Ill Wind: January 2012

Guatemala. Bumping along in a packed bus, immersed in dust and burning garbage fumes and thumping bass, it almost felt like I'd come home. Home, that is, to that other home, the one in the Eastern Himalayan foothills. So much in this new place reminded me of Nepal and North India, from the decorations on the buses to the features of the people. (This last is less surprising when you consider that the indigenous population of the Americas probably crossed a land bridge at some point from Asia.) So many details of life that hadn't crossed my mind since my last trip to the Subcontinent turned out to carry over to this other small, diverse, developing, and deeply politically troubled subtropical nation: bright political slogans painted on buildings and rocks by the roadside; women in traditional dress talking putting a few cents at a time on their cell phones in areas which have never seen landline service; corrugated tin roofed houses with dark, smoky kitchens; terraced fields of maize and potatoes. At first, immersed in this new but deeply familiar place, I found Nepali syllables spilling from my lips whenever I tried to exercise my fledgling Spanish, and, worse, I kept slipping into the characteristic Southasian head waggle.

But despite or perhaps because of the many and obvious similarities between Nepal and Guatemala, the differences soon began to stand out. The bus soundtrack was Reggaeton and merengue instead of Bollywood film music and Nepali lok git, and the buses themselves, though comparable to Indian-made Tatas, were decommissioned Bluebird school buses. On the streets, women bared their arms and (gasp!) shoulders. And other, more sinister differences, too, ones that speak of the appalling violence that has swept this country over the last decades: bus conductors carrying pump action shotguns slung across their chests, country roads unsafe to wander even at mid-day thanks to the armed plantation guards and to bands of roving thugs.

Coffee ripe and ready for harvest

Or maybe this violence isn't so different after all. Both Guatemala and Nepal are rich in natural and human resources, but this wealth gets divided up incredibly inequitably so that they are effectively some of the poorest places on earth. In both cases, cash crops and particularly stimulants are a major cog in this economic machine. In Eastern Nepal and neighboring Darjeeling, of course, it's tea: plantations blanket the hillsides all around the famous former British hill station and employ a substantial number of locals at pitiful wages. In Nepal, inequity has been severe enough to give the Maoists a firm foothold across the country; I never got the inside scoop on labor conditions on Darjeeling plantations, Pitzer in Nepal being fairly politically apathetic. But thanks to the terrific left-wing non-profit language school PLQE/La Escuela de la Montana, I learned substantially more about the realities of life on a coffee finca (plantation) in Guatemala. The basic living arrangements at La Escuela spoke volumes on the subject: the entire founding populations of the two villages where our host families lived had migrated from a nearby finca some twenty years earlier after their efforts to organize resulted in them being blacklisted from the farm. Instead of the poor wages, housing, and lack of access to medical care of the plantation, they are now on their own. This means subsisting on what day labor they can piece together. But since the coffee crisis of the early 00's, day wages on plantations are hardly worth the effort. Women and children sometimes do some picking; the men in the two communities of Nuevo San Jose and Fatima board an early morning pick-up when they can to work construction or dig potatoes in Xela or somewhere. The work is far from steady, however, and most of the families seem to live day to day, hand to mouth.

For a wealthy Westerner--and anyone on vacation in another country is wealthy by these standards--rural poverty can seem romantic at first glance: cue images of honest hard work and its wholesome fruits; vigorous health, fresh air, etc. Of course the illusion falls apart upon closer inspection; poverty is never pretty, nor does it smell very good. But in other poor rural parts of the world I've been to--Sikkim, say--there is at least some grain of truth to this myth. People have a plot of land to sew and reap as they see fit and access to wild jungle beyond for foraging and hunting. If nothing else, people are at least close to their food sources and able to eat simply but reasonably well. Not so in Guatemala, where most of the fertile land is owned by coffee and cardamom fincas. The villagers of Nuevo San Jose and Fatima own only the land their shacks sit on. The food they buy is whatever their meager wages allow. During the week I was there, this meant a lot of cheap pasta, carrots, eggs, a little rice, a little beans. Not rice and beans--rice OR beans. And for spices: not the traditional achiote, cassia cinnamon, thyme and laurel but artificial chicken bouillon, full of MSG and hydrogenated palm oil. One of the few remnants of their traditional Mam Maya diet was the fresh corn tortillas at every meal. Of course the women still know how to cook all the traditional delicacies--rich pepian, festive tamales, hot ponche de frutas, complex jocon--they just can't afford to make them except for big holidays. Strange to think that, while the poor majority can't afford to eat well, the helicopter-riding upper crust mostly doesn't want to: or rather, to them and to the slice of urban middle class, "eating well" means lots of fast food. In Xela, the country's second city and the unofficial capital of the predominantly Maya Western highlands region, fried chicken joints were ubiquitous.

That city, somehow both gritty and picturesque, pulsed with life in a way that few of the more touristy sites manage to. Here, amongst a thicket of fried chicken joints and a sprinkling of touristy restaurants, comida tipica was available from street vendors and comedores: thick stuffed corn pupusas, hot punches of milk and of fruit, thick and creamy atol de elote from the street, and richer tipica dishes like pepian and jocon from the restaurants. Christmas programs blared on loudspeakers from the Parque Central, and Catholic processions filled quiet streets with festive color and sound in the evening. In the thin stark high elevation air, the pastel colors of old colonial buildings stood out starkly, almost glowed. Though only an hour and a half by bus, it seemed a world away from little Fatima and Nuevo San Jose. Indeed, some of the villagers I spoke with had never visited Xela and certainly not the next stop on our itinerary, idyllic Lake Atitlan. A sobering thought as we headed off a little sheepishly to party at the lake, which Aldous Huxley called "too much of a good thing."

Our trip spiraled more or less into debauchery from that point. In the bizarre Lake Atitlan hippie bubble of San Marcos, we discovered that 12 year old rum cost only 50 quetzales. I have lots photos of sun on the water and tropical foliage. Fighting briefly against the hedonistic tide, I did manage to take a morning class at IXIIM on some fundamentals of Mayan Medicine, adding to the modest knowledge I'd gleaned in the town of Colomba outside La Escuela de La Montana when my wonderful Spanish teacher Anny took me to visit the town's herbal farmacia. Alex and I felt good to be supporting a Mayan youth organization when we hired on of their guides for a half day hike around the lake to Santa Cruz instead of piping our tourist loot straight back into the expat community. But it was hard to escape the sense of privilege that comes with travel to poor countries, especially after the hard left perspective of La Escuela.

All resistance gave out when we reached our penultimate destination. Actually the Bacchanalian spirit took hold of us even en route to Monterrico, Guatemala's only real beach party town. It was getting to be Christmas, after all, and the reggaeton beats on our fourth or fifth second-class bus of the day stirred up a deep lust for beer and sunburns. The following four days provided those pleasures in abundance, along with seafood at every meal and black volcanic sand in every bodily crevice. I'm not proud to say it, but it was sweet oblivion. It was, at least a multi-cultural oblivion: we befriended a motley crew of American Peace Corps volunteers; an itinerant, very drunk Polish photographer; and a miner-turned-millionaire from the Yukon and his 18 year old son.

Vacation definitely accomplished, it was time to make a brief stop in obligatory Antigua and head home. A couple weeks later, all the traveling and sunbathing blurs together into one gesture. It's the grit that stands out starkly in memory: kids playing in the dust in the villages where we ate our meals at La Escuela; the commercial town of Colomba with its fancy new evangelical churches and sublime giant Ceiba tree; the authenticity of Xela with its graffiti and bustling market.