So many many people in Guatemala have cell phones. And it begs the question – how can people so “poor” afford something like a cell phone? And if there’s no electricity, how do they charge them?

I think this is a really good question – one that I had when I arrived here. It’s a great example of viewing an issue abroad with the same lense we use to view that issue in the US. This is really easy to do because we rarely have any other reference point with which to make sense of things like this. To the contrary, cell phones in developing countries, vs. cells in developed countries could not be more different. I’m not an expert on this, but I can share the info that I have gleaned….and please take it all with a grain of salt because I really feel inadequate in explaining complex issues like this….but….. 

You can get a new cell phone for Q100-150 in Guatemala (between $13-20). Used ones are probably half that and of course there is a black market for phones too (I don’t know the prices, but we’re talking stolen phones that might be even cheaper). Families also share phones or phones get loaned out or passed from one person to another in some cases. And most people keep the same phone for as long as humanly possible (7-10 years!).

You pay for the minutes as you go – there are no “plans” and contracts with companies here. This is how almost every country EXCEPT the US operates with cell phones. Outgoing calls cost you minutes, but incoming calls are free. Since you have no plans, your phone number would never get shut off if you run out of minutes. 

In Guate, there are special promotion days every week where if you buy minutes, you can double or triple your money. So you could buy $1.00 worth of minutes, but on a triple day it would actually be worth $3.00. That would allow you to talk for a half an hour on outgoing calls. And since all incoming calls are free, you could technically never buy minutes, but still be able to talk when others called you. 

Calls in Guatemala are SHORT since every minute is charged. And people are also obviously extremely understanding if you don’t respond to a voice mail because you have to use minutes to call your voice mail. I’ve left many people here voice mail messages and they always say they haven’t gotten any of them, and I think they simply don’t check voicemail as a matter of policy – to save money. 

Also, since in an informal work market (jobs like selling vegetables or shining shoes) your salary fluctuates, maybe you just buy minutes if you have money at the time. Most things here are a kind of day-to-day basis. People only buy Q10 worth of minutes at a time, or they buy the food they need for just that day….but there’s not the same sense of hording things in case you run out. If you run out of minutes and don’t have the money to buy any more, you’re just out until you get some extra money to buy more – be it a day or a month or a year. 

I think realistically, if you buy an initial phone for about $7, which you have for 5 years, you could get by spending $1-$2.00 on minutes each month and be totally fine here. That’s a really different picture of cost of cell phones here than cost in the US. As for me, I bought my phone brand new for $12.50 and usually spend between $5/month on minutes. So that’s the more “expensive” end of things.

That being said, there is a definitely difference in income between the people who have cells here and those who don’t. For instance, a farmer living in a one-room house with 9 other people and doesn’t have a source of work with a stable income probably would NOT own a cell phone. While someone living in a 4 room house with 5 other people, some of whom have stable jobs in the formal work sector would be more likely to have a phone. To our eyes, they may look the same and both may be dirt poor by US standards. But they are different situations.

In terms of the electricity, it’s similar. Electricity, while outrageously expensive here (and that is why you would NEVER find a Guatemalan in the highlands using electricity for a space heater, when they could just add a couple more blankets on their bed), is actually available in many places. But you just use a little bit. If there isn’t any available, you might charge your phone at another place like a friend’s house, school, work, etc. Many people splice the electricity lines from the city and run an illegal line into their house (which is extremely dangerous, by the way), in which case, using too much isn’t the problem – but having it go off and on all the time is. Electricity and water are never garunteed all day or every day and spliced lines are unstable and break often – esp. during rainy season.  And again, the whole mentality here is different – if you haven’t checked your phone in a week because your electricity has been off, well, people will just find another way to get a hold of you and no one gets ruffled about it. 

Like people all over the world who don’t have enough money, they might not always spend it in a way that would make sense to people who do have enough money (ie, people like us). This brings to mind the case of folks in New Orleans who just lost their homes, but spent government checks on video game systems after Katrina instead of other things. I don’t really get that, but then again, as a middle-class person I don’t really understand the mentality of extreme poverty. So instead of judging how they spend their money, I try to admire the resilliance and the innovation I’ve seen all around me this country!

