I bought this bad boy for 2Q at the Chiquimula market today. It appears to be made out of newspaper and black powder, wrapped in red tissue paper. Some guy named Chucho probably made this in his kitchen, smoking a fat cigar while 10 kids ran around the table. Anyway, I’m gonna blow the crap out of something tonight! Happy Virgin Day!
Mi mama and mi abuelita made it back to Guatemala City this weekend after more than seven years of threatening to come back. I’ve been waiting for this moment since we drove over the La Mesilla border when I could almost imagine the crowd at the airport gate in December. Except, I really had no idea that amid the modernism of the airport there was still that element of total chaos at the door when you’re confronted by a wall of Guatemalan faces, an unbroken blanket of black hair, brown arms waving at you, yelling, whistling, honking, signs dangling crookedly in the air with some pretty bad misspellings.
In cop speak it would be some kind of “functional zoning” to keep the chaos outside the airport doors and give the arriving passengers some time to get it together before the leap. I got my first whiff of it when I returned from visiting mi mama in Florida and it was freefall –I was grateful I didn’t have to pick someone out from the crowd. Brad and I did our usual “hey just park outside the airport and I’ll call you drive-by style” that we’ve perfected by now. I ducked, took cover of flying signs and found a corner where I waited five minutes and slipped right into the car.
I pulled the same move with the folks and it worked well. A lot of it is the timing. So important things to remember:
(1) Have a pre-arranged meeting spot with the arriving guests BEFORE they get on that plane and prepare them for that Leap Into the Guatemalan Wall of People.
(2) Always check the status of the airplane. The last three flights I have either flown on or waited on have been at least 40 minutes late.
(3) If you’re in Antigua and driving, leave 10 minutes right before the plane is scheduled to land and you’ll get there right around the time your arriving guests have exited the plane, made it past customs, picked up their bags and queued up to exit.
(4) Bring food, anything, your guests will love you for it. If not, plan on a pit stop at the Hiper Paiz after the Miraflores Mall because mi mama highly recommends the Q16 buffet. “El pollo con arroz esta bien bueno, mija.”
(5) Have soothing music to make the long drive back. It took us two hours to get back from GUA to Antigua on Dec. 5!
(6) Try to talk some sense into your family so they don’t schedule two flights back to back so you’re stuck in Friday AND Saturday December airport traffic. I dropped the ball on that one.
(7) Pay attention to the door and not the stream of passengers poring out. If you keep your eyes on the door you can make a run inside the iron bar barricade and catch your family member before the GLAZE of confusion sets in and then you have no chance of them noticing you waiting and waving your arms at them.
More on the return of the clan and reverse acculturation in the coming days.
Last night I DJ’d a benefit for the Lions Club Guatemala- they were raising money for Christmas gifts to give to the needy kids around here. I had the honor of sharing the bill with The Horchata Regular Band and Malacates. The Horchatas were your standard neo-ska outfit, all with matching red t-shirts, awkward skanking and tons of early-20’s energy. Malacates was the headline act that got all the cool kids to come out.
DJ’ing this event was just a tad different from my normal steez- the promoter’s unusual requests plus the language barrier provided some great humor and entertainment. After playing a 2.5 hour set, I suddenly became part of an elaborate stage show featuring two hotties from the Gallo beer company. I had ’em bopping around to Swirl People while the MC chattered away about who knows what. FYI there’s always an MC chattering away whenever a soundsystem is present- it’s some sort of Guatemalan tradition. After the T&A show, three couples from the audience were then brought up on stage and I provided a little stop’n’start dance music, taking visual cues from the MC. I can’t exactly tell you all the rules, but it was a really fun game and the crowd was fully into it. After that, I played backing tracks for young female vocalist and her high-strung Dad who made sure I knew exactly what tracks to play even though he gave me a written list. Crazy parents are everywhere I guess. Anyway, her rendition of “Feliz Navidad” was great and got the biggest reaction from the crowd. ¡Good times!
