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?