mornings in the cornfield

Slap slap, slap slap, slap slap


The sound of my host mother making tortillas lulls me out of my lazy sleep in the morning. The smell of eggs, frijoles and tortillas welcomes me to the new day. I step out of my room and the sun is shining amid blue skies and cornhusks are waving in the slight breeze. In the distance birds join in the chorus of a reggeaton song, the gentle drumline a heartbeat of Latin America felt even way out here in the Solola pueblo regions.

My host famly consists of my mother Aura, father Fermin, fourteen year old brother Nelson, Ingrid, a thirteen year old girl who lives at an all girls boarding school an hour or so away and only comes home every other weekend, and the three little cherubs: Jessica age 8, Mari age 5, and Minor (pronounced Minersh) age 3. The three tiny ones are absolutely adorable, with smiles that split their faces in two and laughs that sound like little bells peeling over the fields. Minor is always hiding from newcomers, pressing his faces into his mother´s apron and peering out nervously.. eyes wide and full of sport. His favorite phrase is ´mira´... ´mira´... which he usually couples with holding the small kitten or other exciting toy up high in his hands and showing whoever will look. Mari is exceptionally cute, and her and her sister Jessica run around giggling while wearing tiny little traditional Mayan dresses.

All women here wear traditional dress starting at age 5 or so (sometimes earlier), and while they at times do wear athletic clothing for sports, generally they are always seen wearing their own beautifully handmade skirt and shirt. They take pride in these dresses, and over time I´ve come to notice that each dress is different, with a different design, pattern and colorings. My host mother Aura consistantly wears perhaps the most beautiful dresses of them all, and she spends much of her time over her wooden loom, painstakingly designing each line of patterns, each color and each thread, with striking results.

My family is poor. They have only enough money to buy food every day, and have a difficult time planning ahead of time... for who knows what might happen with the government here, with their jobs here. Fermin is a school teacher and the family runs a tienda, a tiny store, next to the market in Solola´. Currently none of the school teachers are getting paid by the government, so there is no school today as the teachers are all on strike. The times have been very hard for teachers, the country´s most important workers, with most schools being incredibly overcrowded with children and understaffed by the government. In the area that I´m living in there are three small German organizations that have been working for around fifteen years here, building schools in the poorest of poor areas, trying to provide for this nation´s least fortunate.

I am here technically to teach soccer to kids and to provide a space where in the future we can launch an educational program for girls coupled with soccer in Solola, and yet I am also pulled into this struggle of schooling. For this region, and especially for the women, education is the only means of emancipation, but without a school and without books, pencils, notebooks, what hope do these kids have of achieving said liberation? The people here need so much and have so little ... ultimately it is so heartbreaking and I often wonder what real good I am doing here.

My program needs more volunteers, more equipment, more donations, more everything. We are working with a rediculously small budget and very limited resourses, and yet trying to take on the challenges of the world here. For the first month it was just me, the only volunteer, and Luis, the Guatemalan director that I get along with fabulously. Jon Brooks arrived here last week, a good friend from my university and a welcome support for the program. However, I leave in a month and Jon leaves a bit after that and I´m worried, scared, that what we are setting up down here will not be sustainable and will collapse. Without the certainty of new volunteers on the horizon I´m reticent to take on too many practices, and hesitant to promise too much to these villages. Anyone reading this that might be interested in the program, please contact me, we need your help and your time, if you can offer it.

Overall I´m having an incredible time. I´m learning.. so much... everyday. And I can only be thankful for the opportunity to live here and share my time with the people in this village. It is such a calm, beautiful, special place.

Mi Viaje a Guatemala... parte uno

After all was said and done in Nicaragua (and I may add more about Nicaragua later on), Ben and I hopped on a midnight bus from Managua, Nicaragua to Guatemala City, Guatemala. 18 hours and two border crossings later, there we were: Huge buildings, sprawled malls, bright lights, and fast food restaurants. It seemed to me that we had re-entered the civilization that I had left in New York. Nowhere in Nicaragua did I see a big brightly lit building such as the ones here! But don't be fooled, those bright lights were contained to the 'new town' area of Guatemala city. A bit further in we reached the "old town", full of brightly painted, small, Central American style homes all connected by the same walls.

My memories of the capitol are fleeting; after Ben and I exited our bus Luis, our main man in Guatemala, picked us up and we were off to a hostel for the night. The next day, early in the morning, we borded another bus headed for Solola', a city overlooking the famous Lake Atitlan... and the place that was to become my home for the next two and a half months. As though on perfect cue with the change in environment, my stomach began rumbling tremendously, and my first step off the 2 hour bus ride in Solola ended with my vomiting all over the main square. Welcome to Guatemala! ... Classic.

The next few days are a swirl. I had gotten really sick... perhaps from some soy yogurt I'd eaten in the bus terminal of the capitol, perhaps from something else... but I couldn't eat, could barely drink, and had some really horendous nights. Ben took care of me, and we stayed first in Luis' house in Solola, then afterward in Santa Maria, the village just outside of Solola that I was to live in for the next couple of months.

Solola reminds me somewhat of Granada, Nicaragua. A small colonial city, Solola has a beautiful main square lush with flowers, trees, and grass, and is overlooked by a slightly gaudy but still beautiful cathedral. The market starts underneath this cathedral and sprawls outward, revealing rows and rows of tomatos, carrots, potatoes, strawberries, corn, corn, corn and more corn. You can truly get anything in this market, and vendors come from all over the area to sell their crafts here... specifically remarkable are the Tuesday and Friday markets. But however much Solola may seem at times familiar, the village Santa Maria is a world that I have never experienced before... a completely new and mind-blowing place.

My first step in Santa Maria was surreal. Six or so boys around 7-10 years old were playing soccer on a field right next to the main road. They ran up with shy but smiling faces, and explained that they were part of the Futbol Sin Fronteras Santa Maria team... that although there hadn't been a practice in a month or so, they were still playing every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. They had one tattered ball, but their smiles said that they didn't care... that they were just stoked to be playing. I introduced myself as their new coach, and I had a team. Woah.

An hour or so later we had our first meeting with the community, and it was there that I first heard Kaqchikel, the Mayan language spoken in these hills. This ancient eery language drips of a long gone civilization, and sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. Kaqchikel is at times gutteral and at times uses complex throat and tongue patterns, and is accented often by Spanish segue words (such as entonces), proper nouns, and numbers (most that speak Kaqchikel cannot count past twenty in their language, thus Spanish numbers have become commonly appropriated). Most generations living in Santa Maria speak both Kaqchikel and Spanish, with the exception of babies and grandparents who at times only speak Kaqchikel, and it is certainly the language of choice in most of the homes in the village. That is, Kaqchikel seems to function by binding the community together, whereas Spanish enables them to communicate with the rest of the world.

After our meeting, which consisted of instant coffee and about a million "gracias por su apoyo y ayuda" (thank you for your support and help) from all parties present, we made our way to my new home. Literally in the middle of a cornfield, my new home sits snuggled in between recently harvested (and thus the skeleton form of) cornstalks, jutting up an odd angles in the sky. Tiny dirt trails lead from one cornpatch to another, and to several houses all hidden amid the high corn. During the next two weeks of my time here many farmers have cut down the stalks, but when I first arrived I felt on another planet altogether. It's hard to truly describe this experience, other than to say... woah. I'm here, living in a Mayan village, communicating only on Spanish with my family, neighbors, and soccer teams. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. More to come with the people I've met.