adventures around Xela
border officials, soccer, mi casa, and orphans
09.03.2007
Yo friends. So last I left you guys, I was being threatened point blank with arrest, deportation. The proactive part of me devoted to self-protection irked at the thought, and I spent the better part of last Saturday attempting to ameliorate my legal status. It was quite a journey, and I'd love to share the adventure. Entonces, after yet another late night out on the town (I've got to explain to you that I've got a new friend here, named Lars, from Greenland, who carries one of the most stereotyped reputations at the school. Indeed, he is the usual subject of choice for creating basic Spanish sentences for practicing various grammatical points. For example, the future tense plus the imperfect: Lars will not be to class on time because he was still stumbling through the streets of Xela at 2am. A great party buddy, quite funny.), I got up and walked out of my small, simple room...
(Thought: since I've already explained the likely circumlocutious evolution of this blog, and since I've recently come to respect the writings of Salinger, Twain, etc., I think this is now an opportune time to explain my living situation...) The walls are green, the fitted sheet never stays in place through the night, I use six blankets at night for the cold mountain air of Xela, and after two weeks here there are cookie crumbs, receipts (which you even get for using the bathroom here), my dictionary and grammatical notebooks, travel things and local periodicals spread across an old desk. My room enters onto the rooftop terrace, pink and strung with clotheslines, littered with dry potted plants and spilled dirt, and a cute beagle puppy named Shachi. I go downstairs into the small courtyard from where all the rooms abut, and into the kitchen. Breakfast of eggs and black beans, a solo, the choice dish repeated for breakfast, dinner and sometimes incorporated into lunch. The lunches are the main meals, quite extensive, always good, and I do my best to stuff myself at 1:30pm each day after school to make it through the sparsity of dinner. My sole complaint. I have two mothers, Sonya, and her mother, Amanda. Sonya's children, the youngest at 21, are always bustling through the house on their various work/school schedules. Everyone barely comes up to my mid-chest, and Sonya loves laughing at my gangliness and sometimes litters our conversations with so many jokes and teases that I've perfected a small nervious laugh to quickly interject to ascertain whether she's just kidding me. In the room next to me is a 28 year old german girl named Elina, down here for 6 months, learning Spanish as her fourth (of fifth?) language. She's great, we joke around constantly. My house is located literally three doors from ICA, the school I go to, so I leave the house right at 8am for class. We've got five hours of class each day, one on one with a teacher (usually young, fun university student), and we rotate once a week. The classrooms are gathered around a central courtyard, strung with flowering plants, and the natural wood construction gives a rustic, non-pretentious and academic aesthetic. I like to have my classes on the rooftop terrace, on the fifth story of our school, one of the tallest buildings around and with a spectacular 360 degree view of the city and surrounding mountains. My two teachers so far have been great, we spend lots of time just joking around, them always teasing me, waiting for me to translate the joke, comprehension, then bam! they burst into a high pitched belly laugh. That was more the style of teaching of Miguel Gato, my first teacher, a short latino and ex-pro soccer player, the latter fact I only learned after three days straight smack talk about the school's organized indoor soccer game. (The future tense: Cangrejo -- me -- will break Gato's legs in this Thursday's soccer game). This week I had a university student named Cuqui, pronounced just like it looks, and spent much of this past week indirectly flirting with me. Can't say I didn't enjoy it, as she has an exotic attractiveness, but not too sure how much my theoretical knowledge of Spanish improved. Conversational and verbal comprehension skills improved, though. Apparently, she's a competition salsa dancer. There have been some great activities during the week, trips to local villages to see textile fabrication (and sample the incredibly strong Caldos de Frutas), lazying about hot springs, 6am back of the pickup rides through dusty, bumpy roads to sacred mayan lakes, three evening soccer matches, students versus teachers, incredibly fun, and also to a professional soccer game, the local Xela team versus Guatemala City (more colorful vocabulary than I could every learn in a classroom, fireworks, confetti, positively wild fans, great soccer). I've spent a good amount of time just exploring Xela as well, a vibrant city that isn't solely devoted to foreigners. A beautiful central park, market stalls that go on forever, churches, plazas, cafes aplenty, and an incredible cementary, each tomb cast in bight color and adorned with alternately gaudy or ghastly sculptures.
