Thursday, December 29, 2005

Guatemala Journal

Guatemala Journal

December 29, 2005

It continues cold in Xela, and even though it is the dry season, there was thunder and rain today. The clear days are best because the sun warms everything up pretty quickly, but the last few days have been overcast and really cold for a Southern California girl. This morning I put on a camisole, slacks, turtleneck shirt, cotton cardigan, fleece vest, zip sweatshirt and gloves for the walk to the school at 8:00am. I was able to shed the sweatshirt by midmorning, but the last few days I was still wearing all the layers including my gloves at our break at 11:00. Spanish instruction is 5 hours every day. This week I meet with my Maestra from 8:00 to 1:00. Last week I met with a different teacher in the afternoon from 2:00 to 7:00. Most of the time is spent in conversation. It sounds ridiculous, considering my Spanish skills, but we have talked about what the Lutheran Church thinks of Mary Magdalene, the syncretism of the Mayan/Catholic religion, Jewish festivals, the position of the Catholic Church on the poor in Guatemala, and whether Mary was really a virgin. We have also discussed the simple questions that illustrate new verbs and verb combinations: How old are your daughters, what do you wish for?
On Tuesday when my maestra asked me what was in my purse, I realized that I didn´t have it with me, which is unprecedented. We went back to Lila´s house to see if it was there, but it was not. The last time I remembered seeing it was in the internet cafe´. I had put it next to the laptop I was using. The room was so dark, the screen so bright, the conversation with the South African couple who let me use their connector to download my pictures so diverting, my black purse so small, it was easy to pack up my the bag with my flash drive and walk away without my purse. I was in a panic. I expected that it was gone for good. After all, this is Guatemala, and everyone just wants to rob rich Americans, right? We hiked over to the “Gospel Internet Café” where I was sure I´d left it, and they recognized me when I walked in. They had my purse, and everything was in it, my dollars and queztales, my id and my passport. I guess the Gospel part is not just a title.
As much as living with a family drives me crazy, the food has been wonderful. Lila is a good cook and turns the simplest ingredients into delicious meals. This morning I had banana pancakes with honey, yesterday a big fruit salad with fresh bananas, pineapple and melon with my toast and honey. Lunch is the main meal and on Monday we had Carne Asada – the Guatemalan style turns out to be two tortillas piled with grated cabbage and pimento pepper, thin grilled steak and homemade salsa. Tueday was a vegetable broth you ladle into bowls and then fill with rice and avocado, then after the soup you eat the cabbage, potatoes, corn, and chunks of carrots that have been cooked in the broth. There are usually tomalitos to go with everything – thin slices of masa that are heated up in the banana leaves in which they are refrigerated. A few days ago Lila made fresh tortillas on the stove to eat with fried chicken and vegetable salad. But sometimes the combinations get weird, like the afternoon we had chow mein, noodles with thin slices of peppers and cabbage, served with tortillas.
Next week I will be in the mountain school. I was prepared for it to be really cold, but it turns out to be in the Boca-Costa, the mid-coastal area, a lower altitude than Xela. The Boca-Costa is where coffee grows and the mountain school is in a village that grows coffee. Only 10 students study there at a time, and live in a dormitory in the school. We will take our meals with local families, and work with them in the organic garden when we are not studying or doing homework. I am looking forward to sunshine and warmer weather.

