Postcard from Chimaltenango

I spent six years working as a professional transportation planner and in 2000 I took stock and decided that something was missing. I did not know exactly what I wanted to do with my life, but I was certain that there were certain experiences I wanted to have in the world beyond the cubicle. One was to work on a farm, and another was to experience life in Central America. After two years at Village Acres Organic Farm in Pennsylvania, I am spending this year in Guatemala. I am working with an I will be working in rural areas with people affected by the violence of the 1980s.

Guatemala is divided into different administrative districts. There are 22 departments, each of which contains 5-30 municipios, just as states in the US contain varying numbers of counties. For simplicity I will refer to these as counties, because they are the second governmental division, though smaller than in the US. For most of my time here I will be working in the county of Rabinal, in the Department of Baja Verapaz. I spent my first month, however, in the county of San Martin Jilotepeque in the Department of Chimaltenango, 40 miles from the Capital of Guatemala city. The County seats are only about 30 miles apart as the crow flies. The distance on the dirt roads which wind around the mountainsides is more than twice as long, and it would take almost four hours to travel the distance on a direct bus. Actual bus routes are focused on more central destinations and makng the journey would require transferring at least three times.Despite the proximity, the Chaucus the intervening mountain range, is an imposing barrier: traversing the distance was much more difficult in former times. Consequently in the two areas the descendents of the indigenous Maya, who are the clear majority in these highland areas, have maintained different languages and traditions. They have been influenced by five centuries of Spanish rule, but even so, they have maintained some of their own traditions, and the ones they absorbed from their overlods have not always been the same.

San Martin is smaller than a US county. It contains 60,000 people, as many as the suburban Virginia county I grew up in, into an area 1/5 the size (97 square miles). This is according to the official statistics, which almost certainly underestimate the population. Though it has a population density ten times the county I farmed in in Pennsylvania it feels similarly rural. Except where the hilltops provide open vistas, in most places none, or only a handful of houses can be seen from the road. A few miles outside the county seat?most roads see fewer than a dozen vehicles pass during a busy hour. Although we passed through the county seat?fairly regularly, most of our time was spent in these rural areas, in five of the more than 100 communities, of which I will concentrate on describing one. Here, the dusty road through town almost certainly has more traffic from four-legged animals than four-wheeled vehicles. A horse carries firewood, blue water tanks, or a load of washing, two or three cows walk to pasture.The places we went have all received electrical service over the past five years. In comparison the city of Xela (Quetzaltenango) Guatemala's second-largest city, where I studied Spanish, boasts that electrical service was instituted in 1886. This is emblematic of the huge inequity which exists in this country. The shock of traveling from the villages to the city is much greater than I felt going from the US to the Guatemalan cities where I began my journeys. In villages, people have electricity for a few light bulbs, a blender, a radio, and maybe a television. They may have a single spigot that provides water a few hours every day. Some have built two-three room structures of naked concrete block in addition to the older caña (trimmed bundles of corn stalk) houses topped with corrugated aluminum sheeting. But even with the new infrastructure there is a stark contrast with the middle class urban families I stayed with while studying Spanish. They had showers, toilets, refrigerators, stoves, cars, and private bedrooms. And the communities I have seen undoubtedly have more amenities than many parts of Guatemala much further from the capital.

Even the families with cement block houses usually keep a kitchen of caña.Few people have chimneys for their cooking fires, and the ones I saw didn't work well, so the gaps under the roof and the ventilation between the stalks become an advantage though the rooms are smoky and most women complain about their lungs. My first night in the village we ate with an older man I will call Don Ebenezer. Like most families he and his family had a pile of bricks which allowed them to bring the cooking fire to the more comfortable working height of a stovetop, but Don Ebenezer preferred to have the fire on the ground so more heat went into the room, we could sit around it while we ate, and he could relight the cigarette of tobacco he had fashioned from a corn leaf which kept going out. We talked about surveying: most fields in Guatemala are measured not in acres or hectares, but in units based on the vara, just less than 33 inches and roughly the distance between your outstretched fingers and the center of your chest. The vara is also used to measure firewood and the depth of wells. We talked about the Guatemalan history textbook he had studied in school, including lessons about the conquest he remembered vividly across fifty years. He showed me the two-tone machete handle he had fashioned from scrap plastic after his first one broke from 12 years of use. We talked about politics in Guatemala and elsewhere, he brought up events in Afghanistan and Bolivia. It is a clich?to talk about how intelligent and knowledgeable peasants with second grade educations can be, but as we talked around the fire that first night I felt the reality of the admiration which can only sound clichéd when put into inevitably inadequate words.

