Starting It Off (Week 1)

I´m now exactly two weeks in and decided I should probably get this thing going or there´s a good chance it wasn´t going to happen.

I arrived in Guatemala City at about 8pm. You walk out the front entrance and see a large group of people all waiting for arrivals and taxi drivers advertising rides to Antigua. Also noticeable is the dramatic change in size of guns that security guards carry. I was picked up by a woman that had been arranged through my language school and spent the night in her home. We talked about the economic recession which has apparently dramatically lowered the number of tourists coming into the country and has put a lot of strain on her income which, like many people, relies solely on the industry.

The following morning she drove me to the bus stop for Xela, where I´ve been the last two weeks studying Spanish. I ended up sitting next to Jeff, a 55 yo chiropracter from Connecticut and two Guatemalan law students from La Capital. Jeff had decided to leave his practice after 30 years when he felt like he wasn´t enjoying what he was doing anymore and his years of having the opportunity to do something like this were becoming more and more obviously finite.

The two law students were traveling to Xela (a four hour bus ride) for a concert that was being held in a few days with a number of very popular Guatemalan groups. I had been unaware at the time that the coming week was Independence Week for Guatemala and a number of other countries in Central America and Xela happens to be one of the more popular places to spend the holiday in all of Central America.

Xela is a city of 250,000 people and is the former capital of Western Guatemala. It is located up in the mountains at an altitude that I´m forgetting but is high enough to make me winded after a very short uphill walk.

We arrived in Xela and I was picked up by a rep from the language school and driven to my family home for the next 3 weeks. The family consists of a woman in her 50´s named Vilma, her daughter and son-in-law, her 20 yo son, and her 4 yo grandson who was born premature and suffered oxygen deprivation to the brain in utero and has severe Cerebral Palsy requiring constant care. A 15 yo Mayan girl is the grandson´s caretaker and tells me she works 7 days a week, 17 hours a day caring for the child. I asked her if she went to school and she told me she hadn´t been to school in 2 years because "she didn´t like studying.¨

The following day I joined three other students for a school trip to a sacred Mayan Lake up in the mountains. The ride consisted of the four of us sitting in the back of a pickup truck on a mattress which is how it´s done by pretty much everybody down here. I´ve seen people driving with their pre-teen kids in the flatbed even when there´s clearly enough room inside the cab. Definitely makes for a more exciting trip. We drove out of town and up into the mountains, passing through several small Mayan villages and farm land scattered among the slopes. When the truck couldn´t navigate the road anymore, we walked. This is when I first realized how far above sea-level we were and how I imagine people with heart failure of COPD feel. You know you´re taking a deep breath, but you´re never fully satisfied and you´re out of breath by the time you´re finished exhaling.

The lake quite pretty and you could hear the rumbling of the nearby active volcanoes. One of the students I was with is a mechanical engineer who worked at NASA´s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He told me he´d known since he was in high school that that was what he wanted to do, but five years of working there, he´d become burnt out and was questioning whether this is what he saw for his life in the future. He has 6 months off and a job waiting for him, but has started questioning whether he´ll be going back.

When we returned to Xela, we all went to the soccer stadium to watch Xelaju, the city team, play. It is the Guatemalan equivalent of the MLS. Everybody gets really into it and at one point, after a Xelaju player scored a penalty kick, the only point of the game, some sort of bottle rocket set off in the celebration winged him and he was carried off the field in a stretcher. I stood next to two Guatemalan kids and they taught me some of the vocab of the game and made sure to point out when anybody around us said a bad word.

After the game, I went with Arroldo, the son in law of the house and met up with Pai and Liz, the law students. We all went out for a drink at a popular bar. About 1130, after 8 liters of cerveza, the bar started playing music by a famous musician whose name I´m forgetting. Everybody in the bar knew these songs, were singing along, and then started weeping. Seriously every person around me was crying. I know we have songs that are sad in the States, but I´d never seen such a communal reaction to a series of songs. They played seven songs from this guy who apparently only sings on the topic of lost love.

Two days later I attended the Independence Concert with Pai and Liz. The concert was sponsored by Gallo, effectively the national beer of Guatemala. I´ve realized that there´s nothing that they figure they can´t sell down here with women in spandex. Between groups (there were 6 or 7), they would parade out Las Chicas de Gallo and with the MC, get the crowd chanting Gallo! Gallo! Gallo! It took me awhile to ask myself what the fuck I was doing chanting the name of a beer. I´ve never seen anyone yelling Coors! Coors! Coors!

The concert was packed and I learned that Guatemalan youth are fond of moshando (from the verb moshar = to mosh). It´s a very different experience for someone like me who is below average in height in the US but here ranks in the 98th percentile. A group of drunk kids behind us kept trying to hoist their equally drunk buddy in the air except didn´t possess the coordination of the strength to pull it off. Instead, he just ended up kicking me in the head several times before I turned around and shoved him which actually sent the entire group of 8 people to the ground. To feel physically powerful . . .

The following night I went to a fair with the son in law. This particular fair is the only one that happens all year so is a huge event. We took the bus to the outskirts of the fairgrounds and walked the final half kilometer in because traffic was at a full standstill. It´s a very big deal in this town and everybody comes out to sell things. I passed a woman selling bottles of shampoo in plastic bags, because apparently come to the fair to buy their Head&Shoulders. I saw a kid of maybe 15 going up to cars in the street and guiding them along in hopes that the driver would give him a tip. The only thing was that it was a one-way street and there was really no other available options for movement. I´d probably be able to do that job for two weeks before I started playing with the idea of kidnapping white people.

The fair itself was a chaotic mix of colors, smells, noises, and rides. I decided against trying out the rides after I´d been told that Liz´s sister had dislocated her shoulder on one of the spinny ones. I didn´t see another foreigner the entire night.

Alright, enough for one sitting.