So, I leave Xela today for what will in all likelihood be a whirlwind last few days.
I am taking a shuttle to Antigua this afternoon and have secured a wine date with MRM this evening, since we haven't been near one another much of the summer.
Tomorrow morning, I am being picked up by World Vision at 7am and driven 3 hours and then boated some and then we are hiking some in order to meet Lucia, one of my sponsor children. I am very, very excited.
I get back to Antigua Friday afternoon. Am showering at MRM's apartment, repacking my stuff and then she and I and her friend Joren are taking a bus into the City, dropping off our belongings with her family, eating dinner, and then (hopefully, if the tickets are not sold out) taking an overnight bus into the Peten jungle to see the ruins of Tikal.
We will arrive in Flores, an island town in the jungle, about 6am, take another hour shuttle to Tikal and spend the day at the park.
Then bus back to Flores, eat dinner, clean ourselves of sunscreen, sweat and bug spray, and board a second overnight bus.
We arrive in Guat City at 7am Sunday, will head back to MRM's family for showering, resting, and then the 80th Birthday Celebration of her grandmother, Doña Emma.
Monday morning we head to the airport, board planes, clear customs and immigration, and set foot on American soil 14 weeks after leaving it.
What this means is that I will have to finish the posts from home, which feels rather cheap. But I don't suspect I will have much internet access in the next few days.
So, forgive, and I will be in touch soon! XOXO
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Setup
I realized that I never mentioned the third school that I was signed up for. Lo siento!
So, way back in the day when I was considering leaving Xela and then decided to stay, but change schools, I toured quite a few and fell in love with two, Celas Maya and Pop Wuj.
What drew me to Pop Wuj was a dedicated Medical Spanish program that had been at one point, according to their website, associated with Doctors Without Borders. But that wasn't even the first thing that I fell in love with. I remember very clearly, sitting in this drafty, concrete prison of an internet cafe that was down the hill from my first homestay. It was pouring rain and I was soaked and cold, and I was gchatting with my mom while I was reading through the Pop Wuj website. Mom knew it was late-ish and dark outside and I wasn't safely home yet, and I knew she would worry until I was back to my house. We were mid-conversation and all of a sudden I typed "OMG!!!!!!!!!!!" and then didn't type anything else or respond to her for several minutes. This was, in retrospect, not the smartest thing to do. I was freaking out over what I was reading on the Pop Wuj website, but poor Lisa had know way of knowing that. All she knew was that it had only been a week since the abduction, and typing "OMG!!!!!!!!!!!" and then "disappearing" for a few minutes could have meant any manner of terrible things.
But what I had discovered is that Pop Wuj had a relationship/contract with a local Mayan midwife and it was possible for students to do their clinical portion of the program with her. I was floored. The website was incredible. There was a separate .pdf that detailed the Medical Spanish program and the various components of it and I was getting lightheaded while reading it. We would have 4 hours of Medical Spanish immersion lessons, plus daily Cultural Competency Seminars, given by a host of professionals including physicians, anthropologists, midwives and historians. In addition, each student would have to choose a topic of public health that interested them, research it in the context of life here in the highlands, and then present our findings, in Spanish, to the other program participants.
As if that wasn't awesome enough, the school operated a medical clinic that was located on the first floor of the building. The patients were mostly indigenous and if they lived in the communities where the school's other services were operating (a daycare, a reforestation project and a stove project) then the health care services were free. The clinic is funded in part by an increased tuition for Medical Spanish students, and I was only too happy to pay it. Per the school's website, it is run as a cooperative and was founded by 8 teachers who wanted to form a school that reinvested in local communuties in sustainable ways.
The projects I mentioned earlier are:
Daycare -- Single parent households are very common here. I don't know what the statistics are, but there are many children whose fathers are not around for various reasons, and whose moms are working day and night in order to survive. The daycare project is a safe place for these kids to go while their moms are at work. They are able to eat a nutrituous meal, have help with their homework, take English lessons, or just play and be kids. Pop Wuj employs guardians and teachers for the kids, and then students of Pop Wuj are encouraged to visit and help out with the various activities.
Reforestation -- baby trees! Many families here still cook over open wood fires, and this results in deforestation which further compromises the topsoil as well as putting at-risk, mountain-side communuties even more at risk for landslides during the rainy season.
Stove Project -- not only do open fires cause lots of trees to be cut down, but they contribute to an increase in respiratory problems for those that live near them. For children who grow up in a home with an open fire, their lungs look they have been smoking for decades. In addition, they are quite dangerous. Some of the most common, most preventable, and most acute injuries in rural communities are burns. The problem is, a wood stove is often cost prohibitive for most families. So once a week, Pop Wuj takes students and stoves and cement into the mountains and builds stoves for needy families. They hike up steep hills with all the equipment, climb roofs, cut chimney holes, mix and pour concrete, and assemble the whole thing. A wood stove uses 1/3 of the wood that an open fire does, and is much safer.
