Small things.

Today the second-grader we live with braided my hair.  It wasn’t until then that I realized how much I missed being touched – being new here, there aren’t the hugs and closeness I’m used to at home among family and friends.  Having this seven year old chat my ears off about Christmas and New Years and her family traditions as she combed and braided up my hair, I felt at home and safe in a way I had not yet experienced here.

We cooked our first meal with garlic tonight.  The smell of it was heavenly.  Hadn’t been able to find it in the market until yesterday, when the candle-man had some braids tucked among the paraffin.  Delicious…

My shower was hot.  Really hot.  And since it is usually not quite warm enough, I endured some scalding for the pure joy of it.  Never know what you’ll get.

A good evening in Guatemala…

a meeting

Doña Maria invited us to eat lunch with her, in her family kitchen. Hot potato and corn stew, scooped from our bowls by tamalitos- so hot it made my face sweat and Steven loved it. Then we followed her into the rest of her home, where the wooden-plank beds and a bench were at once bedroom and sitting room. Her house is one of the most cared-for we’ve seen, cinderblock with a real cement floor, and pictures from a calendar thoughtfully stuck up on the wall. Through the window into the kitchen, Maria shooed the chicken from the bowl of corn.

We borrowed the room for our meeting, and more than a dozen women gathered around. I began again the same introduction I had been using for the last week, that we were volunteers here, and I was coming to talk to women to see how Agros projects were affecting them and how they might support them more. Steven was hoping to take some photos of their projects. And then my questions began – Why do they join the communal banks? Have they ever owned land before Agros came? What do they hope for their children? Each answer is something so basic to their daily life, you can sense they are not accustomed to having to explain. Yet at the end, a moment of magic. I ask them if my questions are strange, and they tell me that they like it, they are glad to be reminded of what they want for their children, education and to be able to have work.

And then, before we left, we took a walk to see the work these women were doing to bring income into the home, some with the help of an Agros micro-loan and others on their own. Outside of the meeting, showing us the work of their hands, their capacity and beauty and pride came out…but just look below and you’ll see. As usual, Steven’s work is better than words…

one month in guatemala...

eggs, beans, and tortillas
spanish grammar, ixil words
mango season
roosters
communal banks and weaving projects
flowing lava
the snow pea harvest
interviews and transcribing them
chicken buses and microbuses

Coffee and Volcanoes

 Shade grown coffee

Coffee Flowers

Coffee Berries

Women tending drying coffee

coffee drying

 Smoke Ring, Vol Pacaya

Kitchen

Shafts of light filter between the wooden planks that make up the walls of this square room.  We come in to warm our tortillas on her fire, to gather some heat away from the rain outside.  We crouch on low stools near the blaze on her earthen floor.  While we sit in silence, the cat and chickens and children, the pat, pat, pat as she hand makes tortillas from her corn masa (dough) seem a part of the quiet.  She turns the tortillas on her iron cooking slab over the fire, adds an egg to small pan on the slab that serves as her stove, pours the coffee from a scalding earthen pot  - all with her bare hand, accustomed to the heat.  Through the slats in the walls the children’s eyes stare inquisitively – as soon as I look they run away.  They tell us the children are afraid because they think we have come to vaccinate them.  She serves the beans and eggs and tortillas, throws some maize to the chickens, and feeds the baby on her breast in the corner.

The next day, another kitchen, another fire.  The family this time, gathered around.  We ask for a photo, the parents are glad and you can see their pride as they gather their children around them.  They show us pacaya, and how to eat it.  They laugh with us at our ignorance.

We tread lightly, entering into the intimate place – kitchen, hearth.  Invited, but still strangers.  We leave hushed, hardly believing where we have been.  Only because we come with the community organizer from Agros.

Later we talk with the women in the schoolhouse.  We talk of their challenges, their committee, take a tour of their projects.  But it was the kitchen where we could share with them.  We are hopeful to spend time in one or two communities as our project goes forward, to share more meals in the kitchen.

Nebaj

The last few weeks have seemed to be half a year, so much has entered our experience. It is amazing to realize how many hours I spent in college reading and reading about this place and this people, and in less than two weeks among them we have learned more than in a year and a half. Of how they live, of how to walk and move here. Nebaj is a cacophonous town of around 20,000 – construction, roosters, buses, trucks, dogs, vendors, music – neither developed nor rural, a chaotic convergence of the two. We are learning to walk the streets here, to buy papaya and tortillas and bananos at the market. We even have a little room in a house we can call our home for now – with very peach-colored walls.

Nebaj is all at once beautiful – the folds of the green mountains that hold it in, the ornate weaving of the women’s huipiles and headdresses – and difficult – the garbage everywhere on the streets, the rank pollution of the stream through town, the constant noise. We are certainly at the end of the road for travelers – everywhere we go out from here we are the only white faces we see, something that is hard to forget with the calls of “Hello! Gringo!” from all the curious children we pass by.

We are reminded in our daily existence that we are visiting, that no matter how much we may come to understand this place and its people, we still will be always marked as foreigners. We realize our longing for a place to call home…I suppose that is what we are always searching for in this life. Now is a season to know in our bones that we are strangers in this world…

 

Smoke from morning cooking fires settles in Nebaj

Nebaj, Quiche, Guatemala

  

road to Acul