Exhumations

You must forgive me once more a small change in narration style. The events of the day I am writing about demand a more direct approach. As I sit here, the sun on my back, little birds chirping outside my house I am shocked to find myself morbid. This is not due to where I am now however, it has everything to do with the events of which I intend to write.

A story like this is best told from the beginning.

 In 1974 the killing began. Whole villages slaughtered and piled into their well, which the military filled in on top of them. Women forced to watch their children die, infants bashed against trees and thrown in to the well first, their bones crushed to dust under the weight of the rest of their village. This continued until 1993.

 In the city there were more kidnappings than killings, people were being taken from their homes, from the streets and haven’t been seen or heard from since.  People began to congregate outside of hospitals and morgues searching desperately for their loved ones.  After a time they banded together, knowing that unified they stood a better chance of finding answers.

 This is how FAMDEGUA began.

 Once translated FAMDEGUA stands for Family of Disappeared and Detained in Guatemala. Their mission; to find all 45,000 people who are still missing and put to trial those responsible.

 When it became clear the police had little interest in helping find the missing people, FAMDEGUA went to churches and embassies, trying to get someone to listen to them. Finally a representative of amnesty international caught wind of their story. With the help of the French ambassador they were able to spread the word to the international community of the injustice taking place with in Guatemala.

 Since then four soldiers and one general have been convicted of their crimes and are now spending 30 years in jail for each person they killed. 6,030 years each.

 In 1993 the first exhumations of mass graves began, funded by FAMDEGUA. We visited one such sight.

  As you walk through the door, the smell is unmistakable. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled it before, if I have I cannot remember, however I know instantly what it was, the smell of rotting human flesh. In front of me, there are three person sized canvas bag lying on the floor. I try not to imagine what is inside. Beyond the bags, a huge gaping hole in the ground, the source of the smell.

 I keep my eyes on the young man speaking to us, trying to look nowhere but him, afraid of what I might find should my eyes stray.

 To my displeasure, I can not help but see the tables piles with human bones, the mountain of trash bags containing pieces of 200,000 people.

 I can not handle this. My tears streaming from my face I turn from the sight, walk back to the van, sit down, and cry.

 

My whole body shaking with sobs, my mind with a question; how can human beings allow this to happen?

 

Do you know?

La Esperanza

Left to right: Pat (student on the trip), Founding member of Upavim, me

I awake for the third time this trip to a series of loud bangs. I open my eyes to see someone standing outside our window banging on the door, its past time to get up, we’re running late. I jump out of bed, get ready as fast as humanly possible and run to breakfast. Everyone has almost finished eating. Part way through breakfast I realize my back is aching.

After breakfast we load into the van for three of the most uncomfortable hours of my life. I fight with my seat in the van, trying to get comfortable or at least sit someway that doesn’t aggravate my sore back. The worst part about today is that I am not the only one haggard. Everyone it seems is sick or tired or sore except our guides and teachers who still positively vibrate with energy.

We finally arrive in back in Guatemala City, which with its crowds, traffic, and pollution does little to cheer me up, however getting out of the van is a blessing.

After a short lunch it’s back in the van to visit UPAVIM, which once translated stands for United for a Better Life. Upon arrival, there are two little girls standing directly outside the doors of our van, and as we pile out, they each insist on giving each of us a hug. In that moment, my back pain vanished, and my spirits lifted.

UPAVIM is a women’s organization located in la Ezperanza, a suburb if you will, of Guatemala City. In 1983 these women had no place to go, and so they settled on the empty lands around the city. They built plastic shelters here out of things they could find laying about. There was no running water, no plumbing at all, and when they tried to farm chickens the flies made it impossible. The attitude of the surrounding people only made things worse. No one would sell them water from the surround neighborhoods. The only access they had to water was off the trucks, who would sell the women a single bucket of water for 10 Q. Which is a lot. And so they filtered their black water the best they could to wash clothes and themselves.