Scholarship -- school is only "mandatory" here until 6th grade. And many students don't last that long, for various reasons. One being that uniforms and supplies are very expensive. Another being that some families are so poor that they must put the children to work at an early age, selling tortillas door to door, or combing through dumps for scrap metal, or selling gum and candy at intersections. The scholarship program is for gifted students who want to remain in school but whose families cannot afford to let them. The fund pays for the students' expenses, in addition to paying the family a small stipend to help make up for the fact that the student can't work.
As I mentioned, all the families that are within the catchment of the other programs are entitled to free primary health care from the clinic the school runs.
So, back to weeks and weeks ago. I freaked out while learing about all of this on their website. And then I was saddened to learn that all the slots in the Medical Spanish program were full for the summer. The Program costs almost twice what I had budgeted, and that didn't include the $150 application fee, that you had to pay regardless of whether they accepted you. So when I found out there wasn't room for me, I figured maybe it was for the best because I couldn't technically afford it.
But then I received an email letting me know that following Tropical Storm Agatha, there had been some cancellations, and a few more slots had opened up. I applied, tried to make myself sound not at all desperate to work with the midwives in my mini application essays, and waited nervously for their response. A few days later I learned that I had been accepted, and knowing that most Ivy League medical schools send their student doctors here, I felt totally out of my league.
Next installment soon to follow. Promise!
So, way back in the day when I was considering leaving Xela and then decided to stay, but change schools, I toured quite a few and fell in love with two, Celas Maya and Pop Wuj.
What drew me to Pop Wuj was a dedicated Medical Spanish program that had been at one point, according to their website, associated with Doctors Without Borders. But that wasn't even the first thing that I fell in love with. I remember very clearly, sitting in this drafty, concrete prison of an internet cafe that was down the hill from my first homestay. It was pouring rain and I was soaked and cold, and I was gchatting with my mom while I was reading through the Pop Wuj website. Mom knew it was late-ish and dark outside and I wasn't safely home yet, and I knew she would worry until I was back to my house. We were mid-conversation and all of a sudden I typed "OMG!!!!!!!!!!!" and then didn't type anything else or respond to her for several minutes. This was, in retrospect, not the smartest thing to do. I was freaking out over what I was reading on the Pop Wuj website, but poor Lisa had know way of knowing that. All she knew was that it had only been a week since the abduction, and typing "OMG!!!!!!!!!!!" and then "disappearing" for a few minutes could have meant any manner of terrible things.
But what I had discovered is that Pop Wuj had a relationship/contract with a local Mayan midwife and it was possible for students to do their clinical portion of the program with her. I was floored. The website was incredible. There was a separate .pdf that detailed the Medical Spanish program and the various components of it and I was getting lightheaded while reading it. We would have 4 hours of Medical Spanish immersion lessons, plus daily Cultural Competency Seminars, given by a host of professionals including physicians, anthropologists, midwives and historians. In addition, each student would have to choose a topic of public health that interested them, research it in the context of life here in the highlands, and then present our findings, in Spanish, to the other program participants.
As if that wasn't awesome enough, the school operated a medical clinic that was located on the first floor of the building. The patients were mostly indigenous and if they lived in the communities where the school's other services were operating (a daycare, a reforestation project and a stove project) then the health care services were free. The clinic is funded in part by an increased tuition for Medical Spanish students, and I was only too happy to pay it. Per the school's website, it is run as a cooperative and was founded by 8 teachers who wanted to form a school that reinvested in local communuties in sustainable ways.
The projects I mentioned earlier are:
Daycare -- Single parent households are very common here. I don't know what the statistics are, but there are many children whose fathers are not around for various reasons, and whose moms are working day and night in order to survive. The daycare project is a safe place for these kids to go while their moms are at work. They are able to eat a nutrituous meal, have help with their homework, take English lessons, or just play and be kids. Pop Wuj employs guardians and teachers for the kids, and then students of Pop Wuj are encouraged to visit and help out with the various activities.
Reforestation -- baby trees! Many families here still cook over open wood fires, and this results in deforestation which further compromises the topsoil as well as putting at-risk, mountain-side communuties even more at risk for landslides during the rainy season.
Stove Project -- not only do open fires cause lots of trees to be cut down, but they contribute to an increase in respiratory problems for those that live near them. For children who grow up in a home with an open fire, their lungs look they have been smoking for decades. In addition, they are quite dangerous. Some of the most common, most preventable, and most acute injuries in rural communities are burns. The problem is, a wood stove is often cost prohibitive for most families. So once a week, Pop Wuj takes students and stoves and cement into the mountains and builds stoves for needy families. They hike up steep hills with all the equipment, climb roofs, cut chimney holes, mix and pour concrete, and assemble the whole thing. A wood stove uses 1/3 of the wood that an open fire does, and is much safer.
Scholarship -- school is only "mandatory" here until 6th grade. And many students don't last that long, for various reasons. One being that uniforms and supplies are very expensive. Another being that some families are so poor that they must put the children to work at an early age, selling tortillas door to door, or combing through dumps for scrap metal, or selling gum and candy at intersections. The scholarship program is for gifted students who want to remain in school but whose families cannot afford to let them. The fund pays for the students' expenses, in addition to paying the family a small stipend to help make up for the fact that the student can't work.
