Un Día en la Vida

This week I feel like I've settled into a groove here. I have a routine and it is interesting because it has taken this long to fall into one and to be honest I din't think I would ever really find one. Basically when I was thinking about what to write it occured to me that I didn't really have anything more to talk about other than my everyday life here at the Mountain School so bear with me through an everyday play-by-play is.
Even though we are in a rural area there seems to be very little time to sit around and do nothing. Every minute there is something to do.
The morning starts at four with the honking trucks that go down and up the street to take the men off to work in some other town. Luckily I have earplugs so I don't wake up until six thirty to get ready for breakfast at seven thirty. It takes a while to make coffee and sometimes there's a line for the bathroom so I like to get up that earliy though probably I don't have to. With coffee in hand, in a mug I bought at a nearby finca, I walk down to the community of Nuevo San Jose which is about the equivalent to about two city blocks away to eat breakfast with a family. This week I am eating with the family of one of the guys who works at the school, Jorge. Technically it is the mother of the family who is responsible for feeding the students, María is Jorge's wife and mother of seven children. I go into her kitchen which is not part of the original structure of the house but is a crude room built of corrugated metal lamiante at the center of which is a wood burning stove. I sit at a little table in the corner and there is only one other chair where someone sits with me while I eat. Usually it's just me eating because I assume it's like the home of any other busy family where everyone just kind of eats when they get a chance. For breakfast I usually get frijoles and beans and of course fresh tortillas. I chat with María about whetever; Canada, Guatemala, goings ons at the school, past students, ect. Then I head back to school.
This week my class is in the afternoon so I have the morning to do whatever I need to. Usually it's homework, I actually have a lot and I've been really ambitious with learning Spanish. If it's not homework then we are probably making our way to the twon of Columba, the internet... It is here that I get my fruit fix, I buy my usually staples of one pineapple, one papya, bananos, cucumber, zapote and limes. All for about 25Q(uetzales), the equivelent of about three dollars.
We have to make it back to the school in time to go back to our families for lunch. Similar process to breakfast but it probably includes more vegetables. Yesterday I had cucumber salad with egg-dipped-fried cauliflower and of course more tortillas. After lunch I start my Spanish class. Every week we are paired with a different teacher and this week my teacher is Eunice (with four syllables in spanish). She is exactly my age we were born in the same month in the same year. She is amazing, tons of energy and we get along like good friends, letting our hair down and talking about buys. Despite all of our similarities our lives have been very different; she was married at 17 and has two small children, ages 4 and 2. She bagan studying last year on the weekends for social work and I think she is having trouble paying the 1000Q annual cost. A major problem here is that school is officially free but things like books, transit and other costs are not covered and this excludes the vast majority from ever going to school, even primary school. Ay. Our class is four hours long with a twenty mintue break for fruit. After class we have half an hour before we have to head down to dinner with our families. In all of the small breaks during the day I don't even have a chance to sit still. For example throughout the day I did my laundry. Soaking, scrubbing, rinsing and finally hanging to dry.
Dinner is like lunch with veggies of some sort and tortillas and conversation. I am vegetarian but generally people don't eat meat here because it is quite expensive but there is a lot of soy surprisingly, textured vegetable protein. Eggs are relatively cheap too but it is definitely the masa that keeps the country alive.

There was a lot of unsual excitement earlier this week when one of our guard dogs was poisoned. Compa, the dog that has been around since the founding of the school, ate a piece of bread that was left at the entrance that had been poisoned with, what was later discovered to be by the vet, insecticde. We all thought that he was going to die right there because of his age but luckily there is a vet studying at the school right now and she was able to stay on top of the situation. Abelino, one of the directors of the school has a pickup and they left to Coatepeque, the nearest town with a animal clinic, quickly. It was uncertain weather he was going to make it through the night but pretty miraculously he did. He was back the next day and laying in the sun when I left the school this morning.
It was very clear that the poisoning was intentional and the working hypothesis is that our dogs were targetted because they are constantly chasing the motorcycles that go down the road in front of the school. Motorcycles are the ONLY they go after (which might be a little worrying considering that they are supposed to go after suspiscious people). It is like a game for them because they all come from wherever they are on the school grounds to run after every single motorcycle that passes. And they do go after them with determination, I've seen some people have to kick them off as they go by slowly on the bumpy road. Jorge built a gate yesterday to keep them from going out into the road. I was pretty freaked by the attack and I had nightmares the other night about it because it was such a violent way for the community to communicate their frustration with the dogs. That's life in Guatemala, vestiges of war are everywhere...

