21 de Junio

For some reason our tap water has stopped, so Catarina has been washing clothes at the lake, a not-uncommon thing here.

Yesterday I was sitting in the back of Luis's tienda chowing down on some hot tortillas and ham with Catarina and Wilson when they pointed at two packages, one full of canned refried beans and another full of packs of incaparina and mosh, both different kinds of cornmeal/grain meal. They said they got them from the proyecto, this building in town I have seen with its CFCA logo and a cross. I had walked by here earlier and they were yelling names out of a loudspeaker, I guess for the food pickup. The food apparently comes from a partnership they have with a church in the United States. Funny, because growing up at Briarwood Christian School, there were often drives to send food to “third world countries.” Cool to be on the other side of the food donation box for once.

The beans are packed with fat, iron, protein, and especially fiber (53% DV!). We had them last night for dinner and this morning for breakfast, this morning accompanied by a surprise: home-made french fries that were really tasty. I hope it's not going to be beans all the time now.

Incaparina, by the way, is this vitamin-fortified meal (cornmeal?) stuff made by Quaker. Catarina mixes it with cinnamon and sugar to make a hot, thick drink called atol. It tastes remarkably like french toast, quite good. And then there's mosh, also made by Quaker, which is basically oatmeal. They make this with milk and serve it in mugs.

Two days ago, some classmates and I decided to climb Cerro de Oro, the baby volcano around here. It took us about 30 to 40 minutes to get to the top. It was remarkably humid. About a quarter of the way up at a pretty steep part, we moved to the side for a man and a boy to bring down packs of firewood slung over their backs. We also passed some farmland at a milder part. It's hard to imagine this being part of a daily routine. Afterwards some of us went swimming.

Some of us (last I heard: I, Derek, Zach, and Allie) got the crazy idea to climb Volcan Atitlan, the tallest one around the lake; you have seen it in the photos. In order to do this I will spend Sunday night at Zach's place in San Lucas order to begin our climb at 4 a.m. We're going with a guide. I don't know if I should take my camera or not. The volcanoes around here are notorious for being popular with the tourist-robbers (what a brilliant idea, you know? Who's going to catch you coming down a volcano?). In San Pedro, it's now customary (and may even be a law) to have a police escort up and down the volcano. Tune in next week to see what Daniel decides!


I want to talk a bit about depictions of Jesus around here, which I think would have made an interesting paper topic. A few nights ago, Luis Miguel came into my room to show me two framed images of Jesus. I will defer you to the photos for details, but they are both holographic, like Pokemon cards. He pointed out the different components, such as the saints and such in the corners. One time Wilson proudly showed me a plate of stickers that he bought in Pana with all kinds of holy imagery: Mary in a halo, Jesus on a cross in bright colors, stars and mangers and crosses and praying hands and twinkly holographic colors. I have seen them on school supplies and such. Little light painting/print things of Jesus on the cross are hung about the home: one over our dining table, two in my room (one of someone praying to Mary).

My host family doesn't go to church. There are many Evangelical churches and a large Catholic churc in town, all very popular. I mentioned the pictures on my host-mom's desk: two of Jesus on either side of Maximon (see 31 de Mayo entry). I ask about the images, and Luis Miguel will say, “Es hey-soos!” We don't pray before we eat or anything. Luis doesn't like the church's annual festival; he much prefers the town festival on the 26th of November, in honor of Santa Catarina. He seemed a little surprised when I told him that we in the United States have no patron saints for our towns.

But it's not just my family. A huge majority of the transit vehicles you'll see here (pickups, chicken buses, tuk-tuks) are Jesussed-out. A popular decal on the back window of tuk-tuks is “JESUCRISTE VIVE” in cool letters, difficult to read at first. “Dios me Guia” (God guides me) and “Dios es Amor” (guess) are popular banners across the windshields of pickups. I have seen a tuk-tuk with twin decals of Jesus' pained face in a crown of thorns slapped across its mudflaps. The internet place where I am right now sells random household items: mugs, glasses, picture frames, and a clock with Jesus on it and a clock with Mary on it.

