Guatemala: week One

It´s farther down than it looks. The road you see is the one I walked up to get here.

Monja Blanca - Guatemala´s national flower

Spanish isn´t a language for me yet. It´s still a code, a collection of words and sounds that it is my job to decipher, to change into my familiar english meanings before they are understood. Quiero means ´I want´, it doesn´t yet mean ´Quiero,´ itself, alone. But I am close. when I am having a conversation in Spanish my brain has to work twice as hard and fast. Hear the word or sentence, Decipher it into english, Formulate my english response, Change it into spanish, Speak it, Repeat. Somehow I manage to keep up. Mostly I feel like a semi-literate child when I speak in slow, broken half-spanish, asking at least once per sentence by way of raised inflection followed by a pause if the word I´m in the middle of guessing is actually correct . Sometimes I imagine what I would sound like to myself if I were just learning english and trying to make my way in the states. Earlier this week I was having a conversation with Doña Lila about the weather. I wanted to say that when the clouds are there, it gets really cold, but when they go away it gets very suddenly very hot. Unfortunately, I didn´t know the word for clouds so I found myself looking quizzically while pointing up and asking what is the word for the white things in the sky that make cold. heh. They are Nuves. Another student, Anna, and I were bouncing around the back seat of a little SUV on the rocky, washed out road through the mountains up to the school trying to think of the phrase for '4-wheel drive' and the best we could come up with was the equivelant of '4-tire-go.' Speaking with my teacher, Maria, and her husband, Alex, about my motorcycle I remarked that all the motorbikes I´ve seen here have only one cylinder. When I told them I once had a bike with 4 cylinders Alex remarked that it must be very big and strong. I wasn´t sure how to communicate that although the engine was 6 times the size most of those I´ve seen here, that it wasn´t the stongest bike out there. the conversation ended in laughs when I referred to the bike and communicated through body language that it wasn´t so strong. I hit my chest a couple times with my fist and made some rasping coughs before pantomiming death, lolling tongue and all. They understood. ¨your motorcyle had bronchitis?" asked Alex, laughing. Yeah, you could say that.....if you knew how.

The mornings at the farm are full of activity I miss most of it because it´s damn near impossible to drag myself out of bed before 7:40 for my 8am class. I get myself together, have a breath of fresh air on the balcony and am ready to face the morning already bustling noisily beneath me. Doña Lila is hurrying away at some essential task or another, Libby is entertaining and hosting whoever is awake at that point, by now Anna has been conscious for an hor at least and our teachers are sitting quietly patiently waiting in the living room for the gringos to shake the sleep out of their eyes and be ready for the class they travelled a half hour over barely existent roads to get to. Then we fan out. Maria and I at a whiteboard in the living room, Alex and Anna at a counter by the kitchen and Joé, the new guy, with his teacher Loreni at a table upstairs. For the next 4 hours it´s intently focused Spanish instruction in every room in the house, Señora Libby milling about some way, entertaining guests or preparing to leave, and Doña Lila preparing lunch, keeping the fire stoked, cleaning up from breakfast, sweeping and mopping all at the same time.

Anna, Joe and I have fallen pretty easily into a groove. After all, here we three are. Anna has been in the country for a few months and has much better spanish than the other two of us. Joe came just recently and is starting from scratch here. Left to our own around the house we share beers, spanish notes, cooking, cleaning, tea-water-heating, fire-stoking and daily life like we´ve been doing it seamlessly for years.

It´s very safe here. almost like a compound. I think that nobody here is fond of the idea of sleeping on just mats or, worse, earthen floors. Here we have outlets in the wall, two flush toilets, a fridge, gas stove and microwave. There is a gate at the end of the driveway, from the house you pass a citrus orchard to get to it. On the other side is a road that is necessary to have a car of 4-tire-go to traverse and a small collection of modest huts and humble indigenous folks and very many earthen floors and not another microwave within miles. It´s been amazing here but I´m looking forward to getting more experience outside the compound, staying with coffee farmers, digging in the dirt and, with pleasure, sleeping on some.

So this is what´s next. Sadly, tomorrow is my last class with Maria. Following class I´m going to head to Coban for a coffee cupping at the offices of APODIP with one of my wonderful hosts, Sal. I´m excited to finally cup coffee at origin again, it´s been more than two years. Then on wednesday morning I´ll head out around 5am to trek for a few hours into the mountains toward a small community of indigenous Kek'chi maya coffee farmers. I will be present at a meeting between the campesinos and a group of Belgian financiers as they discuss terms of pre-financing, I imagine, next years crop. This is a really important part of the fair trade coffee system and I hope I can learn, through the translations from kek'chi to spanish and back, a little bit about how it works. Then on Thursday and Friday, and this is really the good stuff I´ve been hoping for, I´ll be attending a two-day workshop with the farmers about early cultivation and planting seedlings in the fields and nurseries. YESS!!