As I mentioned, all the families that are within the catchment of the other programs are entitled to free primary health care from the clinic the school runs.
So, back to weeks and weeks ago. I freaked out while learing about all of this on their website. And then I was saddened to learn that all the slots in the Medical Spanish program were full for the summer. The Program costs almost twice what I had budgeted, and that didn't include the $150 application fee, that you had to pay regardless of whether they accepted you. So when I found out there wasn't room for me, I figured maybe it was for the best because I couldn't technically afford it.
But then I received an email letting me know that following Tropical Storm Agatha, there had been some cancellations, and a few more slots had opened up. I applied, tried to make myself sound not at all desperate to work with the midwives in my mini application essays, and waited nervously for their response. A few days later I learned that I had been accepted, and knowing that most Ivy League medical schools send their student doctors here, I felt totally out of my league.
Next installment soon to follow. Promise!
Mexico
I was scheduled to be picked up from Panajachel at Lago Atitlan at 7am. This meant getting to Panajachel, a 45 minute boat ride away, by 7am. But we were all packed and ready to leave by 6am, and after a few detours down the narrowest streets I have seen in a while, and 3 different sets of directions from 3 different people, we arrived at the dock. David got out to collect my bags and have a chat with the captain. I said my goodbyes to MRM and Tara and Nat and headed towards the water. David stopped me on his way back to the car and said in a serious, fatherly way, "I told them to take good care of you. If you need anything at all in Mexico, call me, I have friends there."
The boat was wrapped in tarp because it was raining, and there was only one other passenger when I boarded. We waited sleepily for it to fill and then set out. Because of the tarp, we couldn't see outside of the boat, and it felt a little like flying, only better, as we sped across the water. My neighbor passengers scattered on the opposite shore, and I climbed up to the road and sat by a boarded up tienda, hoping my pickup location, the dock, would be understood by the driver, who had no way to reach me since my Guatemala cell didn't have service at the lake.
A few minutes to 7, a shuttle pulled up, confirmed that I was Rhachelle Jones, and off we went. The shuttle was full, 12 passengers, and I found myself irrationally irritated with everyone else on it. More than likely this was the result of lack of sleep and the sunburn and the insect bites and the poison ivy. I forewent chatting with my fellow travelers and ended up listening to my iPod for 9 hours straight. The scenery was, of course, breathtaking, but you know this by now. We passed through canyons and steep mountainsides and everything was so green and rich and vegetated (am probably using that word incorrectly). Here and there along the mountainsides would be a tiny shed with a chimney sticking out of it and you wondered how anything but goats could make it up there. Before long, the views became so steep and the way so narrow, that the only way to see the sky was to stick your head out of the window. But this was in a word dangerous.
We had to make the border crossing in two stops. I always become anxious at border crossings. Knowing that anything could happen; that you're at the mercy of low-paid government officials in a capacity that you generally aren't in daily life. Anyone could be questioned at any time, for any reason, and it makes me nauseous. It was a really, really hot day, besides, and the immigration office was cramped and sat in the center of a vast park of concrete, so we stood and waited and sweated. But I got my exit stamp from Guatemala without incident, and we only had one hiccup in the group: an Australian was trying to leave Guatemala on a passport that didn't prove he had legally entered it. He had to be walked to the Mexican border, offered entry, then exit, then come back to Guatemala and do the same thing, and then we could all of us walk together to our next shuttle which was waiting for us across the border. Walking across borders is much more exiting than doing it in an airport, and I never tire of the thrill.
We boarded our next shuttle, a Mercedes with AC!, and though we were technically in Mexico, we were driven another 20 minutes to the next border station in Chiapas. From there we had to fill out two forms, wait some more, sweat some more, and then finally reboarded. We were driven through two military checkpoints and then the road opened up. And I could relax.
It sounds cliche, but as soon as we left that last checkpoint, and were "in" Mexico, you knew you were in Mexico. The landscape changed dramatically, and looked a bit like how I think parts of Africa must. The sky was enormous, bigger than Big Sky country. The land rolled forward, on and on and on, and the landscape was dotted occassionally by a copse (that word's for MRM) of scrubby cypress trees, or a whitewashed concrete tienda selling Corona.
Our driver didn't speak much, but he played cheery music and despite the long day of travel, I think we were a happy bunch. From the border we had almost 3 more hours before reaching our destination, but they were pretty hours.