I don't have any particular opinion to share about this, but it intrigues me: Jesus and some saints have taken the status of something like a pop-mythology. The plates of stickers remind me of Disney movies, the car decals of sports teams, the little charms I see of happy-meal toys, but unlike all these other things, Jesus is not owned by a company.


My relationships with Catarina and Wilson continue to grow, not so much with Luis and Luis Miguel. I am learning more Kaqchikel, and today I am going to begin trying out Kaqchikel greetings to the locals that I pass by. I wonder how they will take it, especially the old folks (I want to say “elders”). Some of them seem too austere to take it lightly, which is what I feel like I'm doing. Oh well. My host family encourages it.

At the end of every meal, when you finish your plate, you say “Matiosh, ” (which means thank you) to everyone seated at the table. The other night night, I've forgotten why, but I mimicked the way the kids say this to everyone. It's like “'tiosh Mom 'tiosh Dado, ma-tee-osh Dan-yell, 'tiosh Wil-son.” They thought this was pretty funny, so I said some more: “Cha-nin-cha-nin-cha-nin-cha-nin! Cha-nin-nak!” (what I hear Catarina yelling to the boys every morning when she tries to get them out of bed). Already it has become a kind of inside joke, which is fun.

My project is going along okay. Interviews are getting easier because I have made a questionnaire to give out, instead of having to just approach people and say ´´Let´s talk about dogs.´´

Right now I´m sitting in an internet place listening to the kids who live here playing house. What´s interesting is that they talk in Spanish when they are role-playing, but in Kaqchikel when it´s like okay, you be the policeman and other technical stuff.

That´s about all I have for now.

the Jesus images

Luis Miguel´s new marbles

a ´maraton´ celebrating a school´s anniversary, blocking traffic

climbing Cerro de Oro

There´s just no getting around it: if you want good lighting, you have to wake up early. I accompanied Catarina to go clothes-washing yesterday at 6 am and bathed in the hot springs, which was nice. The next 2 photos and the one up top were taken between 6:30 and 7:30 that day.




a street vendor in Santa Catarina


Luis Miguel drying the clothes on the roof.

Catarina with pulike (see previous entry) and cornmeal cooked in corn husks... I forgot the name.

17 de Junio

This is a good picture of the house. Catarina is making pulike at the sink. Behind her is the dining room. In the distance on the left, you see the ``stairs`` that lead up to the building where my bedroom is.

Yesterday, Tim (Dr Wallace) and Carla came here to Santa Catarina for my two-on-one session. We went to the hotel in the middle of town which, as I have told one classmate, is so nice that I hadn't even looked in there too long. We lazily moved across the courtyard admiring the bizarre flora and sat at one of the tables with a flower floating in water in a glass vase in the center, where I took it all in (see the two photos below). The waiter served us individual butter wrapped in what I took to be small corn husks. Dr Wallace sipped the coffee and guessed correctly that the coffee was from Mike at Crossroads Cafe in Panajachel (see 28 de Mayo entry). I got a mango licuado, which is basically a smoothie except that it's not necessarily cold: the thickness comes from the fruit. They served it in a tall blue glass. It was weird to think that I was not 150 yards away from Luis's gallery, where 3 hours later I was to sit on a dirty floor and eat a lukewarm chuchito for lunch.

This meeting was kind of a progress report on my assignments and classroom performance and a check-up on my project. Dr Wallace got really into the methodology, probing into my approaches and the structure of my project, asking questions of its validity, some of which I was not prepared to answer.

Apart from that, we talked about the experience in general. I shared some unresolved frustrations that I've had (elaborated upon in the infamous 9 de Junio entry), and they commended my introspection and then cautioned that too much introspection can lead to a kind of paralysis. I said something in response about how that's at least one reason the program was good for me, forcing me to act in spite of unresolved frustrations.