Coming to Guate, I had no stereotypes already about Indigenous people here. They look, act, and talk completely different from the Indigenous people in the US so to make a comparison isn’t logical. Not only have I heard close to nothing about Guatemala in my education, I haven’t seen (that I can remember) any images of this country or it’s people in the news or on popular TV. I haven’t read any books or magazines with any mention of Guatemala. Maybe in DC, I had read policy briefs that included the country in a sea of sterile statistics. But basically, I have no reference to fall back on to distinguish between Ladinos (those of Spanish descent) and Indigenas (those native to Guate, who still make up about 50% of the population).

To me, all Guatemalans are simply Guatemalans – and simply fall into the catagory of “not like me”. The one clear distinction my untrained eye could see the first day we were here was that obviously some of them still dress in traditional clothes and some do not. But it didn’t register with me what that means, what kinds of prejudices I might apply to that.

After you’re in Guatemala for a while, you start uncovering the racism against the Indigenous people here. Not only are they recovering from an ugly civil war, where the government basically enforced a policy of genocide against the Indigenas for 37 years, but for hundreds of years, these people have been systematically oppressed, forcibly converted to Christianity, violated, raped, killed, stolen from, and humiliated by Spanish Conquistadors. For centuries, like African and Native Americans in our country, the government has poured out racist propaganda which has been reinforced in schools, official government documents, pop culture, and family life. And now it is simply part of the culture. 

Why? Because they are “different” than those of Spanish descent. And because they were sitting on a wealth of minerals and lucratave natural resources.

Obviously, like those oppressed minority groups in the US, the Indigenous population make up the majority of the poor and are largely illiterate. They do the dirty jobs like domestic work, janitorial, and farming. They have scarce access to education, health facilities, or the political arena, and as a result fall further and further into marginalization and poverty. Perhaps most egregious, is the fact that there are 23 different Indigenous languages still spoken in Guatemala and there is absolutely NO acknowledgement of this fact. If you can’t speak Spanish, you will not understand one word your president or any other goverment official says in this country. And you can’t go to school. Worse yet, if you speak Spanish, but don’t write it, you don’t understand what you’re voting for or even know how to sign your name to legal documents. Basically, you are stripped of your political and civil rights by extension of being illiterate. 

Like cases of banned Hijabs (Muslim scarves that women cover their heads with) in French schools, there are cases of banned traditional clothing in schools here. In other words, you must choose education or your cultural identity, but cannot have both. And similarly to Islam, it is the women who carry the brunt of the racism because of their more specific dress (the Indigenous men here rarely wear traditional clothes anymore).

 

Indigenous kids - a girl, wearing traditional clothes, next to her brother, who is in modern clothes.

 

 

In cases where girls can go to school in their traditional clothes, the racism and prejudice is out of control. A common site here is one, lone Indigena girl walking down the street with her head down, as Ladino school girls hurl insults at her from across the street. Men on the bus will give their seat to me, a white woman, or to Ladino women, but never to an Indigenous women who is usually carrying a baby on her back and a giant basket on her head.

Never in my life has racism seemed so ludacris. To my untrained eye, and my un-propagandacized-soul, everyone here seems the same. I have never been truly free of subliminal messages that I’ve received all my life in the US about an ethnic group that is different from me.  I cannot distinguish between Ladinos and Indigenas inside of myself – they are simply all Guatemalans. 

What a stroke of luck. I’m viewing racism without context, a completely new way of looking at it, and of feeling about it.

 As a result, the idiocy of prejudice and racism has never seemed so pronounced. While Ladinos are also victim to years of propaganda, lies taught in schoolbooks and societal pressure, this systematic oppression of the Indigenous population makes Ladinos look like complete idiots. In the US, of course, it’s more complicated for me. As a white person, I understand the complexities of the racism issues in the US – not all whites are racist. We also have a lot of different ethnic groups in the US (in Guatemala, there are just 2 visible ones, Ladino and Indigena) and they are all racist against each other. There are African Americans who struggled so bravely for civil rights, now advocating AGAINST the civil rights of LGBT folks. There are white people who are ok with black people, but not Arabs. Arabs hate the Persians and Persians hate the Arabs. African Americans blame Latinos for taking away jobs. It is a mess.

