Day 30-33: Antigua

February 1-4.

At the tail end of the plunge we were dropped off on the side of a highway and pointed toward a departing bus to Antigua. We were pulled in through the back door because it was too crowded to go through the front. A very different wave of sound smashed into us: instead of the accordion and trumpet filled Mexican love songs we had been subjected to for the last three hours, this driver was blasting something modern and profane. And so we entered Antigua. 

Huddled around our backpacks at the bus station we discovered Jessica's phone had been stolen or lost. All of us frazzled after a long journey and Jessica especially struggling to keep the ol' chin up, we faced another market maze. On the third attempt we made it through to the main streets of Antigua, and without too much difficulty found our hotel. There we had a happy reunion with our friends and with the showers. 

If you've been reading Camina, Karli, and Rachael's blogs you know that more valuable items were stolen en route to Antigua. 

We spent three days relaxing in the hotel and cafés, looking at old stuff, and debriefing. One afternoon we climbed a hill to earn a view of the city; too bad it was cloudy.

The best part of our last few days in Guatemala was just being together. Even after only three days apart during the plunge I missed the rest of the group. It was great to hear everybody's plunge stories and thoughts. 

Given the historical context... not sure how I feel about this cross. But it gave us a nice Whitworth group photo.

Dana, our intrepid TA, provided us with a generous food stipend, and most of us had quetzales left over from our time in Xela. It wasn't worth exchanging the quetzales into dollars to take with us to Nicaragua, so we were left with cash to burn. That meant mochaccinos, overpriced souvenirs, and more coffee.   

Delicious crepes were enjoyed at a restaurant with beanbags.

Professor Lindy treated us to Pops' ice cream as he had promised many times. 

The downside to all the old buildings, statues, quaint streets, and adorable cafés was being a tourist. We were a large group of white people in a town that is designed to be attractive to gringos. After coming from Nebaj, where we literally counted the number of white people we saw on one hand, it was a little disturbing. Upon entering a restaurant or store we were greeted in English, the signs were mostly in English, the presence of sun hat wearing, pasty tourists was overwhelming. And we were one of them!

Antigua was pretty, very pretty, with museums and building ruins to tell of its rich history. But the culture felt like processed food soaked in preservatives. It was pretty but it wasn't the truth. The truth is that Guatemalan streets are scattered with corn husks, garbage, and dog poop. There are pot holes that will never be fixed and the roads are too narrow to comfortably accommodate pedestrians and cars alike. The truth is crowds of uniformed children walking home from school at lunch time, women carrying babies on their backs, gangs of shoe shine boys chasing each other around the park. It's a market full of people bartering in K’iche’ and Kaqchikel and buses crammed full of people but the assistants are shouting in Spanish trying to cram in more. Antigua wasn't that. 

I went to one shop filled ceiling to floor with trinkets and ornaments. There were a few other tourists there and the owner asked if we spoke Spanish. Their guide or friend or whoever answered that they didn't. The owner then spoke to us all in broken English about her wares, just a few words, trying to be friendly and hopefully sell something. I told her my friends and I spoke Spanish, not wanting to be lumped in the same group as those other people, and boy did she smile. She went on and on about her wares, but after that we continued to chat and laugh. I could tell she was so happy to speak Spanish with customers, I imagine she doesn't get the chance all that often.  

Catch up before leaving Guatemala

Some unorganized thoughts and pictures to share... 

The name "Guatemala" is most likely from the Nahuatl word "Cuauhtēmallān," which means "land of many trees."

On Day 21, January 23, we visited Fuentes Georginas (pronounce the G's like H's), which are natural hot springs. It was very relaxing, but we all smelled of sulfur on the way home. I finally had an opportunity to test out the water-proofness of my water-proof camera. The water was too cloudy for pictures to be any good, but the camera survived. 

I seem to have a lot of pictures of Camina making weird/adorable faces. More of those to come.

I will take this opportunity to share photos of the beautiful countryside -- they didn't seem important enough to take up space in previous posts, but now it seems they are.

