Guatemala Journal, Jan 10

Guatemala Journal

January 10, 2006

The mountain school is located in one of the most beautiful parts of Guatemala. The Boca-Costa is one of the richest agricultural areas, the home of the coffee plantations. It is a land of deep, green ravines and tall trees. The vegetation along the highway looks familiar, ferns and philodendron just like in people´s living rooms, but the leaves are the size of tabletops and double beds. Volcano Santa Maria dominates the landscape, and I understand that if you get up just before dawn, you can see the glow of the fire in the volcano at the very top. I cannot testify to this phenomenon. The air is so moist that it sticks to the edges of the ravines in white wisps at all times of the day, but in the evening the clouds come down to touch the treetops all around the school, and as the light fades it is often colored rose or coral. I found myself always checking the sky and the clouds, it was a never-ending show.
The school itself was the home of a landowner long-gone. It is a very grand house by any scale, especially Guatemala, and easily houses 12 students 5 shared bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. It is a working organic farm with herbs and 100 chickens and the remains of a coffee finca worked by local families who tend, harvest and arrange for roasting of the coffee. There is fresh, real ground coffee all day every day at the mountain school, a real treat after two weeks of Nescafe´in Xela. The teachers conduct their classes in bamboo and grass huts in the basckyard. It is quite exotic. I loved it. The house has a kitchen where everyone gathers for beer or chocolate at night. We always started our conversations diligently in Spanish, but it didn´t take long for them to become a combination of Spanish and English, or all English. I found myself telling a story Maestra Miriam had told me of her trip to San Francisco and Redwood City – quite adequately in Spanish!
We ate all our meals with families in the neighbourhoods that the mountain school has been supporting since it´s arrival in 1997. It has helped to build schools, send students to school beyond primary education, bring in electricity and sanitation, and also teach health and nutrition in the neighborhood. The meals I ate were very basic, mostly beans and tortillas and soup. But I like beans and tortillas and soup, so I was happy. It is a revelation to sit in a block house with no windows, no running water, to share a dinner cooked on a wood-fired stove with a family of five that feels fortunate because their father has a regular job, and they are part of a community that owns the land their house is built on.
The stories of how these communities came to be on that particular mountainside were much the same, and matched the story of the finca across the highway that had just become the property of the workers. The original owner was a good man, treated his workers well, but when he died his children were not such good employers. Here the story varies a bit, but they all involve real hardship, no work, or work for no pay, the church or other organizations feeding families while they organize and try to gain their rights to back pay, etc. It usually takes a few years before anything changes, but the communities of Fatima and Nuevo San Jose, where we were, won enough to gain title to the land on which they currently live. Nuevo San Jose has been there since 1993 and has electricity, running water and septic system. Fatima has only been there for four years and has electricity, but no water yet.
I am very glad that I spent the week in the country, meeting people like Elsa and Juan and their beautiful and boisterous children. Ocsar taught me to play rummy en Español, and Gladis at 13, looks like a goddess on the way down to the local mill with a basket of leached maiz balanced on her head. It is not something I will ever forget. I know I would never have understood their lives in the same way if I had not been welcomed into them with such generosity. But the poverty and difficulty of life wore me out. ¨Los insectos¨ were really annoying, and two of the women in the school became sick with dengue fever from the mosquitos. At the end of the week, I was ready to leave. But as we drove up toward the altiplano again, I watched the clouds touch down on the trees and creep across the ravines. I was sorry that I would not be seeing that soon again. When I told the driver of the car that I thought the sky and the clouds in Guatemala were beautiful, he looked at me like I was crazy.