Many Small People, In Many Small Places…A Sojourn in Guatemala
By Anushi Sivarajah
[monsoonJournal.com]This spring, I set out for Guatemala with twelve other students from my university on a trip coordinated Global Youth Network, a non-profit Christian organization. For four weeks, we traveled to several different locations, immersing ourselves in the culture, the language and the prevailing ways of life. Among many other opportunities, we had the chance to visit mountain villages and orphanages, paint buildings, attend Spanish school, hear firsthand accounts of the brutalities spawned by the civil war and live with a community of ex-guerrilla members. We came across people from the international scene who are devoting their time to making many small but potent changes in attempt to heal the country’s damaged social infrastructure. Among them were a Canadian family heading an initiative to drill free wells in rural areas and volunteers participating in teaching projects that encourage lateral thinking over rote memorization. But what ultimately became the most valuable part of our cultural experience was the interaction we shared with the locals.
On our first day in Jalapa, we met a family doing laundry in the Contaminated laguna (lake) behind our house
Communicating was difficult at first. There wasn’t a single member on our team who had any prior knowledge of Spanish. Without a formal translator, it was up to us to learn the language through exchanges with the locals, who knew very few words of English themselves. It was exasperating to find ourselves forgetting the same essential travelers’ phrases time and time again. Still, these feelings of frustration would quickly dissipate whenever we engaged in actual conversation with the people we met. They all possessed a wonderful kind of persistence, in that they would not allow our lack of Spanish to get in the way of our communication. Fervent gestures and sign language often punctuated our conversations, whose purposes quickly became clear. In a country where silence was practiced and ignorance prevailed among the government-fearing public, being able to tell one’s story to a willing listener was a rarity, an opportunity that one could not afford to miss.
Guatemala’s 36-year civil war came to an official close in 1996. The war marked a period of genocide led by the then-ruling government against the indigenous Mayans and resulted in over 200,000 deaths. Bent on evicting the rural population from its rightful land, the government employed countless vicious tactics on its part. The most notorious was the “Scorched Earth” campaign, in which the national army recklessly invaded villages, set on torturing the men and children, raping the women and mutilating pregnant mothers. Having carried out their massacre, they would go on to burn down the village, literally leaving nothing but ’scorched earth’ in their wake. Over four hundred villages were destroyed in this manner.
Some of the children we met after a day of hiking
Some of the political players involved in these heinous war crimes have managed to re-integrate themselves back into society - back into the world of politics, even. The country is no stranger to political corruption. Candidates for election will often visit rural areas offering bags of free food provisions (usually corn) to the villagers, in an effort to put themselves in the good graces of the voters.
Our trip to Guatemala happened to coincide with the chaos that precedes any federal election; political propaganda was spray-painted shamelessly across mountainsides, buildings and on roadside boulders, while billboards bearing the faces of the contenders loomed tall in the cities.
Political campaigning in the city of Jalapa
At a Sunday church service we attended in our first week, a pastor addressed the upcoming elections and the ploys used by politicians aiming to secure rural votes. He urged the congregation to look past the free gifts. Politicians who approached them in such a manner were likely the ones caught up in drug trafficking and dealings with serious criminals, he warned. He emphasized the importance of inquiring about these politicians, finding out what ideals they stood for and making an informed choice. He reminded them that the kindness these politicians showed on voting day could quickly evaporate once elections were through.
Ultimately, he was encouraging his congregation members to step into the loop of political consciousness, to put aside their physical isolation from the urban core and to take an active interest in keeping the politically corrupt in check. The act was a touching reminder of what it means to be socially responsible.
* * *
Our first ten days were spent in the mountains. Nestled in its foothills was the city of Jalapa where, we were assured on the day of our arrival, Internet cafes and marketplaces abounded. We stayed with a Canadian man named Ted Van Der Zalm and his family, who had been in the country since the autumn of 2006. Their project, Wells of Hope, was founded several years ago with the intent of providing free, accessible drinking water to the people of Guatemala.
In rural areas, it’s all too common that within a community, a single lake or river will serve as a communal place to bathe, do laundry and collect water for drinking and cooking purposes. This water is further polluted by excrement from grazing animals.
Having completed some irrigation projects in Africa, Ted Van Der Zalm was approached by Guatemalan missionaries who implored him to help refine their own irrigation systems. He quickly realized that what many communities were lacking was a permanent source of clean water - and thus sprung Wells of Hope. Every year, the family raises enough funds to drill more wells. The Van Der Zalms relocate to Guatemala until all projects are completed, after which they return to Canada to fundraise for the following year.
Ted ensured that we were always engaged in some kind of activity that involved getting a feel for the extent of need in rural areas. One day, he brought us along with him as he set out to inspect some recent drill sites. The hikes to the actual wells involved steep, uphill climbs and were a part of the local people’s regular walking routines. Ted reminded us that while we were walking bare-handed, the villagers would often bear heavy loads on their backs and, in the case of young mothers, would have to carry their infants along with them.
He continued to throw us anecdotes and tidbits of information that served the collective function of delivering us a forceful reality check. The underlying theme was to stop taking everything we encountered at face value. As we walked, he spoke to us on the importance of perspective. When you see a woman walking down a path like this, he would explain, think of how far she’s already walked, how far she has to go, how heavy the load she’s carrying on her head is, how intensely the sun is beating down, the family she must provide for, how long she’s been awake for and how long it will be until she can call it a day.