Monday, December 26, 2005

Guatemala Journal Dec 26, 2005

Guatemala Journal

December 26, 2005

Christmas comes a little slower in Guatemala than in the US. It took all week for the Christmas lights to go up. The house next-door put up a spectacular display of lights over their façade that twinkled and played “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” We had a wonderful Christmas party on Friday for all the families that house students, complete with a Posada around the local plaza. We lit candles inside red plastic cups and blew ceramic whistles as we marched out into the night, four students bearing the nacimiento (manger scene). When we returned to the school, we stood outside the door singing the traditional plea for a room, while those inside sang the reply, “go away, there is no room.” When the door was finally opened and we came in, they set off firecrackers in the street and fireworks on the roof plaza. We sat down to a feast of Christmas tamales and Ponche, a wonderful concoction of chopped pineapple, papaya and coconut that has bubbled on the stove in huge vat with water for a few hours. The school gave each family a gift basket filled with all the goodies required for holiday celebrations. Most of the families that house students depend on the 280 Queztales (about $35)per week that the school pays them to house us, so the cookies and chips were welcome.
I´ve always wanted to be part of the group that makes Christmas tamales, but, of course, I grew up in the wrong ethnicity. This year I was able to join a group of women who giggled and gossiped while they worked. I didn´t understand everything, but I got it when they asked if I had a boyfriend. When I said no, they wanted to know if I wanted a Guatemalan boyfriend. I declined. Colleen (a student who lives with the family next door) told me later that the part I didn´t understand was their suggestion that having a Guatemalan boyfriend is a good way to learn the language, especially the parts of the body. The women had ground the rice for the chicken tamales earlier in the day, and the achiote paste that seasoned the chicken. Colleen and I helped assemble them in the banana leaf wrappers. Then we washed corn husks for wrapping the cambray, sweet tamales with raisins and colored sugar inside. We learned how to wrap and tie them, but not as well as the women who have been doing it all their lives. They whipped them together so fast you couldn´t even tell what exactly they were doing.
Lila and Mari-Jose and I visited with two families after the tamale making, arriving at our second destination at midnight, just in time to hear the whole town set off their firecrackers and light up the sky with rockets of every variety. We sat down to sweet wine and tamales and cake that was soaked in rum. Wow! We exchanged our own small presents at 2:30 am, and slept til 10:00 am Christmas Day. Lila and Mari-Jose got a color TV and DVD player for Christmas. Mari-Jose has not taken her eyes off it since. She tried to set up the DVD player, but couldn´t get it right. I was no help, there were no instructions in English, and my electronic skills are shaky at best. The teenaged boys next door (known affectionately as El Guapo, “Handsome”) had been showing off their DVD´s when we had been there the night before, so I suggested to Mari-Jose that she ask el Guapo for help. The youngest son came over when he woke up later in the day and set it right up, explaining what she had done wrong. Mari-Jose and I spent the day watching American movies with Spanish subtitles. It was fun.
I was reading the story of the Annunciation in Spanish and English Christmas morning, and singing the Annunciation from Holden Evening Prayer. It is one of my favourite pieces of music. Mary´s song of justice finally coming to birth has a different sound to me in Guatemala. It makes me sad to realize that not much has changed in these 2000 years. I see the poor every day here. Climbing on the local bus with the indigenous people makes me aware every time that they often live in squalid conditions. There is a particular smell that comes from living in a mud house. It is not offensive, but it is distinct. A Mayan man and woman were at the Christmas celebration we attended. They had their new baby, wrapped in several layers of white blankets. He might have been the one to save his people from the way that they looked at him. Does every family who lives in such conditions hope their son will be the one to change their world? I wonder.

Friday, December 23, 2005

Guatemala Journal Dec 20

Guatemala Journal

December 20, 2005

Xela (Quetzaltenango) is more foreign even than I imagined. Streets are narrow and houses and stores front right on the narrow sidewalk. The sidewalks are high and narrow enough that it is sometimes safer to walk in the street. Drivers rocket through them, honking at unwary pedestrians. The part of Xela which houses the school is low, having been a lake in the past. Some streets have concrete and iron bridges over them, dating from the days before the lake was drained for houses. Much of this part of the town suffered flooding and mud damage during Hurricane Stan in October. There are still piles of mud against some curbs and driveways, but most of it is cleaned up by now.

Projecto Linguistico Quetzalteco Español is a friendly face on a street where everything looks the same. Bright ochre yellow, the door opens onto a courtyard full of desks with students and teachers. There is coffee and tea in the café and a room full of internet-abled computers, free for the first half-hour. The library has games and films as well as books in English and Spanish. There are trips to local spots through the week and lectures about various human rights causes. PLQ is revolutionary. They are deeply involved in the struggle for true democratic institutions in Guatemala, and have strong connections to the local indigenous culture, where the profits from the school are distributed to provide opportunities which otherwise would not be available.

Today several of us took a trip to Olintepeque, a village higher up in the Quezaltenango province. There is a large indigenous population there, and today is market day. The market was full of chickens old and young, turkeys, geese, and ducks. Christmas is coming and the local people make special tamales. They are made with rice instead of corn and filled with meat and olives or with raisins and other sweets. The market was full of all the ingredients for Tamales Natividad, plus every other imaginable item from laundry soap to shoes and local fabrics.

The indigenous women wear skirts which are two panels of dark patterned weaving wrapped around their waist and tied with a patterned, floral belt and an embroidered apron tied on the front. Most of the colors from this region seem to be dark. The skirts are most often indigo with a white pattern woven in. But blouses and belts are bright with embroidered flowers on a light ground, pink or coral or lavender. Even the girls are usually dressed in handwoven colors. In Olintepeque, almost all the women wore indigenous clothing top to bottom, but here in the city, you are likely to find any combination local fabrics and European fashions.

My host family lives about six blocks away from school. Lila and her daughter, Marie-Jose, are my hosts. They are very patient with my poor Spanish, and lack of conversation. Their house is pretty primitive, but, I think, about average. There is no heat, but my room has sun coming in all day, so it is warm. It is hard to live with someone and not be able to talk to them. I have a million questions to ask and lots of stories to share, but I can´t. Some days it is really frustrating and makes me sad.

