"Work With Your Heart"

February 21st, 2009. 3:18 PM

This is my final day in Guatemala. We just drove about 4.5 hours to the city of Antigua. I spent some time wondering around, looked at the beautiful churches, and bought some nice sandals since it’s going to be incredibly hot in El Salvador, and the only sandals I have with me are my breaking Old Navy flip flops. Antigua is a colonial city, and it’s one of the most well off cities in Guatemala today. It’s very beautiful, but also much too touristy for my liking. After being in places like Xela and Cantel, this just doesn’t do it for me. It really kind of just reminds me of Florida.

Let me get to the exciting (and sad) events from the past week! Saying good-bye to Xela was not easy, but I think that makes it even better because I really feel like I made strong connections there.

Last Friday was our last day of formal class. In the evening we had graduation at PLQ. They have a dinner and little celebration every week for the students that are finishing their studies. Then on Saturday morning I had to say good-bye to Yolanda (my host mama). She is the sweetest woman, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to spend three weeks living with her. She told me that whenever I returned it was still my house, and made me promise to come for lunch the day that we were returning to Xela after our week in the rural villages.

After leaving Xela we drove to Santa Anita La Union, a small coffee finca closer to the coast. It is a community of ex-guerillas who came together after the war, managed to get their hands on same land, had their wives and children return from seeking refugee in Mexico, and started growing coffee and bananas to make a living. We heard from one man about their history and their struggles to compete with large coffee plantations. Their finca is completely organic, and they sell their coffee fair trade in the United States. We watched a documentary, which I had previously watched part of online. I really recommend watching it if you get a chance. It’s only about fifty minutes long, and it explains a lot of the history and the struggle of this community and of Guatemala. The film is called “Voice of a Mountain,” and can be watched online at: http://www.voiceofamountain.com/en/film.
Anyway, the area of Santa Anita was beautiful, and very calming after three weeks in the city. We went on a hike through a rainforest to a waterfall. We saw their bananas and their coffee growing. A man that walked with us also showed me this flower that, if you touch it, springs closed to protect its seeds inside. Nature never ceases to amaze me. Everything about it is so incredible. It just works, and it’s all balanced. I also saw my first rain in Guatemala. More like my first pouring rain actually. It’s not the rainy season, so it’s rare to see such heavy rain, but it’s needed, so it was good. The smells of rain and roasting coffee beans come to mind when I think back on my day on the finca.

On Sunday, our group divided into two and half went to the Mountain School which was located near Santa Anita, while I (and the other half), went to the community of Pachaj, located in Cantel, about fifteen minutes away from Xela. I’m so glad I chose to go to Pachaj, and I thoroughly enjoyed my week there. We stayed with families in groups of two’s and three’s. I lived with two other girls, and I absolutely loved my family. I got the opportunity to stay with Hermando, the Mayan priest who performed our ceremony the week before. His wife is gorgeous and so sweet, and his mom lived with us as well. She only spoke in Quiche, one of the indigenous Mayan languages, so I learned a little bit of the language, and tried to communicate as best as I could. She was adorable though and was always giggling. The children. They were my favorite part. I had a sister that was 15, Claudia, 13 year old Jorge, 11 year old Raul, 3 year old Dulce Maria, and 2 year old Hermando Junior. They were such a sweet family. The dynamic they had was incredible. Each child had so much responsibility, and they all took care/looked after one another. I really enjoyed spending time talking to Claudia and learning about her life and her role in the house. I found out about halfway through the week that the three older children have a different father. He had gone away to the United States to send back money to his family, but met someone else and never returned.

Speaking of family members going away to earn money to be sent back, one of our afternoon activities was visiting a local elementary school to see how the system is run and what the children are learning. We went into several different classes at different levels of learning. In each class we had the opportunity to ask questions, sing songs, and basically do whatever we wanted. The one thing that sticks out of my mind, maybe the most from the entire week, is when the question was asked about the children having family members in the United States. In each class, at least 2/3 of the students raised their hands, many of them saying it was their fathers who were away, others had uncles away. It just really changes my perspective on the illegal immigrants in the U.S. It breaks my heart that these families are being torn apart because they have to be, because they need to make this money to survive.

Back to my family for a second. One night we spent about two hours talking about ghosts, spirits, and scary stories. The spiritual realm has such a strong belief in these communities here. The most famous story they told is about the llorena, or the weeper. It’s a story about a woman whose father killed her child because he had impregnated her, and the woman was in such distress that she killed herself. Now the woman runs around crying for her lost child. The myth is that if you see her, you die. If you hear her and it sounds close, she is actually far, and vice versa. They also told me of their mom’s aunt who fell off a cliff in the mountains and died. Their mother was out in the fields, and she saw her aunt’s ghost and ran. I don’t know, it was interesting to me the belief in these stories and the connection with the spiritual realm.

