Un poco de mi diario

I want to make this blog into an online journal of my travel. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to download photos yet...Christina...so, partly I have been writing in my journal about twice a day and Im going to copy some of it out right now.

February 4th, 2010
When I left, Minnesota was gray and cold; I slipped on the ice walking down the ramp to the lightrail station. I hate goodbyes, especially long ones, because there is suspense - there is a sense of my being already gone and a depressing sheen covering the whole experience. More than this, though, there is finality, appearing at the doorstep like a bad omen, but refusing to come in...maybe I hate goodbyes because they seem somehow inauthentic, like I have to put on some kind of show to signal to the world that I care? There are expectations about how they should be played out, and I am aware of myself as I say goodbye, wondering if I am meeting expectations.

I watched my bag and shoes go through the bag and shoe machine and promptly the weight of goodbye passed through me, and the weight of lonliness. I remember telling myself to take it one moment at a time from there. All I can do is the thing that I must do next, and those little victories have to sustain me until I can look back and see that they added up to something bigger...

...I will explain - in any uncomfortable situation there is no planning ahead - none, because what is ahead, really, except a line of more things to do? One of the most beautiful things about being on vacation is the simplicity and the linear symmetry - I mean that each day is a line of needs, and put together all days look the same. The simplicity is similar, on vacation there is only one thing to do, and it is the next thing to do.


February 10 2010 2pm
Im waiting for my first spanish lesson. I spent 3 hours with my host family just now, mostly with Monica, the 4 or 5 year old - she doesnt know how old she is. When she talks to me, she doesnt care if I understand and I dont care really, either. We just play. She took me to the lake, just down some concrete steps that resemble the ones in St Peter - thin plant life growing around and through them. Monica is the most patient child I have ever met - more patient than me, even! We tried to catch minnows for a half hour, and every time I got bored and tried to talk to her, she shushed me and pointed at the pescaditos...My first bite of Guatemalan carne (beef with carrots, rice, and onions) was a little bit scary and shocking! There was a bone in the meat that in ingested - not something that we have in America at all. And because it is 85 degrees out, I was not in the mood for a hot meal of rice, meat, and masa tortillas. Especially a big meal - lunch is the biggest meal of the day...

February 6 2010 morning

Is it natural to feel this paranoid in a new place? Wondering what other people are thinking of me but unable to read the expressions on their faces or ask them many questions...Is this what culture shock feels like? Hypersensitivity and consequent exhaustion because, like a child, I am taking in all new information right now? Roosters keep landing on the roof of the house, banging on the tin roof, and I jump every time. The cats and dogs are just skin and bones - they would eat chandler alive!...

afternoon
Just down the street from the school, probably a quarter mile or less, you will come upon a house that looks no different from the other houses. It will have a red door - red french doors actually - that lock with a bolt on the inside of the house. Knock and go in, and you will witness la casa de Elida. The first room is dark and empty...walk straight through, this room will probably be of no use to you. Walk through and into the cemented courtyard, but watch your head because the courtyard is crisscrossed with low-hanging plastic covered wires that are full of drying laundry. This place, which is not covered with the high tin roofs of the rest of the house, has wooden beams hanging high above that connect the cement walls of the two parts of the house. To the east is where Elida and her children sleep...Jessica said that she cooks all day every day, and at night she watches soap operas. It would be hard for me to know what she thinks about it all- her life, her child, it all- because I dont speak spanish very well, but if I had to guess I would say that she is comfortable and content...

February 7, 2010 5 45 pm

As I was writing, the police came to tell me that the park I was sitting in is dangerous at night. The were short and stout men, three of them in one truck, with semi automatic weapons probably left over from the US backed military dictators here. Two of them shook my hand and asked what I was doing and I was too scared to say anything. Three police officers dont get out of their car in the US just to tell someone that theyre in an unsafe place. Maybe the world is more black and white down here?

February 8 2010 9 pm
Its a funny feeling that I have been having, somewhere between my mind wandering aimlessly and my mind wandering aimlessly toward something solid. As it stands now, it doesnt seem real. And not only do my thoughts not seem real, but this experience doesnt either - the people washing their clothes in the lake, firecrackers going off at all hours of the night, paying a quarter for a coke just to have something cold to drink...it seems like a dream, but so does the dream of my life before this...how did my mind wander so far into itself that reality became unreal?...The family is watching television in the room next to mine and I can hear them chatting. They wash the floor with an old t shirt tied to a stick. they wash their clothes in the same sink where they wash their dishes, outside. This must be it - the culture shock - I feel like simultaneously this life and my own life cannot be real, like they cannot coexist on the same planet...

11 pm
I realized, I think, what the feeling I was having earlier is about - I keep expecting that this is not reality, keep expecting to wake up and not be here, that the people exist only in my imagination, that this is not all they have. If this is all they have - a home, a tv, and each other, then I dont understand their lives at all like I thought I did. There must be meaning - something deeper, music or poetry...Ellida goes to church a couple of times a week - she sounds like she is crying when she thanks the Lord for all that she has been given. I remember when I was at church feeling like I didnt get it - why is she sitting next to me crying out to God and Im wondering what the proper reaction should be? ...

February 10 2010, 6 20 am
Every day is the same, predictable, safe...Safe, comfortable, and full of family here. Neighbors visit every once in a while, but for the most part the family sticks to itself. There is a gas stove inside that they choose not to use - a fully stocked kitchen that has been abandoned for food cooked over a wood fire, knives that have browned with age and use. She prefers the heat of a wood fire in the hot afternoon to the cool air inside the kitchen? Before I thought that this life was an ignorant one, but I am realizing now that this is at least something of a choice...It is a lot more like my family than I had previously believed, it just happens to be on a different continent with a different standard of living...When I said this is their reality? what i think I meant was that they dont understand my reality or, for that matter, the reality of a lot of the rest of the world, but they are happy...