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.

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.

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.

Predictability – it was a term I associated with boredom, with the unimaginative, the fearful, the ones who clutched to stability like a shawl of mediocrity. It was the haven of those who shunned the arbitrary and the changing nature of all things; the unexpected and unavoidable truth of our existence. It was the ditch we all had to learn crawl into and drink tea at the bottom, comfortably, still making meaning knowing that death, entropy and all things ended or stopped when we least expected. We vowed, I vowed, the vowing happened down there to make every moment count.

In the middle of editing a video, typing an invoice, opening emails, Skype work chats, and uploads my screen goes black suddenly. My mind and body having merged with the machine, I feel someone pulled the plug straight out of my back. I look around disoriented and then dread enters. Thunder rolls its deep baritone so far away in the distance that  I can barely make out the sound before the second screen also goes black.

Somewhere the gods laugh. Sad, pathetic human to expect predictabilty and consistency.

I know better, it’s gone black many times before in the past month as the rainy season makes its early entry to Guatemala. I put my head between my hands and the only thing I see now is the green light of the power conditioner and battery back-up that has regained itself. I hear  the brain, heart and soul of my computer start in the hard drive and I take a deep breath. No relief yet, just the expectancy when you jump one side of a river and hope your foot catches the other side just enough solid ground to make it over. The desktop comes up, but I cannot get into it, the computer freezes again before it goes black again, this time for longer. I do this a few times and each time it becomes more obvious I have stepped into a different part of the river and didn’t quite make it over. Perhaps I even fell in.

I start the restoring process from my back-up, 4 hours the status bar tells me. Minutes before I was moving fast, leapfrogging forward at the speed of light and now I’ve dropped back again into the ether. “Bossman say get your dirt out of his ditch, Luke.” Cool Hand Luke would then look up from deep in the ditch, rest his head on the handle of his shovel and then climb back up out of the ditch he’d dug for 15 hours straight. He’d dig another ditch and pretty soon the Bossman didn’t want that dirt there either. What breaks a person? Can a person be broken? Does bamboo break?

On the roads there are more military, policy and traffic checkpoints at different spots; the sidewalks are uneven so that wheelchairs are a rarity, pedestrian crosswalks are also rare, so people with babies cross impulsively the six-lane Roosevelt Avenue during rush hour; sometimes you wake up to Internet, but many times it’s a one-night stand; on a sunny day the electricity vanishes for hours and the water trickles in the evenings long after the tourists have abandoned the area to its long and slippery slope into rainy season. There’s no point to this piling up, things have to be seen independently in their own reality, microcosmically you look at your feet when you walk so you don’t fall. And if you fall you depend on the ground as the only solid thing that you can push yourself back up from.

On Friday the church bells of San Francisco did not ring at 6:30 AM. The day before I stopped setting my alarm clock and told myself it was OK to expect the bells  to wake you, to always toll for my morning tea. Silly human. My class schedules change every week, there is no clear school calendar, and the parking we once had to park safely is also no longer something I can depend upon. I stop going to class, it’s too complex, the costs are too great for the little knowledge I gain in Guatemala City’s infamously targeted Zone 10.  More and more I yearn for predictability. Do I grow old? Do I wear my trousers rolled? I tell myself it is natural to expect certain things to remain consistent and predictable. A society has to have predictable processes, the atoms depend upon it. I am happy to double roll my pants to cross from one side of the street to the next when it rains and the sewers will not drain and the cobblestone of the streets is missing cobblestone.

It’s a developing country, what do you expect?  

The fact is I expect more. My Guatemalan mother expected more when the 15-hour days at United Fruit was her best hope for a stable life; her family expected more from three plus jobs in La Limonada  where seven of us lived in a two-room shack along the cerro where the world ended. If a sinkhole opened up and swallowed us, nobody would have missed us. We all expected more back then in 1977 when my mother became a coyote, when her family all quit United Fruit, when we charted unknown terrain through Mexico, when we became undocumented labor arms moving with the waves and seasons of labor – chicken plants, tobacco, cotton, fruit picking –  to find a place where we could expect and do more.

I made my way back because I expected more. I expect more. I don’t expect “developing” to be a word akin to resignation to things as they are, to the end that all things will meet. I expect developing to be more “we’re under construction” or these are our first steps, the first bricks, not grains, bricks we all put down to build something, an edifice, a monolith, a social body and state that is less fragmented, less dismembered, less Darwinistic.

When we opened the door we saw one of the helicopters pointed downwards against the blue western sky, suspended mid-air like a painting. A long breath escaped my mouth as it spun a few times and then dropped – the thread that held it to the sky having been cut suddenly, ever so delicately, by some force unseen. The fall to earth was great as a big crash of wood, adobe, tin all breaking filled the air.

“We have to help now,” I told Brad and ran quickly with a few other neighbors. On first street I turned right and saw the propeller sticking out like a chopstick from the roof. A dark cloud of smoke and dust was rose of the house; water streamed out from underneath the door. It was a matter of moments if the fuel tank from the helicopter had been damaged. We were up against time. Two of us banged on the door and nothing, we heard a scream. I told a neighbor we needed a ladder to break the door down. A white wooden ladder appeared from another neighbor’s house and all of us grabbed it and put all our force behind it. The doors splintered and opened. Other neighbors climbed the rooftop of the house next door and slowly the worker ants set out to get everyone out of the house – the dog, the family, the pilot, the survivors all injured. Brad brought me my camera and I knew what to do. I got out of the way and found a corner to tell the story from.

Time has a way of passing, one moment and then the next, a series of breaths that unwittingly lead you here. Quickly my mind, my heart rushes and fills – a balloon growing both inside and out and filling with some ungrasphable, intangible thing called living. It’s immediate, it’s primal, it’s the pure  instinct and will to live at all costs and to help others do the same.