I need to go on record and say that I loved Mexico from the second I was there. And Mexico is somewhere I had never thought to visit before. As we wound closer to our destination, I listed all things "Mexican" that I love: food, beverages, music, Day of the Dead art, actors (Gael Garcia Bernal!), and wondered why it had never occurred to me to visit before now. During the too-few days I spent there, I loved it more and more. I loved Mexico because it was exactly what I thought it would be. Bright and cheerful and colorful; delicious food; great music. And during my time there, I got to be a tourist in a way I haven't been in Guatemala. Mexico asked nothing of me. I could just be, relax, and think pretty thoughts. I don't love Mexico in the same way that I love Guatemala, who is a sister to me now -- a sister who I have grown up with and fought with, and who I speak of with honest, hard-won affection and love. But Mexico is a place I would like to keep returning to in the years to come.
I spent my time in the highland village of San Cristobal de Las Casas, a place that immediately felt rarefied. SCC is the capital of Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapas. I have had a relationship with Chiapas since the beginning of my adulthood. It is briefly this: I grew up in a small community, I went to an even smaller highschool. A highschool that was both politically and religiously conservative. I graduated a year early. I left home and moved to a large university at the tender age of 17. In my freshman English class I wrote my own papers and I wrote papers for some of the girls in my dorm and one of those papers changed my life. I wrote about the women of the EZLN, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, peasants who staged an armed revolt on the day that NAFTA was signed, were squashed by the Mexican army, and who went on to carry out a fairly successful de-armed revolution. They gave up their arms and solicited international sympathy via the internet and they now live in the only place on earth where the Mexican military is barred from entering. They live in the highlands still as peasant farmers who have reclaimed their land and the rights to it from large agricultural corperations. Before reading about Chiapas and land rights and agricultural reform, it had never crossed my mind that the things I buy matter. That when I spend money, and the things I chose to buy, is in essence voting. Voting for a brighter or a darker future for millions of the world's poor. At the time I didn't realize that cheap products cost us, humanity, in other ways -- in poor families who beome poorer, who can no longer feed, much less educate, their children. These are, to be sure, complex issues. And I don't mean to bring them up only to brush over them. Only that, for me, the word "Chiapas" has been code for "awakening" for the past 12 years. I need also to say that I have been a terrible, reckless steward of this information, for years. I haven't changed my consumption habits to any large extent. I go through boycott phases, and then grow weary, knowing that boycotting is not particularly effective. But even so, Chiapas was where it started for me, and so going there was meaningful on a deeper level.
In its own way, being there wrecked me. I am not going to get into it in too much detail in this post, which will be long enough without it, but being there, even as much as a tourist as I was, I had one of those crises of faith that happen very very rarely.
We arrived at the end of the afternoon, in a light rain shower, and I made my way to my hostel, which was even lovelier than the pictures online made it out to be, and checked into the girls dorm. I got out my map, oriented myself, and headed out. First stop, a bookstore. Then a couple of hours worth of wandering around. I ended up at a craft market beside a huge, yellow church, and found a tiny outdoor restaurant that a lot of locals seemed to approve of. And then I ordered three dinners. I hadn't eaten all day, had been awake since 5am, and was so hungry I was dizzy. I ordered tacos and beans and rice and salad and a plate of 4 kinds of chargrilled meats, and chicken soup and chicken mole and horchata and limonada. It came out to about 12 bucks, with tip. On my way home, I stopped at the main square and listened to the live music playing there beneath a lit gazebo. I had booked the girls dorm with an ensuite bathroom, and this seemed like a good idea at the time. All the other hostels I have stayed at have had bathrooms down the halls. But having 12 girls share one tiny bathroom and shower is not the convenience that I had originally imagined it to be. My sunburn was by this point molting, and I had huge, swollen blisters on my shoulders. I felt gross. I needed to strip down and slather on aloe and lidocaine, and the bathroom never seemed to be free when I needed it to be.
The following day I set out to find the Museum of Mayan Medicine and reading the map incorrectly the first two times, I spent the first part of the morning lost. But I did find a small restaurant on a dusty side street that sold the best torta that I have ever eaten. Once I was on the correct street, I almost gave up several times because I was getting farther and farther away from town, and it was hot, and there was no shade, and even in long sleeves, my neck wasn't protected and I didn't have any water left. But I trucked on, passing small stalls on either side of the road, selling chicarron, charcoal, pinas, handmade wooden decorations, helados, and on and on. I finally came to a long concrete wall covered in grafitti, and towards the center of it, a two story metal gate with the logo I was looking for atop it.
I walked into the complex, a series of squat, burgundy concrete buildings, an expansive garden in the back, and a temascal. In the front area was a parking lot with a robin's egg blue VW Bug, and three wooden crosses. The Museum is operated by a collective of traditional healers and practicioners, including a group of midwives, bone setters, and priests.
The first building serves as the reception office and the "museum" itself, which is a darkened maze opening into sometimes interesting, sometimes hilarious dioramas of what traditional Mayan ceremonies and health services look like. There was literature in English that gave a good overview of the different healers, the interrealationship of spirit and body in Mayan cosmology, and how ceremonies and services are conducted. After walking through the dioramas, there was a small theater featuring first in Spanish and then in English, a birth attended by a Mayan midwife. This was, for me, the best part. It was fascinating. The midwife and her clients spoke a Mayan language (and I am not proficient enough to recognize even the most popular ones at this point) and they were translated into Spanish and then a voiceover was done in English.
