I grew up with a hammock in Chiquimula – a hammock that served as a respite from the scorching hot afternoons where the best survival tactic was to find a dark corner and just stay still until evening arrived. While it doesn’t get nearly as hot in La Antigua, we do find the same comfort and excuse for staying still in our new hammock.
Blog
Extrenando a Craiglist en Guate
Like a new pair of shoes I walked out of the store with (yes after having paid), I didn’t even wait ten minutes after stumbling upon Craigslist Guatemala to put up my first post in both the Writing and Community sections. I knew these sections well and felt right at home, but I did wonder why the hub for CL Guate wasn’t listed under the countries section? I found it on CL’s main page and it looks like the first entry I can find goes back to Oct. 2009. Interesting, I will exploring this, but suffice it to say that we do have a CL here and it’s like we’re on the community map that connects us all on CL.
Did you miss the sunset from another planet today?
I swear to you, this is the view out our rooftop. No Photoshopping involved:
What would Maximón do?
That was the last of them. We put the last crew of family members on the plane and headed back to the fragmented reality of our home – intermittent internet service, static-filled linea fija, useless Vonage without an IP address, dead hard drives, bad power adapters, beeping APCs and the general mayhem of when machines talk to one another and decide to go on strike against their cruel tormentors that give them no rest. Why this onslaught of technological rebellion? What was the universe telling us that we just weren’t listening to? I thought of the visit we paid to Maximón in Santiago, Atitlan this weekend and wondered if I could take my technology troubles to him like the couple in this video who asked the shaman to intercede on their behalf and talk to the Maximón about being evicted from their home:
We were led to him by two Tuk Tuk drivers who zipped us to the other side of the island, passing Parque de Paz, the devastation of Hurricane Stan, and onward to a private home with thatched roofs, dirt floors, and a family eating their lunch by the large pot boiling over the wooden fire. A thick plume of incense billowed from the entrance to a dark cabin where three people kneeled before the austere wooden figure of Maximón clad in silk ties covering his entire wooden body and smoking a large cigar that the two attendants – a cigar man who was a glorified ashtray holder and a liquor bearer –both watched as the shaman issued his plea in the Tz’utujil language. Our Tuk Tuk drivers translated as I sat in the corner and took the video (I had paid Q10 for one photo, but there was no set price for video, so they looked confused when I pulled out my camera).
The family was in trouble, I was informed, they were getting evicted and only the Maximón, the Maya god who has the powers that only the believer can entrust to him in the area the believer needs the most help in. The plea continued, the incense filled the entire room, the couples’ child shrieked and then a bottle of Pepsi was passed around for all to drink.The cigar holder man and the alcohol holder both drank and smoked. I could buy Maximón a drink, the Tuk Tuk friend told me. It would be my offering to him. Or we could sit next to him on either side of the chair and that was permitted while the shaman spoke. We could see things from the Maximón’s perspective. I sat quietly in the room and took pictures. “Does Maximón sleep?” I asked our guides. They looked annoyed. “Of course he sleeps. Every night we take him upstairs and at 5 AM he is brought down to hear people’s problems.” For how long, I wondered? “Until, next year when the Maximón is moved back to the city.” So he’s a traveling god? “Yes, he goes to where people need him.” That makes a lot of sense I told my Tuk Tuk friend. I thought perhaps my technology problems weren’t even worth mentioning to him, he probably had so many other things to worry about.
Was Monday’s Shake Up a “Temblor” or a “Terremoto”?
Guatemala Earthquake 1976. Rails bent in Gualan. 1976. Figure 42-A, U.S. Geological Survey Professional paper 1002.
My friend Esteban Tweeted me today shortly after the 6.0 magnitude earthquake reported to have taken place offshore Guatemala at 9:40 AM on January 18. He writes: “Was it a temblor or a terremoto?” When I sent him the USGS link that presents the “Earthquake Details,” he tweeted again: “Glad u ok. My parents said it was a bit strong but definitely just a “temblor” where they were. They think “terremoto” and they think 1976.”
It’s an important distinction that is lost somewhere in translation, but more importantly remembered in time, February 4, 1976 to be exact, when Guatemala had it’s last big earthquake which many remember as “El Terremoto”. To put it in context: the Guatemala Earthquake we had today was 64 miles deep, the Haiti Earthquake was 5 miles deep, causing more damage and affecting a wider area, BuzzyBloggers informs us. “The most massive earthquake that struck Guatemala was in 1976 – a 7.5 magnitude earthquake that shook Guatemala at 3:00 AM, 5 km deep.”