Here’s a short video montage of the Gallo babes, Kara doing her Fly Girl routine at the beginning of the night, and then some stop’n’start fun: Flickr deleted my awesome vid and I threw away the original, but here’s a lil’ bit I re-upped:
Guatemala is hard on the system. From Coban I bring back a cold and chills, as if having internalized the rainy, smokey mountain terrain. I tell mi mama that I am like a baby learning the new bacteria, germs and the underbelly; she tells me I have a lot to learn. I drive back alone from Coban listening to Miles Davis and Doc Watson, Blue Ridge Parkway Tennessee style with my two powerbars, my Nalgene water bottle, overly sweet coffee made by las doñas at the church, and almonds. In the seat next to me is my old Nikon with my telefoto lens for the long mountain shots. There is no shoulder the entire way to stop so I stop in the middle of the road with the few roving cows and take shots. Before I left Santa Cruz all twenty of the women in the radio training crowded around my car and asked me where I was headed. I told them: Guatemala City.
“¿Sola?”
Si, en veces hay que hacerlo. They nodded and that was my blessing, mi agua santa. So I slipped out the street parallel to the calle principal for obvious reasons.
It’s a quiet winding wet road with dense fog that lifts slowly to reveal an expanse of green mountains that raise you thousands of feet above the ground. I share the road with the tractor trailers making their way up the coast and the trees, always the trees towering steeply on both sides where children, older women and frail men carry large bundles of wood from a leather strap wrapped around their foreheads. I want to shuttle them to their homes everyday. Every town has speed bumps which make an awesome opportunity for passing trucks; every town has children by the side of the road watching in the distance, their fingers in their mouths or in their pockets, watching the cars go by. I wave and they stare at me, I think of how strange it must look to them to see a stranger waving so I shift to second gear and pass the next truck. I turn on the CB radio and start chatting. I pass another truck with yet another guy staring at me like he’s never seen a woman drive. I honk and inch my way to El Rancho where it’ll all change.
After El Rancho I’m out of the mountains and I’ve entered pocket-marked roads, narrow stretches through the final cerros and trucks as far as the eye can see. I brace up, eat the first powerbar and put the car in third to pass three trucks in a row. I don’t think el porque tener miedo, I just become a driving machine and roll right into Guatemala City’s Saturday mercado day, rush hour periferico transito where la cuesta, the steep drop into Antigua seems like the driveway to our house.
Thanksgiving slipped in today, somewhere between the thickening green canyons of the Maya Biosphere Reserve protected lands which marks our entrance into Alta Vera Paz and the colorful plastic plates lined up under the light of one bulb, black beans, scrambled eggs and tortillas, held by young indigenous women laughing and listening to the radio. Tired and hungry they huddle next to each other and keep warm like small birds on a wire. They came down from Peten at three in the morning for the first time to Coban to learn how to do radio in their communities and I put one of my small shortwave radios in their hands and they know every station on AM/FM. The Comppa cooperative trainers also journeyed, 14 hours from Honduras; I picked them in Guatemala City from a youth cultural center in Zone 1, three women, one pregnant, backpacks, a big silver bullet suitcase for their training gear, and fearlessness. I drank my cold coffee and watched them load the Tule and took my orders.
I didn’t sleep last night before because I was terrified of making the leap alone into Guatemala traffic, roads, chaos and utter randomness. I put one foot out before I went to bed and the other foot hung on the wing of the plane just waiting for the leap. I tossed in between. In the morning, I had decided. There was only one way I was going to find out who was winning this one. Pues me tire al aire, a los elementos. I stepped out of the shower and said, “Today, I leave the roost.”
As we climbed higher on a two lane road shared by motorcycles, truckers, pedestrians, the occasional sinkhole and car riddled by 20 or more bullets, along with national police doing random checks, I marveled at the drop off straight down into pine, cedar and raw terrain. I avoided head on collisions at steep curves passing camionetas carrying people, animals or beer and did not think for a moment, until now, of how close we always are to death in Guatemala. “En Guatemala hay que vivir a verga,” performance artist Regina Jose Galindo told me during an interview. A verga. A hard word to translate, but in Guatemala you have to live as if you’re getting screwed.
