Adios, Guatemala

Today is my last day of work here in Xela. Over the last couple of weeks I've been oscillating between incipient nostalgia and a near-physical urgency to get the hell out of here. Looking back, I can see that spending so much time in a country to which I felt no immediate connection has taught me some profound and unexpected lessons. More than anything, I've been able to see the ways in which cultures construct themselves with a logic that is rarely comprehensible to the outside observer. I feel privileged to have gotten beyond the tourist's "Guatemalan cultural experience" that includes one ride on a chicken bus, a photograph of an indigenous child, and a few handicrafts. Living here has helped me understand how, in a thousand subtle ways, the safety of family and tradition counterweighs the physical and psychological insecurity that are a part of every Guatemalan's life. My initial frustration with the conservative social values here in the highlands has slowly given way to a respect for the fact that Guatemala's indigenous cultures have been able to maintain their identity and their dignity even after 400 years of assaults on their cosmology, their languages, their economics. I will probably never identify with the Guatemalan culture on a personal level, but what started out as tolerance, that cloaked synonym of misunderstanding, has slowly given way over the last six months to admiration.

At the same time, I'm tired. Traveling alone throughout rural Guatemala and Chiapas as a tall blonde woman has been exhausting in many ways. Beyond the vegetarian's search for food, or the risks that any woman takes walking by herself at night, I am tired of always being noticed. Maybe this comes off as disrespectful of what, for example, minorities suffer every day living in the US. Well, if you are a transgendered Vietnamese woman living in Hartshorne, Oklahoma, you probably know what I'm talking about. It's impossible to go anywhere without people talking to me, staring at me, touching me. There is something beautiful and even soothing about the anonymity of walking down the street in any multicultural North American city.

That doesn't mean that there aren't things that I already miss about Guatemala. I love the sound of Spanish, the slang, the way it feels to speak it. It has been an amazing experience discovering the endless layers of fluency, the idioms and gray areas that before only existed for me in English. I miss the quiet generosity of the friends I've made here, the fact that I can walk to work, the sangria and wireless internet at Las Lagartijas that helped me finish my thesis. And of course, I know I am going to miss some of the mundane facts of life that I disliked most while I was here: the rickety, overcrowded chicken buses and the eggs-bean paste-tortilla meals. My internship will be over in an hour and fifteen minutes, I've already turned in the first draft of my thesis, and my bags are almost packed. But in December, when I swore I couldn't wait to leave Guatemala, I never realized how much I would want to come back.

Before I head back to the States I'm going to be traveling for two weeks, first by myself in Honduras, and then with my friend Jacky in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I'm sure that I'll have time to at least post jealousy-inducing photos of gorgeous tropical beaches. But in the meantime, it wouldn't be very culturally-sensitive of me to sign off without the standard Guatemalan goodbye: ¡Adios, Guatemala, que te vaya bien!