busy, blessed, overwhelmed, exhausted, happy, content, adventurous, speechless, free
These past two weekends have been massive adventures, and next weekend will be the same.
Instead of writing one or two motherboard novel-type blog posts, I'm going to try to break things up into at least semi-logical chunks & topics & we'll see how this goes.
(Also, please note that I am typing on my little iPod while riding through the mountains, so bad spelling and poor autocorrects may not be entirely my fault:)
Sometimes, I just have to laugh at the contradictions. I feel at home and out of place, I feel at peace and I long for more, I'm learning a language and still struggle to communicate, I see beautiful things and can't bring myself to even try to photograph or describe them. It's crazy and it's beautiful and it's life and I love it.
I am my father's daughter, and consequently process life the best with some classic folk-type music blasting through my earbuds and giving myself time to just 'be' (even if that means staying awake in a car full of very exhausted friends while winding through mountain roads and still calming down from the adrenaline-packed weekend).
Very brief overview of the past two weekends:
Last weekend, we got up very early on Saturday (like, 3am early) and took a bus to Guat city, took a plane up to the Peten area, rode on another bus, and made it to Tikal -- and went straight to jungle hiking, ruin climbing, history learning, adventure having craziness. Then, back on the bus, pit stop in Flores for ice cream, Peten airport, flight, dinner in Guat city, and driving back to Antigua. It was a crazy packed 18+ hour nonstop day, but worth every precious second of it.
Fast forward to this past weekend, where 12 of us girls hopped in a van at 2:00 on Friday for a weekend in Semuc Champey. What we were told was usually a 6-8 hour ride turned into 11+ hours due to a flat tire on mountain roads (which we just drove on even after it was VERY FLAT because Guatemala and rainforest and pitch black) and some really bad fog up in the mountains that had me holding into a handle in our can for dear life. Anyway, 1am and a 45 minute ride in the back of a pickup later (second to chicken buses for moving lots of people to remote places around here) we made it to the hostal, which was an adventure in itself (we lived on a second story, so walls = thatched roof inhabited by bugs). Saturday was a perfect day for experiencing everything semuc champey had to offer us, but that's another post for later when I can steal everyone's pictures to help me describe the inexplicable beauty.
Now, for what's been mulling on my heart...
Antigua is NOTHING like the rest of Guatemala. There's no one real concrete place that represents the country as a whole...from beaches to villages to the tourist center that is Antigua, to the chaos and crime of some of the zones in the capital and the remote hostels and coffee plantations to jungle hikes and cute little kids trying to sell you chocolate. There is no one Guatemala, but if I had to pick a single representation of the actual life of this country, behind the tourism veil, it would be the villages alongside these mountain roads.
Somehow impossibly nestled into the little nooks, crannies, and plateaus of hills and mountains dense with trees and history and mysteries I'll never understand, these little villages or 'pueblos' have my heart. Tour busses stop at bends in the road to photograph the little roofs of houses below and point like this country is a giant zoo... they drive around hoping to get glimpses of the inhabitants of an exhibit and some buy knickknacks out of pity or to remember a sight that they never really *saw.*
Maybe it's my social worker's heart that's just analyzing and feeling all of this so heavily, but it's sitting and turning and working in my heart. Eight years ago I got a tiny glimpse of heartbreaking urban poverty in Manila, the Philippines. It's easy to dismiss this rural poverty because it's not easy to see. It's not the barefoot kids in muddy clothes you see in movies...it's the mothers and daughters who walk hours for unsafe water, the violence that happens behind closed doors, the children pulled from school and put to work in the fields. It's girls marrying young to alleviate financial responsibility for them and the bare lightbulbs in the houses of those fortunate enough to have intermittent electricity. This poverty doesn't fit into photographs and tug at heart strings...it just is and that's hard.
And yet, I cannot just write so many off with the label of 'impoverished' and, in doing so, put myself in a position of authority in an 'us//them' relationship. This culture is so much more complex and beautiful and resilient than that. Each person, even the children, in these remote areas still carry themselves with a level of dignity and optimism that is so beautiful. Little kids wave when they see a group of gringos in the back of a truck like they've just seen a long-lost friend. They learn your names and remember then when you return 3 hours later. Many do hard, honest work with their hands. Mountains are lined with tiendas and restaurants and fields full of corn and coffee. They have so little, but they have so much, and it's impossible to convey this tension into a few sentences on a computer screen.
It's this distinction, this contrast in viewpoints coming from inside me, that's really stretching me.
The approach so many people take towards 'helping' is actually so damaging and degrading to a whole country of people trying to make sense of their history and preserve their (beautiful, but also very oppressed) culture. The violence, internal conflict, civil war, and genocide against indigenous persons that has ended only in the last 30 years (though continues in ideology, with wounds sill very real) has made this country complicated and resilient and strong. Anyone here over the age of 35 or so has personally experienced a season of living in fear, full of violence that may have ended, but ruled by corruption that still continues.
To send $20 in pity to an organization, to clear up a roadside or take a two week tourist/mission trip is the equivalent of less than a bandaid on a gunshot wound...you feel better because you've 'done,' something, but you have made no real impact in repairing the heart of the issue.
Things here run deep...culture, history, corruption...all of these things are integral to 'getting' this beautiful place.
People do not need handouts, they need hope.
I am far from having all of the answers. I don't have solutions planned...I have barely grasped the basics of the things that lay just below the surface here.
But I have been intentional in my choice to be more than a tourist. I don't want to arrive back in the states with a few more vocab words, lots of pretty pictures, and a couple souvenirs. I want to live and love and learn and consistently be fully present in every interaction I have here. I ask hard questions and I try to be content when the answers I get are messy. I try to go to tourist sights with eyes and heart open for more than just the attractions.
And that's all I can do, really.
I can try and I can be and do my best to leave everything else up to a God with a bigger scope than my human mind can handle...to leave my heart and this country in the hands of the One who formed the mountains and beauty all around me, the One with the biggest heart for His dear children, whose Justice never fails, even long after my little heart and hands have given up.