After years of this, attention was finally drawn to the area. The World Bank bought the land and divided it up into 6 by 10 meter plots, one for each family. With funds from the World Bank the women built real houses, streets and drains.

UPAVIM began as a small group of women who met to discuss the needs of the community; they also ran a small clinic. Once the group reached 30 women they were asked to form a legal organization, so they did. And now there are 75 women who help run three main projects.

Education;

They run a cheap day care/primary school so that working mothers may have somewhere to leave their kids during the day. They also run a scholarship program for older children so they can go to high school. They’ve supplied 430 students with higher education since they began.

Health;

They run a small clinic with reliable medicine and a real doctor from the city, and also a small lab where they can run medical tests and things of that nature.

Business;

So how does all this happen? The women also spend a large majority of their time on three business projects. The first is a small bakery which turns our delicious bread and sweet breads every day. The second is a kitchen where they make soy products, mostly milk, ice cream, yogurt, and oatmeal. And the Third is the Handicraft project where the women make things out of recycled materials to sell to tourists. These three projects together make enough money for the rest of the organization to run. Although they still rely heavily on donations.

To learn more about UPAVIM visit their website, http://www.upavimcrafts.org/

We thank the women for sharing their time and their story with us and pile back into our van.

Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala

We stand under the sun, a blue clear lake and 3 majestic volcanoes to our back. In front of us, at five feet tall maximum, stands our guide for the day. Her smile, in contrast to her stature is large and proud, to match her voice. We all pile into the back of a pickup truck and are jostled through the streets to the square where the church stands.

And here is where I must rather regretfully intrude a moment on my own narration because admittedly, this day made small impact on me. I’ll admit further that really only two things even linger in my mind anymore almost a month home from my journey, the first one is this guys pants:

The birds and the purple are a style specific to this town. Most beautiful piece of clothing i've ever seen

The second was our guide for the day. I have never seen so much love or light coming from a single person. She smiled ten feet wide. Short as she is, I would never have noticed if I didn’t have to look down to speak to her. She stands and walks and talks like someone much taller. She is free from the limitation of her flesh and her confidence was invigorating.

Near the end of our day, i am looking through a box of pins and neat trinkets made by local women and an especially lovely piece caught my eye. A pin with a  purple glass bead set among little beads, with three small faceted dark purple stones set above it. I turn to our guide for the day and ask her what sort of crystal they are.

“You like crystals?’ she asks, removing a small pouch from her belt. She opens it, revealing several crystals.  I take out my own pouch and we show each other our crystals. She is fascinated by my malachite, apparently it’s not common in Guatemala. I feel instantly close to her, like i’ve known her forever, like we have many many stories to share.

The rest of the group is shouting at me, the truck is waiting.

I turn to tell our Guide goodbye,

“Keep them with you, they will keep you safe”  she says, and points at my crystal pouch. They haven’t left my side since.

Panajachel

We sit in a circle in the kitchen of our new guest house, this one in Panajachel on the banks of Lake Atitlan. Amongst us sits an ex-guerilla fighter. He takes a moment to tell us about himself and also to outline the conflict that ravaged Guatemala. For years multinational corporations have been taking lands form indigenous people without compensating them for it. Without these lands people have no way to feed themselves or their families. This type of hunger leads to social distress. Without a voice in the government, the local people did the only thing they could to make a stand; take up arms. This movement was met from tremendous fear from the government and resulted in 440 indigenous communities wiped out and 200,000 people dead.

