I’ve been having trouble getting and/or staying online all day, so this post may end abruptly! Chris had class again this morning and learned more Spanish from Florinda but also more about her life and this place.
We frequently hear what sound like explosions, and today I awoke to this before 7 a.m. Chris and I assumed these were the sounds of mining, but Florinda says that in fact it is common practice for people to blow up firecrackers (sure!) and bombs (really?!) at parties, and the early hour didn’t surprise her at all. As I write, these same explosions are the soundtrack to my evening.
It might not appear so at first, but there is a vague logic in the way Chris and Florinda’s conversation flowed from the last topic to the next and to the one after that. Florinda’s husband is a volunteer firefighter in their town where there are only two professional firefighters, and here in Pana there are five. There are few fires to contend with so the job is more akin to being a paramedic. Women—even the indigenous Mayan women who live in the hills—give birth in hospitals and this is a free service the hospitals provide. The nearest hospital is in Solola, and there are local clinics for those women who cannot get to Solola in time. Whereas we say that a woman is delivering a child or giving birth, here the phrase they use is “dar la luz” or to bring the light—lovely.
The Rough Guide refers to earthquakes as a plague to this area of the world, but Florinda says there hasn’t been a major quake in Lake Atitlan in her lifetime, and she is 31. She does say that they experience tremors periodically, and some of them are quite startling. She argues that the bigger natural threat to their well being is the hurricane, which surprised me since this isn’t a coastal community. Chris reminded me that the whole country is smaller than the size of West Virginia so the coast isn’t all that far away. The area was devastated by Hurricane Stan in 2004 and 500 people were killed in the small town of Santiago where we spent the afternoon last week. The hills were flooded and people evacuated into the town, but the roads were impassible so they had to use the boats to ferry supplies to the lake towns where people were without access to food and water for days.
I’m not entirely sure how the conversation shifted to derogations, but future travelers to Guatemala should be aware that the phrase “chicken bus” offends the native people because it implies, one, that every Guatemalan who rides the bus is carrying a chicken around with them and, two, that there is something wrong with someone bringing a chicken on the bus. It will probably come as no surprise that the local people simply refer to their buses as buses.
We spent the afternoon in town picking up food supplies and fabric shopping. Chris cannot be slowed in his drive to round out his wardrobe with Guatemalan camisas: today, a blue one. After having purchased unrefrigerated eggs each time we have been to the market and each time putting them in the refrigerator when we returned home and each time having had the majority of them freeze and break… we did like the Romans, bought some eggs and left them sitting out on the counter. I am trying to step outside of my own epistemology, but it isn’t easy, and I think I hear those eggs right now hatching a plan to kill me with Salmonella. I’m glad I sleep downstairs where they can’t get at me in the night!
No comments:
Post a Comment