A walk on the Wild side?

Tuesday.
Or Friday. Wednesday?

After a breakfast of sweet crusty pan dulce and cubiletes, I pack my jeans pockets with the basic neccesities and head for the front door. The sun is bright today, stronger than usual, the air dry and cautious. The front door swings closed and catches, ringing metal smash. I go through the side gate, sliding my magnetic card into the black box with yellow tape to the right of the gate. A few early-90s model cars and a gas delivery truck with a teenager sitting in the back shoot down 23rd Ave. towards San Juan Boulevard. I turn the other way, briefly shaded from the sun by a massive leafy tree.

The sidewalk here is flat. In between the sidewalk and the road there are rectangular patches of grass with some eccentric saplings and flowers planted in them. Passing by flattened town-houses, all fronted with tall metal gates or brightly painted concrete walls topped with barbed wire. There are no exceptions to this design feature. A Catholic church where on the weekends a lady opens up her churro stand -- just as God intended, I imagine. A pair of little tiendas, a low-quality panaderia, and a trash-blown park in between two high concrete walls with two cracked basketball/soccer courts -- the back one about 2/3 the size of the front one, a smattering of trees making up the difference. These courts are popular in Guatemala and Latin America -- painted and sized the same as a regulation basketball court but with white metal tubes arranged in a rectangular fashion underneath each basket serving as goals. One of the high concrete walls bordering this park belongs to an enormous corner house that apparently houses missionaries of some Christian order. Just to be sure, I try to look as menacing (read: Guatemalan) when I see them on the street. They haven't tried to convert and/or befriend me yet. Other than my house mates, these are the only gringos in the neighborhood.

At the butt-end of 23rd Ave. is Kaminal Juyu park, an oblong tree-lined intrusion into an otherwise nondescript residential neighborhood on the north-western edge of Guatemala City. Kaminal Juyu, in a non-coincidence, was the name of a large Mayan city located on this land, land now swallowed up by heavily-guarded houses for ladinos, smog exiting from passing city buses and trucks, and the smell of auto repair shops. Except for Kaminal Juyu park. I have yet to get inside the park, but according to guide books there are ruins partially hidden under mounds. On many days, especially weekends, you can see groups of people gathering around small bonfires in what appear to be indigenous ceremonies. Rigoberta Menchu, the not-always-beloved Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner, held her post-Nobel celebration here in this park. Eighteen years later, give or take, I walk by on the opposite sidewalk and pass by a companion Mayan site sheltered behind a wire fence and underneath a slightly-tilted tin roof. There are several stone statues sitting in a dug-out section of dirt, a worn plaque in front, concrete wall and barbed wire fronted houses painted in pastel colors on both sides.

I turn away from the edge of the park on 9th Street, a busy two-way heading towards the chaotic, notorious Trebol Junction. The upper part of 9th is dominated by auto repair shops, most of which operate without a garage and do all their work on the street in front of the shop, wheeling out tires, red hoses and dull metal tools littering the sidewalk. On this part of the street there is an island of trees between the north-bound and south-bound sides. I pass by an Esso gas station which looks as if it was plucked from the New Jersey Turnpike in the early 90s, complete with a cafe-store called "On the Run". In English. On the island across from the gas station is a little area with benches, frequented by pass-out drunks (also known as bolos) and make-out couples.

A note of warning: If you have physical limitations which make climbing steps difficult, do not come to this part of town. Whereas on grassy 23rd Ave. the sidewalk is friendly flat, here it becomes a ridiculous collection of steps, dips, and cracks that resemble an environment from a GameBoy video game where the button most often pressed is "Jump". The doors of the various shops and stores are inexplicably at very different levels, and there are steps -- some big, some small -- leading up and down. Even when the sidewalk is relatively flat for a stretch, there are cracks everywhere. Not little slivery, concrete-over-time cracks. Big, gaping, erosion and earthquake and truck-crash cracks. The sewer openings at some corners are no more than inexact trash deposits. There are, of course, no trash bins on the street. Anywhere.