But here, I’ve seen it like a child, ignorant of all the complexities that go into making prejudice and racism functional. To me, it’s just black and white. There are Ladinos who are discriminating against Indigenas because they wear different clothes. How much lower can your IQ get? They don’t talk to each other, don’t make friends with each other. How much more of an asshole can you be? Oppressing 50% of your population induces crime and violence and brings down the integrity of your entire country. What kind of an idiot self-sabotages like that? There is no question, no complexity in my mind here. Racism has never seemed more illogical, more evil, more completely opposite of what God would want from us.

In the US, racism infuriates me, but somehow in a duller way. I’m used to it. I grew up all around it. I have less hopes of it getting better in my lifetime. Sometimes, I don’t even notice it. But, experiencing racism here infuriates me with a hot anger. It is completely intolerable. 

And really, I’ve never felt like a bigger idiot myself for the prejudices and stereotypes that I carry in my own heart.

I’m so glad I’ve gotten this perspective as I head back to the US, back to the maze of racial prejudices that lay just below the surface of politically correct words. I feel like I’ve been able to see this issue from a different point of view and I will carry that insight with me back into my own environment.

Aside from work, there is a lot of other stuff going on.

Mig and I continue to work on our Spanish and we’ve started private salsa lessons too! It’s so cheap here – we pay less than $6/hour for private salsa and $3/hour for private Spanish. Can you believe that? 

We signed up on the CouchSurfers website which links people who need places to stay with people who have places to stay! This week, a French couple have been staying with us. They are riding their bikes from Alaska to Argentina (over the course of 20 months) and are researching microfinance organizations on the way. We had a great time hearing all their stories this week! Here is their website (in French, English, and Spanish!)  http://www.pladusol.org if you want to learn more about the trip!

 

Sara and Sebastian leaving our place. They will be riding through Gautemala for the next 4 days before they hit El Salvador!

 

This is as close as we'll get to biking the Americas!

 

 

 

Also, I have also applied to grad schools for non-profit administration programs and am impatiently awaiting the responses! I applied to UPenn, UMiami, John Carroll (Cleveland). I should have my answers back by the first week of April and then we’re going to make a decision. However, we’re looking at flying home mid-April no matter what to get ready for the wedding and so that I can work work work to save for school!

The economy in Guatemala is HORRIBLE right now as well as the rest of the world. You always hear about other countries being “tied” to the US economy, but seeing it is a different story. The biggest source of income for this country is money sent back from documented or undocumented immigrants in the states – so that has been cut tremendously. Tourism is another source of income, but many Americans aren’t traveling right now, so hotels, restaurants and tour agencies are struggling and shutting down.  Basics, like corn and beans (which, for some families, are the only things they eat every day) are really expensive and many families simply can’t afford to eat anymore. Of course the economy is in the news, but there is a general sense of apathy about it here. There isn’t a whole lot the average person can do — except wait for what happens in the US….it’s unbelievable.

In the midst of all of this, we feel like we have so much to be thankful for: a good family, being born in a country with lots of opportunities (and good roads!), always having enough to eat, and being able to go on this incredible journey for the past year. It’s times like these that really put life into perspective. We are truly blessed!

In January, I went on a trip with an organization that is funding sustainable agriculture programs in Guatemala and Honduras. Over 10 days, we visited close to 20 different family farm projects all working with natural, organic and sustainable ways to produce food for their families and purify and secure clean water in their areas. It was absolutely incredible!

I made two videos of the trip if you want to check it out:

Guatemala:

Honduras:

Now I’m going back into those communities and learning more about the projects so that I can send reports back to the organization in the US.

I’m also volunteering at a battered women’s shelter in the city 2 days a week. My job is to play with the kids and help them with their homework. It’s basically free daycare while the women try to find jobs and transition out of the shelter. Guatemala only has 2 women’s shelters in the whole country, which is pretty shocking. They need more, trust me.

Miguel has volunteered a bit with a project building a new school and has basically spent that time digging into the side of a mountain with a pick ax for a couple of hours. The same project is also running an organic compost project that we’re taking our fruits and veggies to.

