See you in 2008!

I'm leaving this afternoon for a Xela-Guatemala City-Miami-NYC-Dubai-Kolkata-Agra-Aurangabad-Mumbai-Dubai-NYC- Miami-Guatemala City-Xela odyssey...Oh yeah, somewhere in the midst of all that I'm finding time to ride Arabian horses in the desert, see the Taj Mahal, and get married (again)!!! OK, the point of this isn't to brag (well, maybe a little), or even to temporarily distract myself while I wait, but really to wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year! I'll see some of you soon--safe travels!

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Virgencita Morena!

Mexicans seem to always be celebrating something. Fireworks go off at odd times, entire families dance in the street, and in almost any town you can count on finding old men plunking away on marimbas in the central square. On Friday night in Oaxaca City, I was finishing up my mole negro on the patio of a restaurant in the zócalo when a massive crowd surged around the corner across the park, led by a 10-piece band. They stopped a block from us, and with a shout, struck up a loud banda song. Almost everyone in the crowd, at least 200 people, grabbed a partner and started to dance. Those left on the sidelines raised bottles of mezcal above their heads and sang along.

We quickly paid the bill and hurried over to see what was going on. Just as we got near, the singer in the band shouted "¡Vámonos!" over the music and the throng turned and began stumbling off toward the cathedral. Intrigued, we followed along behind. After a few blocks, the group stopped and the same ritual was repeated. Although we were a little hesitant at first, being the only touristas in sight, we soon got swept up in the good time. After we'd been dancing for a few minutes, a guy approached us and, incredulous, exclaimed in English, "You don't have any mezcal?!?" Once we had been introduced to all of his friends, hugged, photographed, and thrown back on the "dancefloor" with new partners, we ended up having mezcal poured down our throats while the crowd shouted "¡uno, dos, tres, cuatro...!" Luckily for me, since mezcal tastes like barbecued turpentine, our new friend was so inebriated already that the majority of the alcohol ended up on my shirt. We eventually found out that they were partying in honor of the anniversary of the founding of their university. "And a lot of us don't even go there!" confessed a girl nearby as she took a swig from an empty bottle. We ended the night at 1am, dancing and singing in front of the dimly lit Catedral de Oaxaca, and wondering why we didn't live in Mexico.

And that was just a random excuse to have a good time. I also happened to be in Mexico for possibly the biggest festival of all, the Fiestas de la Virgen de Guadalupe, several weeks leading up to the December 12th Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In honor of the Virgin, thousands of Catholics from all around Mexico engage in pilgrimage. Some groups go only a few miles, riding in trucks adorned with paintings of the Virgin, sending a runner ahead of their vehicles to carry a flaming torch the whole way. Many people, however, travel for days. Literally millions of people go to Mexico's capital to pay their respects at the Basilica of Guadalupe, where the miraculous first image of the "Virgen Morena" is housed. Apparently, there is even a three-month-long pilgrimage on foot from Mexico City to New York.

In San Cristobal and Tuxtla Gutierrez, the faithful took to the streets at night, mounting processions to various churches and cathedrals. The groups were all led by a truck carrying a young girl dressed as the Virgin in the back, followed by a mariachi band escorting dozens of people carrying candles and singing. Traveling all over the state on my coffee cooperative visits, I came across more and more pilgrims slowing traffic as they made their way on seemingly random journeys from Veracruz to Tuxtla, from Motozintla to Tapachula.

One night in Tuxtla, I walked out of my hotel to find the world's strongest concentration of Mexican stereotypes marching past me towards the town's Guadalupe temple. At the head of the parade, an enormous balloon-covered yellow tow truck dragged a banner announcing that the parade was sponsored by a local horchata factory. This was followed by a pickup carrying a full marimba band, followed by another truck whose bed was filled with mariachi musicians, all playing at top volume. A group of men carrying a life-size poster of the Virgin came next, leading a girl wearing the Virgin's trademark green shroud, and hundreds of women dressed in traditional flowered skirts and lacy white blouses, carrying lilies, singing hymns, and chanting G-U-A-D-A-L-U-P-E over and over. Then came a fleet of at least 30 balloon-encrusted taxis in various states of disrepair, arrhythmically honking their horns. Bringing up the rear was a white, mid-60s VW bug, covered in loudspeakers, announcing: "¡Estamos aquí para celebrar la Virgen de Guadalupe! ¡Felicitaciones Virgencita Morena!" ("We're here to celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe! Congratulations little brown virgin!"). All that was missing was the mezcal.