So now I'll return to Saturday morning. After breakfast, I checked over the map and my guidebook, laying unused and unhappy on my floor. I plan to head to the nearest border -- the El Carmen/ Talísman border with Mexico, in an attempt to finally get that entry stamp, three weeks tardy, from the Guatemalan immigration office there. I pack essentials into my backpack, knowing that anything can happen on chicken buses on Guatemalan roads, and especially at borders -- sleeping sack, jacket, contact lense case, flashlight, passport and credit card. Set off at a quick stride along 19 Avenida and a left onto Rodolfo Robles, heading for the main chicken bus terminal, Minerva, 30 minutes walk away. It's 9:45am. A bright sunny day, a cool breeze as I wade through the milling locals and the energetic hum of the local daily market outside Minerva, the biggest in Xela and where you can quite literally buy anything. Women in beautifully embroidered local dress sprawled with their vegetables in the sun, men hunkering in cluttered stalls, the odor of aging organic produce and sweat and refuse everywhere. I confidently saunter through the crazily decorated chicken buses fuming black smog, the hum punctuated by hustlers barking common tourist destinations at me -- Panajachel, Antigua, Monterrico. I love these kinds of moments, me striding through a local market, through shriveled chips bags and trash, such a graphic display of humanity, nothing here trimmed and neat, nothing meant for me, everything at just a beautiful functionality, just being what it is and no more, dirty but just living living living. I call back at one of the bus ayudantes “San Marcos” (different town than the one I stayed at near the lake), and am escorted to a microbus, just about ready to leave. I hop in the front, and we roll off. Buses here are composed of a driver, and the ayudante, the latter of which tempts death many times on an hour long journey. He hangs out the side of the bus, the door wide open, yelling the direction and ferrying people aboard. When there’s too many people to fit another person inside, he’ll hold onto the a-frame outside at 45 mph and collect people’s payments through the windows. My first bus went smoothly, changed in San Marcos to chicken bus. Young children, men and women stroll onto the bus, trying to sell homemade tacos, water, soda, trinkets, bible verses. One woman comes on with a prepared, bored-sounding speech for the health benefits of ginseng. She’d given the speech every time, she often choked on the ending vowel of various words. Once underway, I met a guy with a broad smile named Israel, sinewy muscles from manual labor underneath a plain white tee. He was anxious to talk with me: he toured restaurant jobs in the United States for a few years, and knew San Francisco. Squeezed against the window, six people to a row, thinking about a girl I met from Holland at the soccer game last week. Annemarie, somewhat shy but enthusiastic and with a fabulous smile, blue eyes. Dreaming about a life of adventure, chances to finally be heroic. The road from San Marcos to Malacatán drops steeply from the Western Highlands to the coastal plain, descending 2000m in a dramatic series of hairpin turns. The scenery, and the vistas, are riveting. In Malacatán, switch to another micro bus for deposit at the border. Step in with the crowd of latinos streaming in both directions between Guat. and Mex. and find the Immigration office. Try to play the dumb tourist with the official, but when he questions the lack of a Mexican exit stamp, I pleadingly explain to him my plight. He leaves to talk the situation over with his superior. On his return, he explains sure, he can give me a stamp, but first I’d have to leave Guatemala, cross the border, and then return in a few hours to his office. An only after a gratuity charge of 200Q. Somewhat deadened, and wondering about the ramifications of my dubious legal status, I think it over, and tell him that I’d be leaving the country in two months anyways, couldn’t I just pay the 200Q then? In a way that seemed far too off hand for a government official and which didn’t necessarily instill in me a whole lot of confidence, he said sure, no problem, you’ll be fine for two months. A little unsure, I thank him and walk off. The way back was just as fun, sat first next to a woman who quickly learned I had a 17 year old sister, and quickly began to make elaborate plans for me to return to Guat. with Megan, who would marry her 22 year old son, and there would be a huge fiesta, celebration and all. