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.