So I call mi abuelita who lived through that earthquake and always talks about it using those same terms. The first thing she asks me is: ¿Como sintieron el temblor? Hubo temblor o terremoto en Guate? “Did you feel the tremor? Was there a tremor or earthquake in Guate?” I tell her it was classified as an earthquake by the USGS, but that doesn’t matter. “Where there damages?” No, I tell her, none that were reported. ¡Ah, pues fue temblor! I ask her how she makes the distinction and here is what she told me:
‘Temblor’ es cuando tiembla la tierra, ‘terremoto’ es cuando causa mucho daños, como Haití. ‘Temblor’ viene derivado de que tiembla la tierra, pero terremoto causa muchos daños. “A ‘tremor’ is when the earth quakes, an ‘earthquake’ is when it causes much damage, such as Haiti. A ‘tremor’ is derived from the earth trembling, but earthquakes cause damage.” I tell her there is a technical difference. The Spokeseman Review and the USGS inform us that a “tremor is normally associated with movement of magma along with actual earth movement. Whereas earthquake is normally just earth movement.” Only scientists can really tell that technical difference, but in case you’re interested I found the USGS frequently asked questions to be really informative.
But I was curious about mi abuelita’s experience of the 1976 earthquake, one year before I was born, and ingrained in my mind as this looming shadow of a chaotic time before the lights were even turned on in front of my eyelids.
Pues, como fue el Terremoto del ’76 abuelita?
“Allí estaba yo en las fincas. Había regresado de Chiquimula hasta el 3, y el 6 de febrero fue porque era el cumpleaños de tu tío Hugo. ¿Yo estaba en Chiquimula, porque la Lucky se quebrado la clavícula y una día antes habíamos ido a Esquipulas y me puse a pensar que tal si se calle la pared encima de nosotros? Y el otro día paso.
Pero eso fue feo. Bailaba la tierra como se era trompo, pero agarro mas por La Costa [por Puerto Barrios]. Se hundieron las puertas como se hundieron las casas en las fincas y solo por las ventas pudimos salir. Como a los 8 días volvió temblar igual y estábamos afuera. Yo sentía debajo de mis pies que corría el agua. Estábamos en Yuma. Fue terrible. Cuando hay terremoto se pone frío, ese día que hizo El Terremoto hasta morado se puso el cielo.”
So how was the Earthquake of ’76 Grandma?
“There I was on the farm [United Fruit company banana finca]. I had returned from Chiquimula on the 3rd, and February 6th was when it happened because it was the birthday of your uncle Hugo. I was in Chiquimula, because Lucky had a broken collarbone and a day before we had gone to Esquipulas and I started thinking about what would happen if the wall fell down on us? And the next day it happened.
But it was ugly. The Earth danced like a top, but it took hold more on the coast [of Puerto Barrios]. The doors sank like the houses collapsed on the farm and we could only get out through the windows. Eight days later it began to tremble again and we were outside. I felt it under my feet like running water. We were in Yuma. It was terrible. When there’s an earthquake it gets cold that day. When The Earthquake happened the sky even turned purple. “
***Note about the picture: I chose the picture from Gualan because that is where mi abuelita’s family is from and the rails in Guatemala always lead back to United Fruit Company where my family worked for many generations.
Rosenberg’s Last Laugh
Guatemala is buzzing with life or perhaps death lately, especially with the UN investigation of the murder of the attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg and his self-hatched political suicide. I have written about it for Hablaguate and Americas Quarterly and it still reads like a CSI episode or a film noir plot.
The investigation consisted of four parts:
(1) Who ordered and paid for the crime?
(2) What about the video?
(3) Kahlil and Marjorie Musa?
(4) Corruption charges
The results were part #1 and # 2 (so stick around for the continuing saga), but the murder of the Musas and the corruption charges put out by Rosenberg’s video are still to be clarified. Much like the Japanese crime movie Rashomon one gets the sense that the more you know the less you really understand, with more questions than answers surfacing with each detail. What I do get very clearly from the explanation of Rosenberg’s murder is a real sense of how tragicomedy happens offstage through the life of the balding, tormented and disillusioned figure of Rosenberg who was an embodiment of both the best and the worst of Guatemala. Having worked as an honorable attorney inside Guatemala’s upper echelon, Rosenberg experienced an emotional downfall not unlike Hamlet who lost faith in his mother (country that is) and could not quite overcome that fall from grace. In many ways the social drama he constructs around his murder drives home the point that the Guatemalan judicial system (in a country where 6,451 people were violently murdered in 2009 with only 230 convictions and a 96.9 percent impunity rate) is broken exactly because his murder could not be solved without the help of entities such as the FBI and United Nations. Perhaps the last relational act Rosenberg gave us was giving us this view into a snake that eats itself and you are forced to watch it hoping for something to change.