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It was interesting to look at her, she seemed rounded – all her features, chin, nose, forehead, teeth and most of all fingers, seemed eroded away from years of toil. And as is becoming more common, a free word of warning for “a guy like me”, to be vigilant for robbery. As Guatemala flitted by outside, next sat next to me a girl, 21, dressed nicely. She saw me writing in my journal and asked where I was from. We talked for quite a while, with some mutual attraction, before she got off at her town. A pleasure, she told me. I was left to my thoughts on the way to San Marcos. I thought about how I liked these situations, these times alone, these trips of what would be seven hours on six different buses, navigating new cities, the only gringo I saw for an entire day. I then began to reason that this wasn’t all together good for my ego, something which I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I keep searching for ways to push my comfort level, incessantly. I can now navigate successfully an unknown 3rd world country – what now?? I keep daydreaming about heroic and daring rescues, and bloody fights. Maybe I’m a fighter at heart, and the nonviolence I’ve accepted as the highest value is just an rationalist theory. I’ve more than a few times wondered what service with the UN PeaceKeepers would be like. A girl at Vassar, CP, mentioned that I’ve likely not yet challenged myself emotionally. Though I find beautiful things and interesting places, people, I keep looking for motivation, inspiration, and keep feeling unfulfilled, unchallenged. Need a cause. Anyway, long journey on Saturday, unsuccessful, but keenly enjoyable.
More activities, lots of visiting with cool people from all over the world. On Tuesday I went to an orphanage, where the Dutch girl Annemarie is a volunteer, and passed two of the most intense hours in a while. There were tons of kids, few volunteers, and absolutely no structure. Being a rather rambunctious guy myself, the young boys had a blast crawling all over me. Interesting though, a few got hands into my pockets and tried to make off with my watch, all the while being interested and intimate. That’s likely how they’ve survived the streets for their few short years. It was humbling, though, to be schooled in Spanish by a four year old. Intimidating too, that I didn’t have the lingual sophistication to really adequately reason through any scuffles among the kids. All I could say was “stop fighting” without much substance or attention. And all of them, with such needs. One boy spent quite a while asking me to translate and write phrases like “We’ll be brothers forever”, “I like you”, “I want to be your friend” from Spanish to English, then gingerly folded the paper and put it into his pocket. When it came time for us to leave, the same boy, Edgar, came running up to me at the main door, his face far too grave for an eight year old, pulled the paper out of his pocket, and ripped it into pieces in front of me, all the while maintaining a horrible eye contact. Tragic, really. And to think about the ramifications of being a volunteer. These kids don’t need an intelligent person, nor a friendly one, really – what they need is consistency. I doubt I could give that with less than six, seven months of service. I wonder if it’d be smart for me to go back in my few weeks here. Lots to think about, and Annemarie and I talked lengths over coffee, then walking around Xela and through the cemetery. Shy, but attractive and as idealistic as I am.
This weekend, we leave for Tajumulco, the highest volcano in Central America. We’ll camp Saturday night, then leave early Sunday for sunrise at the top. PBJ sandwiches and apples for three meals straight, but a little roughing it for a beautiful vista is what I’m all about.
Good night and good luck, love, Ty
Posted by tyrobinson 16:19
i just read this aloud to mom and jim. you are such a great writer, ty. really vivid, we felt like we were there! amazing, unforgettable experiences you have had!
and i am so so so jealous all about the soccer there! playing, watching, etc. i really do sometime want to travel around the world just watching and playing soccer in different countries...
i wish i could be there taking classes and all with you! it sounds really great.
love you and miss you tons.
megs
oh, and to keep you posted i got my acceptance letter from Cal Poly today! waiting for the UCs.
by megs_214