Now I write from a church cultural center in Coban, a big triangle made of cedar. I’ll sleep in the attic with three other trainers in a room full of bunk beds. One floor below are the girls and tomorrow at six our day begins. But in my head there are only triangles because I am sitting on the left wing of the triangular building, writing on a wooden floor that has seen many feet rest their body’s weight and trust. I think of things coming together in the same way, how things mundane become sacred. How we decide to enter the unknown and to trust others. Because of this I’m thankful for presence, for the small lights in the darkness that guide our way.
Our neighbors on the corner are decked out. They’ve got the double-stroke blinking lights that drip over the upstairs porch, the reef with a big red bow on the door, the velvety poinsettias lined up exactly in a straight line in the window ledges, and, of course, inside: the notorious pine tree caresses the top of the white ceiling and extends halfway into the living room. Presents have started collecting underneath. At night I snuck over there to marvel at their glory:
It’s contagious because the neighbors next door have a tree in place as well. Is it a coincidence that its the native Guatemalans who have it together enough to get the tree up before Black Friday? An online search for “Where to buy a pine tree in Antigua?” produces all kinds of random things, including Hiper Paiz’s (our Walmart) upcoming Christmas specials. I close the window and sigh. I want a tree farm, I want to plant a tree for the one we kill with one fell swoop with our Salvadorean machete. I want to hike up a mountain to pick the right one and throw it over our shoulders and triumphantly descend with pine needles scraping our skin until a rash becomes our medal. I want my hands to smell of bark. Am I asking for too much? Tomorrow, I will knock on the neighbor’s door and praise their tree and their foresight, but mostly I will ask them where they got it. It’ll be my first Christmas in Guatemala since I was a kid and the tree is the harbinger. How can I just walk past it without paying due respect?
Monterrico, originally uploaded by newmaya.
My people are coastal people. They are from the Caribbean side of Guatemala, out by Puerto Barrios, so close to the border with Belize that the saunter is equally slow and unyielding. I tell people in Antigua I was born by the coast because I identify with the blanket of heat, sun and salty air that makes coastal people a little more extroverted, easy going and more open like the flip-flops they wear to embrace the elements.
Today we headed south to Monterrico, where the ocean floor drops off very steeply after only 20- 40 feet, and the endless stretch of black volcanic beach is like moon rock that causes your feet to melt with the heat. The sun blared, the Pacific swelled and the shade was the crook in your arm as you lay your head on your towel. Raw and intense and in many ways it also reminded me of Key West and that 7-mile bridge that lifts you up above water and suddenly plops you back into small stretches of land and marsh. We lasted about an hour and then headed over to Johnny’s for cold batidos, fish tacos and ceviche and watched the ATVs speed by with four or five people sprawled over every inch of it. As the sun set we made our way back drinking a chilled coconut, driving through numerous fires from garbage being burned, car accidents, flares and finally pitch darkness where the outline of Pacaya was a reminder that we were headed inland again.
I’ve been gone for a week from Guatemala and already I missed the laneless Roosevelt drag, the fearless pedesterians zizagging between car pile ups, the “va pues” between sentences, the unbroken green canopy of the elephantom drop leading into Antigua, and, of course, the sunsets. Brad and I stared in awe at this one today:
Tampa International airport has free WIFI, laptop workstations, and an integrated domestic-international terminal that makes life easy at 5:15 AM. By the time my plane is called, I have downloaded five TED episodes, All Songs Considered, the NY Times Front Page and a few documentaries from the BBC , blogged and done my first fix of online news. I’ll be back in Guate in a couple of hours and have much to write about. Here is my scene of airport paradise (note the boiled eggs, pear, apple and a copy of the New York Times in a plastic bag):
My step-father died so I am headed back to the United States to be with mi mama to spend more time with her and, apparently, the Dallas airport as well. While easy and rather cheap to get a flight back for only $630 with a one-day advance, I am always amazed at how a flight that normally takes between 3-4 hours from 
Guatemala to Florida can take 12 hours because direct flights from Guatemala are hard to come by. So I have been in Dallas for the past five hours, two more to go, doing my time in layover land.