“Well see, there you go again,” Dr Wallace replied.

On Sunday we went to Chichicastenango, renown for its Sunday market. We climbed a pine-covered hill outside of town to observe a worship service, a bizarre mix of Mayan and Christian practices; I had to wait around for a while before they would let me take photos. I talked with one worshipper who had spent some time in the U.S. He told me that this was his first time to this service and that he wanted to thank the gods for granting him safe travel to and from the U.S.

For the rest of my time in Chichi, I swam through the market crowds and visited the churches. One church had hundreds of candles lit all around the sanctuary.

I am about halfway through Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It's a trip. It`s about a black guy about my age who moves from the south up to Harlem. It`s like a mixture of The Matrix and Forrest Gump.

My relationships with my homestay family continue to deepen, especially with Luis and Catarina, and especially with Catarina. I find her affable and it seems we have similar senses of humor.

A good example: a dog named Chasso, who is not technically theirs but who hangs around the house enough to be, still doesn't really know what to do with me. He barks at me like I'm a threat, but then I see him following me out of the corner of my eye when I walk by him, and he'll start to bark or run away if I look at him again.

Well sometimes, just to amuse myself, I will jolt at Chasso to spook him. This makes him run around and start barking like crazy, like “look look everyone he is bad news!” Now, I think this is totally hilarious, but I don't laugh about it because I'm being Dan-yell (which if you don't know is the perpetually self-conscious alter-ego that I assume when I'm living in Santa Catarina; once again, see the 9 de Junio entry). So, while Luis would just look at this and say something like, “Yes, Chasso is very scared,” Catarina laughs genuinely, even when she knows that I don't know she's watching. Por eso ella me gusta.

The night before last, Catarina and I were walking back up to the house from the shop, and she asked me about my day, and we talked and I asked her about hers. Not only does this show a basic friendliness, but it is also a vote of confidence towards my Spanish, because she's initiating a normal conversation, assuming that I will be able to “chat.”

Walking up the stairs, I had just come from an especially-awkward interview with a group of more “modern” folks who own a restaurant by the lake. We passed an old woman traditionally-dressed carrying something on her head, and she and Catarina exchanged a Kaqchikel greeting. I thought, “Now that is someone whom I would love to interview,” imagining what the age-old folks around here think about the dogs. This was the first time I have ever humored the thought of interviewing an old woman, and I realized that it was because I was walking with Catarina. I suddenly felt closer to the old lady, as if she were moving out of complete strangerhood into a network of friends. If Catarina becomes more comfortable with me, then maybe some of the locals will too.

Although now I remember waiting for a pickup to San Antonio directly across the road from where Catarina was hanging out with a bunch of local women cackling and gossiping, and it seems that I am very far away from talking seriously with any of them. I especially want to interview some of the women street vendors, seeing as the do their business in the street, where dogs “do their business,” so they are probably pretty opinionated.

Speaking of ulterior motives for becoming friends with Catarina, it seems that as I show more interest in food (e.g., torilla-making), she shows more interest in cooking good things for me to try. Two nights ago for dinner she made her favorite dish, pulike. I watched her make it: it's basically a tomato-based soup with masa (a kind of cornmeal) to thicken it up along with onions, cilantro (which they grow in a little garden that I had never seen before), salt, consume de pollo (which I guess is like dried chicken broth; I don't know anything about cooking) and a kind of meat like chicken, although we ate it with mushrooms. It's been raining a lot so there are a lot of mushrooms. It was pretty tasty. We had it again for lunch today because it is Luis Miguel's 8^th birthday. I bought him some marbles, which are all the rage here. Wilson said to him, “That's nothing. I've got a lot more.” And went inside and got his box of marbles and rattled it in the left, left, left right left rhythm. Luis Miguel told me that he would win Wilson's marbles. The showdown is taking place right outside my door right now. I hope my birthday present for Luis Miguel doesn't turn into an early birthday present for Wilson.