Photos from my time in Mexico are here.

It's not that stones are mute

No es que las piedras sean mudas,
sólo guardan silencio.

It's not that stones are mute,
they just maintain their silence.

-Humberto Ak'abal

Browsing the shelves at a bookstore in Oaxaca City a couple of weeks ago, I happened on a photography and essay book on Guatemala. It fell open to a black-and-white photo of a beautiful young couple at their wedding, tight-lipped, stiff, staring resolutely at the camera. As I leafed through the book, a quote from the K'iche' poet Humberto Ak'abal caught my eye: "It's not that stones are mute,/ they just maintain their silence." In two lines, he articulated my experience of Guatemala. Before I came to Xela this summer, countless people told me how friendly Guatemalans were, how helpful and warm. I arrived expecting the infectious sense of humor and generosity that I remembered from trips to Mexico. After a couple of months of work throughout Western Guatemala, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. It's not that highland Guatemalans are rude, or unfriendly at all. It's just that being obliging is a form of defense, a deflection learned by people who have been conquered, enslaved, and killed for hundreds of years. It has been hard for me to tell the difference between civility and compliance in a culture whose conservatism is both innate and imposed.

For the last three weeks, I have been working in Chiapas, with a long weekend vacation in Oaxaca. The unlikely contrasts between Mexico and Guatemala led me to reflect on the stoic Guatemalan character that has challenged me during my first three months in the country. A cultural, economic, and political divide runs along the Guatemala-Mexico border. On the ride out of the mountains from Xela, the only noise came from the bus itself, belching smoke and creaking at every turn while its passengers sat quietly gazing out the window or slumped forward in an exhausted torpor. Crossing the trash-clogged river to Chiapas swept us into a world of paved highways, loud laughter, air conditioning, and spicy food. The contrast between Ciudad Tecún Umán in Guatemala and Tapachula in Chiapas was heartbreaking. In Tapachula, couples kissed under the shade of the trees filling the zócalo, musicians played in front of sidewalk cafés, and shouts from an anti-domestic violence rally carried for blocks. Walking around town in the late afternoon heat, I felt intoxicated by the colors, smells, and sounds of life bursting around me.

Physically and demographically, Chiapas is as close to Guatemala as any state in Mexico. In fact, its highlands were once part of the Sixth State of the Federal Republic of Central America, along with much of Western Guatemala. It is Mexico's poorest state, with a large indigenous population and a history of armed conflict. But the social history of Guatemala has marked it in ways that I only realized once in Mexico. The most telling difference, in a convoluted way, is the fact that in Guatemala you will almost never see someone begging on the street. Although Mexico is relatively wealthy, in Chiapas and Oaxaca, it's commonplace to be approached by people asking for help, appealing to your sense of communal duty. Indigenous Guatemalans have learned to survive by turning inward, and, as Ak'abal writes, by recognizing the power and defiance implicit in maintaining their silence.

Is there a metaphor in here somewhere?

Eight years ago it was still the second millennium A.C.E., Clinton was president, and Kunal and I were both teenagers. Eight years is a long time. Yep, as of today we've been together/dating/whatever/married for eight years! Yesterday we celebrated by climbing Santa María, a 12,375 foot volcano near Xela. The 4500 foot climb was arduous but the sense of accomplishment and views from the summit made the effort more than worth it. ¡Feliz aniversario a nosotros!


More photos here.

Happy Shiny Fancy Guatemala

I should apologize in advance for the lack of depressing stories about poverty, apathy, and the vagaries of free trade in this entry. Since my last post Kunal and I have hosted my parents and then Pam and Carl, managed to see just about every tourist site in Guatemala, and even squeezed some work in between visits. Not only was it wonderful to have everyone here, we also got to see a completely different side of Guatemala. We traveled to Tikal, Lago de Atitlán, and Antigua with my parents and (truly a miracle here) even ate good food a few times! Tikal and Lago de Atitlán easily surpassed their reputations. The temples of Tikal are surrounded by a living, breathing jungle filled with howler monkeys, toucans, and coatimundis. Risking the climb up rickety wooden ladders to the top of the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the Western Hemisphere, we were confronted by hundreds of miles of thick jungle, its canopy disturbed only by the tops of other temples and the roars of howler monkeys.