So that’s the update on the volunteer front. We’re learning a lot!

We went to see the Mayan ruins, the ancient city of Tikal, on our way to Belize. Tikal is in the Peten region of Guate – in the northern part, in the midst of tropcial rainforest. The ancient Mayans of Tikal lived from about 900 BC to 900 AD when their giant civilization collapsed quite suddenly – no one knows the reason. They estimate the city had about 200,000 occupants.

Tikal is a city that is about 3-4 square miles, and is one of (if not, THE) largest ruins site in the Mayan world. Mayan ruins stretch across Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.  There was no metal whatsoever found in Tikal, so the city was made with limestone from flints and obsidian. Oh my goodness.

I’m almost through the Popol Vuh (the Mayan Bible) and the seeing the correlations between that and Tikal was interesting. The round stones and gravestone looking things in front of all the temples were for sacrifices – some of them, human. (You can see that in the first picture) In the Popol Vuh, there is a part where the sun is so hot it turns the gods into stones and the people have to pour blood sacrifices into the mouths of the stones to help the gods turn into flesh again… There is a ball court in Tikal and in the Popol, the  Mayans played a ball game that had great significance in the formation of people. In Tikal, 4 is clearly a sacred number, with great difference paid to the 4 corners of the earth and the 4 directions. The temples in Tikal are built in directional lines, to make certain shadows during fall, spring, summer and winter solstice. The first men that were created in the Popol Vuh were 4 men.

We were actually there on DEC 21 – Winter Solstice and we got to see a Mayan ceremony, performed on the contemporary alter (you can see it’s just a round, cement dent in the Grand Plaza). The ceremony was pretty touristy, but interesting nonetheless. Only 2% of Guatemala’s population still practices only Mayan religion (the rest are Catholic, or mix the two, and Evangelicals are on the rise too). There was lots of burning offerings for the ancestors. The shaman opened by saying “People ask where are the [ancient] Maya? Where did they go? But we want the world to know we are right here – we have the legacy of our ancestors and all that they left us. We are not going anywhere and we wish for the unity of all people.” 

And it was pretty heartbreaking to be in the midst of what was once a huge, rich society, full of life and hundreds of thousands of people — and to witness the Mayan people today. Today, they are discriminated against in modern Guatemalan society, conquered, poor, subdued, harassed and oppressed from one war after another  by the Spanish, the Canadians, then the Americans, and now their own government (of which NONE are Mayan representatives).  They are asked to vote in elections where they can’t read the ballots (many don’t speak Spanish and many are illiterate), they are relegated to domestic and farming jobs, they suffer constant discrimination. My old Spanish teacher used to wear her local indigenous clothing to school and her teacher prohibited her from carrying the school flag because of it, even though she had the top grades in the class and was supposed to get that privilege. Another Spanish teacher I had dated a Mayan girl when he was a teenager – not only was his family PISSED but they could never go into clubs together, getting turned away because of her indigenous clothing….it goes on….

Tikal means “the accoustic city”. Our guide took us to the first temple (it’s the first picture below) and had us face the temple and then he clapped. You could hear the echo, even though we couldn’t see another temple near us. All the temples echo off of one another. In lots of places in the city you can clap or call and you can hear it miles away echoing off another temple. Wow.

They had cleared out all of the trees during their tenure there – and it’s hard to imagine because as you can see, the rainforest has reclaimed this land! Everywhere you walk in Tikal, you can basically assume you’re walking on top of an original structure – with most of them still unexcavated because it’s so expensive. Also, the Mayans deliberately destroyed alot of their older works of art and buildings, and built on top of them (perhaps when one king died to erase his memory when the new king took power?)…so there are layers upon layers of buildings all getting higher and higher – closer to the gods.

Also, the temples were originally covered in a plaster and painted bright red and blue. Many masks and sculptures were carved into the sides of the buildings, but time has eroded them away. You have to use your imagination, but this city was every bit as fascinating and sophisticated as ancient Rome.

There is very little remaining art from Tikal – and it’s not enough to be very telling about how the people there lived. Like Egypt, they found tombs under the temples, the elite (or kings?) buried with every day items for the after life – jars, pots, servants, jewelry. And like Egypt, they had many gods for everything – the sun, the moon, the cinema, the airplane, the cranky neighbor….maybe? The hieroglyphics are almost cartoonish compared with Egyptian art.