The first in the "Dana Sleeping in Unusual Places" series.


Day 26, January 28, we foolishly "took a walk" up a mountain to get to Lake Chicobal. The whole time I reminded myself that it wasn't as bad as Santa María, but it was still hot and dusty. 

Santa María in the distance.

After admiring the view of the crater lake from above, we had to go down A LOT of steps to reach it.  

"NO SWIMMING (WITH CLOTHES)" Lake Chicobal is a sacred place to the Maya people. Around the shore there were ceremony sites and bouquets of flowers. People are allowed to touch the water but not to step a foot in it.

A log. 

The second in the series of "Dana Sleeping in Unusual Places." This time, with the dog that followed us.

Day 24, January 26, we went to Almolonga, a town fifteen minutes outside of Xela. They grow a lot of vegetables, and use a lot of fertilizer.  It also gave us this very pretty view.

Day 28-30: ThE PLuNGE (part 2)

Saturday, January 30 - Monday, February 1
(Did I say I'd try to keep these short? Mmmmmmmm-oops.)

Jump back in to time to Saturday, the day we arrived in Nebaj. We went to an archeology museum (and had a fun time gaining admission, which is another story) and saw a lot of pottery and talked to a young man named Diego. This was the first of 3 Diegos we were to encounter.

The museum was started by a Protestant pastor who saw the need to preserve the history of the Ixil people. A huge amount of artifacts and treasures from Guatemala are owned by museums or private collectors in other countries, so this man wanted Nebaj to hold onto its own history. The museum building used to be a church.

The coolest thing I saw there were these big clay jars used to bury corpses. The Ixil used to bury their dead in the fetal position: since that's the way people come into the world, that's the way they should leave. There's only one other location in Guatemala where archaeologists have found bodies buried in the fetal position. (That's also how they were buried in Chile.)     

Diego and his friend painted all of these pictures.

Diego gave us some advice about where to go to next to learn more about Nebaj, which leads to our next adventure...

He told us to go to la Pista, a little town just outside of Nebaj. It was the site of a lot of killings during the war. We took a microbús there on Sunday, and it truly was a one street town. We poked around a little bit and farther down a dirt road some little kid shouted "GRINGOS!" Clearly, they don't get a lot of tourists. There wasn't anything to do so we bought some Coca-colas and sat down on a curb to watch the world go by. It went by very slowly.

This isn't "the road" of the one road town, just to be clear.

We thought that since we were there we might as well walk around some more, so we went up the hill and followed the main road past a school and some fields with horses. The road became very wide, oddly wide, and stretched on for a long ways.

At the urgency of someone's bladder we returned to the main street to find a bathroom. We asked and were directed to someone's house. They just let people use their toilet pit, I guess. While we were waiting for the bus outside a store Grace saw someone inside she recognized: it was Diego from the museum! He asked if we saw la pista and we answered yes -- that was the name of the town wasn't it? After thirty seconds of us describing what we had seen, which was not much, Diego realized we didn't know what a pista was. "Did you see where the planes land?" he asked us. OOOH. So that's what that big wide road was for!

Later that day we took a took-took to the outskirts of Nebaj where Diego had told us there was a Maya ceremony site. The driver didn't know exactly what we were talking about but gave it his best guess. We walked down a little path between farms until we came to the site, a fire pit. It would have been disappointing if the scenery hadn't been so dang pretty. The took-took driver had advised us to continue walking up the hill where he dropped us off in order to see Nebaj from the top. We did just that, and it was even more dang pretty.  

Monday morning we left Nebaj. There was some confusion getting on the bus because we wanted to go to el Quiché, but the bus assistant replied "yes, we're going to Santa Cruz." "No no!" we said, "where's the bus to el Quiché?" The assistant looked at us like we were idiots, which we probably were, and clarified, "Santa Cruz del Quiché!" 

