Day ???: It Again Rains

The rain started slowly tonight. At first it was a drop on my neck -- something dripping overhead perhaps. A light Friday night crowd on la Novena; some well-dressed folks on their way to one of the various evangelical churches, scattered teenagers with red backpacks coming home late from school, men and women with sooty hands and downward-cast eyes, a few older folks leaning in their doorways. Few people will be out on the street, a commercial street like this, after the sun goes down. A tuk-tuk rumbles by blasting reggaeton. I realize, as if coming out of a daze, that the ground is freckled with dark spots and at the same time the rain seems to start. The pirated-movie stand on the pasarela corner is closing up, all the movies shuffled into piles, plastic tarps shoved roughly into bags. We all expect the rain to crescendo, to really start coming down, making drowned rats out of the lot of us, but it doesn't. Not yet, at least.

I was not sure if I should continue writing this travel blog. I am still in Guatemala. Am I still traveling? It doesn't feel like it, a year into my time here, each week buzzing between the highs and lows of working in a non-profit, as routine -- if not more so -- than past years in the States. I just finished reading over the older entries here, reaching back to my first days in Peru, the accented blandness of solo travel, first arrival in Guatemala and the blind-dartsman decision-making that followed. I am certain that my decision(s) to extend my stay here mark a definite break with those experiences. At the same time I have made a clear decision to limit my time in Guatemala to the middle of next year, and to enroll myself in graduate studies in the fall of next year. So this is not home. But it is not travel either.

I suppose that, despite any ambiguousness, I am writing another entry and therefore owe some sort of update. Let's do the highlights:

As may be gleaned from the newest mini-slideshow to your left, I took a bit of a vacation during Semana Santa (=Holy Week=Easter). The vacation was most assuredly not blessed. The week previous I got the flu hard and spent a lot of time in bed, clunking around the house, and wondering whether I should go the doctor. Felt better and decided to follow through on plans to travel to the Ixil region in the northwest Quiche department. First night in the central town of Nebaj was struck with some dastardly dehydrating diarrhea and became intimately acquainted with the toilet stall door on the second floor of the Hotel Nebajense. This persisted for a while, but felt well enough on the next day to follow through on my plan to take a one-night, two-day hiking trip to one of the surrounding aldeas before my housemates arrived mid-week. The hike began with an exhausting climb under a hot sun, followed by a rocky descent, a stroll through the somewhat famous town of Acul -- formerly a model village set up by the army in the 1980s to keep control of the population suspected of helping/being guerrillas. This, of course, was one of the more humane responses given by an army that massacred hundreds of indigenous villagers in other parts of the Ixil region, and thousands throughout the country. I was greeted by stares. My hike continued for another 8km west, sloping up into a long valley to the village of Xoxocom (sh'sh-cum). There, as in almost all the local villages, there is a family who has built a shack to host backpackers. This family, for unknown reasons, was temporarily without any adult figures (the father, as I learned just before leaving, is a local politician with a right-wing party). The teenage son, for similarly unknown reasons, gave me a scare with stories about suspicious local activity and increasing robberies by "outsiders". As a result of these stories, plus the fact that someone had come into the shack while I was out and took my cell phone out of my backpack before discarding it under the bed AND the door had absolutely no locking mechanism, I decided that security measures were necessary. I barricaded the door with all the furniture and heavy objects in the shack, including my bed. Slept about 1 hour total between constant dog barking and creepy human whispering, thanked the sun for coming up again, and hightailed it out of there as fast as I could. Long walk back to Nebaj, but it was nice to be back in civilization. Met my housemates the next day, meandered around town, and then hopped a crowded minivan towards Lake Atitlan. Passed a few basically uneventful days there (oh, but please do not let me forget to mention the night-time Easter parade in Santiago Atitlan which included a Jesus casket wrapped in Christmas lights and actually carried through the streets by rotating teams of teenagers trailing an electrical generator behind it). A sweaty bus ride back to the city before starting work again on Monday.

My mom visited in June, and we managed to enjoy ourselves with some family reconnection time and World Cup action despite my short illness and hectic work schedule. More reconnection time on the way!

My two-day trip to Mexico and back, purely for the required visa stamp, should also be mentioned. A ridiculous amount of time spent on buses, an official fleecing by the Mexican authorities, an encounter with a van full of packages wrapped in black bags, a lucky mistake by Guatemala authorities, a lot of illegal migrants, and an underwear purchase. There.

Work has gone mostly well in the intervening months, I will spare you (and me) the details. I feel I have spent my time well, but also have no desire to stay past the middle of next year. I will be taking the GRE in a few days and will be back in the States over December break. There is a movement to life that keeps me going. For better or worse the next 10 months will probably be the best months I have here in Guatemala -- not necessarily because better things will happen, but because of improvements in my attitude and comfort brought on by the knowledge that my time here is limited. Screwy, maybe, but...well, yeah, screwy.

It was still pouring when I started writing tonight, but now everything is quiet outside.
Still...