I can not even describe what it felt like to be in this mysterious place and the largess of it is overwhelming.

This video turned out to be really crappy quality (the frustrations of video online), so I’m posting some high res pics below it…

 

Morning light

 

Temple 1 and Grand Plaza

 

Side shot from residences looking at Temple 1

 

Still half-buried ruins, excavating in process

 

Temple 5 - very steep

I am starting this post knowing that a blog won’t do justice to everything I want to convey – the sights, the sounds, the smells. We’ve been here for 3 months now and we’re getting ready to leave the city for the first time for our Christmas trip to Belize. We’ve gone on a lot of day trips to and hikes through other villages in the mountains around us, but we haven’t seen any part of Guatemala other than the highlands. 

As a general rule, I’ve been totally overwhelmed for 3 months straight with no relief. There’s so much to learn and I know now that I will never have enough time. Cultures are like people – it takes years and years to REALLY get to know them. So after knowing Guatemala for a short 3 months, I am starting to love her, but I’m still cognizant that I’ve barely scratched her surface… and I’m not even sure if the Guatemala I think I know is really who she is.

SIGHTS

In Guate, 50% of the people are Ladino (Spanish heritage) and 50% are Indigenous. In the US, you see pictures of indigenous or tribal people in traditional clothes sort of in a vacuum – they are always in rural settings or little huts, yes? But here women in incredibly colorful traditional clothing, usually carrying a baby strapped to their back in a blanket and a basket of produce on their heads walk down the narrow cobblestone streets next to women in professional, modern suits.

Typical street scene - indigenous woman, ladino women and the cotton candy man!

There are street markets in which the streets are lined with rows and rows of baskets of fruit, veggies, flowers – and stalls of everything else you could ever want, including underwear which of course is always fun to buy in the street in front of all your friends and family.  ALL the vendors are indigenous – usually women who may or may not have lost her husband in the war or to immigration, who live in surrounding farming villages in the mountains, where they farm on like 70 degree angle slopes….they bring the produce down to the city on big baskets on their heads or in bags on the bus or in the back of pick-up trucks, stuff with produce and people coming into the city. 

Street Market

My favorite time of day is between 9-10am. That is when I feel like I’m living in a movie from the 1950′s. All the stores have hand-painted signs and are locally owned. In the mornings you can see store owners opening up their shops, sweeping the fronts….it’s so reminiscent of a simpler time. There’s no such thing as 9-5 here. Stores open around 9 or 10 ish and close around 5 ish. Most offices close for 2 hours during lunch (in which a large majority of the people go home to eat) and NOTHING is open on Sundays and the entire city has all but shut down for these last two weeks of the year. EVERYONE takes off 2 weeks at least for Xmas and New Years. It’s really nice.

There are other things that just seem old fashioned – boys as young as 7 or 8 walking around with old, wooden boxes holding shoe shining gear and shine stands in Central Park. All the restaurants and stores give you soda in glass bottles, which they re-collect and send back to the producers for more. If you buy a soda in a little tienda (mini store), you can pay 5Q and take the bottle or pay 3Q and the woman will pour the contents into a plastic bag for you and keep the bottle. Glass is very expensive. People do everything buy hand here – sew, fix cars and TVs, build street booths for selling, carry produce to sell. People use things until they are so old and worn out they don’t work anymore – after you’ve fixed them 100 times. Cars and buses are from the 80′s. Kids run around in the streets all day – and play more with balls and dolls than with video games and TV. Every festival, restaurant, store, etc. is very family oriented. Kids go with their parents EVERYWHERE.

Street scene - a little street fair set up

And everywhere are mountains! I love living in the mountains! Our apartment is on the 3rd floor with tons of windows and this is usually what I wake up to —>

Sunrise in Xela

WEEKLY STUFF WE DO

There are 3 main produce markets in the city and once a week I usually buy about $4-5.00 worth of produce which lasts us all week!

Everything I got in the market for 35 Quetzals ($4.50)

I buy a newspaper twice a week because it takes me 3 days to read one! There are 3 choices: the city paper, the national paper, and the gossip paper. And that’s it. 