We enjoyed some giggly conversation with two young ladies on the way to el Quiché. They advised us not to marry people from different cultures because we do things differently -- the example they gave was a Guatemalan husband wanting fried plantains and tortillas for breakfast and we North American girls not wanting to cook that. My solution was that he could make his own tortillas, which was either not the right answer or a very right answer because an older woman in front of us almost choked from trying to keep from laughing out loud. 

After an hour of laughing with them we learned they both had children of about eight years old. They were in their early twenties, just two or three years older than us. We tried to contain our surprise -- they started having kids when we were in the middle of high school. There's nothing shocking about that, but after chatting for a long time we perceived them as girls, very giggly girls, who played on their phones and wanted to be facebook friends and were crammed in this van together with us. And only after that did we learn about a huge difference between our lives.          

One of the few pictures that isn't blurry, taken on the bus ride from Nebaj. Only three crazy buses and five hours to Antigua.

Day 28-30: THe PLUNGE (part 1)

Saturday, January 30 - Monday, February 1

(I'll try to keep these next posts brief so I can catch up to February, we'll see how that works out!) (It didn't work out.)

We left Xela, our home for most of January, on a Saturday morning. Emily and I either pretended not to cry or pretended not to notice the tears of others while we said goodbye to our host mom. The 10 block walk to el parque central didn't seem that long before, but when we were loaded like mules it sure did. We had just passed the school and met up with a few other CASPmates when the family car pulled up behind us with Simon driving and Emi in the passenger seat! Emi can't drive and Juan José had taken a bus to work, so she enlisted Simon's help. 6 of us piled our backpacks into the trunk and backseat, leaving enough room for one person to squeeze in (me!) with the rest walking unencumbered. While it was wonderful not to have to carry our heavy packs the last 5 blocks, it meant we had to say goodbye again. UGH.

We joined with the rest of our group under the statue of Justo Rufino Barrios, where we were to embark on THE PLUNGE. This was the part we didn't tell our parents about before we left for CASP. The Plunge is a good, character building tradition in which we students are divided into groups of 3 or 4, handed an envelope with some cash and the name of a pueblo, and told to get lost. The rules: don't use technology to find directions, don't cross any borders, and don't go to Guatemala City. On Monday we would meet back up at a hotel in Antigua. 

I was with Anne Marie, Jessica, and Grace. Our town was Nebaj, in the department of el Quiché. After a few minutes of dithering to use the bathroom and get coffee, we set out to find a microbús to the bus station. Now, bus stops aren't usually labeled in Guatemala. The city buses are vans that maneuver frighteningly fast through the narrow streets with as many passengers as possible crammed inside. They're not hard to find because each bus has an assistant who hangs out the door and shouts at passersby to get in. The first person who we asked for directions ushered us to a nearby street corner and sure enough, within 3 minutes the right bus came.

We got off at the bus station and ran around confusedly at first. The "station" was just a street next to a crowded market with a lot of Durham buses coming and going. To catch a bus to el Quiché we had to cross through to the other side of the market. There's one thing that I regret not taking pictures of, and that's the markets. They're fascinating and claustrophobic places, and going through one with large backpacks is not easy. 

Well we made it through the maze and emerged in a dirt lot full of pimped out school buses. I'm talking flames on the side, blinking lights, "DIOS ES AMOR" emblazoned on the windshield in a monster-truck font, and stickers of busty-girl silhouettes. We were overwhelmed by the chaos: there were no signs, no information desk, just a lot of roaring chicken buses and people running every which way. Before we even had time to assess our surroundings, a man asked us where we were going, then grabbed one of our bags and ran off. We could only run after him. Our backpacks were thrown on top of a bus and so we found our ride to el Quiché. 

As the bus lurched out of the city we were joined by numerous salesmen who delivered speeches resembling infomercials praising their wares. They'd hop on when the bus stopped and hop off a few blocks later. We were a captive audience, forced to listen to speeches about everything from chocolate to eucalyptus leaves to needle-threaders. 

