Greg Frederick, 2 Apr 2020
One of the great pleasures of travel is the release from the routine pressures of home. Familiar anxieties are made less urgent, even trivial, by a new, more worldly perspective. Technology has made it a choice rather than a necessary consequence of travel, but the relief is still there for those of us lucky enough to have families and employers who allow us the occasional indulgence. This trip was different, however. COVID-19 was a distant threat when we departed Seattle for Guatemala City. But our cell phones brought us the same, anxious news as everyone else. We were, in a sense, self-sheltered in a country with no reported cases of the virus, but we knew this was a pandemic and that Guatemala was no less vulnerable than anywhere else. We worried for family and friends, and we worried for those we’d be encountering. The toxicity of international tourism could be assuaged by our mission, but this added a whole new meaning to the word.
Day 1 (Sunday)
Our arrival was the usual confusion of passport control, immigration, and cab drivers scrambling to relieve us of our luggage. Emma’s expert consignment of a rental car, and the calm with which she swerved and lurched her way out of the city’s traffic was a work of wizardry, and magic weaved its way through the entire week we were there, beginning with a small town along CA-1, about an hour west of the capital. It was Sunday morning, and market day, and Emma parked the car along a stretch of gray highway squeezed between double-parked trucks being unloaded by strong, weathered men in straw hats. Women with bundles disappeared into the shadows like colorful birds. Emma led, and we followed, past produce piled on the sidewalk, between stalls, up stairways, through a labyrinth of intoxicating colors and the crush of commerce.
Day 2 (Monday)
In my briefing before the trip, I was told that when visits are arranged with TINFA schools, we make every effort to ensure our presence interrupts lessons as little as possible. The teachers are encouraged to carry on as usual and to acknowledge us with little or no ceremony. Gifts, especially, are discouraged. Well, perhaps our FUNDAP partners didn’t get the memo. We woke early for an appointment at their offices in Quetzaltenango and accompanied them for tours of two schools their foundation sponsors. At the first, Escuela Oficial Rural Mixta “Xolquiac,” even before we’d shut the car doors, a chorus of children’s voices had started up, and the singing continued as we made our way up to the central courtyard. There, we were surrounded by most of the student body, children, ages 5 to 11, all swaying in song. There was no doubt to whom it was directed as we humbly took our seats for the remainder of the ceremony. Next on our itinerary was a meeting with the beneficiaries of FUNDAP’s scholarship program for underprivileged girls, Becas para las Niñas. Several insisted on having their picture taken with me because they were sure they’d seen me in the movies. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder the same thing.
Day 3 (Tuesday)
Our reception at Escuela San Antonio Buena Vista did little to reground us. The school is high in the mountains between Quetzaltenango and Retalhuleu, at the end of a long cobblestone road that would have broken the axles of our rental car, if cars still had axles. The pickup truck we recruited had a rugged and stiff suspension, and we felt every inch of the roadbed as we made our way slowly up to Buena Vista. The road follows the deep gorge of Rio Ocosito in jungle thick with exotic foliage more familiar to us as houseplants. It looked wild, but we learned that much of the forest is cultivated for fuel and export crops, and we often caught glimpses of neat rows of coffee plants under the shade of towering trees. Occasional clearings provided views of Volcan Santa Maria and San Santiagito actively belching plumes of steam and ash. A common occurrence, I was told by the departmental minister of education for Quetzaltenango, William Quixtan, who was with us in the back of the truck. He was smiling when I lowered the long lens of my camera. “Buen Augurio!” he said, giving me a reassuring thumbs up. “Good omen.”
Buena Vista, true to its name, has a gorgeous view of the volcanoes, Santiagitos, now with only a whiff of smoke like an extinguished birthday candle, and the more distant Santa Maria. As we stepped down from the truck bed on wobbly knees, I saw a group of kids standing at the best viewpoint, smiling, as if they were waiting for someone to snap a picture. So I did.
Day 4 (Wednesday)
Escuela Entre Rios is in its second year with TINFA, and Escuela Sector Aguilar graduated from the program in December of last year. Both are just west of Retalhuleu, which would be our home base for the next three nights. Retalhuleu (or Reu if you’re in a hurry) swelters in the damp tropical air of Guatemala’s Pacific slope, and felt very different from Xela (or Quetzaltenango if you prefer more syllables) which was almost alpine in comparison. At Entre Rios, the fifth graders were given the assignment of interviewing us. I would’ve loved to see what they wrote, especially about those of us whose Spanish provides plenty of room for creative interpretation. At Sector Aguilar, the teachers had been with the TINFA program for more that two years and had officially graduated, and our visit, I think, gave them the opportunity to show off a little. Their lessons were well-planned, and executed with a dynamism that held our attention and kept the students engaged.