There is a random Mennonite bake shop in town that opens only on Tuesdays and Fridays. Those days are BAKE SHOP DAYS and you don’t miss it! We buy our milk there, as well as home-made bread, granola, yogurt (mango, lime and coconut), granola bars, and of course DONUTS!!! The best donuts you’ve ever eaten! Apparently this community of Mennonites got kicked out of Mexico and came to settle in Guatemala. In a town where you see only Evangelicals or Catholics, it’s weird.

We eat at a place for lunch where every meal costs 20Q once or twice a week. It’s in a little dug-out place underneath Central Park. It’s partially open air and they always have meat on the grill which promptly blows smoke all throughout the restaurant. You get fresh fruit juice, a huge portion of chicken, rice, pasta, salad, avocado, tortillas, and soup. For $2.60. I have already started lamenting leaving the 20Q place.

Finally, we go to Salsa lessons Mon-Thurs from 6-7pm. It’s a great group. On Mon and Wed we practice group dancing and Tues/Thurs we do couple dancing. We’re the only foreigners in the class and I have a hard time catching everything our teacher says so fast over the music, but I love it! Every other Wednesday, the whole school goes to La Parranda, one of the 2 clubs in the city, to “host” salsa night there.

I do my laundry down the street with a guy who runs a lavendaria. His name is Hugo. I stop to talk to him almost every day. He’s usually chillin with someone from town. His 3 brothers were killed by the government during the war and his sister fled to the US on foot with 2 small children to seek asylum. This past summer was the first time he saw her in 18 years – she’s now a doctor in the US. He wanted to be  a doctor and got a scholarship to go to the US to study medicine in the 80′s, but couldn’t find the money to pay for the $200 visa fee. Like most people I meet here, he has amazing potential that he never got to realize due to lack of opportunity and money. 

RELIGION

…is everywhere!!!!!! 

I go to church here —->

Cathedral in Xela, Parque Central

There are so many religious festivals, I’m not sure how people keep track. Lots of Virgin celebrations. Virgin de Guadelupe, Virgin de Rosario, Virgin Santa Lucia, etc… A friend told me there are 11,000 different virgins celebrated as saints around the world. This pic is from a funeral, but there are many festivals where people carry a statue or float-type thing by hand through the streets. Fireworks, incense, guitars, trumpets, and/or dancing accompany this.

Indigenous people carrying a virgin (quite a common site here)

Churches are still the central gathering places in town. Central parks are built outside of large churches – or soccer fields, depending. Candles are used a lot in worship – and different colors mean different things. Schools, stores, and places are named after the Holy Family. 

Candles used in an outdoor flower offering - a petition to God

SOUNDS

This is sort of hysterical, but as I’m writing this (8am), there is some kind of a mariachi band next door at our neighbors house playing for them. It looks like some kind of a singing telegram perhaps?

The thing that’s different here, is there isn’t the same sense of not disturbing your neighbors. When people wake up, there is firecrackers in the street every day, music pouring out of houses early in the morning and even loud domestic fights in house courtyards you can hear from the street.

While the city is relatively laid back and slow-moving, there are a lot of random noises that seem a bit out of place.

Firecrackers are simply a part of daily life. People set them off every day, all day long. They are set off in Central Park in front of the Catholic Cathedral before every mass (there are 6 masses a day, and more on Sunday). Since we live so high, we hear them when they’re set off in Central Park – every morning at 5:30am before the first Mass.  They are set off for people’s birthdays and any other occasion. You can buy them everywhere.

Fireworks are also often used. After living here, the 4th of July is going to seem so lame. At every religious festival, holiday, celebration in the city, there are fireworks. They are also set off from the streets, from Central Park, from seats in the soccer stadium (see our video to get a better idea). It is intense. Many ashes have fallen on my head since I’ve lived in Xela.

At football (Soccer) games, there is no money for a “band”, so people bring drums, trumpets, whistles, etc. and at any given time there are 1-4 impromptu bands playing all over the place.

The one thing you can hear if you’re walking the streets before 9 am is pat, pat, pat….women making tortillas by hand in little tiny stores with a griddle to sell for the day.