It was 3 hours from Quetzaltenango to el Quiché, the capital city of the department of the same name, where we would take another bus to Nebaj. All the school-buses were imported from Mexico or the United States, and I wonder if they beef-up the engines or if we just didn't make use of their full power on field trips back home, because these monsters eat up the road and it is scary. These were windy mountain roads, and we were passing cars on blind corners and being thrown out of our seats and not slowing down for anything. All set to energetic Mexican music blasting out the back speaker. 

At the bus station in el Quiché we encountered a problem. Like before, we told a bus assistant where we were going and he rushed off with our bags, but 2 of our bags were thrown on the wrong bus and it started driving away. Jessica and I were in the bathroom while all this was happening, but Anne Marie and Grace got it sorted out with some good use of the imperative mood. 

Onto another microbús for 2 hours of carsickness and admiring the landscape, and we arrived in Nebaj. Our next steps: find a cheap hotel to dump our stuff and find food. We found a place for 50 quetzales a night per person (that's $6.50), and we got exactly what we payed for. There was free agua pura, a TV, and no bed bugs, but that was it. To our annoyance, our room was above a busy street with lots of noise at 5am and at 10pm, when heavy shop doors slammed shut. 

Here we are with all our heavy stuff.


The city of Santa Maria Nebaj, population 79,000, is located in the northern mountains of Guatemala. A plaque in el parque central boasted that Nebaj is home to the most beautiful traje típico in the world. Almost all of the women, of all ages, wore bright red skirts either with a huipil (the traditional blouse) or a t-shirt.

The parque central is dominated by the facade of the Catholic church, which is overflowing during the weekend masses. One of our tasks was to talk to a priest, because they know the history of their parish. This proved difficult to accomplish because Saturday evening they had mass, and Sunday they had 3 masses. We finally got an interview with Padre Diego on Monday morning.

When we finally did get to talk to the padre (there was a sick, annoyed secretary in our way), we learned about how the Catholic church was involved in the healing process of Nebaj, and all of Guatemala, after the civil war. The whole department of Quiché was hit the hardest, and Nebaj especially so. During the worst years of the war entire villages of indigenous people were slaughtered by the Guatemalan army. In Nebaj the population is largely indigenous; we noticed that most people spoke Ixil and knew Spanish as their second language. The guerrilla forces were hiding out in the mountains near the pueblos, and the army wanted to stamp them out. The civilians were accused of helping the guerrillas, or of helping the army, and were caught helplessly in the middle.

Padre Diego described how the church has been working to collect accounts of the war to keep a record. Ten years ago someone set the building on fire to destroy the records, and they were only able to save a few binders. They also have voice recordings that they are working on transcribing. The church has a radio station that has programs in Spanish as well as Ixil, and there are masses in Ixil.

One example of the practical, dirty work the church did was to help exhume mass graves to identify victims and give the bodies back to their families. Can you imagine your pastor asking your congregation to go out with shovels and exhume graves? Not give money to the cause -- they didn't have money to give -- but actually do it themselves?    

 

The mural next to the church. It depicts the conquest in the top left corner, and a scene of peace on the right. A monk is over there with the conquest, but he doesn't look happy with the way Spain is doing things. The woman in the center, who is labeled "Nebaj," is holding water and corn. "Nebaj" is an Ixil word meaning "birthplace of water." The three other women have names in their hair which are the origin places of the Ixil people.

Sunday morning we wandered around the dense, busy market that had taken over several blocks that had been empty the day before. Once again I lament that I didn't take any pictures. We found breakfast, bread and fruit, and our souvenir to share with the rest of the group. Walking proved dangerous as there were tarps hung up for shade, with the cords stretched out above the heads of the average Guatemalan but right at choking level for us.

Grace spotted an open doorway between two fruit vendors that led into a quiet mall in the middle of the busy market. Here they sold all kinds of woven fabric and traditional clothes. Anne Marie chatted with a woman who ended up dressing us all up in the Ixil variant of the traje tipico and telling us her life story.

She even did up Anne's hair.

We mostly only saw old women wearing the hair pom-poms, but as I said before, everybody wears the bright red skirt.