Back to my project: interviews with people are going okay. I'm yet to hit a rhythm or get on a roll: each interview is its own painstaking, awkward animal. Two days ago at an appointment interview I was met by a group of people who didn't speak very good Spanish (and wouldn't admit it). I would ask a question, and the woman would look at her friends in stifled laughter, talking in Kaqchikel, not making eye contact with me or answering me. That was frustrating. The interview was saved by one of their guy friends, and he actually had a lot to say so it ended up okay.

And by the way, if you've ever been uncomfortable approaching a stranger to help you out with some kind of cause, try doing it in a language that you (and sometimes the person you're talking to) don't totally know. When things go bad, it's beyond awkwardness, literally, because awkwardness implies some kind of common social tolerance threshold, which doesn't exist between an American and a Catarineco. Granted, you feel less embarrassed because you're not competing for social status in a society where you don't belong, but the frustration is more intense. And social status happens to be something that I do need to worry about, if only for my grade's sake! If I gain a reputation in this small town as Dan-yell, that insensitive American blockhead, then I won't be able to interview anyone.

Dr Wallace told us the story of an anthropologist who worked in a society in which when someone is not present, you refer to him or her with one of a number of set relational names, like “brother of long-arms” or “mother of light-foot.” The people had no respect for the anthropologist, and they decided it would be funny to make up indirectly-insulting names to refer to other people, like “brother of fat-cheeks,” so that the anthropologist unknowingly passed these insults along when he interviewed more and more people. Well, he didn't pick up on this for quite a while, but when he finally did, he found that his months of social data-gathering made nothing but a web of fake people.

To end today, let's talk about fruit. When Luis returns from Panajachel, he sometimes brings bizarre new fruits for me to try. My favorite so far is this thing called mango de leche. It's mango, but it's grown differently or something with some kind of milk or suger, I didn't really understand, but it is deliciously sweet and has a slight milky taste, like coconut milk. It's really really fibrous; I had stuff stuck in my teeth for a day (I had no floss). Then there is this little purple fruit which seems to be exactly in between a plum and a cherry. Most recently, he brought back one melon-shaped fruit with a shell so hard it was almost wooden. He broke it open to reveal slimy fuchsia-orange meat with a giant, shiny, sunflower-seed shaped pit. I could barely finish my half because it was so sweet. Imagine the texture as a cross between a kiwi and an avocado (more slimy than juicy) with the taste of an ultra-sweet breakfast melon, especially the gooey-stringy part of the melon towards the middle that ends up on the edges of your slices.

This reminds me of a passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls in which a half-credible clairvoyant woman is describing the smell of someone who is about to die. She says it's a mixture of three smells (this is missing a lot of details and I'm probably getting some of it wrong because I don't have the book on me): one from a particular kind of brass under a porthole of a boat, one from discarded soil in a particular alleyway in Spain in early spring after it rains, and one you can only get by kissing one of the slightly-mustached old women who walks out of a particular town to put flowers on a certain grave or something. If that sounds overly-dramatic, then good, because the guy she's telling this thinks it's BS too, and then later she confides in him that she's all smoke and mirrors. I just don't want you to get the wrong impression of the book. That doesn't really spoil anything, by the way.

the hotel in Santa Catarina where I had my meeting.

Chichicastenango: A libation of Coca-Cola for the gods. On top of the stone on the left is the severed head of a sacrificed chicken.

The colored sugar represents different things (like green for wealth, white for prosperity, etc., I don`t remembe which is which), as well as the four cardinal directions, as indicated by the crosses. On the pile are candles, bread, cigars, and I don`t remember what else.

walking back to Chichicastenango

Chichicastenango Market

Sarah is always the first target of the street vendors.