There is also work and school, but that can be another email. Just wanted you to get a sense of our daily life here.

 

Overhead shot of a typical middle class house

 

Merry Christmas everyone!

 Day of the Dead is celebrated here on November 1st. It’s a day that’s similar to Thanksgiving in that there is special food (Fiambre), and it’s a simple holiday mostly celebrated with family. But the point is to honor the dead, to keep up the graves of our ancestors. People come out to the cemetaries in droves — they are either selling flowers, selling services (like painting a tombstone, or cleaning it), or are there to freshen up the graves of their loved ones. Worship services are held right in the church in the cemetary, and people pray by the gravesites too. Yet, there is a carnival-like atmosphere in the air – vendors set up booths outside the cemetary and sell fair-like food and have little games.

 

Droves of people flowing through the cemetary all day long

 

 

The single largest element is flowers. Tons of flowers. Pick up trucks filled with flowers in the back, women, women, women everywhere with bunches of flowers carried on their heads, children weaving flower wreaths by hand in the park….. I bought a boquet of beautiful calalilies, which are about $15/stem in the US. I got 7 calalilies for about 50 cents!

 

Indigenous women carrying flowers and water on their heads to the graves

The cemetaries in Guatemala are already colorful and cheerful looking. They aren’t the depressing, cold, stone, grey of the places of the dead in the US. The coffins are above ground and it almost seems that you could just sit and have a cup of coffee with the deceased. It’s actually pleasant to spend the day amongst the brilliant blues, the sunny yellows…and when you add the flowers, greenery, and fresh paint, it’s quite festive.

 

Families beautifying the gravesites of loved ones

 

 

Another  element of Day of the Dead is that the kids all fly kites in the cemetary (maybe a way to give them something to do while the adults clean and prune the graves). Some cities are known for their kite festivals that day with huge, artistic kites. 

 

A young boy flying a kite in the cemetary

What particularly struck me was the mix of sorrow with joy. It was the warm life of colors, flowers, kids with kites, festive food, and families all coming together in a place of death. It was irony of seeing the solidarity and togetherness of families in a place to  remember those who have left them and surely have made them feel a little less together….

 

An indigenous family mourning at a gravesite

The whole day was simply beautiful. I wish we had some kind of official ongoing healing/connection with our loved ones in the US. Perhaps we’ll start a similar tradition with our own family when we get home!

Our city’s team (Xelaju) made it to the semifinals with a team from the capital, Guatemala City. We got lucky enough to go after I stood in a long line for 2 hours that morning for tix. The stadium here holds 11,000 people, but I’m pretty sure they sold 20,000 tickets! This is also the place I’ve learned all the words my Spanish teachers won’t tell me about. I apologize in advance if you know Spanish and understand the language used in this video! I know you’ve all heard about how crazy over soccer people here are, but I knew I had to film this because I just…..can’t…..explain…..

The REALLY interesting thing about learning Spanish is how much you mess up! You mix up letters; use “at” instead of “in”; use “on” instead of “around”; use he instead of she. You get flustered in the simplest situations and say the wrong thing even though you know the right thing….

Here’s a list of some of our funniest blunders:

1) On our hike to Chicabal Lake, we ran into an indigenous family farming potatoes, so we stopped to make some small talk.  They asked what we were doing, and our friend Kristen wanted to say – “Right now, we’re waiting for our friend, but in general we all study spanish in Xela.” So she said “Esperamos nosotros espanol estudiar en Xela” = “We’re waiting for our Spanish to study in Xela.”

 

Hike to Chicabal Lake

 

 

2) Same family – they asked where we lived, so I wanted to ask if they lived in the town at the bottom of the hill, which is called San Martin. I said, “Ustedes vivamos in San Simon?” = “You guys, we live in San Simon?” I accidentally asked them where WE lived, not where THEY lived….and I asked if we lived in San Simon, which is a Guatemalan Saint/god, not a town.

3) We heard about a guy on a crowded bus who got elbowed in the crotch by an old woman trying to get out. She apologized profusely and he replied “No importa. No tengo pene.” He MEANT to say, It’s no problem, it didn’t hurt. Instead, he said “It’s not important, I don’t have penis.” In Spanish, when you say something hurts, you say you HAVE pain. So he was trying to say he doesn’t have pain, but said he doesn’t have a penis!