The woman described life in Nebaj during the war: they were afraid to go outside after 5pm or use lights because they would be shot in their houses. Many people disappeared or were tortured. Her father was tortured and killed, but they don't know which side did it. She made it clear that both the Guatemalan army and the guerrilla forces terrorized civilians. The town shrunk because people fled to Mexico or to the cities where it was a bit safer. When the fighting was at its worst she and her husband moved to Guatemala City where they lived for 5 years. Even there they had problems. No one would hire her husband because he was indigenous, so she sold street food to provide their income. She didn't know any Spanish then, only Ixil, but she learned. Because she wore the traje tipico she too faced anger and hatred from ladinos who thought Indigenous people were on the side of the guerrillas.

Once she was on the street and a ladino woman pushed her (or they bumped each other accidentally, not sure) and then shouted "Guerrilla! Guerrilla! That guerrilla pushed me!" Our friend the saleswoman was petrified. She thought she would be killed.          

We asked why she continued to wear the traje tipico in Guatemala City, since she was discriminated against because of it. She said it was what she had always worn, and what she was comfortable in. How could she wear anything else? Then we asked what she thought of foreigners like us buying Ixil clothes and wearing them, even though it isn't our culture. She said she was proud that today foreigners think Ixil traje tipico is beautiful, and that if you like something you should wear it.

Anne Marie, Jessica, and Grace all dressed up.

Day 1-28: Mi familia guatemalteca

January 3-30

If you ever want a really awkward experience, try living with a family without fully understanding their language. They're going to do weird things, like put ketchup on all their food and never wear seat belts, but they're going to think you're pretty strange too because you don't know how to operate a shower faucet. Once you get past the first few days of not remembering your mom's name or how to get home from school or to put the toilet paper in the trashcan... well, once you get past that first week you'll probably continue to do things wrong or say things that are funny but you don't know why they're funny. It's a lot of fun, trust me.

My family in Xela was small, only Emilia (Emi for short), her husband Juan José, and their daughter Ana. Some confusion followed because my roommate's name was Emily, and the "H" in my name is optional. They're really fun people, and have hosted a lot of foreigners. Emi and Juan José loved looking at photos of Spokane and our families and learning about the United States. 

All the houses in Guatemala are walled in. I find this slightly ironic because Latinos are supposed to be more social, more connected with their families and the people in their communities. And they are, but they don't do the rocking chairs on the front porch thing. They go to family parties late at night with loud marimba music and dancing, and then somehow wake up at 6am to do it all over again. Although I like front yards and porches, I also really liked the houses in Guatemala. They're bright and colorful, and it just looks cool. 

This was my street, barely a 10 minute walk to our school. Our neighbors had dogs on their roof that scared Emily and me the first time we walked by.

In the middle of the day the metal door was really hard to open because it expanded. This is our host sister, Ana. 

Emily taught Emi how to make banana bread, and she LOVED it. Later I made a chicken pot pie with her, which I had serious doubts about, but it turned out to be delicious.

One evening we had our friend Karli come over to teach our family country swing dancing. Emily and Karli are both pretty fantastic at it. (This was at the end of January, and the overwhelming Christmas decorations are still up.)

In the last week, we got a new host brother, Simon from Switzerland. We played a lot of card games with him and had fun trying to pronounce the German words on his Spanish flashcards.

On the last night Emi dressed us up in her and Ana's traje tipico. Each department in Guatemala has its own indigenous culture(s) with their own unique traditional clothing. Depending on the place, everybody wears the traje tipico or only the old people do. In the department of Quetzaltenango, which is 25% K'iche', a lot of women wear the traje tipico but none of the men do. And a lot of people only wear it for special occasions. These dresses are really expensive and take up to 5 months to weave and embroider by hand. Emi said the men's traje is even more expensive, which is why they never wear it out and about except for special occasions.