What most impressed me today, however, is the Guatemala City airport – sleek, shiny, clean, modern. It’s the most well-thought and intimate airport I’ve experienced. I walked into it and a smile cut across my utterly dumbfounded and sleep-deprived face at 6:15 AM.
My first memory of the Guatemala City airport was watching my mother leave from the second floor, my head poking out from between two wooden railings into this large open courtyard, all indoors, with one set of glass doors leading into it and the area where you checked in your bags. She turned and waved back at me and disappeared into the security check and then the gates beyond headed to the US. I remember how the light streamed through the dirty windows and the vendors piled up against the entrance, the dirt road and the wooden planks around the small moat created by the rain. The taxis weaved around each other and honked incessantly.
This morning, the sun’s rays reflected from the cool blue of the glass of the second floor where a neat lined formed as two people took traveller’s passports at the entrance and everyone else waited patiently around a railed section. Inside neat lines moved quickly and attendants walked around helping people fill out their forms.
I bought a Prensa Libre from a woman walking inside and as I tossed my bag over my shoulder, I realized how much Guatemala had changed and how much I was changing with it, just by being here to witness it.
When I was younger and living in the remotest part of North Carolina, getting a bike was the equivalent of having a car – I didn’t have to ride the “cheese wagon,” the bus to school where I was the only immigrant Latina. With a bike I could just hop on its K-Mart squeaky clean wheels, and 25 sweaty minutes later I wheeled up to school with one pant leg rolled up, muddy shoes and lopsided backpack. Small price to pay for having your own wheels and no waiting for a ride or being pushed to the back of the bus. I had the same feeling today when I bought my bike- a feeling of elation and freedom. No longer will I stare longingly at the construction workers’ bikes propped up between the new tin roofs and cinder blocks at El Calvario. No longer would the caravans of other bikes and mopeds heading into Antigua remind me to my pedestrian plight. Today, I got a new bike. It’s a no-name brand but it came with an incredible pedal-powered headlight! Here’s my baby getting the full treatment by two store employees and Brad:
I feel connected to the world again and it’s as simple as getting my New Yorker to our house- with no special arrangements made at all. I just called The New Yorker, gave them my forwarding address in Guatemala and they promised it would be at my doorstep, two days later than most folks in the United States (they reassured this skeptic). I shrugged in disbelief, but figured it was worth the experiment. They also promised they wouldn’t charge me the extra $1.50 international shipping fee since I was in the middle of my subscription cycle. Sure, why not. Let’s try this out and see if mail does get to Guatemala. And here it is on our counter top:
Inspired by this event and now with the knowledge that I had two ways of getting things shipped to our doorstep – DHL delivered an almost 2 pound envelope to our doorstep for $31 three days after being dropped off in Oakland – I knew it was time to find the happy medium and get our own postal box at the appropriately named PostalBox at Interior Enlaces on 6ta. Ave. Norte. No.1, 7832-5546. We pre-paid the 20 pound weight and paid the $15 one-time inscription fee. It was Q500 even and we got our own “apartment” number. Anything that comes to our box gets shipped automatically and the weight gets deducted from our pre-paid amount. Economist, Harpers and Atlantic Monthly come on over!
BradElectro played his first Antigua gig this year at the opening of Club Fotográfico de Antigua’s photography exhibit in Las Capuchinas, an ancient convent of all places, and introduced his special recipe of house music to the art-loving audience. We had a town crier proclaim the event official, and the rain stopped long enough for the crowd to warm up to each other. For me the best part was actually preparing for the show, where we shared the intimacy of hanging up our work and sequencing the pictures on the wall. I also appreciated learning the technique of hanging matted pictures using fish line, toothpicks and masking tape. For a tutorial, watch a video of Nelo the master at work.
I am horribly late in posting these pictures from Sumpango, Sacatepéquez’s Kite Festival on Nov.1, pero mejor tarde que nunca. Besides I’ve been thinking about kites. I’ve been thinking of them in the obvious revived Maya custom of using giant kites to send messages to ancestors during Day of the Dead, but also in the way Guatemalans often fly kites with their children as a pastime on Sundays or wherever there are open spaces with even the slightest bit of wind. And so I catch myself staring at how teaching a child how to fly a kite here is a central image, incredibly captivating, about teaching a child individuation and independence. While similar teachable moments exist in the United States, I can’t say that it’s as common a sight to behold as it is here.