4) Another student was looking for his pen at his host family’s house and asked everyone in the family “Buscando mi pene. Lo miraron?” = I’m looking for my penis. Have you seen it? (the word for pen, is “biligrifo”)

5) A few weeks ago at the bank, I opened the door and asked the security guard “Peudo cambiar dolores?” I meant to say “Can I change dolars?” but way I pronounced it, made it come out like “Can I change your pain?” He gave me a weird look and Miggy corrected it!

I’m talking about the kind you actually play with your foot – soccer. Xela (our city) was playing Municipal – a team from Guatemala City. Xela is one of the worst rated teams and Guate City is one of the best. We were expecting a blow out.

I’m not even sure how to begin writing this. I’ve decided I just need to film it because there are no words to express…..

The game started at 8pm. It was raining of course. The stadium was sort of an enhanced version of a high school stadium (mind you, this is the second largest city in the country with 200,000 people). The tickets were $6.75. Lemme tell you – it’s so refreshing to actually be able to afford to GO to a pro sports game. It made a fan out of me before the game even started.

The same guys with AK47′s who guard everything in the city were out in droves. We got searched going in because apparently you can’t take water or pop bottles in because all the fans throw them on the field!

So we all bought ponchos and grabbed a seat on the far end of the field right above the goal. Great seats. There are no assigned seating – if you wanted to pay $2 more, you could sit in the covered section, but we didn’t know that. The door you enter in, is the section you sit in.

As the game was about to start, people started playing trumpets, drums, horns, other instruments. And we realized we were sitting in front of Those Guys. You know what I’m talking about – the guys who paint their faces, scream the entire game, rally up the crowd. There was no band. No cheerleaders. The crowd was more than enough.

So imagine me in a red poncho, dripping with cold and rain in the Guatemalan night next to 5 other Americans, excited with anticipation….. And then some dudes start to climb the fence. Now, I can’t imagine what these security guards with guns would do in the USA if the fans started climbing and sitting atop the fence around the field, getting their fireworks ready, but no one took notice. And thus, the game started.

The entire stadium lit up with fireworks, sparklers, flares, blinking flares, colored flares….. The field was awash in smoke and fumes and sparks. A guy on the fence hung a devil pinata from the fence and put a firework in it’s mouth, which it dutifully smoked until it caught on fire.  Now, mind you, this is a place where you can’t bring a water bottle in. But pyrotechnics? No problem. 

The entire game these guys behind us were singing with their trumpet and drum – some of the songs we caught onto, some of them were too complex but we sang and clapped along all the same. Wish I could repeat some of them here, but let’s just say, um, well, my mom reads this blog….

We all learned every curse word in Spanish last night – 100 times over. Ok, one of my favorite chants was this one:

Aqui, no hay gringos
Solo Super Chivos!

“There are no Americans here
Only super rams!” (repeat with trumpet)

Their mascot is a super ram. lol! They asked where we were from and when we said the US, they put thumbs up and started chanting about Obama. They love that guy here.

Then, they asked what the meaning of doing that ninja turtle thing with your hand – you know, the one where you stick out your thumb and pinky and say “RAD” or something like that…. We told them it means cool, which they translated into “Excellente!” We didn’t know how to tell them otherwise. So there were all these Guatemalan guys behind us shouting “Excellent” and doing that hand motion. I decided to ask them a question of my own.

I said what does *&#%& mean? (a curse word that seemed to be everyone’s favorite). They all laughed and told me it means “the ball.” As often as they were using it, you could almost believe it.

Well, Xela ended up winning (1-0) and at the end of the game the whole stadium erupted again. They got an iron-plated swat team to escort the refs off the field while the fans lit fireworks again.

The guys behind us had a stash of their own. Nate got a hot spark on his neck and the rest of us got plastered with this pink stuff in one of the pink streaming flares. It was all over our clothes, our faces, our hands….I was hiding under my thin, little poncho.

We said goodbye and walked home in a celebratory mood, dripping wet, and singing our newly learned songs all the way….