My house was very modest, but also quite sufficient. The kitchen was the main gathering room, and food was cooked on an open fire in the corner. There were about three other rooms which served as bedrooms for all the members of the family. There was also a small enclosure for their three cows and one for their two pigs. The toilet was just a hole in the ground outside, with only three walls around it, so it was quite easy to see in. The shower was similar to my shower in Nicaragua last year. Just a little closet type thing where you simply use a bucket of water to bathe. It makes so much more sense and uses so much less water. I bucket bathed at night by candle light on the first night. It’s such a neat experience, and really makes me think about the luxuries we have in life that we simply take for granted.

Throughout the week we had class in the morning. My house was a 25 minute-ish walk to where we had our classes. The walk was beautiful though, because I was surrounded by mountains. The roads were all dirt roads, which gave the experience an authentic feel, but also angered me because of how much the government boasts about building up infrastructure. Anyway, it was really sad working with Ailsa for the last week. She’s a great woman, and I’m so happy that she has been my teacher for the past four weeks. We learned past and future tense all in four days, which was kind of rushed and my head is still kind of jumbled with it all. I need to keep studying!

Our afternoon activities were really interesting, and I enjoyed them all. We had a cooking class, where we learned to cook envueltos, which happened to be my favorite food that Yolanda had made for me, so I was quite happy to learn how to make it. We went to a hot springs that was designed for actual bathing, which was good because many people in my group did not bucket bathe once the entire week, so they smelled. We went to a glass blowing cooperative, which was a very cool thing to see. I got to blow the glass, but I blew too hard and made it fly off of the tube…Oops.

We also worked one afternoon with Hermando’s environmentalism project. He is a full-time volunteer for his project called Chicomendes, named after a man who was an environmentalist himself. The project aims to educate people about the environment and its importance, to plant trees in the surrounding mountains, and to fight against the governments wishes for the privatization of water. The project has planted 80,000 trees in the past year. We helped gather seeds for more trees. It was tiring work, because we picked hundreds and hundreds of seeds off of tree branches. It was also very rewarding, and I’m glad I could be a part of the project. I am really inspired by Hermando, and I would really like to continue to help his project thrive and succeed.

On the final day of class we played basketball against our teachers. I really miss playing games like that…being competitive and active. It was so fun and energizing, although we lost pretty badly. Oh well.

Overall, it was an incredible week. I was really inspired by a lot of things that went on around me. It frustrates me that people have so much ignorance to communities such as this one. Being a rural community while others are building up around you doesn’t mean that you don’t have the brains to do it. These people I met in Pachaj are some of the most creative and innovative, but they chose to live life a certain way, and value family and life more than material possessions. I think it’s a good thing, and I feel like they understand what life is about. I wish I could live so connected to everything around me. It was also weird for me to think about the fact that I got to come, experience what their lives were like, and then leave, and (eventually) return to mine. I’ve also been thinking about how weird it is that we see so many people every day…and will probably never see most of them again. I’ll never know their stories, and that kind of makes me sad. …but now I’m way off topic.

I also wish it were possible to raise a family the way families are in this community. The families are so close and so loving. The children grow up quickly and are responsible, yet they still have time to be kids and play with one another. In the U.S., I think we let people be adolescents for too long. I mean, people never really have to grow up. We have most things given to us. The children have to grow up here. They need to help their families survive. That’s such a responsibility. I don’t know…

I will certainly remember my time in Pachaj for a long time to come. The final night we had a bonfire to say good-bye and to wrap up the week. Two things my host daddy said really stuck with me:

“We need to break the chains that separate the world. And we need to unite.”

“Remember to work with your heart, and you’ll get better results.”



On Friday, we returned to Xela for the day. I ran around doing some errands/going places that I hadn’t been to in all my time there. Then I went back to Mama Yoli’s house for lunch. She was so happy to see me, and it made me feel really good. I realized what a good connection we had really made, but it also made me miss her all over again because I knew I would really have to leave after that. She did convince me to come eat one last pancake with her for breakfast the next morning, so before we departed from Xela, I woke up at six to go eat and see her one last time. I miss her, and I wish I could have lived with her longer.

Alright well tomorrow I’m off to El Salvador!