities who have historically grown maize and frijol and a few vegetables are eager for the chance to grow snow peas for the supermarkets of London, a reason they replace their plots of maize with coffee plants - "pista*" it is called, "cash." When I ask them why they plant these crops, the answer is so obvious to the tellers - there are not many choices in how you will make your living here, no one asking you in grade one if you want to be a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer. Export is a way out of the day-to-day subsistence they have endured for too many years.
So I leave with paradoxes - I who am so smitten with the local consumption of food, faced with the reality that export is the best option for a step out of poverty for these communities. Yet these families continue to cultivate their own food sources, clear the fields from where their three meals a day are harvested. I believe there is something to be learned in this, even as markets make our economic interdependence inevitable. A posture of reverence for our dependence on the land, a humility to the earth as a partner in life, endowed also with the Image of God and essential to our living and working and waking. May my life as I return to the corner of the earth I call home reflect this more every season...
*is this even how you spell this word? not a dictionary use...
May 13, 2010
history
I haven't yet written about the history of this place, the "Ixil Triangle." I've tried to let this blog be a reflection of our experiences, rather than a teaching forum. If you didn't know about it, you could spend a few days in Nebaj and not realize that 25 years ago the hills surrounding this town were killing fields, one of the most heavily affected regions during the armed conflict and the the genocide of indigenous people by the Guatemalan army during the early 1980s.
...Until you start to ask some questions, about families and grandparents and schooling. All the sudden in the middle of an interview it stares me in the face - "my parents were killed by the army and so there wasn't anyone to pay for me to go to school," "my two children died of hunger while we were hiding in the mountains," "we moved to Cotzal because our village was burned..." Not one person I have met in Guatemala does not have a family member who died during the conflict.
Some of you know the story well - the 36 year conflict, the "scorched earth" strategy against Mayan communities, the support of the US government for these "anti-communist" strategies. And it is a history of oppression that goes back further - posession of lands, dictatorships, colonization, conquest.
Yet life and the resilience of humanity goes on here. People have children and raise them, buy and sell at the market, continue to grow their corn and beans on the hills. It is hard to hold all at once the the heaps of vegetables in the market, the corn stalks a few weeks along, the women doing laundry in the creek, the blaring of tuk-tuk taxis in Nebaj with the real history of violence on these same streets and hillsides. But the massacres, "disappearances," betrayals, refugee camps, are just as much a part of the story as the beauty and joy I have been privileged to witness here.
Multmann writes that our collective patterns of living only become part of our awareness as the victims make the perpectrators aware of what they have done. As an American, then, it is part of my "collective self-experience" to listen to these testimonies of the years of violence that my government supported. To keep listening to the stories about CAFTA and deportations and the failure of U.S. foreign aid projects. For in the listening, the "deliverance from delusion to reality comes." We see the blood on our hands. And then we also hear the utter grace poured out, humbling me as these same communities tell me "welcome" and "come and eat with us."
...Until you start to ask some questions, about families and grandparents and schooling. All the sudden in the middle of an interview it stares me in the face - "my parents were killed by the army and so there wasn't anyone to pay for me to go to school," "my two children died of hunger while we were hiding in the mountains," "we moved to Cotzal because our village was burned..." Not one person I have met in Guatemala does not have a family member who died during the conflict.
Some of you know the story well - the 36 year conflict, the "scorched earth" strategy against Mayan communities, the support of the US government for these "anti-communist" strategies. And it is a history of oppression that goes back further - posession of lands, dictatorships, colonization, conquest.
Yet life and the resilience of humanity goes on here. People have children and raise them, buy and sell at the market, continue to grow their corn and beans on the hills. It is hard to hold all at once the the heaps of vegetables in the market, the corn stalks a few weeks along, the women doing laundry in the creek, the blaring of tuk-tuk taxis in Nebaj with the real history of violence on these same streets and hillsides. But the massacres, "disappearances," betrayals, refugee camps, are just as much a part of the story as the beauty and joy I have been privileged to witness here.
Multmann writes that our collective patterns of living only become part of our awareness as the victims make the perpectrators aware of what they have done. As an American, then, it is part of my "collective self-experience" to listen to these testimonies of the years of violence that my government supported. To keep listening to the stories about CAFTA and deportations and the failure of U.S. foreign aid projects. For in the listening, the "deliverance from delusion to reality comes." We see the blood on our hands. And then we also hear the utter grace poured out, humbling me as these same communities tell me "welcome" and "come and eat with us."