 

With a smile in his eyes he told us this, “The Guerilla movement started in our hearts against the state of injustice. A state indifferent to hunger, to poverty. So to understand this movement is to see your neighbor suffering, to be able to see the injustice around you and want to change that. The last step is to be willing to give yourself up to change it. The movement came from people throughout the community; students, farmers. The main force behind the fighting was internal. There was so much injustice a lot of people were motivated to change it. The revolutionary movement within a person brings them to a higher level. You have to be willing to give up your home, your family, in order to change the country. We gave up college, family, good jobs and friends. Whole communities moved for this change. This movement generates the motivation. We were lacking food, shoes, medicine. And there is an enemy down there and he’s looking for us. You don’t join a war on instinct; it’s not only extreme on the body, but also on the mind, you must learn what’s going on in your country, in the world. You also must explore what happened with big companies, other countries in your country. It’s the most complete college I could have had.”

 

He spent 20 years in the jungle fighting for his people, and was part of the group that sign peace agreements with the government; the URNG, which means National Guatemalan revolutionary Unity. The URNG consist of former guerilla fighters that formed a legal political party. He was later elected to congress.

 

When asked if he felt he did more good as a guerilla fighter or congressman, he told us that he feels he did more good in the jungle.

 

After his twenty years in the jungle someone asked him what he was going to do, he told them the he was going to fight for twenty more years after that.

Chichicastenango, Guatemala

Amanda, Amber, Mckenzie, Me, Julia, Goloria, on the top of our hotel in Chichicastenango

I wake in the early hours of the morning to a series of loud bangs and a jolt of adrenaline. I lay there for several seconds trying to form a coherent thought. The first hints of morning are just now starting to creep into the window. Julia and Amanda are still sleeping. The building is not shaking, no one is screaming, and so I decide the noise could have either been a car backfiring directly underneath the window, or a firework. In either case I shut my eyes and fall promptly back to sleep.

When I wake next it is to another bang, only the origin of this one is immediately apparent, someone is knocking at the door. It’s time to get up.

Out on the streets under the sunshine, we are greeted with a mob of sensations. The smell of mangos and pineapples and corn and raw meats and flowers and incents. There are make-shift booths lining the streets for as far as the eye can see. Each stacked high with colorful treasures; weavings, carvings, shirts, pants, hammocks, intricate beading, duffle bags, bootlegged C.Ds and movies, batteries, anything you could imagine. There are two distinct groups of people; those that are selling wares, the locals, none of them stand any taller than myself, most are a head shorter at least. The others are buying, these are all clearly tourists, and they come in every size and shape, each speaking a different language. Together the two groups along with the clucking of the chickens is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

We dive into the throng of people weaving our way past women with huge sacks atop their heads, men with large bundles on their backs held in place by a single strap across their forehead, and children; arms laden with everything from pens wrapped in fabric to head bands and scarves to candy and gum to little beaded animals on key chains.

This market place is a strain on the ears and the eyes, everywhere I turn there is more to process. Bangs like the one that woke me the night before go off every so often, making me jump every time without fail. On one such occasion I look up at the shop owner I am bargaining with and inquire to the nature of the noise. He laughs and says “bombs.” Sure the term means something else to him I ask Gloria, the only Spanish speaker among us, to talk with him. “Like firecrackers,” she tells me after a moment “they do it every Sunday to celebrate their saint.”

By eleven, my senses cannot handle the market anymore.  Too much color, too many smells, too many people, not enough space. Having emptied my wallet into the local economy, I retreat to the peace of our hotel to pack away all my new treasures before lunch. 

 

Guatemala, Chontala

The van trundles up the mountain, switch back after switch back after switch back. Painted all over the rocks that line the highway are the symbols and initials of the prominent political parties of Guatemala, a different one each couple of yards. All hastily spray painted. Out the other window the majestically lush hills of the highlands slide past. Farms, shanties, empty bottles, food wrappers, skinny live stock, the smell of burning garbage, dirty children and women with tanned and wrinkled faces; each with a smile on their face. Through all of this, a feeling of strange and wild beauty.

