Whoops! Well, I just remembered that Im supposed to be putting pictures on facebook and words on blog. So i will put the rest of the pictures on facebook and the rest of the words here. This is Lago de Atitlan. I stayed here for two weeks in an apartment by myself - i helped the owner fix the place up and also helped her build some fences and a roof garden (pictures on facebook). I carried some serious loads up to the roof for padma. serious. She reminded me of a cross between Katie Becker, Mom and Aunt Cindy. Also she was like me, but also she was almost 60. This woman sang with Grace Slick. I think. Im sure. She told me, and i believed her.
Anyway, Panajachel on Lago de Atitlan is a place where people go to forget the rest of the world. It is about half gringo (white people), and the rest mayans, with a little ladino thrown in for effect. I have been studying under some sort of feminist yoda there, whose name, appropriately, is padma. She went to the lago to teach indigenous women to use the internet, and decided to stay for 15 years. she doesnt have a job, and she likes it that way. It is so refreshing to meet people who dont give a damn if they have a job or not - actually, who don´t even want one! They just want to learn, and working so hard as we work in the US everyday I am beginning to think is detrimental to my mental capacity. I do not learn nearly as much when Im stuck in some sort of routine...I want to be a traveller for my job, and Im looking at ways to facilitate it.
So I got to the town and almost immediately ran into this woman, who I heard speaking english on the street. I asked her if she knew of any apartament that I could rent, and she took me up to hers and set me up inside. I am positive that somehow this was meant to be. I can´t explain it, but this woman was like a mother and a teacher to me, and she needed my help! So I helped her set up her upstairs garden, build some fences around the roof, and clean out her apartments. I also provided her with a daughter figure, and she provided me with a mother. Her daughter moved to the states to go to school for music, and she needed some emotional support. We were meant to be, right?
It is difficult to describe the feeling that I have known someone for longer than life, and irrational. I think the best that I can do without incriminating my craziness too much is to say that I had a very strong feeling when I met her that I wanted to know her better, that we were alike, and that i would learn a lot from her.
She set about teaching me all about guatemalan culture. I read some of her books, I, Rigoberta Menchu, and The Managua Lectures, by Noam Chomsky. From these I learned the story of the Guatemalan war, the genocide, the hatred of the indigenous people. I learned the same stories that I have been learning about other places with different names, different labels. People all over the world with a little bit of power have these same habits of believing, I think without guilt (except that I did see the robert macnamara interviews, fog of war...please watch this if you havent- it is a really good documentary about the vietnam war), that they are entitled to anything that they want. Indigenous people all over central america, and actually, all over the world, have been exploited since way before our time, and they are still being exploited today.
The thing is, though, that they stick with life even though it is hard. The story of Rigoberta Menchu, a mayan woman who helped start the guatemalan revolution, is about a woman and a community and a people that knows how hard life is and yet chooses life every time, over and over again. This is, I think, part of the answer to a lot of my questions about guatemalan culture. When I asked how people could live this kind of life - they just do. They choose life, and life means this life. We dont have the luxury in my circle of knowing what a hard life feels like - the kind of life that abject poverty necessitates, and we also don´t know the satisfaction of providing for ourselves, the gratitude, and the communal experience of a village living through another year. We have lost that with all of the power that we have gained.
So anyway, I am getting hungry. I climbed a volcano in Panajachel - it is called San Pedro Volcano. The Guatemalan people do not understand switchbacks, or easy trails. They get up and get down and probably dont get as sore as I did, but my partners in crime and I were sore for 3 days after we got down from there. It was about 2 miles straight up this thing, with hundreds of stairs to climb as well. It was sort of worth it when I got to the top within seconds of the entire valley being covered by clouds - i mean, i saw a glimpse and then everything was gone. but now i can say that ive climbed a volcano, and even if the experience was only one of pain, hunger, and frustration, I climbed a volcano and you probably didnt.
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