The other side of the fence

School yard at Uchuch

My Guatemala field trips have mostly been as a special guest, talking to groups assembled for the benefits of visitors. Today I’m tagging along at a real-live, roll-up-your-sleeves work day with the local staff ministering in Uchuch.  Since it´s the start of school, it´s time to enroll children in our programs who have moved into the community or reached school age.

We arrive at the elementary school in Uchuch, which has just been freshly painted sky-blue.  Because of a teacher strike, classes haven’t started.  The furniture and teaching supplies have been moved around to accommodate the painters so things are in disarray.  The school director is there, and I find him laying out first-day-of-school banners and other decorations in each classroom.  It’s good to see him hopeful that government negotiations with the teachers will succeed soon. “God willing,” I say to him, “Ojalá.¨ He sighs and smiles at the same time.

The school director here has been a real help, staff tell me.  He´s collected copies of birth certificates ahead of time, an important first step to certifying kids´eligibility for our programs.

Rescue

In the early morning, when the mist still hangs on the hills, I’m glad for the warmth of the cooking fire inside Elena’s home.* Her two daughters, Ana and Petrona, work quickly to arrange a temporary bench for our visiting team with a piece of plywood balanced between some squat wooden chairs.

Elena sits in front of me, next to the fire. We gather in the kitchen area of her three-room wooden house; through a doorway, I can see a wooden loom strung with thread that will eventually birth cloth to make the traditional local blouses (guipiles).

FH’s staff member who works with this family, Grigorio, tells us that Elena is a widow and that she suffers from debilitating arthritis.  I can see swollen finger joints as Grigorio tells me this, although you would not know from Elena’s visage or manner that she is in any pain. She is eager to talk, even to speak to me in Spanish that I can tell comes only with extra effort. She has an active mind and engaging manner, one that’s led to her taking leadership posts in her church.

Something different

Feliciana and I conversing during our interview

Between the lush gray-green hills, a rutted road twists its way out of Nebaj, a market town in Guatemala   As the road climbs higher, the broad leaves of banana, papaya and avocado plants give way to tall mountain pine forests.  We cross a bridge over a shallow river, and see a sign announcing our arrival in the town of Rio Azul.

When I enter the borrowed store front that’s serving as a workshop, I first notice a fragrance, even before my eyes adjust to the darkness inside.  A polite group of women greet us briefly with their soft Ixil hello and delicate handshakes, but they move on quickly — there’s work to do.  These five women are part of a group making scented candles as part of an income generation project.  Pine and gingerbread scents waft through the room.  In back of the store, over a wood fire, the women are melting paraffin for the next batch of candles.

The group’s vice president, Feliciana, has the best Spanish. So she’s elected as the spokeswoman, and for the first time in her life, she clips on a lapel mic so I can record her thoughts and stories.

Hidden costs of war

During my first week in Guatemala, a friend asks me what has changed the most about Guatemala since my last visit 17 years ago. I have to think a bit, since we’re not in the same part of the country I saw back then.  But I do remember one jarring aspect of life in Guatemala in the 90’s – streets with soldiers, soldiers in trucks, whispers of attacks, a friend showing me bullet wounds on his abdomen that came from government rifles.  “I’m not seeing that anymore,” I say.  The 36-year civil war is, by visual accounts, a thing of the past.

Peace accords between the various factions occurred in 1996, about three years after my last short-term mission trip.  But the war lingers insidiously.

Home

Our team visiting inside Jose's home

Up from the main road, over the ridge, down into a shallow valley, up and around the back of another ridge, and up again on a path that I wouldn’t want to attempt in the rainy season.  I’ve worn a skirt to balance my white skin and what must be shocking gray hair, thinking the skirt might lessen the cultural distance a bit.  Now I’m cursing the skirt, which is picking up burrs and bugs and whatever else is alongside the narrow path. Ruts in the path suck my trusty SAS flats right off my feet, so I trip and slide down the path. My female colleagues, in very American blue jeans, sneakers and baseball caps, make much faster progress.  Breathing hard due to the altitude, I manage to keep up so I don’t lose the group on a turn.

Near the top of the hill is a wooden house, made of one large room with a peaked roof and a kitchen attached lean-to style on the back.  A man sits outside, weaving a hammock out of maguey.  As we arrive he waves and motions us inside.  I note that he maneuvers with the aid of a crude walking stick.

Vision

Maria explains her vision for her community

We’re eating lunch, or perhaps I should say, our second lunch – it makes me think of “Second Breakfasts” in Lord of the Rings.  Every community we visit wants to feed us. Toward the end of the meal in the dark community center, a woman enters with so much energy that every head turns.  It’s as if an invisible spotlight has focused on her confident, jovial presence.

I’m told her name is Maria, and she’s a community leader.  I ask if we can do an interview with her, because I think she has spark and wit that will present well on video.  She moves so fast that I have trouble keeping up, even though I think she passed “pleasingly plump” several kilos ago. She begins talking about her work in the community before our team can get the camera rolling.

“Puedo hablar”

I heard it twice in one day:  the description of a community leader as someone who “can speak.”  The first time, a man named Ernesto with the gentle joy of the Lord in his heart gave thanks to his father for sending him to school, and thanks to FH for helping his children’s school.  “Thanks to my father, I can speak, and I can do math,” Ernesto said.  He wants the same for his children, and thanks to FH, they have it.  I found it curious that he just used the phrase “Puedo hablar,” I can speak, to describe the process of learning Spanish in addition to his native Q’eqchi’.  Not, “I can speak Spanish,” just, “I can speak.”

Possibilities

He chose David his servant and took him from the sheep pens,

From tending sheep he brought him to be the shepherd of his people Jacob, of Israel and his inheritance.

And David shepherded them with integrity of heart, with skillful hands he led them. (Psalm 77:69-72, NIV)

On this Wednesday morning, as the chilly fog burns off the mountains, mothers and their preschoolers emerge from the leafy pathways that feed onto the main road.  They gather in the  community center each month so that volunteers can measure the children’s weight and height.

Guatemala, 22 January

My head hurts.

I’m carrying around a ton of “stuff” in my brain, sorting through the last 3-4 days in Cobán and Chamelco.  I’m posting right now mostly to let people know I’m still alive.  I don’t have much to say that’s super-intellectual.

Techie woes continued when I left my camera on a desk at Victor and Eli’s house. Again, that just fed into God’s plan.  I feel very, very good about my time with staff in the Chamelco office.  Since my equipment was AWOL we used two very simple digital cameras for photos and video.  Before leaving for Guatemala, I’d reviewed photos they had sent to help me see what they already knew, and where we needed to make some adjustments.

Guatemala, Sunday January 17

The cathedral on Guatemala City's central plaza

Today I experienced the Guatemala of the upper class.  We went to a well-equipped church and ate lunch at a shopping mall with some of the same designers you’d see in Scottsdale Fashion Square.  The Wal-Mart is down the street, as is the supermarket.  It takes two gates to get through to the house where I’m staying. It is beautiful, green, clean and peaceful.

My host family, headed by my colleague Victor and his wife Elizabeth, made sure I understood I was seeing the “top of the heap” in the first part of the day.