The woman labored fully clothed in a squatting position. She didn't make a sound. She didn't smile or grimace. The midwife crouched behind her with a thick strip of fabric that was wrapped around the top of her belly and then tightened, to help the baby move down further into the birth canal, presumably. This was all happening in a TINY dark hut with a dirt floor and the only light came from the open fire on one side of the hut and the lights from the video camera. The baby was born while the mother was still squatting, with her husband in front of her holding her up and the midwife behind her, reaching up into her skirt to catch the child. The baby was cleaned with a tin pot of water heated over the fire, and then the stub of the cord was wrapped tightly against the belly with a piece of cloth. The placenta was buried into the dirt floor of the hut, near where the child was born. I watched the video twice and then wandered into the garden and peeked into the temascal, which is a Mayan version of a sauna. For the week following the birth, women go into the temascal daily because it is believed to cleanse and strengthen them both physically and spiritually.
On the way back from the museum, I got lost in the stalls of a large crafts market below a huge church on 20 de Noviembre, which is one of the main drags in San Cristobal, and the date of the Mexican Revolution, and my birthday. Yay! Dinner was at one of the restaurants that Lonely Planet recommended which turned out to be a bust. All summer long, in terms of good food, I have been safer going to places where residents, not tourists, are eating. San Cristobal was no exception. I tried several more LP recs over the course of the few days I was there, and nothing compared to the small places I found on my own.
The next day was another museum day as well. I went to the coffee musuem, which gave the history of the prized bean from its roots in Africa to the colonization of the New World, stopping shy of the Chiapas uprising in 1994. The museum was terribly depressing. Allegedly when coffee was first introduced to Europeans they derided it. You have to wonder how much human suffering and degredation could have been spared had they kept that opinion. Likely, they would have found some other crop with which to enslave indigenous populations. But you never know. I suppose the saddest part of the coffee musuem was realzing how little has changed, and how many people the world over are struggling and suffering and dying in order to provide cheap exports to wealthier nations and appetites. I was morose at the end of the coffee museum, and consoled myself with a steaming plate of huevos rancheros and toast and jam.
After lunch, I found the next museum, Na Bolom, or the Jaguar House. Na Bolom was the home of Trudy and Frank Blom, anthropologists, writers, and friends of the Lacandon Mayans, who are, according to documents, the only group of Mayans to slip deep enough into the jungle to avoid being colonized. When the Blom's discovered them in the 20s, they were still living as they had been for centuries before. The Bloms learned their language, and dedicated their lives to studying and protecting them. The house, which was a monestery before the Bloms purchased it, features hundreds of artifacts of the Lacandons, and I spent several hours wandering through the rooms learning more about this people. Na Bolom is now operated by a trust, who continue the couples' work, manage a reforestation project, education projects in Chiapas, as well as providing a space for the Lacandons to sell their handicrafts to a larger audience. I have to say, I am not one of those people who freaked out when "Julie and Julia" came out. I don't cook much. I don't fetishize high end or artsy cookware. But the cooking accessories that the Lacandons had carved, out of crazy jungle wood, were some of the prettiest things I have ever set eyes on. I wanted them for my mom. I wanted them for me. But, alas, they were very, very expensive for this nursing student.
The house has been converted into not only a museum, but a guesthouse as well, with a group dinner/discussion every evening, at a massive table that seats 30. The library (one of the most gorgeous places I have ever seen) is open to scholars, and tea is served there every afternoon to guests. Scholars and anthropologists often spend months in the library alone conducting research. Across the street is a private organic garden that provides the guesthouse with all the produce they cook with. All in all, a gorgeous and magical place to spend a few hours.
The following day, Friday, was my last full day in SCC. I was originally going to come home on Sunday, but then remembered that was the final game of the World Cup, and I wanted to be home for it. There were dozens of things "to do" that I hadn't done yet. The Mayan clothing museum, the amber museum, and little day trips to ruins and canyons and waterfalls. Not to mention a bazillion cafes and restaurants. But I dediced to take it easy and let Friday be a reading day. I found a cozy spot for breakfast, a place with bagels and the best herb cream cheese On Earth. I was really happy there until they started playing awful music that was really vulgar and offensive. So I packed up and headed to a park. I spent the afternoon window shopping on 20 de Noviembre. I really wanted to get some amber jewelry for my mom and sisters but I couldn't afford any of it. But I happily discovered at Bar Revolucion the best licuado ever. It was lemon juice and mint and pepian seeds, all ground up together with water and it was incredible.
My dorm had emptied out and a new girl had checked in, Bubble (she said she loves her parents' weirdness but would have preferred a more conventional name), and we got dinner at a steakhouse on a very ritzy street, and the food was awful, and she told me about living in France, and being able to speak 4 languages, and being a 1 hour train ride away from 3 other countries and I envied her life.