(photo stolen from blog of german volunteer /benschilling.blogspot.com from Dia de las Victimas 2008 - we didn't take photos of this day in February this year, but it looked much the same...)
May 7, 2010
May 6, 2010
pigs and ponderings
I showed her this photo, and she beamed with pride at "mis coches!" (my pigs!). She couldn't get enough of it, kept looking at it and laughing with wrinkles that lit up her whole face. "The pigs have grown since then," she tells me.
As we sat and talked, she tells me about her harvest of beans and chiles and tomatoes that she was selling in the market down the road just this morning. Shows me the peach tree in the yard that is hers, her very own, and the other that is her husband's. Her daughter comes to whisper something in her ear, and she pulls her coin purse out of her belt and gives the six year old a quetzale. "This is it," I kept thinking to myself, "this is exactly what microcredit should do." Starting with a loan worth $62.50 about 6 years ago, this woman has pieced together enough crops and harvests and animals to provide an income that allows her to pull her own money from her skirt for her children, give to their schooling, and fill her day with creative energy that is valued now by her husband.
In a region where many of the women I talk to never hold money for themselves, much less bring any income into the home, she is an exception. Why this worked for her, while in many cases the women who receive these loans hand it right to their husbands, is one of the questions I'm trying to answer through the interviews I've been conducting the past month. Studies on microcredit programs say that when women have income, money is invested more in the family and her ability to contribute to household decisions increases, so it seems a worthwhile goal. Yet promoting women's income here is complex, as the family is the safety net that replaces social security and savings and the role of the man as the jefe of the home is deeply rooted in how families function.
It is a complex web for a white girl to step into - a country with one of the highest femicide rates in the world, where domestic violence is rampant, where most of the women I talk to are illiterate and don't speak Spanish, where my privilege of education, waiting until I am older to have children, and having skills to get a job are unthinkable options. Yet the language I learned of Western feminism is an ill-fitting shoe here; the language that will bring women into places where they raise their own pigs and sell their own peaches at the market must come from their own mouths, their own discoveries, their own dreams. Here in the Ixil it is a language slow to develop, but it is there, an underpinning flow that is creating women's committees and banks and sending at least some daughters to school. A long way to go, for me and for them, in learning this language that will bring women into themselves, the fullness of life they are made for...but yesterday I heard it, heard it in the joy at some pigs.
As we sat and talked, she tells me about her harvest of beans and chiles and tomatoes that she was selling in the market down the road just this morning. Shows me the peach tree in the yard that is hers, her very own, and the other that is her husband's. Her daughter comes to whisper something in her ear, and she pulls her coin purse out of her belt and gives the six year old a quetzale. "This is it," I kept thinking to myself, "this is exactly what microcredit should do." Starting with a loan worth $62.50 about 6 years ago, this woman has pieced together enough crops and harvests and animals to provide an income that allows her to pull her own money from her skirt for her children, give to their schooling, and fill her day with creative energy that is valued now by her husband.
In a region where many of the women I talk to never hold money for themselves, much less bring any income into the home, she is an exception. Why this worked for her, while in many cases the women who receive these loans hand it right to their husbands, is one of the questions I'm trying to answer through the interviews I've been conducting the past month. Studies on microcredit programs say that when women have income, money is invested more in the family and her ability to contribute to household decisions increases, so it seems a worthwhile goal. Yet promoting women's income here is complex, as the family is the safety net that replaces social security and savings and the role of the man as the jefe of the home is deeply rooted in how families function.
It is a complex web for a white girl to step into - a country with one of the highest femicide rates in the world, where domestic violence is rampant, where most of the women I talk to are illiterate and don't speak Spanish, where my privilege of education, waiting until I am older to have children, and having skills to get a job are unthinkable options. Yet the language I learned of Western feminism is an ill-fitting shoe here; the language that will bring women into places where they raise their own pigs and sell their own peaches at the market must come from their own mouths, their own discoveries, their own dreams. Here in the Ixil it is a language slow to develop, but it is there, an underpinning flow that is creating women's committees and banks and sending at least some daughters to school. A long way to go, for me and for them, in learning this language that will bring women into themselves, the fullness of life they are made for...but yesterday I heard it, heard it in the joy at some pigs.