The indoor part of the Chichi Market

on the way up to my house

Town Square thing in Santa Catarina

13 de Junio

a local taking a break from the festivities in San Antonio

So I`ve been praising the joys and comforts of time off in Panajachel, but I have found that Catarinecos are not without pleasures of their own.

Last night, after a dinner of big blue grilled mushrooms with tomato sauce and tortillas, we got in the temascal. Wearing only my scivvies, I crawled into the four-foot-high brick chamber after Luis and sat on the bench next to him. Except for the glowing embers, I could see nothing. First Luis handed me some kind of good-smelling tree branch, and we patted ourselves with these while he periodically poured water onto hot stones over the embers, making the air thick with steam like a sauna. Then we scratched ourselves all over, you know, to get the dead skin off. Then he drew water out of a cauldron heated by the fire, and we bathed ourselves with this and with soap. From then on it was just like a hot bath sitting on a bench, all steamy and aromatic. “Ah, it's rico, huh?” Luis said a few times. Rico literally means rich, but it's usually used for food, something like delicious, “bien rico,” or like Puerto Rico (“Rich Port”). A temascal is definitely that.

Afterwards, Wilson and Catarina insisted that I rest. It's best to sleep, they said, but to avoid being sick, I should lie down for about ten minutes because the temascal is very hot. It's makes Catarina's head hurt. Either way, it felt really nice with my skin smelling clean with a trace of the sweet incense smell of the firewood.

Luis came into my room and sat down and asked me if my head was okay. I said that it was fine, but he twirled his finger around his head making the loco sign and told me that he felt a little crazy because of the heat. He smiled and laughed some more. “You have anything like this in the United States?” I described to him a sauna, which is in fact very similar, and I told him that I thought those originated in Europe and that they are usually public, not personal. “Ahh, it's so nice, very good for you” he said. “It's like medicine.” He says we'll do it again in ten days.

I want to interject here the fact that Catarina works very hard. She prepares fires for cooking before every meal she makes, which is two to three per day. Last night, she crawled into the temascal to prepare the ashes, unphased by the smoke. Tonight she burnt her hand and sent Wilson to ask me for a bandaid, which doesn't surprise me given that she flips every tortilla by hand and carries the coffee pot with her bare hands when the boys hesitate to touch it.

For dinner we each had a bowl of beans (like kidney beans) with a hard-boiled egg sitting in it. And tortillas and coffee. I would call this meal exactly average, a good indication as to what I'm eating down here. I have lost weight; Dr Wallace commented on this the other day, and the temascal photo might indicate this. Nonetheless, I still feel totally healthy, Mom, even though I do look forward to eating when I get back. (She knows this. We email.)

Sometimes after dinner I go down to the campo with the boys and maybe some of their friends and we play soccer and basketball. It's hard to see, which is part of the fun. I think I should look for a glow-in-the-dark all-purpose ball to get for them as a going-away gift.

Something else. My Spanish has had a huge spike over the last week or so. I've suddenly realized that I rarely feel limited by the language anymore when I speak with my family; I can explain anything I need to or make a joke when I want without thinking about it. After about a month, you become comfortable with a certain word bank and you get used to the way people talk. The most trouble I've had recently was explaining to Luis that I didn't want Catarina to go to the trouble of washing a pair of pants that I had forgotten to give her unless she was already going to wash a load of other clothes as well. After three or four tries, I got the idea across. I guess that's kind of a complex situation. That was maybe five days ago, and thinking about it now, I'd probably have an easier time saying it now than even then.

This morning Luis and the boys and I went to San Antonio's town festival, one town over. It was great for photos. There were more convites, those dancers in the crazy costumes; I have pictures this time. Afterwards, Luis told me that he thought the convites were much better at Santa Catarina's festival. He said it was because they danced better.