Our van turns down a dirt track and trundles along for several minutes before we arrive at our destination, Chontala. We proceed on foot through a corn field and down a steep hill until we arrive at a small, but cozy home. It is square, made of cement, and smells of something delicious. We walk through a short hallway and emerge onto a covered back porch. Hanging on parallel clothes lines around the perimeter of the porch are weavings of every size, and color, and pattern, each more beautiful than the last. Together they make up the most vibrant walls I’ve ever seen. Each piece was hand-made on a back-strap loom by one of the women in this town.

Each one of these innocent women was personally affected by the war. Most lost husbands or sons or fathers, but some lost their entire family. Left with no one and no way to support them self the women went to the church seeking help. However the church had also fallen victim to the military, surviving a bombing and poverty as extreme as the women’s. What the church did have however was thread, which it donated to the women so they may make clothes and bags and journals, and all kinds of beautiful things to sell. In this way the Ruth & Naomi project begun.(Want to see more? http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/8810)Despite all their troubles and the material poverty they live in these women have lights in their eyes. The moment we arrive they smile at us. They share their personal trials with us, each story heart breaking and inspiring. They do not cry, they simply tell about what once was, eager to share. The hope and the happiness in these women’s eyes is what I’ve come to see.  I just want to know that people, despite dire circumstances, still are happy.
Once the stories are told, the ladies reveal to us the source of the delicious aroma; the best fried chicken I have ever eaten and soft warm hand-made tortillas. When we finish they whisk away our dishes with bright smiles.

Despite not being able to exchange words with them directly we can feel in the air how happy they are for us to be there listening. We feel welcome.

Arrival in Guatemala

After I drank from the faucet, opened my mouth in the shower, and threw my toilet paper in the toilet instead of the waste bin, all luxuries which I was deprived of over my stay in Guatemala, the thrill of being home subsided. I looked around my room, and I found that I didn’t know what to do with myself. All my options seemed insignificant, and so here I sit, trying to put words to something that is beyond them. Until you have seen what we saw, and heard the stories we did, you will not grasp the magnitude of what we learned. However I will do what I can with mundane language to try to let you see.

My first impression of Guatemala City was of noise, my second was of the smell of exhaust and burning garbage, my third was the traffic. Endless lines of cars present themselves before my eyes, and everyone it seems is honking their horn. I don’t know how far our drive is, but by my reckoning, it should take us about 15 minutes to get to the place we are staying, with this traffic however, it takes around 45. Fifteen of those spent trying to pull out of the bank we stop at to exchange our money. Stores, street vendors, armed guards with automatic weapons, old women, small grimy looking children, trees who seemed to feel out of place, and people standing in the middle of the road selling whatever, all move by outside the windows of the van. We see people piled in the backs of semis and pick up trucks. Needless to say, I am out of my comfort zone.

There seems to be no emission testing in this country. Black clouds of fowl smelling smoke billow out of cars and trucks every few minutes, the smell only made worse by the thickness of the air. We arrive at the guest house, a man with an Ak-47 and a CIA hat moves aside a traffic cone to let us in. We walk into the enclosed court yard of the place we are staying, they close the gates, the smells and sounds of the city fade away. A garden full of grass and vines and flowers greets us. The smell of hand-made corn tortillas washes over us. The contrast is startling. But people live their whole lives behind such walls here, shut off from the chaos of the streets beyond, ignorant of the injustice that ravages their countrymen. Behind white walls topped with razor wire, in enclosed courtyards of Guatemala City, there is serenity.

That night we met with a member of the community who gave us a short overview of Guatemalan history and the current state of the country. To give you the short and sweet version, Guatemala has been torn by corruption ever since the Spaniards arrived in 1524, the 15 families that lead the original conquest own basically all of the fertile lands in the country today. This gross inequality has made for an immense poverty gap, with the majority of Guatemalans living on what they can grow and make themselves.

Time to Fly

 

 

Todays Music Does a Better Job of explaining than any words really can…

On The Road, The String Cheese Incident

 

 

Today, the first day of March 2012, I and nine other students set off on our grand adventure to the beautiful land of Guatemala.

