City Mouse, Country Mouse

It's a good time now for me to reflect on my time here in Guatemala City. Classes ended this week, and I find myself inside another microcosm of change.

Sometimes I like to think about it in terms of circumstances. This week, I found myself in a car with three other people driving to El Salvador in the pouring rain. We found ourselves 15 minutes from the border when a bridge caved in and we had to turn around. The next day I found myself back in the capital, sin further plans to go to Santiago, sitting in a cafe. I was reading about the torrential rains while watching the rain. I have found myself with wet shoes alot, and wet feet and wet socks. And wet laundry that doesn't dry.

My friend Maria found herself in a new home with a new family in El Salvador. She found herself in a new city with new brothers and sisters, and a new job too. But she found herself without her Guatemalan family, and I found myself suddenly somehow within it. I hope she's doing well.

So I found myself without an English-speaking companion, thinking about the ironies of mastering a language. I was thinking about that while I was talking in Spanish, so it was then that I realized that words were coming out of my mouth. It happened while I was walking down the street talking to a friend. I didn't know who I was, but only for a split second. I think our identities have to be able to encompass that. It's a kind of forced growth- being able to say that all these things happened to me, that I met and talked to all these people and saw all these places. When are you gonna do it? When are you gonna meet people you're not gonna meet? It's a travelogue. And in some sense I had to do it. I had to meet them, in that moment, and talk to them, and eat with them. But in an another life I didn't have to, so I didn't. But it's like another variety of religious experience, and, strangely, people covet it, most likely because they're never gonna meet people they're never gonna meet.

I went to a birthday party and talked with a lot of people. I went to the mall to try and liberate my iphone. For the first time, I wasn't scared to talk to them. But, for some reason, I have this horrible fear that I'm going to forget how to speak English.

Currently, the plan is to leave for Santiago Wednesday, at which point I will finally settle in to the place in which I will live for the next 10 months. I won't be forgetting these days here in the city, though, for a long time.

It's strange thinking about what happens when you meet a goal.

Talking in the Subjunctive

What is the map of communication castration, the point at which frequency and intensity combine to produce such a violent explosion of polarity; in this case- hysterical laughter and complete non-reaction? It's at the dinner table. Her head is in her hands. She's rolling on the floor, laughing. But on the other side we're not talking in the subjunctive yet, and apparently we're not understanding it either.

So I have to write. I have to write to communicate to you an emotion so specific, so fine-tuned, so calculated, so complex, that English is my only vessel. And it's true- it's not gonna mean a thing unless somebody reads it. But I am somebody, and it means something to me, and i've come to believe that it helps me.

You only have so much time. What do you want to study? What do want to verse yourself in? We're well down the pipe at 23 years. Yet it's the 10 year old that's laughing. I don't think she's taken linguistics yet. It would probably be worse if she read books- she wouldn't be talking. And who sits opposite with their face in their food? The one who's been to the University.

In this, education is experience. And when is experience most readily available? When you don't have any. When the tab is still white. When your brain is bursting at the seams of your skull and comprehension starts oozing out your pores in the form of miraculous cream-colored brain juice; juice that adds and subtracts, juice that thinks. You're processing incredible amounts of vocabulary every hour, making thousands of unconscious decisions about the thousands of variables regarding their usage with a retention rate still unequaled by the world's most (un)intelligent artificial you. Somehow she knows, she knew today, she knew in that nanosecond that she was supposed to laugh. She acted correctly.

It's gonna be more difficult to learn the piano. Twenty Three you're an old man, practically exponentially degraded. You can change a few belts, maybe throw in a new plastic knee, but hot damn you can't never change the oil inside that head of yours. Your tongue already knows its way around the inside of your mouth, and when you try to change it it spanks you.

I don't know how to say that in Spanish yet.

"So here I am in the middle way, having had twenty years, twenty years largely wasted... trying to learn to use words. And each attempt is a whole new start, and a different kind of failure. For one has only learnt to get the better of words, for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate! With shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion, and what there is to conquer."

- T.S. Eliot

The History of a Military Man

I'm spending a lot of time attempting to discern the dispensation. We're not sure yet, but we start by methodically investigating in what framework are the questions being asked? We have sets of questions, see, dozens of them, that people ask. I try them on- I'll ask some to blank faces, rearrange in different order to warmer smiles and casual returns. And then we may say to ourselves "Ah, here it is," but only with the emphasis on the right syllables. And only with group x which is actually a split off of a split off of a fraction of the whole.

Which brings me to the next question- who are we asking what questions are you asking? We could ask the leaders- maybe frame it in terms of Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility." Therefore, you are obligated to answer for the disparity. Secretly we would hope to be overpowered by the veracity of their vision, but we would have to be realistic and say, like many here, that I remain unconvinced.

