A thousand tiny hands

Driving through those mountainous hillsides, clouds covering up the pueblos like the country’s best kept and most shameful secret.  All the overpopulation, the poverty, the indigenous, the brisk, red, wind-burnt cheeks carrying firewood down the mountain.  The clouds are shading them, hiding them from the rich elite that might be passersby on the carreterra.  Yet like development and aid projects abounding, these clouds come and go and they can’t hide these secrets forever.  Out from the clouds emerges those rebels, those little hoodlums, those curious little niños who without even knowing it have ventured from the pueblo to the highway to reveal this best kept secret.  So many tiny hands waved at me on my drive back from Lake Atitlan on Sunday.  I gazed out the window thinking about all the stories hidden from my eyes by those clouds.  It was the best moment of their day.  It was their adventure.  It was their trip to the airport to watch the planes fly overhead.  It was their forbidden peaking through the cracks to observe the rich next door neighbors. I’m not sure if they had to sneak out to do it.  They just sat there, in groups of four of five, holdig each other with the most innocent intimacy, and the most apparent excitement and curiosity.  Gigantic smiles draped from ear to ear, eyebrows raised in the hopes of a wave back.  Every car, and I mean every car was honored with a wave from these kiddos, like beauty pageant stars that are never ingenuine and never get tired of waving. 

I was distracted long enough from my novel long enough to ponder all these tiny, scarred, Moreno hands waving at me all afternoon.  What is it they were hoping for?  What is the feeling they got when I waved back at them.  Do they dream sometimes, at night in those clouded, shaded, cold hillsides, that someday they could drive in the car on that highway.  If they did, would they wave back?

That could be me.

I live in one of the most unequal countries in the world.  Of all the seemingly useless information I learned studying International Development, the Gini coefficient is unfortunately seared in my brain – one of the endless nifty ways nerdy statisticians have created to measure a country’s worth.  For what its worth, on a scale of 0-100 (0 being perfectly equal, 100 being perfectly unequal), Guatemala comes in at a shocking 61 - the highest in Latin America and topped only by Namibia and Botswana in the world.  While numbers are interesting and incredibly useful for research papers in grad school, now I live in this number. So where exactly do I lay and how do my ideals line up with my (temporary?) home on the spectrum?

I am privileged. Period.  Born somewhere in the middle class range, I take residence with the majority of my fellow Americans who own cars, eat out when they want, take an occasional roadtrip down to camp in the great outdoors, and generally have some (if even minimal) amount of dispensable income.  Guatemala on the other hand, struggles to define a middle class, mostly because there is none. Money is not the problem, Guatemala holds the highest GDP in Central America believe it or not (another one of those silly statistician marvels of simplifying an overly complex idea) Yet even so, nearly 70% of the population lives below the poverty line.   Another 10% own over half of the entire wealth of Guatemala, either relaxing in their mega coffee farm haciendas or crusing through town in their pimped out hummers payed for by the drug trade. I guess this is where that mysterious and undefinable middle class is, somewhere in that remaining 20% of the population.  And I guess I am somewhere in there as well. 

I have an exceptional portrait of this question of class, living in diversified and progressive Xela. Recycled US school busses tote Mayan women in every morning from the highlands to sell produce, shoeless and shirtless children shine boots in the park for 20 cents, twenty-something hipsters walk from university to organic coffee shop to dance club, a healthy population of expats take a break from first-class stature back home to ride in coach for a while, and wealthy lawyers send their kids to private grade schools more expensive than my university – talk about a spectrum.  I don’t have a closet, a dresser or an oven, but I have a warm comforter for cold nights in the mountains.  My bedroom walls are made of plywood, but I can splurge on a $3 box of wine for nights out with the girls.  My office is an old concrete house with one desk for the entire operation, but I am paid 10 times more than the tortilla vender the next door over. 

 “Here are people of all classes and stages of rank. From all countries of the globe. Every hue of ignorance and learning, morality and vice, wealth and want, fashion and coarseness, breeding and brutality, elevation and degradation, impudence and modesty.” I keep looking out thinking, That could be me.  And that could be me. Why am I not indigenously dawned in bright colors with produce overflowing a thatch basket?  Why wasn't I born as a shoeshiner?  What is it that separates any of us?

About the leaning and loafing...

Walt Whitman started what would become one of the most loved and hated collections of poetry in American history with the words, “I loafe and invite my soul.”  Right now, I am leaning and loafing.... at my ease observing a green-covered hillside backlit by one of the bluest skies I have ever seen.  What is in front of me is not necessarily beauty.  These rusted tin roofs, broken electrical lines and the colorful array of ragged clothes hanging on a clothesline would never make the cover of National Geographic.  But something about the smoke from the tortillerias, the ominous clouds carrying earth’s most precious assets, and the unfinished buildings of shotty concrete construction across from me… something about these things makes me feel alive.  I invited my soul – or maybe my soul invited me – into this world, and now that I’m here I just feel so alive. Maybe that’s what true living is, checking the RSVP box on your soul’s invitation to life, saying yes to sinking, drowning in a world of your soul and your self.  Leaning and loafing in there, that’s what I’m living. 

When the art is not lost

I want to see things more.  I want to see more things.  In places where there is not enough municipal clout to incessantly paint over graffiti, its easy to notice art that has not been lost in the mix.  In the age of facebook, tumblr and a million options for wigging out on some narcissistic advertisement of your art, its refreshing to absorb someone's work of which I will never know the artist's name.  They do this without recognition or respect, and their art is not lost.   