Today was the first day I was able to function and at remain upright for a few hours in Antigua, flyering for our photo club’s upcoming exhibit on Nov. 6th at 7 PM, with music by our very own DJ Brad Electro. I had two of my photos printed and we picked up matte board and foam core for mounting them. I tried not to cough on the lovely flyers created by our club’s illustrious leader, Leonel Mijangos Hernández “Nelo”. Quoting Antigua Daily Photo here’s more about the event:
The exhibition is a part of the celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Consejo para la Protección de La Antigua Guatemala. The exhibition will have two objectives: to introduce the club to the local community and to collaborate with a local association in need of support through the sale of the exhibited photographs.
The opening of the exposition will be celebrated November 6 at 7 pm with a musical presentation by DJ BradElectro. JP’s Rumbar will be sponsoring the event with cocktails.
If you will be in Guatemala in November, you are cordially invited to join us and to purchase high-quality photographs to support a local association in need of funds.
I like being sick, it’s true, because it slows me down and forces me to pay attention to things. That said, I can always count on Guatemala knocking me off my feet for at least a week with germs that make me wish I hadn’t used so much antibacterial everything in the United States. I did my best to do the just walk it off and attend to business as usual: heading West to “Alaska” near Santa Catarina to help some friends on Saturday, going to Sumpango for the Kite Festival on Sunday, heading off to Guatemala City at 4:30 AM to get my Alaskan friends into Roosevelt Hospital (another post on that), but come Monday night I couldn’t even muster enough energy to check my email and my teeth actually hurt.
“It’s official, I’ve never seen you this sick before,” Brad declared at noon while I was sprawled across the bed. I called myself on it because on Thursday night I lectured mi abuelita on the importance of not taking Western medicine all the time and just letting the body learn what it needed to learn about the germs surrounding it. Public health babble aside I did stumble upon two magic potions for revival:
Mar y Tierra Restaurant’s fish soup with corn, ayote, potatoes and wiskil. I had them make it this way for me because crabs, snails and shrimp freak me out. This pescatarian special to revive dead people from germy, mucusuosy graves is Q70. They do take out so I was grateful: 2 a. Avenida Sur, final #81, Antigua GT 5399-4345, cell: 5912-9416.
The other remedy was quite unexpected. In my sickly sweaty state I walked into my semestresses’ shop (because I simply had to be productive in some way or another) and she looked at me and shook her head, “Pobresita!” She called her husband who looked at me from underneath his bifocals, shook his head and said, “I think you need to give her the recipe.”
“Mire pues,” she said and I knew I needed to pay attention. “Usted es Guatemalteca y es importante que sepa esto para poder cuidar de otros. Pues aquí se lo escribo, es fácil.” I always worry when I hear the phrase: “it’s going to be easy, just remember that.” She wrote down the letters: T-O-M-E.
Once you have all these ingredients, boil them together, add the honey and perhaps a lime for good measure. Even though we didn’t have ocote, we cooked it all and I drank it all up. It was very soothing, but now that the germ warefare continues and night presses on, I think sleep will also do the trick. My kingdom for an ocote!
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, has been with us for centuries– from French monks to German Nazis to Mexican lowriders– and of course it’s all over the signage of Guatemala! If you read anything important in this country, i.e. religious or market-related, chances are it’s been set in blackletter type. Actually it’ll most likely be scripted by hand, just like those old European dudes used to do. In all fairness, the degree of technical mastery of your average tienda signpainter –vs– an old school Bible-scribing monk is debatable, but hey it’s all goth. Anyway, being the thoughtful visual observer I am, I pondered to myself: “Well, my graphic design work is important. Why not re-brand with some bitchin’ blackletter?” And so I did, on the splash page of my portfolio!
I got this from Mashable in my random searches for phones that might work well in Guate. Now where’s the new Android phone in there? I am also wondering when people will start reviewing these in developing countries based on what’s most compatible with networks down here.