The next morning we were on the same pimp Mercedes van and I was less grumpy this trip and condescended to talk to the other passengers :) There was a woman who sat next to me who is a school teacher who has been coming to Guatemala and Mexico for 25 years. She comes for a month each summer to study Spanish. She and her husband adopted a Guatemalan child 22 years ago, and now they sponsor an education project in the town that their adopted son was born in. She had a lot of insight into the region and culture and gave me a dozen travel tips and made me wish for more time and money to see Honduras and Belize and El Salvador.
We made our border crossing safely and parted ways in Los Encuentros. The rest of my bus was headed to Lago Atitlan. My pickup at the gas station in Los Encuentros wasn't another shuttle, but a two door Jeep-looking thing with a snorkle and enormous tires and a safari rack. Word.
More soon! I know I have several weeks of catch up due you! Sorry for the delay in between posts. I picked up 5 freelance projects that were due in the past 3 weeks and haven't had the energy to do much writing on top of that.
The boat was wrapped in tarp because it was raining, and there was only one other passenger when I boarded. We waited sleepily for it to fill and then set out. Because of the tarp, we couldn't see outside of the boat, and it felt a little like flying, only better, as we sped across the water. My neighbor passengers scattered on the opposite shore, and I climbed up to the road and sat by a boarded up tienda, hoping my pickup location, the dock, would be understood by the driver, who had no way to reach me since my Guatemala cell didn't have service at the lake.
A few minutes to 7, a shuttle pulled up, confirmed that I was Rhachelle Jones, and off we went. The shuttle was full, 12 passengers, and I found myself irrationally irritated with everyone else on it. More than likely this was the result of lack of sleep and the sunburn and the insect bites and the poison ivy. I forewent chatting with my fellow travelers and ended up listening to my iPod for 9 hours straight. The scenery was, of course, breathtaking, but you know this by now. We passed through canyons and steep mountainsides and everything was so green and rich and vegetated (am probably using that word incorrectly). Here and there along the mountainsides would be a tiny shed with a chimney sticking out of it and you wondered how anything but goats could make it up there. Before long, the views became so steep and the way so narrow, that the only way to see the sky was to stick your head out of the window. But this was in a word dangerous.
We had to make the border crossing in two stops. I always become anxious at border crossings. Knowing that anything could happen; that you're at the mercy of low-paid government officials in a capacity that you generally aren't in daily life. Anyone could be questioned at any time, for any reason, and it makes me nauseous. It was a really, really hot day, besides, and the immigration office was cramped and sat in the center of a vast park of concrete, so we stood and waited and sweated. But I got my exit stamp from Guatemala without incident, and we only had one hiccup in the group: an Australian was trying to leave Guatemala on a passport that didn't prove he had legally entered it. He had to be walked to the Mexican border, offered entry, then exit, then come back to Guatemala and do the same thing, and then we could all of us walk together to our next shuttle which was waiting for us across the border. Walking across borders is much more exiting than doing it in an airport, and I never tire of the thrill.
We boarded our next shuttle, a Mercedes with AC!, and though we were technically in Mexico, we were driven another 20 minutes to the next border station in Chiapas. From there we had to fill out two forms, wait some more, sweat some more, and then finally reboarded. We were driven through two military checkpoints and then the road opened up. And I could relax.
It sounds cliche, but as soon as we left that last checkpoint, and were "in" Mexico, you knew you were in Mexico. The landscape changed dramatically, and looked a bit like how I think parts of Africa must. The sky was enormous, bigger than Big Sky country. The land rolled forward, on and on and on, and the landscape was dotted occassionally by a copse (that word's for MRM) of scrubby cypress trees, or a whitewashed concrete tienda selling Corona.
Our driver didn't speak much, but he played cheery music and despite the long day of travel, I think we were a happy bunch. From the border we had almost 3 more hours before reaching our destination, but they were pretty hours.
I need to go on record and say that I loved Mexico from the second I was there. And Mexico is somewhere I had never thought to visit before. As we wound closer to our destination, I listed all things "Mexican" that I love: food, beverages, music, Day of the Dead art, actors (Gael Garcia Bernal!), and wondered why it had never occurred to me to visit before now. During the too-few days I spent there, I loved it more and more. I loved Mexico because it was exactly what I thought it would be. Bright and cheerful and colorful; delicious food; great music. And during my time there, I got to be a tourist in a way I haven't been in Guatemala. Mexico asked nothing of me. I could just be, relax, and think pretty thoughts. I don't love Mexico in the same way that I love Guatemala, who is a sister to me now -- a sister who I have grown up with and fought with, and who I speak of with honest, hard-won affection and love. But Mexico is a place I would like to keep returning to in the years to come.