Crack of dawn grandma drop off
We dropped off abuela at 6 am and got to see the sun rise:
Then we headed over to Cafe Condesa for Sunday morning breakfast. We were the first customers there and were two hours early for the infamous Sunday buffet. I haven’t seen the streets of La Antigua this empty in a while:
Giant Steps Are What You Take With La Antigua Sunsets
Today was a hard day of getting lost in Guatemala City looking for the bus station in Zone 1. I knew the old address but 21st street, 11th avenue was horribly painful to get to. But I digress, it’s the sunsets that really matter.
Two Days of Firsts
New clothes don’t make me happy. Fast, new shiny cars don’t make me happy. Meat doesn’t make me happy. But getting my recyclables picked up makes me immensely happy and such was my happiness today at the end of the day when these guys arrived:
For weeks I’ve been asking different people about recycling centers, pickup services, anything to stop the madness of the trash we’ve beem generating in our house for the past two months. Everyone’s says “Oh yeah, La Antigua recycles.” or “Have you tried that place in Ciudad Vieja?” “The capital has a few places, go there.” All so vague and unhelpful that it made me question whether it was sheer urban legend.
So we go to these places and all they take is tin and glass (but that’s ten percent of the trash we generate) or they only take it on certain days, oh, wait, you have to go to the capital. I looked in the yellow pages, I Tweeted, I asked other “greensters,” but nothing satiated my need for convenience, conservation and practicality. So I spent a few hours on Facebook looking for Facebook groups with the keyword “Guatemala” in them and poured through 500 pages until I found these folks:
http://www.guatemalagreen.com/how-works.html
We called and spoke to Pedro Morales Tel: 5104 8447 (there’s also an English speaker – Becky Harris (English Speaking) Tel: 5778 4009) and scheduled a regular pick-up from our home on Tuesdays. We neede to improve our sorting/storing methodology, per their requirements, but an hour of sorting, washing out and rearranging everything did the trick. We got some neighbors in on it and they brought their recyclables over. I will be checking our their facility next week and making a longer video, so stay tuned. Update: One of the junta members of our residencial is presenting the recycling idea to about 50 homeowners, most of them Guatemalan, who are interested in learning about this recycling program. In preparation for the meeting I created an English and Spanish information flyer.
The other “first” for me was getting my first bank account with my hot off the press (ok two months later) DPI. From my little cubicle with the BI rep who took almost 90 minutes to set me up with a checking account, I sat and watched the endless lines of people trying to pay their electric bills, credit cards bill, deposit money, everything they had not done during the almost five days of banks being closed:
San Felipe Ingenuity and Finca Filadelfia is a Fail
We promised mi mama a leisurely Saturday around La Antigua away from the madding crowds of the Puerto San Jose beaches and the onslaught of traffic generated by the one million Guatemalans headed back to Guatemala City this weekend after a long holiday break. “No se, you pick something, I don’t care what it is, I’m just bored,” she told us and, thus, gave us our mandate to entertain. Sidenote: Only my mother could be bored in her own country, find absolutely nothing interesting about a city in ruinas (“Somebody should really fix those walls or at least the streets because it’s hard on the cars and it’s hard on your back when you walk.”). So we took her to Finca Filadelfia (“¿Porque el monte, mija? I came from el monte!”) and San Felipe de Jesus, the home of the “Entombed Christ” with a lovely Gothic cathedral that made me reminisce about Gaudi and non-colonial architecture. San Felipe also happens to have one of the most animated mercados and creative vendors which included this woman selling shoes from the top of her car. “Tell them this is how we sell shoes in Guatemala,” she told me:
The food court inside the mercado was a much welcomed change of scenery from my recent dreaded visits to Miraflores during the holiday crunch.