After a few days in Xela, where the highlight was El Día de Todos los Santos on November 1st (a sober Guatemalan take on Día de los Muertos), we crammed into a little car and headed to Lago de Atitlán. Even though it is widely known as "one of the most beautiful lakes in the world," the first view from the road into Panajachel from the Interamerican Highway shocked us into silence. The lake formed 85,000 years ago, after the Chokoyos eruption spewed rocks and ash as far as Florida and Ecuador. Today, at 1000 feet deep and ringed by three perfect volcanoes, it looks like a lost world where dinosaurs might still graze among the bougainvillea. We spent a "cosmic" (thanks, mom) two days at La Casa del Mundo jumping off of rocks into the blue water, soaking in a wood-heated hot tub, and eating such traditional Guatemalan delicacies as tofu burgers.

Before Carl and Pam showed up, I had a three day cooperative visit in the central desert area of Guatemala, and Kunal came along to see how the magic happens. Or doesn't, in my case. This visit was notable only for the fact that the cooperative manager and I got in a motorcycle crash on a remote mountain road. Luckily we came away with nothing but bruises and a broken side mirror. Next time I need to ascend a 45 degree slope covered in slippery rocks and mud wallows, I'm going to stick with the mule option.

Since Kunal and I can never sit still, we used our free 24 hours to visit the Garífuna community of Lívingston, on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala. We ate Calcutta-style Indian food (the world really is a handkerchief, as they say in Spanish) and drank coconuts filled with rum while contemplating the impossible task of showing Pam and Carl the highlights of Central America in two and a half days. Naturally we took them directly from the airport to Lago de Atitlán. Our main activity was jumping into the lake from the hotel's balconies, so many times that Carl gave himself a bloody nose. Twice. OK, really I just wanted an excuse to post this photo. On Sunday we took a 4am shuttle to Copán, in Honduras, and wandered for a few hours among crumbling temples and massive, intricately carved stelae. After a hectic trip back to Guatemala City in seven different vehicles, it was time for our visitors to head back to the States, and for us to re-enter Guatemalan reality.

Last but not least, Auntie-ji and Sam, we wished you could have been here with us this past weekend. You were missed! Lots of photos from the last month can been seen here.

"Para qué se usa el café en los Estados Unidos?"

I woke up at 4am every day. I ate nothing but a few eggs and beans at each meal. I lost the digital recorder I had spent 11 hours on a bus to retrieve from Guatemala City, and with it hours of recorded interviews. I hiked all day wearing a 50 pound backpack and a heavy shoulder bag, and fell repeatedly on sharp, slippery rocks. Every little thing that could have gone wrong with my most recent cooperative visit did. But in the end, nothing was more painful that a simple question from a young coffee farmer: "¿Para qué se usa el café en los Estados Unidos?"


I spent three days this last week working on the Guatemala-Chiapas border, in communities that are part of a coffee cooperative called APECAFORM. And although I felt lucky to be able to spend time in such a remote and beautiful place (see photos), I couldn't escape the mounting evidence that the organic, Fair Trade, shade grown, microfinance, quality improvement, cooperative organization complex is failing these farmers. The majority of cooperative members live in tiny wooden shacks, without access to improved water and sanitation, and in many cases without electricity. Every family has sent at least one person to work in "El Norte." In the communities that make up APECAFORM, coyotes charge between 40,000-60,000 Quetzals ($5000-$8000) to smuggle a single person into the US. In the village where we stayed, the nearest pharmacy is over four hours away, and no one can afford the medicine they sell anyway. Don't believe the Fair Trade, organic marketing hype that the extra $5/lb you spend for "responsible" coffee has pulled certified farmers out of desperate poverty.