Friday Still (the non-political)

The transformation is only just noticable.
Feeling the day turn into night.
Now only a soft shade of pink to remind us of the earlier day.
We can see the clouds now for their true selves, their shapes, their subtle movements: No longer distracted by their brilliant reflection of the long gone sun...
The banana leaves accept the night easily, liquidly trusting the cool breeze.
In moments the valleys will disappear making way for the silent theatrics of lightning bugs
Accompanyed faithfully by the music of crickets growing ever louder in competition with the enduring bassline of evangelicals.
Along with dry wood burning in stoves is the faintest, imaginable
scent of coffee flowers.

In the Boca de la Costa

Last Sunday I arrived at the Mountain school, another campus of the Spanish school that I am attending right now. It is the rural sister school and it is located in the lush coffee country, west of and below the volcano I wrote about earlier, Santa Maria. After a two-hour ride crammed in a "chicken bus" we got to the school. The change in altitude and climate was noticable immediately; lush, green, humid and warm. I was totally blown away of course like I always am and right away I signed up for another week at this campus, three weeks instead of the original two. The school is located by, supports and is supported by three nearby communities. The nearest access to computers and ATMs is in the town Colomuba, a twentyfive minute ride by 'pickup' down the hill. The school itself is beautiful; the grounds are covered with tons of plants, lime trees, banana trees and other palms, super wonderful lilies, the tropical plants that you buy for your house, neon (not exaggerating) impatients, ferns. Our classes are held in little "ranchitos", thatched huts that hold two people and a desk and chairs comfortably that are scttered in the back. There is a dry latrine which is super fun to use even though there are also tiolets inside. There is a hut on stilts that gives us a view of the photosynthetically productive valleys and hilltops surrounding us. We all live together and some of the teachers stay with us through the week so it really feels like a home that I can let loose in. We eat all of our meals with families in the communities and that has been really fun because we get to see how people live and also get to be a part of the life here in a small way.
We are in the heart of coffe country which is like heaven to me. We are in the "Boca de la Costa", the foothills of the highlands to the east. We are able to fully appreciate the geography and its range of features on our rides into town standing up on the beds of the local taxi-pickup trucks. On the way down we can see the land flatten out presumably until it reaches the Pacific. On the way back up we can see the enormous crater of santa Maria with its regular eruptions and rocky west-facing slope. I don't know if words could do justice to the grandeur of the sunsets we get to see...
So as I mentioned we are in the heart of Guatemala's coffee country and little by little I am learning just what that means. Basically all of this land is divided into coffee fincas. the divisions were made in the late 1800s under the influence of the then president something Barrios. He is responsible for allowing foreign companies and oligarchal Guatemalan "ladino" families to invest in developing the land for export production. This was the beginning of the finca system that continues to permeate and dictate life around here and through the rest of the country. This is the land of the campesinos, people who make their living on the fincas and who either live on them or live in other communities and commute daily or weekly while their families stay at home. I haven't come close to comprehending the effects of this finca system; a system that seems to have been formed by global processes of greed and demand and by local processes of living and surviving. Everything around here seems to be a direct result of the finca. Today we visited a community of exfinca workers who were kicked off the finca on which they lived and worked for attempted to organized to more effectly demand fair pay and humane living conditions. This was in the eightie and since they moved off the finca they have developed their community on land that an American aid institution (Welden?) bought and loans to them. They are now trying to find a way to buy their own finca as they still have to leave their remote community to work. It is absolutely unbelievable. This place that we visited is just one exaple of what has been happening as a result of the finca system and they have eeked out a decent living for themselves because they are exceptionally well organized. Other groups of families (ex and current finca workers) have not been so fortunate and are really struggling to meet their basic needs.
It has been really amazing to see the ways these people negotiated their situation. It seems that a lot of people have turned to foreign aid organizations for material and legal help since the government has a well-deserved reputation of being inaccessable and detrimental instead of helpful. I've also been struggling with the role of the church here which seems to have had a role in putting a lot of these people to sleep as I think I mentioned earlier; there are several situations in which the church, evangelical and catholic, has been an important organizing tool that has allowed some communities to access what they need to survive.
I think I am slowly piecing together the convoluted legal processes many of the communities around here find themselves in. Clearly the judiciary system functions sort of as it does in Canada in its treatment if Indigenous "issues"; it is complex, entangling and systematic oppression. Here though there is a very blatant emphasis on maintaining an essentially passive workforce, sustanence to the oligarchy.
Note: Apparently eight families hold control of EVERYTHING in Guatemala, down to who is let in from other countries to "invest".
The school that am going to right now was developed by some of these ex-finca workers as a way to create alternatives to finca work. It really seems to be an amazing organization that serves as gathering place and an oulet for people who need access to outside help.

I hope some of this made sense. I have been in a continual state of 'blown away' since I got here three weeks ago and I am feeling myself attaching to the land scpae and also to the shit that is going down on it. Ask me questions if they come to you because it would be a great excuse for me to do some research.

I love you all and I thin about you even when I'm not writing you or talking to you. I hope that I am generating some curiosity about Guatemala amongst you because that would be amazing.
over and out love xoxoxo