My relationship with my Blackberry Pearl is on the rocks since we got to Guatemala. We don’t talk as much anymore- when we first started it was hard to tell my hand from its curvy little frame. Now I’m looking at other phones, I admit it, not just once in a while, but every time when we go out, I look at other mobile-users bending lovingly towards their iPhones, their Sidekicks or the new Ericssons. Instead I keep my Blackberry in my bag, buried beneath the lint, small coins and religious flyers deep at the bottom. I pick up my cheap Tigo phone on which I can listen to radio for free but have to write phone numbers down in my notebook.
It stopped being us against the First World, showing them who rules in this EDGE land of simple data transfer to Blackberry configured RIM networks and manual WAP configurations. But when I left AT&T’s data plan it was 12 hours of Tigo customer “support.” Back then I believed we could do it, we didn’t need to jail break each other, we could conquer the world, and not be afraid of PDOA (Public Display Of Access). Imagine a PDOA with an iPhone here on the street in Guatemala or on the chicken bus, riding through the smokey sunset. We laughed at them. But now I have to use the browser on my phone to get to my Gmail, my Twitter, my Facebook, my WordPress; things just aren’t the same without the shortcuts of love we had for each other everyday.
But today when the most competent of the Tigo guys I’ve spoken with all week said to me: “Seño, fíjese, que ya no podemos hacer nada ni AT&T ni Tigo ni Blackberry porque es el software de Blackberry y va tener que llevarlo a installer software para que trabaje con otras frecuencias.” Well, something broke. Shattered is really the word and it was my faith in the crackberry that has been my best friend for three years, three countries, three phones (the same model), just a different SIM card in each country and it was us and the open road. So I’m at a point where my friends are telling me, have you considered therapy? Have you tried time apart? Seeing other phones? I’m not sure I want to invest any more time in it but, I’m not ready to leave either. I mean we still look good together, but we’re more like friends. Just friends. Maybe it’s for the best.
The hardest part about getting to know Guatemala is the lack of signage and good directions. Going north is “para arriba” (you want me to drive towards the sky?), “recto” cannot be confused with “derecho” (as they say in Mexico) – a direction indicating you need to go straight, “para aya” could mean right or left, and “no esta muy lejos” could mean it’s 1 km or 10 km away. It’s also true, as our friend Rudy Giron informs us, that when all else fails, “just follow the hand” because words don’t often capture the complexity of gestured directions. Very few of the towns have names so you never really know when you’re there. The best signage I’ve seen so far besides Antigua is Jocotenango which has a wall painted with its name on the narrow left side of the street as your trying to swerve incoming traffic. Otherwise, it’s rare to see a city sign making it clear where you’ve just arrived. In speaking to a colleague at Namaste who lives near Santiago, I am informed, that it’s a larger problem with infrastructure and municipalities getting funds for things such as city and road signage. Some towns started hand painting their signs on cardboard, but when the rains came, well, it poured.
Knowing this we embark on our first “excursion” into nature since we got to Guatemala about three weeks ago (yes we’ve been working hard). We play it safe and head for Finca El Pilar for some hiking, bird watching and swimming. The hardest part, of course, is finding decent directions to get there. So we do our research in several guides, give the bird sanctuary a call (no one answers), the Antigua tourist directory, Inguat, read Revue mag’s article on Pilar (a map would have worked better than the vague directions at the end), but to no avail. So we take to the streets to pool the collective knowledge about how to get there. “Hay seño es para aya! Recto recto y despues sube!” For how many kilometers? “Hay, esta cerca.”
We do a few roundabouts near our house and we find out that it’s about a twenty minute walk through a cobblestoned road with greenhouses lining part of the path, wildflowers and finally, the finca itself which looks like the pedrería that it is. “They sell rocks here? Huh? I thought we were going hiking?” Brad says. That’s what the hand painted sign on the tall wall in front of us says, I tell him, and then we see the pools on the left and the tall looming mountain which I am well aware we’re going to climb. Brad doesn’t know yet, but he’s about to find out what 5 km uphill through fincas and a canopy of banana leaves feels like.