I'm continuing my reading binge. I'm kind of on a classics/literature thing right now because I feel like there are a lot of staples that I haven't read, especially being that I'm a literature major, so I read Animal Farm. As a novel, it's okay. The writing is kind of boring, but then again, it's supposed to be a kind of fairy tale, with flat characters and such. The story is good, and it's best if you're into the whole historical context of it, which I know about an average amount about, and this makes the preface and the introduction the most interesting parts. To read today, it's a fun way to get an idea about what happened to communism, which is why it's on junior high reading lists. I'm unenthusiastic about it; I guess Hemingway spoiled me. I really loved For Whom the Bell Tolls. Zach brought The Shining with him and highly recommends it, so I think I will read that next. Stephen King is supposed to be a great writer, so that'll be cool.

This is, by the way, the most consecutive pleasure reading I have done in my entire life. It's always school, and then in the summers it was always summer reading, and then in my spare time I always run to some other kind of stimulation. Here, there are fewer distractions.

As far as my project, I think I'm about on track, although all this talk of pleasure reading makes me feel as though I'm behind. I've been watching things around town a lot, and I always read in at least a semi-public place, which is a solid way for people to get comfortable around me in such a small town and for me to passively observe things. Yesterday, for example, I was just reading in Luis's galeria while he and this really old local guy chatted about something in Kaqchikel. Eventually they must have started talking about me because Luis addressed me in Spanish. We all talked for a bit, and the conversation turned towards languages, and then it turned into a Kaqchikel lesson for me. The old man seemed very eager to teach me Kaqchikel and taught me eye, ear, tooth, hand, nose, and bread. He may come by tomorrow, and I may have another lesson, and I may ask him his name and what he does, etc. The next time, I'll ask him if I can interview him about dogs.

Sitting in Luis's galeria, I run into many more tourists too. Some days there are no groups of tourists, some days there are five or six. Maybe 60% of the tourists that stop by speak English. The most popular are the young backpackers, either large groups of girls, a group of two or three guys, or a couple. The couples never talk to me. My favorites are always the families, I guess because it takes a somewhat entertaining family to travel together. There are the Spanish-speaking families with the women wearing tight, tight pants and usually curly hair-dos, the reserved father with slick hair, the quiet teenager who doesn't want to be there, and the talkative and whiny little kid.

I especially liked one family: a brown-eyed, olive-skinned, bilingual bunch from Florida, originally from Cuba, who talked like they were from New York. They stopped by Luis's on one day and then I ran into them in Panajachel on the next. In order from most to least talkative: the mom's brother who seems sly and slick but interrupts to make a good joke and asks good questions, the mom who would perfectly fit the role of the mom in a family-based sitcom (Home Improvement, Raymond) if you cut her talking speed in half, the late-teens daughter who was just like her mom, the good-natured dad with thin sweaty curly hair, the early-teens boy whiz-kid with glasses, and the aloof late teens-boy with a baseball jersey and basketball shoes. The dad was always like, “Yeah we checked out those ruins too, hey Ronny (whiz kid) what was the name of those ruins?” And then “No last night, last night we stayed over at that town across the lake, hey Ronny what was the name of that town we stayed at last night across the lake?” The dad and the uncle smoke cigarettes together.

Another piece of conversation from them:
“Ohh I really like this painting how much is this?”
“No honey we don't have enough on us right now. We're coming back here tomorrow remember so we can get some more cash from the ATM.”
“No but if I don't buy it now then I won't buy it. We have enough look I've got five-hundred qet-salls right here.”
“No mom remember we still have to pay this guy!” The daughter pointed to a short man in a collared shirt standing in the middle of them who had not said a word and whom I had not noticed at all until then.

Today there were missionaries from Nova Scotia, a handful of men in button-downs and dark pants and shiny shoes who talked to me with welcoming faces. There were one or two women in long, canvassy skirts. We witnessed a short dog fight, and I told them about my project. After bidding me farewell, the leader of the bunch left me with, “Don't let your life go to the dogs. Give it to the Lord Jesus instead.”