That week Don Ebenezer was doing carpentry work for a new community building. My companion complemented him on his craftsmanship. She had seen caskets he made. He smiled and said that the difficulty was the where the angled parts of the lid fit together, but that the really skillful carpenter was his older brother. He talked with pride of the church doors his brother had worked on. His brother had apprenticed to a carpenter in town and had picked up skills through years of practice, while Don Ebenezer had only been able to take occasional days away from working in his fields. And that is how easy it is to come upon the scars of the conflict of the eighties. When people warned the village that the army was coming, his brother was one of the ones who argued that they were villagers not guerillas and had no reason to be afraid. So while some fled, the carpenter remained—he was rounded up and shot with fourteen others in Ebenezer's house alone. The tools of the carpentry craft, the planes, the drills, the lathes, were looted or burned when the army set fire to the caña houses. Cows, chickens and livestock were slaughtered or taken, and the harvest torched in the fields.

And the coffins my companion had mentioned had been a small attempt to heal these scars. After twenty years, three of the mass graves in town had been opened and some people had been exhumed to be reburied with dignity and names. Don Ebenezer's coffins had been a part of that. Some bodies remain in the mass graves, their relatives uncomfortable with disturbing them, or still fearful that public acknowledgement of the violence might bring retribution in the present. The violence in Guatemala left an estimated 200,000 dead and over a million fleeing with the country or outside. Here in a community which even today has fewer than five hundred residents, more than one hundred died in February 1982. Although there were ostensibly two sides, the leftist insurgency was much smaller than the military response which often leveled indigenous villages with no discernible military objectives. Investigations by the UN and the Catholic Church showed that more than 90% of the massacres and other crimes were committed by the military or other state actors. Shortly after the Catholic Church report was released in 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, the director of the project was himself assassinated. Of course none of this is unique to Guatemala. We are all too familiar with similar acts of brutality perpetrated throughout the world. Some of those who perished have survivors who can express the unique loss which each death constituted, some do not. In Guatemala, however, there is now an attempt to put some of the people responsible on trial. For me there is the added factor that in this case my government wasn't simply sitting on the sidelines when the machetes were drawn, but actively engaged with the government planning this scorched earth campaign: rewarding the latest in a decades long succession of military leaders with guns and money for what our president characterized as their commitment to democracy. And some people in the villages still remember those statements from more than twenty years ago.

But though the community has been scarred by violence, like Don Ebenezer, it has many other things going on in the present. It is one of the few in the area to have not just an elementary school, but a high school. In the county overall, most residents are 4-15 miles from the schools in the county seatand students must pay for either transport or lodging to study beyond sixth grade. This village had a high school built, and even paid for teachers salaries for a while before the government took over.

The village has an ongoing relationship with one of the Spanish provinces, and has used the aid for infrastructure. Because this community lacks running water, the Spaniards provided matching funds for some in the community to construct cisterns to collect water during the rainy season to use in the dry season, when the only water sources are unreliable springs in the valley below. They also provided money to buy a communal farm to provide another source of employment. Unfortunately, like many aid projects in Guatemala, the requirements of the donors ended up being more important than the needs of the recipients. After allocating the money, the Spaniards wanted it spent rather than sitting in a bank account, and the only farm on the market was 15 miles away, without a water source, and with very rocky soil. Nevertheless the community has set up a dairy herd, hoping to improve the stock even of family cows and is looking into planting fruit trees. So far however, it hasn't provided many jobs.

In addition to traveling to the farm, I did small jobs in the rest of the community, using my machete to cut firewood, or the cornstalks which make caña siding. Because our house lacked a cistern, I also experienced the burden of carrying water from the spring in the valley. After a thirty minute journey with a 42 pounds water supported by my forehead and my back as I climbed the slope I had almost enough water to flush a toilet twice—or for two people to drink for several days. I learned about the economics of cornfields, the sharply rising cost of fertilizer and falling value of corn. Last year, fertilizer for a given area cost more than half of the market value of the corn from a good harvest. Although many people have animals they don't have enough to fertilize large plots, and people said organic fertilizer was even more expensive, something I'm hoping to look into in the coming months. Based on the numbers they gave me, six weeks of work might net $60 from an acre (which is all the cropland most people have), and then you have to buy fertilizer for next year. I did the math and realized why I saw almost so few men under 40 growing corn, and why so many willingly faced the risks and distance from their family entailed in working in the capital, or sneaking into the United States.

During Lent, I saw several processions. Much smaller than what takes place in the big cities: a few dozen pilgrims stopping by the clay banks alongside the roads where pine needles, purple flowers, and a few candles have made a small hollow into a place of beauty and grace. A catechist leads a prayer while a picture of Jesus stumbling for the second time is placed in the hollow carved out of the hillside, resting on the needles. All the elements are simple, but these simple elements have converted the dirt of the hillside into a place of worship, and beauty, one deserving the reverence of the villagers—as I too feel reverence for their simple act of communal celebration.