Near the pedestrian bridge over 9th there are a bunch of bakeries and barbershops and a table set up to sell newspapers with headlines like "National Police Director in jail" and "Ex-President finally caught". Here the island ends. On the next block there are a few more auto repair shops, and a pair of massive Evangelical churches, quiet and locked on a weekday morning but bustling on most nights or weekends. The street also widens out here, allowing the bus/truck repair shops to operate on the side of the road. There is a key shop where a little toddler is always playing outside in his sit-in toy truck under the less-than-watchful eye of a woman -- his mother? Doubtful. A female relative? More likely. Possibly just a lady who is paid to watch the kid while the mom spends all day working in some crappy, repetitive job. Which is the only kind available, if you were wondering.

A few dull red city buses grumble and puff past, repainted American school buses operating on the piloto-ayudante system, charging 1 Quetzal (12 cents US) during the day and 2 or 3 in the evenings. Another evangelical church painted blue and covered with a cell phone company advertisement, another lazy gas station, a small computer high school. The middle-of-the-street island makes a brief appearance as 9th takes a hard right towards Trebol. Here we part ways, I take a left into the neighborhood where I work. This junction is right at the high end of a barranca which leads down towards the municipal garbage dump, the economic heart of the community where most of the families we serve live. The road branching off from 9th slopes downwards, downwards, past brick houses, partially-brick houses, plastic-sided shacks. I stay along the edge of the barranca, past the choco-banana store (there are others, but this is the "the"), left onto 6th Ave.

6th Ave. is the market street for this neighborhood, and accordingly the sidewalks are packed with stands. Hanging sausages and sides of beef, a glass-sided cart stuffed with fried chicken and fries, a blanket laid out with an assortion of Chinese-made plastic items, hanging long plastic sleeves with bootleg movies, a woman seating amidst baskets of overripe avocados, fly-buzzed tomatoes, and a few lonely pineapples. Shoppers and passerby are forced to walk in the street, constantly checking behind them for cars and massive yellow-with-inexplicable green check mark garbage trucks. On a cultural note, vehicles here have a much higher tolerance for proximity to pedestrians. Read: If you don't move, you will get hit.

I throw out a Buenos Dias to the shuffling old man who sells candy from a box, the gel-haired guy at the corner store, and the lady with her little lunch stand, wood grill, tupperwares of meat and vegetables, tall plastic packets of tostadas. I rarely eat with her, as we get a free lunch (it does exist!) in the cafeteria, but I will stop around the corner to visit a lady who studies in the Literacy class in the afternoon, sells choco-bananas out of her freezer, and baby-sits Jackelin. Jackelin is one of my favorite little toddlers who frequent Literacy with their mothers, a possesive chubby-cheeked two-year-old who speaks in one and two word sentences and giggles histerically at...at most anything.

Jackelin's mother leaves her with the choco-banana lady because she works from 7am to 7pm (30 minutes for lunch) at the maquila behind the Literacy building stitching T-shirts and shorts for less than 4 Quetzales (50 cents US) an hour. She is not allowed to take any breaks. Every day there is a production quota to meet, and if she does not meet it, she is not paid for that day. If she is sick and brings a note from the hospital, she will only be docked a week's pay. If she does not bring a note she will either be docked a month's pay or be fired outright. At 12 noon, the doors open for lunch and she runs RUNS with her 200 or so coworkers to get food and get back before 12:30pm. This maquila, as with most in the city, is run by Koreans. Koreans are not well-liked among Guatemalans. But people come from around the city to work here because, as one lady put it, "at least they pay". As in, there are other maquilas where payment is far from assured. Jackelin's mother is lucky. At least she has a steady paycheck. And she doesn't have to go down into the dangerous bowels of the municipal dump to pick and sell trash -- even though on average she would make about the same amount of money a day. And every night at 7pm, when I am finishing up with my Men's Literacy class, she can grasp Jackelin's hand in her own aching, half-arthiritic hand, and lead her, stumbling slightly, speaking in two word sentences, back down Sexta Avenida and home.