May 2, 2010
hospitality
She let me have her bed for the week I stayed with them, even gave me her shawl to use as a pillow. The first night after dinner around the stove, they urged me to go first in the temazcal, their sauna bath, before my sleepy eyes fell asleep. Isabela mixed the water, hot and cold, for me, so that I wouldn't burn myself, inviting me into the most intimate place of the home and family, where they ease their bones and wash their bodies and give birth to their children. Each night I was a quiet witness to the affection between this mother and father, their six children and grandson - not understanding a word of their banter, but seeing clearly the laughter and enjoyment as Isabela put her feet up on the stove and lingered with her sons and daughters. She even ate the misshapen and lumpy tortillas I made.
There was so much light in this home that only has a candle after dark, among this family who marveled at my headlamp. It was my first week alone here in Guatemala, only not alone at all, falling asleep each night with the warmth of this family's generosity filling my chest. They were awake again at 5am early light, he to the fields, she to the weaving, her daughters to the kitchen. I was supposed to pay for my stay, as it was arranged as part of my work, but Isabela refused to take anything from me when I left.
Hospitality - transcending culture, material wealth, language. They took in a stranger, and loved me. So often I have been the one with a home; to be the sojourner, to receive the gift of hospitality - I am humbled by the abundance of their generosity, startled by the power of hospitality to make way in me for peace and the love of God.
There was so much light in this home that only has a candle after dark, among this family who marveled at my headlamp. It was my first week alone here in Guatemala, only not alone at all, falling asleep each night with the warmth of this family's generosity filling my chest. They were awake again at 5am early light, he to the fields, she to the weaving, her daughters to the kitchen. I was supposed to pay for my stay, as it was arranged as part of my work, but Isabela refused to take anything from me when I left.
Hospitality - transcending culture, material wealth, language. They took in a stranger, and loved me. So often I have been the one with a home; to be the sojourner, to receive the gift of hospitality - I am humbled by the abundance of their generosity, startled by the power of hospitality to make way in me for peace and the love of God.
April 20, 2010
changes come...
It is about time to share with you all the changes that have been brewing for us the last few weeks. The decisions we've made represent weeks of thought, prayer, and conversation, which for the sake of distance we haven't been able to share with all of you. But the end result is that the plan for our time in Guatemala has changed. Many of you asked when we left how long we would be here, what we were doing, and received the fairly vague reply that was as much as we knew from that vantage point.
Several weeks ago, some work opportunities came up for Steven in Montana, starting a process of re-evaluation for us. In the end, we realized several things - we came to Guatemala for me to do fieldwork and a project for Agros, not because this is where we eventually want to call home. We decided that for the longer vision of life we have, it would be best if Steven did not lose another season of work in the mountains of Montana...and in general he has been too long away from that home. After a supportive response from Agros, we decided that we would shorten our time here so that I could accomplish the fieldwork for my project, but that I could then return to the states to complete the analysis and writing of the report for Agros and be near my husband for the summer months.
So...Steven is returning stateside this week to begin preparations for the summer season. You might see him for a brief second in Seattle, but mostly he will be in Western Montana. I'll be here in the Ixil a bit longer to finish interviews before returning to live in Whitefish with Steven for the summer. In some ways these are big changes from our initial vision, yet in other ways we feel like this reshaping of our time here in Guatemala flows clearly with the rest of our life. If you want to explore the wildlands of Western Montana this summer, or join me in a little home in Whitefish for writing days, we'd love to see you...
Several weeks ago, some work opportunities came up for Steven in Montana, starting a process of re-evaluation for us. In the end, we realized several things - we came to Guatemala for me to do fieldwork and a project for Agros, not because this is where we eventually want to call home. We decided that for the longer vision of life we have, it would be best if Steven did not lose another season of work in the mountains of Montana...and in general he has been too long away from that home. After a supportive response from Agros, we decided that we would shorten our time here so that I could accomplish the fieldwork for my project, but that I could then return to the states to complete the analysis and writing of the report for Agros and be near my husband for the summer months.
So...Steven is returning stateside this week to begin preparations for the summer season. You might see him for a brief second in Seattle, but mostly he will be in Western Montana. I'll be here in the Ixil a bit longer to finish interviews before returning to live in Whitefish with Steven for the summer. In some ways these are big changes from our initial vision, yet in other ways we feel like this reshaping of our time here in Guatemala flows clearly with the rest of our life. If you want to explore the wildlands of Western Montana this summer, or join me in a little home in Whitefish for writing days, we'd love to see you...
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