On my way to the cloud forests

I'm pretty excited about a trip that I go out on tomorrow. I will be picked up in Coban by a Mayan guide who will take me by bus, pick-up, and a long hike to his house up in the mountains where I'll spend three days and two nights with his family in their village. I am told that at least one of the men of the household will be able to speak a little bit of Spanish, but the rest of the family probably only speak the Mayan Q'eqchi' language of their ancient ancestors.

The group who organizes this trip is interesting. On the bus ride from Flores to Coban, I saw hundreds of miles of burned down forest. In order to survive, this has become a regularly practiced method to gain more farmland for growing corn. Rather than acting as a standard protest organization that scolds desperate people for attempting to survive, PEQ has given the indigenous people alternatives. The group aids them in developing “low environmental impact” or eco-tourism as well as a few money makers such as producing candles for sale.

Here is a small description of the trip I’m taking:

http://www.ecoquetzal.org/eco_chic.asp

There are also links here that describe the group’s philosophy a bit better.

Three days in home of a Mayan family

I took an opportunity to spend two nights with a Mayan family in the what is referred to as a cloud forest because at the high altitude, the hills wake up misty and foggy every morning. The program is run by a non-profit organization that tries to find alternative income opportunities for the rural poor. It consists of about 30 homes that rotate hosting interested tourists, which seems to average out to each family hosting someone about every two months.

The first morning of my excursion, I was met in the city of Coban by a Mayan man, Guillermo, 33 years old, who would be my host and guide for the weekend. He and I took a 20-minute bus ride to the smaller town of Carchá, where we bought an hour-an-a-half ride standing in the back of a cargo truck with about 25 other people on the way out to his home near the village of Chicacnab.

Upon arrival at Guillermo’s home, I was immediately greeted by his three boys – Walter, 7, Minor, 6, and Wilson, 3. Clearly knowing nothing but love in their lives (and as I would find out not having much more than that), they ran up to me with their arms extended for me to pick them up. The skeleton-thin family dog was nearby eating from his large bowl of black beans. After playing with the children a few minutes, I was invited inside of the wooden, tin-roofed home, where I was served fresh-squeezed, steaming-hot, heavily-sweetened limeade.

The inside of the home was divided into the sleeping area with a twin bed on each side of front door, and the kitchen off to the left side. The three boys used one bed, and the parents generally slept in the bed I would use, but these two nights, my hosts slept in a hammock hanging in the kitchen. The kitchen is dominated by a large wooden box about five-feet-square and two feet high, located in the center of the room. The box is filled to the top with hardened mud and serves as a stove and counter. A stick fire burns on this counter for most of the day and night and heats a large pot of water used to prepare most of our food and drinks. Hanging above the stove were a few small pieces of smoked meat. Guillermo explained that after harvesting his corn crop in September and October, he stores the family's annual supply in the attic above the smoke-charred ceiling. Then, he makes a much larger fire on the earthen countertop and smokes the corn dry. The corn serves as their primary food source for the following year, and it is always consumed in the form of tortillas. Since it was nearing harvest time while I was there, we were eating off of the small stash remaining from last year’s crop that was stacked on the floor in a corner of the kitchen.

The first night, Guillermo’s wife, Maria, age 30, served us mashed black beans, scrambled eggs, thick corn tortillas, and coffee at a candlelit dinner. (Actually, Maria went by her second name that consists of at least five syllables, each of sounds that my mouth is not trained to recreate.) Neither Maria , nor the children spoke Spanish, only K’iche Maya. During dinner, Guillermo explained to me that the youngest child of a family generally inherits his or her parent’s home and the responsibility to stay there and care for their aging parents. His family farm, or milpa, had been divided into three equal lots – one used by his mother and sister, another occupied by his brother, and finally, his. He has five other siblings, who have moved off of the family’s land, but still nearby.

I tried to explain that in some families in the United States when a child turns 18, they are expected to either move out of their parents’ home or get a job and start to pay rent. This was shocking to them, and we began to repeat a cycle of conversation: Guillermo would translate everything that I said to his wife, her jaw would drop, she’d ask him if he really understood me correctly, he would repeat back to me what I had told him to confirm my meaning, and then he’d assure his wife of what I said. They simply couldn’t imagine a situation when a parent would kick-out or ask for money from a child.
Guillermo only had two years of schooling in his lifetime and is self-taught to speak and read Spanish. Having had no exposure to education, television, movies, or books, some of their questions at first seemed surprisingly basic to me with inquiries such as, “Is the United States as big as Guatemala?” In another conversation, I was asked if it was the same time of day in the United States. They knew to ask this question because they had hosted Europeans in their home as part of this program in the past and knew that the time was different in Europe. When I answered, “Yes, but there are four different time zones in the United States.”, they became bewildered and tried to imagine why.

