Guatemala Summer

July 13, 2006

Here I am back in Guatemala. It looks very different in the summer. The patchwork of brown fields covering the mountains along the Interamerican Highway are now filled with waving fields of corn, bright green and as high as the men who cultivate it. There are fields of squash dotted with deep yellow flowers. It looks as if the harvest will be good, and I pray that it is enough to help mend the damage from Hurricane Stan last October. The storm took out cities along the lake, washed out bridges which still have not been repaired and destroyed the harvest leaving families with damaged homes and no food, I had almost forgotten the damage from ¨El Stan,¨ having spent a week in the Gulf Coast working with people who are just beginning to dig out from Katrina. So much damage, so much loss makes my heart hurt. I don´t know where to put the sadness.

As I expected, I have forgotten almost everything I learned in five difficult weeks last winter. I promise myself that I will not make the mistake of not using Spanish every chance I get. I want to find a language partner who needs my English as much as I need their Spanish, so that I will not lose it again. So I am back in the present tense, practising those irregular verbs. My maestra Ana Maria is an expert teacher and has a more organized way of presenting lessons, so that it makes much more sense to me than I remember. Maybe I just needed a second time around. I find that much of what was lost is coming back in our conversations.

I originally arranged to stay in a guest house owned by a Lutheran Church here in Xela. I hated the room I was assigned, and arriving at the end of a week-end, I found the bathroom to be so dirty that I hated to use it. I went right to the school on Monday morning and asked to stay with a family. When I got the guest house to pick up my bags and pay for one night, the duena had returned and maids were scrubbing everything. The family I got lives in a small apartment behind an auto shop. It is not very clean either, and my room is tiny. But I like the family and I have a second-story view that I love. I´m unpacked now, and so I´ll stick it out for the two weeks I am scheduled to study before my week of travel. I hope to arrange a room in the sparkling clean guest house across the street from the school for my final week in school.

All in all, it is lovely to be back. I feel at home here.