Not a single complaint came out of mi mama while we were in el mercado, except the usual “¡Que caro! ¡Como si el mundo fuera solo en dólares!” “How expensive, as if the world was only in dollars!” She’s not quite used to La Antigua prices, so that’s a running complaint. In any case, I knew she was relatively content with the surroundings. Finca Filadelfia was another story. To be fair, mi mama is Americanized and fully acculturated (not assimilated) to American standards and way of life since she’s been there for more than thirty years after leaving Guatemala como una coyota of sorts. The last time she visited Guatemala was seven years ago and even that’s too soon. She promised it’ll be twice as long next time. The worst punishment that can be imposed on her is the lack of a hot shower, flushing toilets or clean tap water. Following that is not having a car, a YMCA or highways with clear big fonts that she can read and space out to while listening to Lola Beltran or JuanGa (Juan Gabriel to most). My mother likes “medium” everything and wants things to be highly customized to her tastes. So, like me, she’s from Guatemala, but she’s not really FROM here anymore, nor does she have the desire to have that distinction erased. In any case, she’s conflicted to say the least about most things Guatemalan, but Finca Filadelfia was very clearly a trampa or “rip off” to her. So I will tell it from her perspective and then I will present the other side from Maestro Rudy who balances out her view.
Things la Finca did wrong by mi mama’s standards:
(1) No à la carte menu on weekends. Because it was the weekend, the restaurant did not offer an à la carte menu, so it was either the Full Buffet for Q140 or the Meat Full Buffet for Q220. Mi mama was in disbelief, “You’re not serving from the menu?” “No seño.” Her next question was a reasonable one: “Do you offer a soup and salad option for people like me who are only mildly hungry?” The immediate answer was “No, señora, disculpe.” She was obviously dumbfounded by the response and then continued to look for other options. “I would be happy to pay just for a soup that is part of the full buffet and you can charge what is reasonable, but I cannot pay for an entire buffet that I know is not what I need,” she told the waiter. Again, “No, señora, eso no se puede.” So, she scratched her head: “Then I will take from my son-in-law’s soup which he doesn’t like because it’s not vegetarian. Is that ok?” At that point, the waiter needed back-up, so a waitress came up and added an extra “No” to my mom’s problem solving to get what she needed at a restaurant where she was ready to pay for what she wanted.
She was having a hard time, so I intervened and said, “Please, do speak to your manager and tell them that she is willing to pay for the soup at a price they think is fair. We have ordered one buffet and drinks and would really be very satisfied if another option was possible. Before you say no again, please do go ask. Thank you.” After much tribulation with the manager– I saw them debating from the lovely table on the lawn overlooking the valley where the coffee finca began– the waiters returned and said, “Claro que si.” So my mother enjoyed a beef stew while Brad ate his veggie treats from the buffet. I drank my papaya milk shake, while the waiter hovered the entire time watching. “He thinks we’re going to eat Brad’s buffet,” mi mama laughed and the waiter finally left at the end of our meal.
Rudy’s counterpoint: Most Guatemalans visit La Finca Filadelfia specifically for the buffet on weekends and usually come with their families for the entire day so they are meeting their clientele’s needs by providing a full-buffet (with vegetables even!) and a meat buffet and not serving an à la carte menu.
(2) No option for self-guided tours. Since the official tours end at 4 PM, those of us who arrived after the last bus left, were left walking around in very few public places, much of the finca is private access and there are no informational signs to give you a sense of the historical or provide you with a context. What I have encountered from visiting different landmarks, tourist sites or places such that are mildly historical or educational, is some option for self-guided tours to enjoy the grounds, some “whuffie” as it were to create some good feeling to take with you of this place.
Brad’s counterpoint: The place is a private finca and spa, it’s not a national treasure or protected park or anything like that. They have a lot of overhead and they’re objective is to make money.
(4) Priced in dollars and intended for American tourists. Mi mama was frustrated to say the least when she saw all the prices in USD (when asked what the Quetzal prices were for all paseos or tours, none of the folks at the information booth could actually cite the prices even though on that particular day I only saw a few Americans or foreigners out of the hundreds of Guatemalans walking around aimlessly after the last scheduled tour). Take a look:
The two-hour tour by mule for $35, Brad and I agreed was reasonable (my mother having ridden mules most of her life for free to cart sugar cane, bananas or get around thought it was another trampa). The Paseo Corto for Q25, which the folks at the information couldn’t describe what exactly it included, seemed the only thing intended for Guatemalans. Everything else was insanely expensive for what it was and knowing now that the average Guatemalan makes Q56 for a work day (thank goodness for the Q4 raise this week), the prices are most definitely priced to price out Guatemalans.
Rudy’s counterpoint: Which looks smaller for a canopy tour, $50 or Q412.50? In the past week the Quetzal has also varied and the USD has not, so it’s a more astute business practice to print in USD and to also make things look cheaper. It gives the customer the impression they are getting more for less.
I could go on and on (mi mama certainly did), but the conclusion from this peanut gallery is: Great place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there. Nor could we afford it for that matter. But the view was nice. Pues, como dice mi mama, “Hay que ver y no tocar.”