Honestly, I have an easy topic. Some students have to seek out certain populations: Sarah has to hunt for families who have been divided by religious conflict, Nicole has to find people who control access to computers. For me, if you live in Santa Catarina, then you know about the dogs. My only problem is finding people willing to have an interview; I have been politely or cleverly turned down more than a few times. It's better if it's someone who at least knows who I am, like the lady at the internet cafe or the bread guy. If not that, then it's good to have an intermediary, which is where Wilson comes in, because he knows a lot of families. Basically, I have no excuse for a shortage of interviews.

In other news... I mentioned in passing at one point that Valerie was sick. She actually had appendicitis and had an operation done down here. Her mom flew down to be with her through the operation, and afterwards they hung out in Panajachel while she recovered. They've since decided it would be best for her to go back home. Best of luck recovering, Valerie. We'll miss you.

To end on a less somber note, it's worth mentioning again how gorgeous Santa Catarina is. Walking back into town from the beach area, I am overcome by the sheer steepness of the mountain wall that holds the pueblo. It's similar to the feeling you get when you stand at the entrance of a skyscraper and look up to the top of it and feel as if you're going to fall over backwards. And what's more, the slope is grassy like a meadow and speckled with trees that grow out of the face at a slanted angle, so that if you concentrate on only this section of it and then suddenly consider the whole view, it throws off your vertical perspective, like a cubist painting.

``Una fota?`` one of them asked, and another told her, ``It`s foto, idiot.`` It`s a good deal for me because all they want is to see themselves on the screen afterwards.

in Santa Catarina

L to R: temascal, me. It`s very short.

San Antonio, on the way to the festival

L to R: local who apparently thinks he is San Antonio, San Antonio

some convites taking a break from dancing

Luis chases away some perros from his tienda. They had been fighting.

11 de Junio

Que pasa: Notice that the titles of these entries are the day that I write them, not the day that I post them. So there's a little lag in what I'm actually thinking/doing because of my internet access, or lack thereof.

Thanks to those of my family who gave encouragement after my last entry. Know that I am a long way from despairing. All that's up is that I'm having to take little measures (coffee, peanut butter, a novel in English) to keep my bearings, something I've never really had to do before. It seems weird to me because I'm not like a prisoner or anything, so I hesitate to embrace a “you can make it” mentality. I have chosen to do this myself in order to see if I like ethnographic fieldwork, a 24/7 thing that swings with your mood. Overall, it is stretching me and humbling me, two things that must be ultimately good.

I have spent much of the last two days sitting in a chair at the entrance of Luis's gallery, reading. I have finished For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it was an excellent read. I'm going to get another book tomorrow in Panajachel. If you know me, you know that I'm a slow reader (getting faster), so that tells you how much time I have spent reading.

I love Hemingway's style because it really gets into the characters' heads. He follows their trains of thought and saves his most descriptive language for their memories and impressions. All 470 pages take place in the span of 3 days, so you can imagine how much detail there is. A great sentence: “His face looked as though it were modeled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion.”

The old paperback book broke in half because I used it to swat flies, which means I can't sell it back to the bookstore for half the price of 40 Quetzales. I killed many flies though.

Something else about the book: the main character is Robert Jordan, an American ex-pat fighting in the Spanish Civil War, so the dialog is transliterated from Spanish. Towards the beginning of the book, one guy says to him, “So much talking makes me very thirsty, Comrade Hordan. You have a funny name in Spanish, Comrade Hordown.” Funny because the day before I read this I had had a conversation with Luis about saying Jordan. It's very hard for Spanish-speakers to say the j sound; the closest equivalent is ch. I have been helping Luis practice his English. “Whesch pintin do you like?” “Whesch pants do you like?” “Orichinal work” “Tree-handred dollars.” He wants to learn to say sure, but I think it would be best to leave that one alone because it doesn't come out any better than “chird.”