About leaning and loafing

Walt Whitman started what would become one of the most loved and hated collections of poetry in American history with the words, “I loafe and invite my soul.”  Right now, I am leaning and loafing.... at my ease observing a green-covered hillside backlit by one of the bluest skies I have ever seen.  What is in front of me is not necessarily beauty.  These rusted tin roofs, broken electrical lines and the colorful array of ragged clothes hanging on a clothesline would never make the cover of National Geographic.  But something about the smoke from the tortillerias, the ominous clouds carrying earth’s most precious assets, and the unfinished buildings of shotty concrete construction across from me… something about these things makes me feel alive.  I invited my soul – or maybe my soul invited me – into this world, and now that I’m here I just feel so alive. Maybe that’s what true living is, checking the RSVP box on your soul’s invitation to life, saying yes to sinking, drowning in a world of your soul and your self.  Leaning and loafing in there, that’s what I’m living. 

Poco a Poco

I watched Anita march her fair-skinned, ruby-haired self into that kitchen with confidence and open arms.  As flies buzzed hungrily over the rusted pot of gallo pinto, billowing smoke enveloped this small outdoor cooking fest resembling a campfire more than a kitchen, Anita didn’t flinch.  There is something instilled in your fellow human when you approach them with unconditional positive regard.  Something is instilled in these women every time Anita travels to these communities as something far from a gringa or an foreign aid worker.  She enters like an old friend ready to share laughter and spoons, tickle babies and taunt little brothers, and dig her hands right into the masa with which we will be making the day’s tortillas. 

Me?  I was scared.  I was intimidated both by the power of my colleague’s “work” and by the intensity of the Guatemalan women surrounding me.  My brain fatigued on Spanish failures struggled to express a single sentence.  My heart fatigued on an explosion of philosophical questions of human dignity struggled to control its emotions.  My well-oiled machine of pride told me to be strong and feign confidence and professionalism. But questions flooded in to that private space about my right to be here, sitting on this mud floor trying to connect with this corner of the great Universe.  This is different than all of my past internships or volunteer experiences – this is my job now.  I should be doing something, I should be speaking better Spanish, I should be funnier, smarter, better with the women, more educated on nutrition, more comfortable with eating beans out of a rusted bowl… Within two hours of reaching my first community visit of my first real development job, I was in full break-down mode with passionate pangs of self-loathing insecurities.

But break-downs are necessary and welcomed in the world of change.  Break-downs bring revolutions.  Trini, our Guatemalan Agronomist, was fortuitously placed in my path that afternoon to hold my hand, ease my pain, and whisk my worries away.  It seems my pride had somehow forgotten that this was in fact my first day of my first week in a collision of incredible amounts of change in my life. I guess people are right when they say I’m hard on myself. 

Trinidad Recinos, the heart and sould of Semilla Nueva

And the masses were right when they told me that Trini is the heart and soul of this organization.  Of all the wisdoms whispered to me on that thatch bench overlooking endless rows of Maize glistening in the sunlight, he repeated a memorable phrase that has come to define my first week here: poco a poco.  I have been bursting at the seams with an overload of new things: new language, new city, new friends, new food, new work, new cultures, new sleeping patterns and new challenges.  No matter how well I thought I prepared for this step in my life, all these new things require new commitments. In order to rise to the occasion of this endeavor I have desired for so long, I must take these things poco a poco. Little by little, I must cultivate a spirit of patience, humility and dedication.

Over the next few days in the field, Trini illuminated the spirit of the work of Semilla Nueva, transforming a simple categorization of agricultural development into a dynamic interplay of community, relationships, trust, open minds and open hearts, equal exchanges and mutual development.   The beautiful Spanish phrases that so eloquently and liberally roll of the tongue of this man are incredible.  He expressed confidence in my “clean heart” and belief in my ability to be that confident, loving, smart, funny gringa comfortably working with women in the kitchen someday; it will just be poco a poco. He finished with a phrase I scribbled on the back of a bus ticket as the truck navigated the terrifying terrain of potholes along the highway – luckily, it came out legible:

“Mantenga expectivas buenas cada dia; No pierda la illusion.  Cada dia trae cosas nuevas.  Cada dia sembramos una Semilla nueva”

“Keep good expectations every day.  Don’t lose the illusion.  Every day, brings new things.  Every day, we grow a New Seed.”

He llegado

To borrow poignant words from one of America’s greatest thinkers: “Since I wrote before, I know something more of the grounds of hope and fear of what is to come.  But if my knowledge is greater, so is my courage.  I know that I know next to nothing, but I know too that the amount of probabilities is vast, both in mind and in morals.”  Today, waiting in the Spirit lounge of the Miami airport (which already feels like I’m in Latin America), I am reminded of the last time I packed my life into a bag and decided to venture around the globe.  That day, waiting for a thunderstorm to pass over the Oklahoma City airport (which resembled nothing of Latin America), I was full of angst and anguish, anxiety and audacity, I couldn’t stop staring out the emblematic window of my heart to the rest of my future.  Today, I am an entirely different being than I was then.  Today, I am shockingly void of butterflies.  Today, I have waited patiently sans tears and sans sentimental stares out windows (emblematic or literal).  I don’t feel like I’m holding my breath for the next moment of my life, and that feels good.  Today, my knowledge is greater and so is my courage.  Today, I know that I know next to nothing, but I know too that the road ahead of me is full of opportunities for which I have the courage and knowledge to enjoy. 

There is something sweet about my moment right now, where my mind lays in this calm haze.  I take pleasure in knowing that this absence of fear, this ease of anguish based on a past of dreams of achieved, this moment is peculiar and unrivaled in all of the whole universe.  This is my emotion.  This is my life that I am living.  I am homesteading new ground, uninhabited ground, because it is new and uninhabited to me.

Again, borrowing from Emerson, I make one promise to myself (or three...): Be Silly, Be Honest, Be Kind :)