The women's traje tipico is made up of a huipil, which is a heavily embroidered shirt, a skirt which weights about 50 pounds, and a belt cinched tight so you can't breathe. There's also a long piece of cloth that can be worn as a scarf, folded over your shoulder, to carry on your back, folded on your head to keep the sun out of your eyes... I don't remember its name, but it's very important that you fold it right.

Emily, Simon, and me. Simon is wearing Juan José's traje tipico shirt over his two shirts. The pants were a little short.

We went to Emi's parent's house to show off our new outfits. They live within walking distance, along with various other relatives that I can't keep track of. A few nights a week Emi and Juan José go over to have dinner with them and "work." This mysterious work, we found out two weeks in, is grinding meat to make hot dogs. Emi's mom sells hot dogs in the market. That explained why there were hot dogs in our spaghetti one dinner. 

The abuelos' house is also full of Christmas decorations, and really loud marimba music. The whole family would sits around a looooong table and eat and makes merry until Emily and I were falling over because it was past our bedtime. One kid, Ángel, who I'm guessing was very autistic, liked to dance. He'd go up to people and grab their hands wanting to step to the marimba music.

And here Ángel looks like a zombie.

Mi familia guatemalteca. I didn't know them for very long, but I already miss them.

El Cementerio en Xela

Xela's public cemetery is more alive than any cemetery in the United States. Every weekend the square outside the walls is packed with venders selling massive bouquets of flowers and families going to visit their lost ones. Latin America in general is more in touch with death than the U.S. I think part of it is that family connections are stronger, and they try to maintain that connection even after someone dies. 

Perhaps another contributing factor is that every country in Central America, with the exception of Costa Rica, went through a civil war in the last half of the 20th century. Brutal civil wars. In Guatemala many people don't like to call the 37-year long conflict a civil war because it was one-sided. It wasn't a war between two armies but rather a slaughtering and terrorizing of civilians. Yes, the guerrilla forces also tortured and killed civilians, but 90% of the atrocities committed from 1960 to 1996 were done by the Guatemalan army (The bishop Juan Gerardi, who was responsible for that report, titled Guatemala: Nunca Más, was assassinated a few days after it was published). So everybody older than 30 remembers the war, and had close friends and family members who died. 

The sign hanging in the entrance to the cemetery says "The memory of the living gives life to the dead." I think the people of Guatemala do live by that saying.

 

The most striking difference between U.S. cemeteries and Xela's is that the graves are above ground, and they're colorful. They make me think of shelves for caskets. The head stones (shelf stones?) tend to have whole poems or Bible verses written on them, not just names and dates. There are a lot more flowers too -- families visit graves regularly for years after someone has died.  

All that visiting means that, like the rest of Xela, there's a lot of garbage. Old flowers and ribbons get thrown on big dirt piles. As gross as all the litter and stray-dog poop is, there's something nice about it too. It means that this is a place for people, for alive-things.

Of course, some people get fancier graves than others. Some have statues on top, or busts of the deceased, or are mini-chapels. A few years ago someone smashed off the head of every angel in the cemetery -- only the angel of death's head was safe. My professor thinks it was satanists. Maybe it was just a group of dumb kids. Weird.

Some of the fancier, older graves had the caskets below ground. Here's what an open one looked like: shelves for everybody in the family!

A lot of the graves had chapels I could peer into.

And now! The legend of Vanushka! It's a long story that I don't feel like writing, fortunately Camina beat me to it. Read the whole legend here.

Probably the most famous tomb in Xela's cemetery is Vanushka's, a gypsy who died of a broken heart... or poison. Couples, distant lovers, and those seeking love write their names on Vanushka's tomb so the lady will help them. Her love story ended badly -- he married someone else and she killed herself -- but her ghost-spirit-whatever wants to help others avoid her sorrow.

Lastly, smack in the middle of the cemetery there's a big yellow wall. It's a monument to the fallen soldiers of the revolution of 1897. Remember how I wrote about Quetzaltenango trying to be it's own country, the sixth state of Central America? This is a monument to that struggle.

"The love of liberty made them heroes."

"The hatred of tyrants made them martyrs."