The irony is trying to convince the unconvinced that convincing is half the battle. And that's my point. You've gotta get on the bus, even if the windows are broken and you're gonna get robbed. You've gotta go shopping, even if they blow up the mall with a car bomb. You've gotta vote, even if they don't count it. The problem is setting the conditions- if the leaders are wrong, we're not gonna sit down with it, right? And you're always gonna have them. You must have them. Yet divided we (or they) fall. An interesting slogan for a country built on tolerance.

So what is worth taking on in the name of progress? What is worth riding with double negation? What is worth selling your soul to the devil? These are the questions of presidents and citizens.

It seems that the current conclusion of president Alvaro Colom's term is that centrists do nothing. Much like the divided U.S. government, they're not benefitting from a diversity of opinions, they're suffering from it. It's the ugly face of democracy- try getting anything done here with 13 million opinions. Or like Protestantism- try developing an orthodoxy without any authority. But what are you gonna do? Take away their voice to get things done?

So we arrive at what I've been thinking is the central paradox of the Guatemalan elections- democracy or safety? Guatemalans are in a binary position. For the first time in 30 years, they're not at war, yet they're now being terrorized by Mexican drug cartels and violent city gangs. Many people currently consider Guatemala City one of the most dangerous cities in the world. I heard somebody say the average homicide rate here is 12 a day. In Philadelphia, a city of comparable size and already questionable reputation for safety, it's about .8.

So you can continue to have your voice, but unfortunately the reality seems to be that the killings will not cease until you lower the level of diversity. Yet surrendering your rights to a dictator in the name of getting things done is precisely what makes you vulnerable to things like "ethnic cleansing." As far as I can understand, this is exactly what happened in the war- the government attempted to unify to people against the threat of Communism. But at what cost? The cost that not even genocide was sufficient grounds for halting the progress.

So you can vote for your representative and fear for you life, or you can walk the streets and shut the hell up. It's a terrible choice, a decision that no one should ever have to make, the decision between representation and personal safety. Yet this is the practical reality, and these are the competing goods.

In the elections this week, it seems they've already swung the other way, voting to elect the "strong hand," the one who has promised to be toughest on crime, the one who promises "security and employment." Yet can you guess what his background is? He was a general during the war, the war in which 90% of the civilian deaths were found to have been directly perpetrated by the army.

Yet the people have spoken. They have formed their questions within the framework of the priority of security. Or so it seems, to me.

Crime is the Focus of Guatemala Election (Photos)

Desperate Guatemalans Embrace an "Iron Fist"

Decision Libre

Same Shit, Different Day

So language school comes with its own set of routines. They´ve never been quite long enough to establish them as such, but so it goes. Life here now is more or less cosmopolitan. I wake up in the morning, take two buses, go to class, eat lunch, do homework, take two buses home. There´s malls. Then there´s tiendas. Then comedors. Imagine a room with plastic chairs and plastic tables with a cheap tablecloth on top. Then imagine a small grill outside with tortillas and some kind of meat. This is where people eat lunch. It costs about two dollars. I´d like to take a picture of one for you.

I'm staying with a family. This family is made out of people. My room is separated, kinda nice, away outside on an open air patio, but inside, with a desk and a bed and a bathroom. In the evening we eat dinner together. In the morning, I enjoy making my bed.

I sleep under a comforter and study in a t shirt. Everyday. The rain comes in the afternoons. You see it first on the mountains. In the city, there´s a smell. You might know it. I've decided it's a calculated ratio of smoke, trash, and diesel fuel. I´d say about 50% diesel fuel, halfsies the others. Allow for some variation in the countryside. More smoke, less fuel.

The buses are fun. Have you ever wondered what happens to all the buses in the states that no longer meet vehicle code? Well, it´s about a two week drive. It´s like a funnel; keep driving it south and you´ll eventually get here. Though, by the time you do, it'll almost certainly be belching diesel clouds the size of clouds. So it goes. But this is why you brought it here in the first place. So mission accomplished.

There's not a lot of grace extended to signage, though. Poor Español- you've had to deal with English cramping your style now for far too long. "Chatham County Public Schools" is not culturally appropriate. Nor is "Please stay behind the yellow line while bus is in motion." Nor, for that matter, "Maximum capacity 100 persons." And yet there she is, accomplishing a task no one ever dreamed she would do while belching bountiful billows of diesel fuel out her rear end, carrying twice as many people in her retirement as she ever did in heyday. And the people seem to get by OK. I wonder if they ever think about Chatham County.

My bag is still half packed, around the room in some tidy corner lurking. So it will be until the middle of October when my bag takes me to Santiago Atitlan, my final destination. Last week we had the opportunity to stay the night there. We went to this little coffee shop called "El Horno." It means "The Oven." Mentally, I've already included it in my morning routine. In fact, in my head I've already been there about 20 times.

