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."

 (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...)