Really, though, the fault lies not so much with the cooperatives and the international certifying agencies, but in much larger macroeconomic processes. At each cooperative that I've visited so far, I've heard the same thing from almost every farmer: the slightly higher, consistent price we get from the cooperative helps, but the cost of basic necessities has increased so much in the last five years that we are worse off than before. A little research supports the coffee producers' claims. In the month of January 2007 alone, the price of the "basic food basket" in Guatemala went up 17%. In part, this is due to worldwide increases in the price of oil and other commodities. However, according to one article, a major factor in Guatemala is the fact that twenty years ago, the country was self-sufficient in corn and rice production, but now imports 40% of its corn, 66% of its rice, and 100% of its wheat.

Throughout my visit to APECAFORM, the human costs of nonexistent health care, lack of even the most basic infrastructure, and rising commodity prices became more and more evident. On the morning I left, completely exhausted from the previous day's trudge over a mountain, I opted to rent a mule to ride out to the nearest road. I won't even go into the personal pride and white guilt issues that came up riding a starving mule through the forest, with the mule's owner following behind on foot. At least it will provide a good crazy gringo story to the many bewildered children we passed on the two hour journey.

My companion for the morning was a 20 year old coffee farmer from the tiny village of San Juan Bullaj. And although we didn't speak the same native language, we kept up a steady conversation, pausing only to adjust the sweating mule's saddle or to try and remember a word in Spanish. Vincente recounted what it was like growing up on a small coffee farm, and how when his father died a few years ago, his mother gave up farming and moved away to a larger town. Both of his older sisters work in the US, one in Florida and one in Kentucky, and he hasn't seen either of them in five years. He grows coffee alone on a few hectares of steep land, and makes about three dollars a day.

I told Vincente about living in the US, about what the weather was like in the places where his sisters were living, about my own family. He had a lot of questions, too, mostly about why it was so difficult to get a visa to come to the US, and why I didn't have to pay to come to Guatemala. Eventually the talk turned back to coffee, and I told him some of his coffee probably ends up in my hometown. "Well," he said, "I don't know where my coffee goes." There was a long pause, broken only by the heaving breath of the mule. "What do they use the coffee for in the US, anyway?"

Every time I think of him looking up at me, asking an innocent question that has such an unjust answer, I start to cry. It took me a minute to realize that he really had no idea what happened to his coffee. The few years of school he must have attended taught him almost nothing about life outside of San Juan Bullaj, and no one bothered to tell him anything about the international system of trade and commerce and labor in which he participated without a choice. I explained to him that in the US, we drink coffee just like in Guatemala, only there, a single latte costs as much as he makes in one day. "Oh, I didn't realize," he whispered, and we climbed the rest of the way up to the road in silence.

Balance

I've had a strange week, a bizarre mix of the extremely good and the extremely bad. And since I'm still in bed with the "bad," I figured why not write about it...

On Sunday, we hiked to Laguna Chicabal ("the center of Maya-Mam cosmovision," or so they say in tourist literature), with our housemates Ethan and Lacey. We woke up at 5am to beat the clouds that settle over the highlands by 11 every day, and took a rickety bus an hour out of Xela to the town of San Martín Chile Verde (St. Martin of the Green Chiles is one of the best town names I've ever come across). From the center of town, we had a 3 mile slog 2000 feet up to the top of Volcán Chicabal, and down into the crater, which is now a beautiful, perfectly round lake. The hike was tough, partly because we started at 7800 feet, and partly because of the total absence of switchbacks. In spite of the effort, the hike was amazing, first through the outskirts of town, up into a dense tropical forest with views out onto the flat Pacific plains, then higher to the summit of Volcán Chicabal.

Panting and sweating as we reached the top, we were greeted on one side by clear views of Volcán Santa María and Santiaguito smoking and steaming in the early morning light. On the other side, we looked down five hundred feet into the crater of the volcano, to the blue-green waters of Laguna Chicabal, framed by dense vegetation and a narrow strip of beach. Standing on the rickety wooden viewing platform, I felt a rush of pride for having made the hike. I couldn't help but think back to five months ago, when I was lying in bed with an IV dripping antibiotics into my arm. Although even now I am certainly not 100%, it felt like a great accomplishment to summit a mountain, and to feel good doing it.

After a much needed break, we hiked around the lake, passing 20 simple altars that represent each of the nahuals of the Mayan calendar. Just as we were lying down to sunbathe on the beach, and commenting on the lucky weather, clouds began to pour over the rim of the crater. Within 15 minutes, fog had enveloped the lake, and we couldn't see more than a few yards in front of us. We hiked back to San Martín through the gathering clouds, sore but exhilarated.