But sitting at the same spot along the main road of Sta. Catarina for two days straight has also been good for giving me a feel for the rhythm of this town. Luis and I chat some, and he has his own greetings for each passerby. In this town of 3000, he has sat at this same spot every day for I don't know how many years, so he knows about everybody. He taught me some Kaqchikel greetings today, which are many and vary with the time of day and the age and sex of whom you are greeting.

Also what's neat about this town are the noises. It's small enough that you could hear faintly someone scream from one side to the other, although the noise of the town would obscure it. Someone is always blasting music in the morning or the dogs are always barking at night, and then there are the sounds of the day in between. Every kind of service vehicle has its own distinct noise to announce his presence. The man with the ice-cream cart has jingle-bells that he shakes. The bread man has one of those old-school brass horns with the rubber squeeze-ball (and he comes along our stretch of town every day around 2:20 with fresh banana bread, cinnamon bread, sweet bread, and other kinds, all 1 Quetzal (about 14 cents) a piece. They are baked individually in rolls, not loaves, and I buy one every day). The pickups have their quick police siren noises. The buses have their barge-horns. The promo-trucks for Coca-Cola or Gallo or the cell-phone companies blast music and muffled announcements of deals out of the loudspeakers on their cars. That leaves the car alarm for the garbage truck (you know, that 8-phase car alarm).

It's amazing how my attitude towards the food here has developed: I have loved it and hated it, I have praised Catarina for it sometimes and I have eaten in silent disgust other times. Granted, some dishes are better than others, but some things (tortillas) never change. I haven't mentioned this yet, but my amoebas are gone, so the ol' digestive system is back on track. I'll say now that my sickness affected my appetite way more than I realized at the time, and now my attitude towards the food has come about full circle.

Today (and yesterday) for lunch we sat in the back of Luis' gallery and ate hot tortillas and processed packaged ham and lukewarm coffee. Not much of a meal, but I have grown to look forward to even that, as long as the tortillas are hot. I have run the whole spectrum of getting sick of things to having things grow on me. There is no telling which way it will go next, or when it will level out. I wonder how much of my appetite has to do with the novelty of the food and how much to my natural disposition to it.

On its erratic and uncontrollable track, my attitude towards food here develops just as much as (and probably affects) my attitude towards the people and towards this place in general.

Funny: as I am writing this Catarina knocks on my door with a hearty “buenas noches” and brings me something she bought below: a tortilla with black beans cooked inside, called ta' un. She made these a few nights ago herself; I picked one up and was fascinated. They're really tasty. I have asked if I could learn how to do this. She says it is difficult but she will teach me.

I've been making tortillas with Catarina before dinner. I'm getting better. I found out that when we eat them she can actually tell which side was made by her right hand and which by her left. Her making them really is something to watch, given that she's done this one to three times a day since she was ten years old. I've asked her and no, they don't have contests for tortilla-making. I think that if this were the U.S. or Japan there would be a contest somewhere.

Right now I'm sitting on my bed writing this. It's 6 pm and there's low and steady thunder coming from across the lake, where mounting storm clouds are hiding the volcanoes' peaks. My door is wide open, and the dense breeze brings with it the smell of the sweet firewood they burn here and a constant noise of kids running around. Fish for dinner tonight, and then we're going to the campo to play basketball with a ball that needs air.

One more thing. Luis Miguel turns 8 next week. All this time I thought he was 8 and Wilson was 10, but it's actually 7 and 11. That better explains the maturity difference. Today, for example, Wilson missed school to take a pickup into Panajachel where he sells hand-made embroidered postcards to tourists. He ate lunch there and with some of the money he made bought himself and Luis Miguel each a toy car. Luis Miguel is a long way from this. He cries easily when he and Wilson fight or play a little rough, although I guess that's about “normal” for a 7-year-old. I continue to treat Wilson as an equal though. I ask his advice about who in town to stay away from, and I even like his sense of humor most of the time.

All of these are in Santa Catarina

Lightning over the lake