Month: May 2012

Team Guate

En Este Día

Posted on by newmaya

In 1982 she came back, for me, for all of us. I was five-years-old and living in La Limonada, a section of Guatemala where you have to make, sell, get lemonade any way you can to survive. We lived in a one-room shack, five of us, with a dirt floor and two small beds that we pushed up against the wall to create a living space during the day. There were communal showers, one section for the women and one for the men, made out of unpainted cinderblocks creating a dark box with no electricity and when the water drained, the snakes would crawl in at night. Mi abuela and I always showered together during the day, right before I walked to school hand and hand with her. The buses rumbled past our house rattling our corrugated tin roof which made the afternoons unbearable with not a shadow to spare between the concrete and asphalt.

One day slipped into the next and I soon forgot that distant feeling of mi mama walking away from me and mi abuela’s firm hand not letting me run after her. We stayed there until her figure was so small against the horizon that it became a small grain of dirt against the jagged edges of the houses stacked up against the hill until the treetops reached for the fading sun. Inside there was a dull feeling of something emptying and falling upon itself.

She walked in as easily as she’d left, two years later, walking down the same street as if time was liquid and her body just flowed right towards us with the same electric walk that made people turn their entire heads to look at her. This time she walked towards me, towards us and not one of us knew she was coming. She opened the door while I was doing my homework and I thought I had invented her with my pencil midair, the shoulder-length, black hair, hour-glass figure, jeans tight against her tighs, and a cherub face with a mischevious grin. She had a gold front tooth and sometimes it would glimmer when she talked or when she made her final bet in family poker games.

Mi mama, la coyota. La machasa de la pelicula.

She took us back with her to the United States that year, threw us into the desert for thousands of miles through Mexico and across the Rio Grande that none of us, including her, could swim. We walked, bused, hitchhiked, tomamos jalones, hopped the trains, ate bread and butter sandwiches wherever we could. It never crossed our minds not to follow her. Who wouldn’t? She was bigger than life.

I’d follow her today, as she’s followed me back to Guatemala since 2009, since I moved here. I know every instinct of her tells her I, we shouldn’t be here, even as mi abuelita also makes her way back to Guatemala for Mother’s Day to see her children. I tell her mi mama it’s my turn to make a path to an unknown destination. She laughs, no longer with her gold tooth which she had taken out to blend in more in the U.S. “Guatemala I know,” she says. “You’ll just have to learn it for yourself.”

On El Día de la Mama, I thank mi abuelita for always being there for me and teaching me compassion. I thank Silvia, mi mama, the woman who has taught me to be exactly who she is: fearless.

Guatemala

Border Runnings

Posted on by newmaya


It is our last run to the border, to La Mesilla, the border with Mexico which is six hours from Guatemala City. Five military checkpoints and countless speed bumps later we are in Comitan checking our email at an Internet cafe and waiting for the requisite hour to pass before Brad and I can get stamped to go back in. We opt for sitting inside this oven with Internet access where we can at least do some work while waiting.  (My bag with my passport and cellphone falls into the toilet at the migration office before we head off to the cafe.) But no amount of tragedy can take away from my full-fledged support of  this border Internet cafe where I have already suggested to the owner that having iced coffees and a hostel would bring the gringos in who are stuck waiting for their papers.  She nods. She is open to it, she has thought about it many times, but the heat is too much to do more. A breeze blows in from over the mountains and sweeps up the dust on the sidewalk as I talk to her.

Each run for the border has its difficulties, this one is about the journey and not the end bureaucratic maze. The checkpoints came early and often – first the municipal police, then the national police, then the ejercito itself, the military, who are the easiest to deal with because they cannot be bothered with the small print. Fact is, it is all about the state of siege in Barillas and I want to be there before things get violent, which is unavoidable. The town has been striking against the new hydroelectric plant for two months now and this week they set fire to vehicles owned by the plant. The Guatemalan government has responded and brought in the troops. The town is not backing down.

We pass the turnoff to Barillas which is unmarked, but the military checkpoint tells me the way to Santa Cruz Barillas is right passed them. We drive on as life on the road because more vibrant. Women sit on the grass in small groups of colorful huipiles and babies in the center of them, men carry large loads of wood or tables twice as large as them strapped around their foreheads, the painted rocks from the 2011 election remain while mile after mile of trash pores along the side of the cliffs thousands of feet below. There is no barrier between your frail body and the fall.

You really have to want to be here.

Everywhere you are reminded that life means a lot less, if much at all. The jetlag sets in early today.  A few days ago I stood on the edge of Tel Aviv and stared across the Mediterranean Sea, ushering in the day for Guatemala. It seemed so far away at that point and so difficult to describe for people.  Standing at the foothills of the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, I look eastward and think of the Mediterranean so far away and marvel at how different two countries can be.

Conferences

The Type Machine

Posted on by newmaya


From Jerusalem I bring back an old manual typewriter in a half torn case that cracks open the leather spine during all the security checks. Random people stare at it with familiarity or confusion, the security guards click on the keys and laugh with each other in Hebrew. Then I trek it across Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Madrid and then back to Guatemala feeling the weight of this commitment. Once the machine almost falls on my head from the overhead compartment as I board my plane from Madrid to Guatemala.

When I show it to my new friend Kiki she doesn’t know what to make of it, she turns it around and calls it the “typing machine”. I tell her it’s my story machine, beneath its heavy keys lies my novel. With the machine and my words I I will pivot towards Ma’ayan Alexander, another writer who gave me this machine – hers in Hebrew, mine in English. But both of us vowing to write our stories and what’s inside us from across the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, two magnets of intention forcing us to create, to weave narratives one heavy key at a time with no “delete” button. We will chisel into stone. But most importantly:  I vow to write, we vow to write, the world vows with us and leans in to our stories.

Off of Allendale Street in Tel Aviv, I come searching for more ribbon.  Isaac, the owner of the store, knows the machine well, an old sturdy friend he calls it. He  tells me the catridges are no longer in the machine’s original red and black, but he’s got plenty of black. I ask him why they don’t make it in the original catridges and he laughs. “Where are you from?” He asks. I tell him Guatemala, via the United States, twenty hours away by plane. He pauses and stares at me waiting for a good story, but as I turn the new black cartridge in my hand, I get restless.

More and more these moments start to feel like a fragile egg I hold carefully in my hand where I have to pay very close attention to the cupping of the hand and the way I care for it as I move through the world or it moves through me.

All of my trip through Israel feels this way, an innate interwoven sacredness to interactions with people, with the religious history just beneath or on the surface, the politics of a present State and a future State, the diversity of the young State of Israel formed in 1948 by so many Jews taking refuge. And then there’s always the general pushy familial informality of Israelis.  You have to think fast and think on your feet. There’s no room for ruminating, weighing out options, finding options, there is just well-grounded quick decision-making based on a local knowledge and history shared by everyone.

To learn the city, I ride the buses. The 31, the 18, the 161 through Jaffa and parts of Tel Aviv that later people stare at me in confusion wondering how I ended up there. I learn quickly that Tel Aviv is to play and Jerusalem is to pray.  Later on, in Ramallah, I feel the heaviness of the occupation and the unhappiness that stems from it.