On Monday, I woke up even earlier, at 3am, and got on the first bus to Guatemala City. Several weeks ago, my mom had sent me a package containing a digital recorder for my interviews and some medicine, both of which I really needed. Global Express had said they'd have it to me in 3-5 days. After two weeks, I had pretty much given up. Then, after three weeks, I received a telegram (those still exist?!) in the mail from the Guatemalan postal service. I was overjoyed as I read that "a package has arrived for you and is being held at the post office in zone 1." Excellent, I thought, that's one block from my apartment! "...in Guatemala City." Yes, in order to retrieve my package, I had to take a five hour bus trip to Guatemala City, present my passport, and allow customs agents to open the box and perfunctorily check for contraband. It is supreme irony that on the telegram envelope was a stamp proclaiming: "ésta es una prueba de que el correo si funciona" (this is proof that the postal service does work). Even better, as my dad pointed out, is the fact that they neglected to put the accent on "sí," making it "if" instead of "yes", and rendering the phrase both nonsensical and accurately equivocal. There is nothing much that can be said about spending 11 hours on a bus in Guatemala, just to pick up a package that should have been delivered to my office weeks ago, except that it was extremely not fun.

And then, on Tuesday, I got the flu. The flu is awful in its own right, but really does not go well with Lyme Disease. And so the lesson of the week seems to be that good and bad actually do balance each other out over time. Sometimes even in the course of a few days.

Religion in Guatemala

Just a quick link for anyone interested in a little more about how evangelical Protestantism is changing Guatemala--an article entitled "Born Again in Guatemala."

K'iche' and Foundation Finance

K'iche'

I've always loved learning languages, or attempting to learn them. So far, I've managed to get at least competent in Spanish and French. However, I'm realizing that I've also developed the annoying habit of trying and failing to learn languages wherever I go. Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese--my "mastery" ranges from 10 random words to basic comprehension, but no one is going to mistake me for Brazilian. Of course when I found out I could study K'iche' in Xela, I immediately signed up. And now, three weeks into my one-on-one class, I'm starting to wonder if this is going to be yet another failed experiment in language learning. K'iche' is hard. The first class literally gave me a sore throat and a pounding headache. A couple of the most common letters are supposed to be pronounced deep in the throat, but when I try to to pronounce the word qq'uq' ("our quetzal"), or kqtzukuj ("we look for"), I end up sounding like I'm choking to death. Not only is K'iche' hard to pronounce, its structure bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything I have ever come across in my detours through various Romance and Dravidian languages. Personal pronouns are buried inside of verbs, and nouns are proceeded by a baffling variety of untranslatable helping words. When pluralizing human-related nouns (woman, doctor, etc), you have the choice of two word endings. Trying to distinguish between them, I asked how I knew which one to use. My teacher smiled sweetly and explained, "sólo hay que sentir el gusto de la palabra"--you just have to feel what the word wants. So far, I haven't felt it.

And yet, there is something addictive about K'iche'. My instructor is an old woman from the small town of Totonicapán, who has fought her whole life to bring K'iche' instruction to public schools in Guatemala. On the first day of our class, she told me that what makes the language unique is that in speaking it, we are elaborating the Mayan cosmovision with our words. My first thought was that all languages carry within themselves an implicit view of how the universe functions. But after two hours in which we talked about nothing but corn, earth, water, birds, and animals, I started to realize that she was right.

The K'iche' origin story tells how God made the first people out of yellow and white corn. In K'iche', there are words for every part of the corn plant, from the unripe cob to the dried kernels used to make masa. There is no word for telephone, so it is simply called "the thread that passes words." Cars and forks are both referred to by the general word for metal or iron. Even the word k'iche' means "many trees." It seems that in K'iche', there is no dichotomy between natural and human worlds, only the illumination of an order that roots us in the earth like so many stalks of corn. Somehow I've begun to feel invested in this language, and I'm hoping that someday, I can honestly say "¡je', kinch'aw pa ch'ab'al k'iche'!"