I spent my time in the highland village of San Cristobal de Las Casas, a place that immediately felt rarefied. SCC is the capital of Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapas. I have had a relationship with Chiapas since the beginning of my adulthood. It is briefly this: I grew up in a small community, I went to an even smaller highschool. A highschool that was both politically and religiously conservative. I graduated a year early. I left home and moved to a large university at the tender age of 17. In my freshman English class I wrote my own papers and I wrote papers for some of the girls in my dorm and one of those papers changed my life. I wrote about the women of the EZLN, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, peasants who staged an armed revolt on the day that NAFTA was signed, were squashed by the Mexican army, and who went on to carry out a fairly successful de-armed revolution. They gave up their arms and solicited international sympathy via the internet and they now live in the only place on earth where the Mexican military is barred from entering. They live in the highlands still as peasant farmers who have reclaimed their land and the rights to it from large agricultural corperations. Before reading about Chiapas and land rights and agricultural reform, it had never crossed my mind that the things I buy matter. That when I spend money, and the things I chose to buy, is in essence voting. Voting for a brighter or a darker future for millions of the world's poor. At the time I didn't realize that cheap products cost us, humanity, in other ways -- in poor families who beome poorer, who can no longer feed, much less educate, their children. These are, to be sure, complex issues. And I don't mean to bring them up only to brush over them. Only that, for me, the word "Chiapas" has been code for "awakening" for the past 12 years. I need also to say that I have been a terrible, reckless steward of this information, for years. I haven't changed my consumption habits to any large extent. I go through boycott phases, and then grow weary, knowing that boycotting is not particularly effective. But even so, Chiapas was where it started for me, and so going there was meaningful on a deeper level.
In its own way, being there wrecked me. I am not going to get into it in too much detail in this post, which will be long enough without it, but being there, even as much as a tourist as I was, I had one of those crises of faith that happen very very rarely.
We arrived at the end of the afternoon, in a light rain shower, and I made my way to my hostel, which was even lovelier than the pictures online made it out to be, and checked into the girls dorm. I got out my map, oriented myself, and headed out. First stop, a bookstore. Then a couple of hours worth of wandering around. I ended up at a craft market beside a huge, yellow church, and found a tiny outdoor restaurant that a lot of locals seemed to approve of. And then I ordered three dinners. I hadn't eaten all day, had been awake since 5am, and was so hungry I was dizzy. I ordered tacos and beans and rice and salad and a plate of 4 kinds of chargrilled meats, and chicken soup and chicken mole and horchata and limonada. It came out to about 12 bucks, with tip. On my way home, I stopped at the main square and listened to the live music playing there beneath a lit gazebo. I had booked the girls dorm with an ensuite bathroom, and this seemed like a good idea at the time. All the other hostels I have stayed at have had bathrooms down the halls. But having 12 girls share one tiny bathroom and shower is not the convenience that I had originally imagined it to be. My sunburn was by this point molting, and I had huge, swollen blisters on my shoulders. I felt gross. I needed to strip down and slather on aloe and lidocaine, and the bathroom never seemed to be free when I needed it to be.
The following day I set out to find the Museum of Mayan Medicine and reading the map incorrectly the first two times, I spent the first part of the morning lost. But I did find a small restaurant on a dusty side street that sold the best torta that I have ever eaten. Once I was on the correct street, I almost gave up several times because I was getting farther and farther away from town, and it was hot, and there was no shade, and even in long sleeves, my neck wasn't protected and I didn't have any water left. But I trucked on, passing small stalls on either side of the road, selling chicarron, charcoal, pinas, handmade wooden decorations, helados, and on and on. I finally came to a long concrete wall covered in grafitti, and towards the center of it, a two story metal gate with the logo I was looking for atop it.
I walked into the complex, a series of squat, burgundy concrete buildings, an expansive garden in the back, and a temascal. In the front area was a parking lot with a robin's egg blue VW Bug, and three wooden crosses. The Museum is operated by a collective of traditional healers and practicioners, including a group of midwives, bone setters, and priests.
The first building serves as the reception office and the "museum" itself, which is a darkened maze opening into sometimes interesting, sometimes hilarious dioramas of what traditional Mayan ceremonies and health services look like. There was literature in English that gave a good overview of the different healers, the interrealationship of spirit and body in Mayan cosmology, and how ceremonies and services are conducted. After walking through the dioramas, there was a small theater featuring first in Spanish and then in English, a birth attended by a Mayan midwife. This was, for me, the best part. It was fascinating. The midwife and her clients spoke a Mayan language (and I am not proficient enough to recognize even the most popular ones at this point) and they were translated into Spanish and then a voiceover was done in English.
The woman labored fully clothed in a squatting position. She didn't make a sound. She didn't smile or grimace. The midwife crouched behind her with a thick strip of fabric that was wrapped around the top of her belly and then tightened, to help the baby move down further into the birth canal, presumably. This was all happening in a TINY dark hut with a dirt floor and the only light came from the open fire on one side of the hut and the lights from the video camera. The baby was born while the mother was still squatting, with her husband in front of her holding her up and the midwife behind her, reaching up into her skirt to catch the child. The baby was cleaned with a tin pot of water heated over the fire, and then the stub of the cord was wrapped tightly against the belly with a piece of cloth. The placenta was buried into the dirt floor of the hut, near where the child was born. I watched the video twice and then wandered into the garden and peeked into the temascal, which is a Mayan version of a sauna. For the week following the birth, women go into the temascal daily because it is believed to cleanse and strengthen them both physically and spiritually.