It does change things for you. We’re already so desensitized to images of suffering and human labor. It’s important, then, to put things into perspective and to try to understand the contexts people are living in.
As you train yourself to think in this manner, you become all the more appreciative of those simple acts of kindness and generosity that are directed your way.
Ted had told us, countless times before, that eating meat was a luxury in many of the villages that we were visiting; in fact, it was usually a once-a-month occurrence.
In the course of one of our hikes, as a teammate and I were turning a corner, a woman called out to us from the back of her house. We stopped, unsure of what she had said. She quickly ran out to meet us, holding a stack of tortillas wrapped in the trademark, vibrantly-colored Mayan cloth - and piled neatly on top of the first tortilla were several small pieces of cooked chicken meat.
It may not sound like much, but after Ted’s constant reminders about meat being much more difficult for these people to afford, I found it a little overwhelming that she was offering her food to us so willingly and for no apparent reason. Unfortunately, our command of the Spanish language was still quite weak. We smiled at her, thanked her as profusely as we could, and patted our stomachs, trying to indicate that we had already eaten. That wasn’t the issue, of course; it just didn’t feel right to take away from her already low ration of food. And still, she persisted, eventually relenting with a smile and a few parting words.
Fortunately, continued interaction with the locals enabled the eventual dissolve of this language barrier. Later that week, Ted split the team into three and dropped each group off at a different village. The intent was to give us a glimpse of ‘a day in the life.’
We were dropped off at the village of Aldea San Francisco, where we were led around on a house-by-house tour. Every building was made of sun-baked bricks of mud and corrugated tin roofs. Every family seemed to consist of a few matriarchs and numerous children. The men were out working the fields, we were told, and they would not return until very late.
As we moved through the village, we began to acquire a whispering, giggling posse; it continued to grow as we left one house and entered the next. The children of Aldea San Francisco trailed us with mighty resilience, as if we were a gang of Pied Pipers spiriting them away.
We got rained in at one point. We all gathered around on the cement porch; a couple of the children were kicking a soccer ball around, while others were lining up for pictures and then clustering around digital cameras to view the results.
More children from Aldea San Francisco; 12-year-old Tulio in the gray Adidas
I’d made myself a friend on the walk to this house: he was a twelve-year-old boy named Tulio. As we waited the rain out, Tulio took it upon himself to teach me some Spanish. He pointed out various objects on the porch, had me repeat their names before moving on to more, and took me through basic colours, numbers and adjectives. He was incredibly persistent. If I couldn’t wrap my head around the pronunciation of a certain word, Tulio would spell it out for me, simultaneously pointing to the letters on my shirt to ensure that I was following. He was a teacher with wonderful patience; he never once seemed to get bored of the initiative he had taken on. It touched me that while his friends were clearly having a good time playing soccer, he had instead chosen to help me out.
* * *
We spent the fourth and final week of our trip in the community of Nuevo Horizonte. There were some misgivings about how this leg of the trip would wind up; all we knew was that the community had been developed by ex-guerrilla members. We had spent our third week in the upscale city of Xela, where we attended Spanish school and comfortably discussed the history of the civil war over coffee with our language instructors. And now, we were on the verge of meeting the people who had taken on hefty roles in this still-volatile part of Guatemalan history.
Fortunately, our apprehension turned out to be in vain. The community itself had only been developed eight years ago. Very soon after the war ended, a group of former guerrilla members acquired about nine hundred hectares of land, as per the terms signed in the final peace accords. Of course, tensions between the government and the guerrilla were still rife, and the fact that their new plot of land was treeless and desolate came as no surprise to the future settlers of Nuevo Horizonte. Undeterred, they devised an organizational hierarchy by which the community would be run. They agreed that their most economically sound option would be to function as a cooperative. This way, the income generated from the numerous projects they were planning could be circulated evenly amongst the community members, and the massive gap that typically separates the rich from the poor in Guatemala would be denied the chance to emerge.
The Nuevo Horizonte cooperative has continued to flourish beautifully since its inception. Having finally received land of their own, the community members were anxious to start moving forward. Their determination to recoup their losses has brought them a long way from the position the war left them in. They are recognized locally and internationally for their equality-based cooperative system and their self-sufficiency. Together, they envisioned, planned out and brought into action a whole slew of initiatives to sustain their economy and the well-being of their people, including fish farming, reforestation and eco-tourism projects, agricultural ventures and an alternative high school education programme. Their excitement for the future of their community is a palpable kind and is definitely justified in its existence. While their past was a bitter one, they have effectively closed that chapter of their lives. They have risen to the challenge of starting over with real strength and obvious competence.
* * *
The trip in its entirety made for a very rich and diversified learning experience. Even now - over a month after returning to Canada - I still find that my thoughts are very much occupied by the people I met.
A building painted by volunteers in Nuevo Horizonte
In spite of their troubles, they radiated a tangibly positive energy. Their determination to preserve their rich culture and history, to fight for their rights and to have their voices carried to places they couldn’t physically reach through foreigners like ourselves burned fervently. In Nuevo Horizonte, I saw a building painted by former volunteers, inscribed with the words “Muchas pequenas personas, en muchos pequenos lugares, haciendo muchas pequenas cosas….pueden cambiar el mundo”
In English, “Many small people, in many small places, doing many small things….can change the world” - simple words that, I believe, complement the nature of the Guatemalans in the most perfect way possible. [monsoonJournal.com]
Anushi Sivarajah is a Canadian of Tamil heritage, she is currently studying Health Sciences at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.