End of the Alphabet with Julie Zimmer

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Messaging the Great Beyond

Sue, my friend from Elkader, arrived in Guatemala

just in time for a field trip best described as (Vinton's) Party in the Park .....

........ and Memorial Day,

all rolled into one.

On November 1, the Day of the Dead, the people of the villages of Santiago and Sumpango fly vibrant tissue paper kites, large and small, to honor their dead.

Brian drove us to Santiago where we parked in someone's yard as if it was a Hawk game in Iowa City. Later we paid to use the family's toilet, a simple cement throne in an out building near our car.

But first we wound our way through the streets....

.....past fair vendors (this is something medicinal, I think)...

......to join families in the cemetery who spent the day cleaning up graves....

......decorating with flowers.....

....picncking.....

......and of course, flying kites.

This should be the featured photo with this post .. the cell phone company advertisement next to the old school message to the great beyond.

Brian, Sue and I...

..... climbed atop a tomb for a great view.

Traditionally it takes 40 days to build the kites, the first day marked by the village's unmarried men heading out to the coast at 4:00 am to laboriously collect bamboo for the kite frames, some measuring over 60 feet in diameter.

Community and family groups work for months, cutting and pasting. The glue is a mixture of yucca flower, lemon peel, and water, ropes are made of the maguey plant (the plant that also brings us tequila), and the tails are made from woven cloth.

The kites have portraits and messages to or about deceased family members (below, the words read "there is no other love on earth as great as that of a mother") and slogans about issues like caring for the environment or women’s rights.

Below, the quetzal, their maginifcent national bird.

The groups who have created the kites assemble them onto the frames and attempt to fly their kites in the later afternoon. Families and children fly smaller kites together as well, running between graves to get them up in the air and suffering crashes that can be somewhat fatal to their carefully built kites. Bystanders learn to duck!

These kite celebrations have been around for 3,000 years and are recognized by various religious sects. Locals believe it is a tool for communicating with the beyond.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Learning the Language

Below, you will find Antigua, very near Guatemala City

in the south central state of Sacatepequez (say that five times real fast).

What do you call someone who knows two languages?

Bilingual.

Three languages?

Trilingual.

One language?

A gringo. Or gringa, as the case may be.

My first impulse was to answer, "An American," but being in Central America introduced a paradigm shift. Guatemalans have been Americans forever, we are the new kids on the block.

In and around Antigua the people I met spoke Spanish (and maybe English, German, etc, depending on their country of origin).

The estimated 35,000 indigenous people of the Guatemalan highlands mostly converse in any one of 22 other Mayan languages. Sue and I spent four days in the small village of El Hato, 7 KM above Antigua, where the Spanish-speaking Mayan children attending a summer school daycamp were learning Kaqchikel, a local heritage language.

So my second week (after Van left and before Sue Gnagy joined me) I took two-hour daily language lessons at a school in Antigua named after and near a landmark old church, San Jose el Viejo. '

Almost everything in Antigua is viejo (old) because it is the earliest European city on the continent. And Antigua is a great place to learn Spanish because Guatemalans reportedly speak more slowly than Mexicans, so there are many schools to pick from.

Isobel and I met in a carrel in the courtyard and talked, (mostly) in Spanish,

every afternoon.

We talked a blue streak as she helped me with the presentation (in Spanish) I was working on for a Lions Club (more about that later) and told me about her life and her hopes for her country, asking me many questions as well.

We covered culure, politics, education, our families, economics, favorite pastimes, history ... I can't begin to tell you how much I learned in addition to excercising my rusty high school language skills.

Isobel is evidently Mayan, more educated than average, younger than me, with a hard working husband and two young adult children (one prepared to teach but with no job, the other hoping to pursue post secondary education and looking for a job as a cook), living in part of her grandparents' home on the far side of Antigua with other extended family. She was worried about her grandfather, in his 80s, whose taxi was now beyond repair, because there is no such thing as retirement in her country.

Some of her questions: were my glasses acquired new or used (we talked about vision due to Lions presentation) and were they bifocals? She was surprised during a conversation about Reach Out and Read (again from the slide presentation) to learn that there are U.S. Americans who don't know how to read.

But mostly she was discouraged about the corruption in her country that prevents tax money (and foreign aid) from reaching the schools and people. She estimated 80 percent goes into the pockets of the President and government officials.

This sentiment and statistic was echoed by a later encounter with a wealthy Ladino (a person of Spanish descent, not Mayan). Everything I had read about the class divide between the two groups came into sharper focus on my journey, but they both said the corruption at the highest (and lowest) levels of government was criminal.

And during our lesson I managed to drop my i-pad on the tile floor, crazing the screen into a maze of splinters. It still worked, and my slide show presentation about Vinton and our Lions Club was intact.

I was humbled by knowing I could afford to get it fixed, when a simple paper BINGO game at the Bodegona was beyond the reach of even educated working people's budgets, and an education and a paying job are beyond the reach of so many.

We in the U.S. are muy (mimados?) privilegiado/privileged/spoiled, but I guess that goes without saying.

Tomorrow: Sue and Julie's big adventures in Antigua, El Hato and Chimaltenango.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Kid Time & Kodak Moments

I thought I would blog while I was there, Ha Ha. But better late than never. More installment coming after this one, the final chapters will go into Big Picture experiences, what I learned about Guatemala and its people. But for now, here's a family story, if you'd like to be a mouse in the corner.

Brian and Denise live in Villa Santa Catarina Bobadilla, a gated neighborhood next to the pueblo of S.C.Bobadilla, a basic (translate very poor) community with corrugated tin houses and live poultry (translate: roosters crowing in the early morning).

They are maybe four of miles outside of Antigua. There are maybe thirty-five houses on the loop. You can get there by chicken bus, slightly more expensive but equally packed with people van/bus if one happens by, car, or by toot toot cab I suppose, over the hand-built cobblestone streets.

They took us to fabulous restaurants in and above Antigua. Stunning views. Incredibly fresh food, well prepared, graciously served. And we spent some time with them at home.

Denise: Stella and Junie;