That night a town elder came by the house to invite the family along on his semi-annual pilgrimage to leave offerings in a cave considered sacred by many generations of his family. Since part of the program is to take me on a hike the second day, we accepted. This turned out to be an amazing experience that demonstrated again how the modern Mayans have accepted Christianity, but have not actually abandoned their ancient traditions. Early the next morning, the town elder, Guillermo, the two older boys, and I set out on a steep, strenuous four-hour hike up out of the corn fields and into the virgin forest. The forest was damp and green with more types of fern than could be imagined – big-small, curly-flat, thick-thin – as well as beautiful, wild orchids and lots of birds.

When we reached our destination, the elder, Guillermo, and I climbed up and into the cave with our candles. Inside, Guillermo translated the elder’s explanations of how his family believes that the entire Mayan world is represented by the stalactites, stalagmites, and other formations within this cave. They pointed out ears of corn, different types of beans, squash, fruits, and animals that they imagined in the ceiling and walls.

After a few minutes of elderly confusion trying to identify the right path and spot where he was supposed to make his offering, the old man laid out chunks of raw chicken and beef. As part of the ritual, he doused the meat with alcohol, took a swig for himself, and then set the meat on fire. From the thick layer of soot coating every surface within the cave, I could imagine that these acts had been carried out for many, many years; if the elder was right, perhaps over a thousand years! And, then came the bizarre twist…. Guillermo and the old man started their Christian prayers to Jesus Christ right there in the cave over the flaming offerings in the practice of their ancient ancestors to Mayan deities.

Following the ritual, we started the mostly downhill hike home. In the days before arriving in Chicacnab, I was experiencing stomach problems (yet again). I thought they were over since I had no problems the day before, but they came back with a vengeance at a really inconvenient time. I had to make the tough trek back down with cramps and stomach pains. As soon as we made it home, I rested for an hour before dinner.

That night, we had meat-broth soup served with a plate of a potato-like-but-stringy vegetable, cabbage, and a small piece of the smoked meat that had been hanging from the ceiling the night before. In the evenings, the smoke in the house from the kitchen fire burned my eyes so badly that I could not control my heavy tears, so I went to bed by 8PM where I could squeeze my eyes shut to keep out the thick smoke.

The rest of this story might belong filed away under “too much information”, so read on with care…. By the second night, I was already feeling that I was into something that was beyond my voluntary tolerance level. With a dirt floor, food piled in the corner, and kids, chickens, and dogs coming and going through the house, nothing seemed clean. In the evening candlelight, small roaches crawled everywhere. As soon as I finished using a dish and sat it on the earthen kitchen counter, a dozen roaches were finding my leftovers. Guillermo and the kids would just pick them up and move them off of the dining table, usually throwing them into the kitchen fire. When Maria moved the boiling water pot, and put down her giant steel, shallow, sort-of-wok that she uses to cook tortillas, the roaches running around the rim fell down into the fire.

I describe this not to give a bad impression of the family, but to try to give an accurate impression of the conditions. To their credit, Maria scrubs every dish before using it, and the kids know to go outside to the trickling water tap to rinse their hands before every meal. Guillermo works extra jobs to afford materials for construction of a concrete home that he is building himself. When finished, the new home will serve solely for sleeping quarters, while the old home will be used to store and cook food. They certainly do their best with what they have, and Guillermo works hard to improve the family’s living conditions and assures that his children go to full-time school.

If you’re still with me, I’ll give you a second warning that you may not want to read on…. That night, my misery really began. My stomach was on full scale revolt probably carried over from the days prior to arriving, but certainly not helped by the current conditions. I made several urgent trips in the night to the community latrine that was located about five minutes away, through the cornfield, down the road, and back into another cornfield. I can’t (don’t want to) imagine a much worse place for me to be sick. The latrine was a 4-foot-high shed with a wooden seat built above a pit. The night was long and miserable. Every time I got up, I would have to brush the roaches off of my backpack before opening it to reach my toilet paper. (Thankfully, the tourist organization had put toilet paper on my list of items to bring. Otherwise, the family members pulled a couple strips of newspaper off a nail near the door on their way down the hill.)

I couldn’t wait for morning when I could get a truck ride back to the city at 6AM. The only comfort I had was that the weather was cool enough so I could escape deep into my sleeping bag when not trekking the cornfield through the night. As soon as I got back to the city of Coban, I checked into a hotel room with a very clean, private bathroom, and slept off the rest of the day.

I have waited a little time before writing of this experience to make sure that I wrote it with a fresh perspective. The day I left the village, I was asking myself the same question that my friend Marvin emailed me about my lost backpack the other day, “And this is supposed to be fun?” I don’t have a straight-forward answer to his question. I am enjoying all of these experiences, as uncomfortable as they seem at the time, but I’m still torn on this one. I would not recommend it to anyone else, and I’m not so sure that I would do it again, but somehow, I feel that I must have learned something from the experience. I just can’t yet tell you what.