I’ve been trying to write this post now for three days. I’ve thought about writing of the excitement boiling in my stomach, I’ve considered verses on the trepidation I feel about learning more of the war there, I’ve considered writing of the magic that awaits us at the ruins in Tikal. None of these however were sufficient to really make you understand the whirlwind inside of me. So in the end, I decided a simple sentence is best.

Take a deep breath because here we go….

 

Threads for Thought

Mayan traditional backstrap loom, Photo by Sergio Pitamitz/CORBIS

Music” Eoto, Atlantis 115

The Native women of Guatemala, if to be summed up in a single word, would be called hardy. They have survived genocide and brushed starvation in harsh mountains. And now that calm and relative peace has come to that part of the world, their lives are less scary, although from my perspective not all that much easier.

They still struggle to eke out a living from their subpar mountain farm lands, take care of their children, as well as their houses and animals, and in their spare time they take up the backstrap loom, which has been a part of the Maya culture for nearly 1,200 years. This is tedious work, the most intricate of Mayan weavings taking up to two months to complete with this method.

In the world today, it is nearly impossible to live off of the land the Mayan people have ended up with. Therefore weavings and embroidery have become an essential part of Maya life. Not only to make clothes for themselves but also ones to sell to tourists. In this way the Mayan people are able to survive even when their farms are not so healthy.

Each town has a pattern of weaving that is specific to it. The trained eye can tell where a woman is from simply by looking at the pattern of her blouse. This is amazing to me, because to create even one pattern on a backstrap loom takes more skill and precision than I have ever seen.

I cannot wait to go and see these women’s work with my own eyes.

However what I am most interested in is meeting these women face to face. After they suffered such a hard life, I am interested to see what remains of the women’s spirits. Their lives have been enough to break my spirit, and I want to know how, even if, they cope with it. I want to see the lights in their eyes and the smiles on their faces after such hardships.

Ever since I learned about the war in Guatemala and my countries role in it my heart has been heavy. I guess I just want to know the women there are happy despite their forced trials. If through everything these women kept their smiles and their hope, I will not feel as guilty. However if we robbed them of their hope and their spirit, it is no better than murdering them. If I can see signs of meaningful life, smiles, then perhaps I won’t feel so bad for what my country did to them.   

Guatemala Art and The Resistance

Mayan ruin Tikal, which we will be visiting on the trip,

Music: Railroad Earth Jungle Jam

Every year Colorado Mountain College, the fine institution I find myself a student at, offers international trips. This year’s is a trip to Guatemala to experience the local art and learn about the previously resolved bloody conflict that ravaged the people there. I never had any particular interest in that part of the world; however I do have an insatiable thirst for traveling. So naturally, when such a trip was offered I jumped on the opportunity.

After I registered for the trip it slipped to the back of my mind.

That is until this past week, when I received an e-mail from my instructors. In it were the time and place of our first meeting along with the first set of pre-trip reading materials. These included an over view of the conflict in Guatemala as well as a book with testimonials from women who lived through the war.  Both of these reading struck a chord deep within my heart.

For those of you who don’t know, this is what happened in Guatemala. In 1960, the American CIA funded a military coup in Guatemala to over throw the democratically elected government. Under the guise of protecting the world from communism, the Guatemala military backed by the US government proceeded to kill over 200,000 of the local population, most of them indigenous Mayan people. It is now obvious that the entire military takeover was an effort of American big business to protect their foreign lands, as much of it was being threatened under the policies of Guatemala’s democratic government. The War ended in 1996 when all the guerilla groups had formed one party known as the URNG, and signed a peace agreement with the newly restored democratic government.

It is events like this that make me ashamed of the American government, and I hope a deeper understanding of the conflict will help to ease my second hand guilt over the acts of my government.

Our trip will take place March first through the eleventh, with meetings every Friday until then, and I will be posting updates here until the conclusion of the trip.