Foundation Finance*

Every day on my twenty minute walk to work, past three or four headstone factories, slowly up the hill in a cloud of black exhaust, crossing the street by the Cabro brewery, I wonder how I ended up working somewhere with "capital" in the name. I never made it past Algebra II. I cringe at the thought of the "live for the weekend" lifestyle. I hate spreadsheets. But here I am. Granted, Foundation Finance is a financial organization with a social and environmental mission. That doesn't change the fact that I'm still involved in discussions about financial risk mitigation, pre-shipment trade credit, and interest rates. Weird.

Luckily for me, and for Foundation Finance's legitimate number crunchers, my work here focuses on qualitative impact assessment. This means I get to travel to remote parts of Guatemala to interview coffee farmers about their lives, with the aim of improving Foundation Finance's services, and of course, developing marketing materials for the organization. I had my first field visit this week, to a coffee cooperative called ASUVIM, about 3 hours from Xela. Let me quickly digress to mention that for some reason that I can't understand, every organizational name in Spanish must be an acronym, or some combination of words smashed together to produce an easy-to-say but meaningless designation. This tendency has reached its zenith/nadir in Guatemala. The national telephone company is TelGua, the tourism institute is InGuat, and the names of coffee cooperatives range from APECAFORM to ADIPSA to ASUVIM, which stands for Asociación Unidos para Vivir Mejor.

Anyway, most of this past month has been spent developing indicators and interview questions to assess the socio-economic impact of Foundation Finance in these communities. I leafed through my 40 pound Social Research Methods textbook. I read scholarly articles on microfinance indicator construction. I pondered how credit might affect the lives of coffee growers and their families, and came up with nine pages of questions ranging from "have you had to travel outside of the community to work in the last year?" to "how many times a week do you eat meat?"

I have to admit that I was surprised when my assessment of ASUVIM turned out to be a complete failure. When I arrived at the cooperative, I found out the management had scheduled a visit with a buyer for the next morning, so instead of having the planned two days to interview community members, I had three hours. When I sat down with my first interview subject and asked him what he thought about Foundation Finance, I got a blank stare. Only the manager and accountant had even heard of the organization. And, in fact, since the association received its first loan, life has gotten harder for many people: Hurricane Stan decimated their crop two years ago, and the government keeps raising the price of staples like bread and sugar too fast for the price of coffee to keep pace. Although the visit wasn't a total disaster, and I met some very funny and perceptive people, I didn't arrive back in Xela with either a comprehensive impact report or marketing-friendly stories of success against the odds.

I'll be traveling for two of the next three weeks, to three different cooperatives. This time, I'll have more time in each community, and a much shorter list of questions.

Check out my updated photos from this month. ¡Hasta octubre!

*Not the organization's real name

First Impressions, Elections, Xelafer

Welcome to my blog! I'm going to very periodically update this with info, stories, and random thoughts during my time in Guatemala...

First Impressions

Honestly, the first thing that struck me about Guatemala is the sheer number of guns here: at the army checkpoints along the highway, at banks, even the home appliance store down the street from my apartment is watched over by two men carrying sawed-off shotguns. Guns are everywhere, slung over men's shoulders as casually as backpacks or sacks of rice.

A close second is the religious conviction that pervades all aspects of life here, and is neatly summed up by the massive sign that dominates one of the hills behind Xela: "Cristo Viene." This to-the-point sentiment is echoed by the windshields of every pickup in town, announcing "Jesus cambió mi vida," "Dios te ama," and "Jesus es El Señor." There is a love of the Lord in Guatemala unlike anything I have ever encountered anywhere else in the world. To me it makes sense as an indirect measure of the suffering inflicted on Guatemala over the last 50 years. I read recently that an evangelical Christianity that preached abstinence from politics and transcendence of earthly suffering took hold in indigenous communities during the war, and has all but displaced Catholicism in many rural areas. But no matter what the reason, you can't walk 10 feet, or talk to most Guatemalans for more than 10 minutes, without encountering God in one of His many forms.

