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