Supposedly my bedroom is the on the third floor and looks out on the lake. All around is nothing but coffee. November is harvest time. The beans are green. We shall see what we can do about that.

Cornered

Came across this in a friend's blog:

“We’ve previously established that a good part of the allure of the Expat Aid Worker (EAW) lifestyle is the bragging rights afforded by far flung humanitarian adventures. But bragging rights imply an audience. Facebook helps bridge that gap, but only superficially. A blog platform allows the experienced EAW to more fully expound upon his or her sensitivity and savvy in the face of cross-cultural predicaments, boast about enduring exotic tropical disease and illustrate a profound depth of insight on international development theories.” -From the blog, Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like

Cornered.

Thanks to Bria for that.

The High Cost of Low Prices

My very limited understanding of economics suggests to me that one of the predominating questions of wealth deals with the idea of mutual exclusion. The question here is- are human beings capable of producing a net profit? Or are we dealing with a balance sheet type of scale in which the wealth of one side is precisely the prerequisite for the disparity of the other? We witness the return of the zero-sum game. This time, however, it's not just personal goals at stake, it's the future of the entire developing world.

Looking outside my window here in Guatemala City, there is a formidably sized billboard for the golden arches reigning down it's trip-le bacon burger-ness on the Avenida Periferico. (The keys to the kingdom? They got locked inside the kingdom.) I knew I was in the right place when the first thing he said was don't buy it. I got off the plane, slept, woke, was bludgeoned by Spanish. First thing in the morning, I was ushered into a meeting of local pastors and NGO's in which the country representative for MCC gave a lecture about the necessity of buying local. I was comforted with irritation.

Example par excellence- fried chicken. We had fried chicken for lunch today. In our neighborhood, there is Guatemalan fried chicken and there is American fried chicken. Which one do you think is cheaper? Given the incredibly cheap cost of labor here, it seems plausible that a comparable product would sell for significantly less. But no- the American fried chicken is almost 20% cheaper. Why? Because the American companies have so much money that they can afford to invest millions of dollars into improving the efficiency of their mass production. Your chicken is processed in Guatemala? Ours is processed in India! Yours is cheap? Ours is cheaper! But only where it needs to be! Bring the chicken to the people, the American people, this is when we start talking in dollars.

It is incredible to witness the remarkable speed with which the system of Western affluence has followed me into the developing world. Greed has a remarkable resilience, and there is no end to which the system is perpetually adapting itself to the wants of the masses. It's called market research. There are people in America asking, "What things do Guatemalans want?" or even worse, "What are the things which Guatemalans cannot go without?" There's going to be expats here- these people know. The rich are everywhere. So what do they do? Build a gigantic, overtly elaborate American mall right in the middle of the city that they know 98% of the population could never afford to shop at.

There's going to be dissenters. So what do they do? Buy up all the newspapers. Or, as in the cases of Bishops Oscar Romero and Juan Gerardi, assassinate them outright in the midst of a judicial system that many believe prosecutes less than 50% of its crimes.

What are the answers for Guatemala? I'll waste a year to find out. Then maybe together we can construct a relative and humanistic dispensation tailored to the complexity of the situation. We'll watch it burn, of course, then try again.

Empty Expectation

This past week I spent in Akron, PA for an orientation at the headquarters of Mennonite Central Committee. Gathered here with me were about 70 other participants of my program from the U.S. and Canada as well as about 70 participants of a partner program called I.V.E.P. Participants of the Serving and Learning Together program are those from the U.S. and Canada going to international locations all over the world. Those in the International Volunteer Exchange Program are international volunteers coming to the U.S and Canada. For one week, young adults from 30 different countries and 5 continents lived together on this campus on the outskirts of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There's something to be said for that. The thing is- you're either coming or going, so.

A lot of speaking in order to essentially say that you're expectations will not. Around the world or next door, no matter. I want to get in that plane, and I want the pilot to turn to his co-pilot, and I want him to say, "Where would you like to go today, Earl?" and believe me when I say that I am just about as prepared for Guam as Guatemala. Maybe Earl needs a vacation. But Bob and Earl- they have authority in these matters. So wherever Earl said, I would go. And I'd believe him when he told me that he could get us there.

We've talked about goals. I'd like to stay alive. It's not a requirement, though, for the universe. Guatemala City in elections month. Total Lockdown. Government corruption. Assassinations. Permanently culture-shocked ex-pats. University districts. Mudslide barrios.

I feel like I'm obligated to fill in the blank space with best guesses and educated assessments. All the while they're filling in the gaps with this Christian merrymaking, a sure dangerous disillusioning facade. Or not so sure.

But what judgments to make? The country is green and the people are brown. Failsafe right?

So then where am I going? Amidst a lack of distinguishing characteristics- anywhere and everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.