I meet with my Maestra every day for five hours and we converse in Spanish. I am getting to the point where I use my dictionary equally for Spanish and English, but it is still such an intellectual process to produce a sentence or two. I alternate between being proud of my progress and discouraged that I´ll ever learn. I look forward to what the rest of the week will bring.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Retreat Days

September 1, 2005, Saint Andrews Abbey

Underneath all the planning, preparing for approval, accepting responsibility for stewardship of my new financial assets is still a well of grief. It meets me here. I was already weeping when I arrived. Every time I thought about money, it opened a well of tears. It should have been clear from my inability to do anything smart with my money that it was complicated for me. Leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in my checking account and using it to buy hundred-dollar shoes is not a good investment strategy. But I was unprepared for the deep anxiety and tears that followed my conversation with Jim Kottra, my new financial manager.
It was tempting to spend my time here working my way through the Buffy DVDs Rachel gave me as a birthday gift, and making runs down the hill for chocolate bars. I made another choice; to be in the quiet of this place and let it inform my reflection. If this is “God’s House” for me, I need to bring all the turmoil, all the doubt, all the fear and questions and let them breathe in this high desert air. I want to let God’s presence here inform how I see them, how I hold them, how I live in those questions.
This openness is so hard. Everything makes me cry; singing “into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit…” at Compline; watching the morning light illuminate the cups and glasses on the empty breakfast table brings tears up from a deep well of both sadness and joy. These are the images that go with me when I leave here, that are part of my dwelling in God’s house forever.
Walking on the monastery road this morning, Father E’s garden with its avenue of brilliant green Lombardy Poplars rose up on the hill to my left. Ahead of me were the cottonwoods which surround the pasture, reaching higher than the five-story Disney Concert Hall we visited on Monday. The trees never fail to move me with their glorious, unself-conscious beauty. On Monday, Marti and I spent the day at the new concert hall and cathedral in Los Angeles, architectural wonders of the modern world. And, I find, they pale in comparison to the simple beauty of these trees. The rise of the poplars is the truth that the spires of cathedrals imitate, the delicate green on the huge cottonwoods, the real grace that architecture emulates. Walking among these monuments of living praise invites me to release the reactions that drive my compulsions for the time that I am here, knowing that when I pick them up again to leave, I might have some new peace with them.
In Psalm 50, God chides the people for going through the motions in their worship and praise. The praise God asks for is disarmingly simple – requests for help in distress. Who would have thought that asking for help when you are lost and confused is praise? So I will spread my loneliness and confusion out before the God who invites them into our relationship. I will bring that home.

Back to Seminary

August 25, 2005


“Homeless…..” the strains of Ladysmith Black Mombazo are echoing in my mind as I drive over yet another dry wash with a sign that names it as a river. No, now I know what rivers really look like. They are filled to the brim with water that reflects the sky. They are crowded upon by a crush of trees, every color green imaginable. I have come to love a different landscape than my native one. Is it possible to love two, like you love your children, never one over the other, but differently, each one calling into being a part of yourself that creates the love between you.
Moving back into the dorm is not a homecoming exactly, because this was the home created when I gave up my own home. I love the simplicity of living here. All you need to bring is your personal belongings. The toilet paper, cleaning supplies, dishes and pots and pans live here already. Each person brings their use to them, and what’s here and how it is used is always changing. It is hard to believe that I’ve only been gone a year because so much is different here. So I spread my precious objects around this space, claiming it as my own, and knowing beyond a doubt that nothing in it will leave a mark when I am gone.
Home is in my call right now. As everything in the world around me moves and changes, my call to ministry is the constant. As people move into my life and out, it is my connection to them through my emerging sense of myself as pastor that defines the relationship. The very temporariness of the life I am leading serves to make me seek the deeper roots of God’s own love and care, God’s longing for peace and justice that becomes the model for life and the proclamation of it that is my vocation.
“What is your center?” my supervisor would ask. “Is there a deeper story that holds all this together?” Sometimes it’s hard to answer when you feel pulled in so many directions by conflicting loyalties and longings. But when you rest a minute, take a breath, listen for the Spirit in the deepest recesses of your heart, you know the answer is yes. I am a gift to God’s people. It is not because of anything I have done or chosen. Rather, it has chosen me. It is when I respond with all the love and openness which I have received in the choosing, that it becomes a gift to me as well. That giving and receiving is the center of my story, the place that is my true home. And….even with the sadness of always moving away in order to go forward, there is the joy of knowing that no matter what changes in life, home comes with me.