On the way back from the museum, I got lost in the stalls of a large crafts market below a huge church on 20 de Noviembre, which is one of the main drags in San Cristobal, and the date of the Mexican Revolution, and my birthday. Yay! Dinner was at one of the restaurants that Lonely Planet recommended which turned out to be a bust. All summer long, in terms of good food, I have been safer going to places where residents, not tourists, are eating. San Cristobal was no exception. I tried several more LP recs over the course of the few days I was there, and nothing compared to the small places I found on my own.
The next day was another museum day as well. I went to the coffee musuem, which gave the history of the prized bean from its roots in Africa to the colonization of the New World, stopping shy of the Chiapas uprising in 1994. The museum was terribly depressing. Allegedly when coffee was first introduced to Europeans they derided it. You have to wonder how much human suffering and degredation could have been spared had they kept that opinion. Likely, they would have found some other crop with which to enslave indigenous populations. But you never know. I suppose the saddest part of the coffee musuem was realzing how little has changed, and how many people the world over are struggling and suffering and dying in order to provide cheap exports to wealthier nations and appetites. I was morose at the end of the coffee museum, and consoled myself with a steaming plate of huevos rancheros and toast and jam.
After lunch, I found the next museum, Na Bolom, or the Jaguar House. Na Bolom was the home of Trudy and Frank Blom, anthropologists, writers, and friends of the Lacandon Mayans, who are, according to documents, the only group of Mayans to slip deep enough into the jungle to avoid being colonized. When the Blom's discovered them in the 20s, they were still living as they had been for centuries before. The Bloms learned their language, and dedicated their lives to studying and protecting them. The house, which was a monestery before the Bloms purchased it, features hundreds of artifacts of the Lacandons, and I spent several hours wandering through the rooms learning more about this people. Na Bolom is now operated by a trust, who continue the couples' work, manage a reforestation project, education projects in Chiapas, as well as providing a space for the Lacandons to sell their handicrafts to a larger audience. I have to say, I am not one of those people who freaked out when "Julie and Julia" came out. I don't cook much. I don't fetishize high end or artsy cookware. But the cooking accessories that the Lacandons had carved, out of crazy jungle wood, were some of the prettiest things I have ever set eyes on. I wanted them for my mom. I wanted them for me. But, alas, they were very, very expensive for this nursing student.
The house has been converted into not only a museum, but a guesthouse as well, with a group dinner/discussion every evening, at a massive table that seats 30. The library (one of the most gorgeous places I have ever seen) is open to scholars, and tea is served there every afternoon to guests. Scholars and anthropologists often spend months in the library alone conducting research. Across the street is a private organic garden that provides the guesthouse with all the produce they cook with. All in all, a gorgeous and magical place to spend a few hours.
The following day, Friday, was my last full day in SCC. I was originally going to come home on Sunday, but then remembered that was the final game of the World Cup, and I wanted to be home for it. There were dozens of things "to do" that I hadn't done yet. The Mayan clothing museum, the amber museum, and little day trips to ruins and canyons and waterfalls. Not to mention a bazillion cafes and restaurants. But I dediced to take it easy and let Friday be a reading day. I found a cozy spot for breakfast, a place with bagels and the best herb cream cheese On Earth. I was really happy there until they started playing awful music that was really vulgar and offensive. So I packed up and headed to a park. I spent the afternoon window shopping on 20 de Noviembre. I really wanted to get some amber jewelry for my mom and sisters but I couldn't afford any of it. But I happily discovered at Bar Revolucion the best licuado ever. It was lemon juice and mint and pepian seeds, all ground up together with water and it was incredible.
My dorm had emptied out and a new girl had checked in, Bubble (she said she loves her parents' weirdness but would have preferred a more conventional name), and we got dinner at a steakhouse on a very ritzy street, and the food was awful, and she told me about living in France, and being able to speak 4 languages, and being a 1 hour train ride away from 3 other countries and I envied her life.
The next morning we were on the same pimp Mercedes van and I was less grumpy this trip and condescended to talk to the other passengers :) There was a woman who sat next to me who is a school teacher who has been coming to Guatemala and Mexico for 25 years. She comes for a month each summer to study Spanish. She and her husband adopted a Guatemalan child 22 years ago, and now they sponsor an education project in the town that their adopted son was born in. She had a lot of insight into the region and culture and gave me a dozen travel tips and made me wish for more time and money to see Honduras and Belize and El Salvador.
We made our border crossing safely and parted ways in Los Encuentros. The rest of my bus was headed to Lago Atitlan. My pickup at the gas station in Los Encuentros wasn't another shuttle, but a two door Jeep-looking thing with a snorkle and enormous tires and a safari rack. Word.
More soon! I know I have several weeks of catch up due you! Sorry for the delay in between posts. I picked up 5 freelance projects that were due in the past 3 weeks and haven't had the energy to do much writing on top of that.
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