Something that has crept up on me over the last two weeks is the sharp contrast between a surface level of Americanized affluence evident in Xela, and the serious poverty and social problems afflicting most of Guatemala. My first week here I visited La Pradera, a spotless mall on the edge of town that boasts Lacoste and a department store owned by Wal Mart. Strolling past shop after shop selling expensive American products, I almost forgot that I was in Guatemala. Then, on my way home, I caught one of the old vans that serve as public transport here. As a skinny 10 year old wearing a torn sweater took my change and I settled in next to a security guard with a semi-automatic on his lap, I was jarred back into a world of child labor, privation, and insecurity. Sadly, a crowded, broken down van seems to be a much more accurate symbol of life here than $100 French polo shirts.

Elections

By coincidence, the national elections, Xela’s yearly fair, and Guatemala’s Independence Day all fell during our first two weeks in Guatemala. The build-up to the elections had been particularly violent this year; murders of campaign workers and political activists culminated in August in the brutal murder of one candidate’s 14-year old daughter, in an attempt to force him to withdraw. The violence and abuses that have characterized Guatemala’s political process for at least the last half-century have produced levels of cynicism and apathy that make US citizens look like passionate participants in the political process. When I asked my boss who the best presidential candidate was, he quickly replied, “none of them.” And the least bad? “None of them.”

On election weekend, the mood was understandably tense,
and we were advised not to travel outside of Xela. The large military presence in town, combined with a national ban on selling or publicly consuming alcohol during the entire weekend, resulted in a sort of forced tranquility on election day. And, in fact, the elections turned out to be surprisingly non-violent and transparent. The field was narrowed down to two candidates, who will face off in a final round on November 4th: a bland left-center businessman, with 36% of the vote, and close behind, with 30%, the far right ex-head of the military police, responsible for sanctioning torture and disappearances during the later years of the civil war.

From an outsider’s perspective, it’s almost impossible to understand how so many Guatemalans could vote to bring back the “Mano Dura” (“hard hand”) policies of the 1980s. The prevailing explanation is that people are simply choosing the orderly repression of the army over the unregulated crime and violence that is common today across the country. Although this is probably true to a degree, it’s also undeniable that many rich, urban Guatemalans seek to preserve their economic hegemony by supporting neo-liberal political regimes, while the indigenous rural poor, who tend to vote left, remain disenfranchised and excluded from the political process.

Xelafer
This past weekend could not have been more different from election day. In mid-September every year, Xela hosts Central America’s largest fair, a week-long celebration that coincides with Guatemala’s Independence Day, September 15th. Our first taste of the fair came on Wednesday night, when Kunal and I rounded a corner near our apartment and stopped in our tracks. An enormous flatbed semi-truck carrying at least 25 beauty queens had nearly jack-knifed trying to make a tight turn onto one of Xela’s narrow side streets. The truck lurched back and forth, attempting to complete a 50-point turn, while Miss Quetzaltenango, Miss Indigena, Miss Municipal Employee (seriously), and international representatives including Miss Mexico and Miss Nicaragua struggled to maintain their smiles and choreographed waves without being thrown from the wooden platform. Finally, after about 20 minutes, the truck managed to complete the turn, and the visibly relieved beauty queens disappeared up the hill in a cloud of black exhaust.

The fair itself was held in an enormous dusty field on the outskirts of town, and combined the rides and greasy food of a US county fair and the chaos of a typical Guatemalan market, with vendors hawking cheap Chinese-made toys and housewares from blankets set up along the main paths through the fair. For some reason, we chose to visit on Independence Day, the busiest of the entire week, and made it only 100 meters inside the fair grounds before we were overwhelmed by literally crushing crowds, staggering quantities of broken plastic toys, and the sickly smell of frying chorizo.

While the actual fair turned out to be simultaneously overpowering and disappointing, the sheer number of people in town for the week meant that Xela played host to free concerts in the central plaza every night, even more delicious street food than usual, and parties that lasted until five in the morning. On the last night of the fair, we sat on a bench in the park, eating pupusas and listening to traditional Mexican folk music, as laughing families strolled past and a veil of bright, high-altitude stars came to rest on the shoulders of volcán Santa María. It was the first time since I arrived in Xela that I understood why so many of the expats I’ve met here came to Guatemala on vacation, and ended up calling in their two-week notice to work from one of the payphones lining 12th avenue.

You can check out more photos here

Next time: how someone possessing only a passing familiarity with addition and subtraction ended up working in finance, why learning K’iche' has given me a permanent sore throat, and Guatemala’s love of acronyms...