Day 5 (Thursday)
We had intended to visit the two schools on today’s itinerary, Calahuache and Estancia y Pinales, on Wednesday, but a teachers’ strike had been blocking traffic on the only sensible route north. This had led to a long conversation that evening over the meaning of “irony.” The teachers were back to work Thursday morning, and the highway north of Retalhuleu was once again choked with chicken busses, tuk-tuks, scooters, and large trucks without mufflers. Our rented Kia hatchback’s relative invisibility was both a strategic advantage and a hazard as we darted into oncoming traffic and then quickly retreated into the impossibly narrow space between the chrome grill of a chicken bus and the back end of cattle wagon.
Both schools are funded through Rotary International. Calahuache, the larger of the two, is built on hillside with steps zigzagging through a terraced garden. From its ball court and playground, Santa Maria forms an impressive backdrop to its relatively new and handsome buildings.
The director is a fit young man with a quick smile and an infectious enthusiasm. We took in the view from the ball court, then toured the classes where the lessons, thankfully, progressed with a minimum of disruption from us.
Escual Estancia y Pinales is a smaller school a short distance away from Calahuache. There, we learned to kick box our way through the multiplication tables and were taught to read by a monkey (see below). In my day we learned to multiply with our hands folded on our desks (so we wouldn’t be tempted to count on our fingers) and were taught to read by an angry woman with a stick.
Thursday was the last day of the official TINFA itinerary. If time and circumstances had permitted, we all would’ve have gladly stayed longer, learning to read along with the 1st and 2nd graders, learning grammar and long division (in Spanish) along with the 4th and 5th graders, and learning about Mayan language and culture along with the 6th graders. But of course the week hadn’t been all fun and games. Our afternoons and evenings had been devoted to the serious business of sightseeing.
Holy Week Begins Early in Xela
Holy Week, or Semana Santa, was still a full month away when we arrived in Xela on Sunday, March 8. But as we explored Xela that first afternoon, fighting off sleep after 24 sleepless hours, we stumbled onto a precession making its way down a narrow street. Curiously, both men and women were shouldering the float, or “paso,” whose massive weight and inertial forces were kept under careful control by tenders at the back, and by the rhythm and brass section bringing up the rear.
Coffee Roasting in Aldea Loma Linda
Mundo Verde is a non-profit association of progressive and enterprising women who combined their individual assets to form the coffee cooperative in the early 1990’s. We found their plantation and processing facilities in Loma Linda, a short distance from the school, San Antonio de Buena Vista, which we’d visited earlier in the day. We were served a lunch of chicken soup and fresh tortillas before being invited into a spare room with a desk, where the director gave us a brief history of the cooperative, which had been fraught with disappointment. The price the market was willing to pay for their raw beans was too low to be sustainable. The process of preparing the beans for distribution is labor intensive, and involves not only the planting and harvesting, but the long and arduous process of sorting, shelling, fermenting, drying, storing, milling, and grading the beans. Roasting and packaging the final product is a simple process with relatively low overhead and labor costs, but it’s also the step that generates the only real profit. So, the women bought a roaster, scales, and sealers, designed the packaging, and began marketing directly to the retailers and consumers. The director gave a weary sigh. Marketing their arguably superior brand of shade-grown organic coffee brought them up against powerful commercial interests, and the cooperative was struggling. They roasted a batch for us, and we each bought four pounds of what we all agree is some of the finest coffee we’ve ever tasted.
Takalik Abaj
Our guide at Takalik Abaj reminded me of the Navajo guides at many of the Ancestral Pueblo sites in the (North) American Southwest, whose plausible narratives draw generous tips from the tourists but are often more entertaining than scholarly. Neither my Spanish nor my knowledge of the Olmec and Maya civilizations is good enough to properly judge the merits of his commentary, but the well-tended ruins which date from about 800 BC to 200 AD were impressive, and looked beautiful in the afternoon light.
Fuentes Georginas
The way Fuentes Georginas above Ratalhuleau follows a narrow road past steep, cultivated fields that draw much of their moisture directly from the perpetual fog that gives the region’s “cloud forests” their name. Relaxing in spring water heated by volcanic vents, we would’ve forgotten all our troubles, if, for the next hour or two, we’d been able to remember any troubles we were meant to forget…
La Democracia
On Friday, we’d be approaching Antigua from the south, turning off CA-2 at Esquintla. My guidebook mentioned La Democracia as worth a stop for its central plaza that contains several Olmec style stone heads.
Antigua
Most visitors to Guatemala never stray far from Antigua, and for good reason. It has a perfect climate, fine hotels, great restaurants, colonial architecture, and photogenic ruins. But after a week with TINFA, touring schools in the west highlands and the tropical coast, Antigua felt a bit isolated from the rest of the country, with its bourgeois ambiance, and its streets and restaurants crowded with people who looked like us.
Day 6 (Friday)
On Friday morning we drove to Antigua, where we’d all stay one night before taking our separate flights home.
As the week progressed, we spent more and more time on our phones. On Thursday morning there was panic as Trump tweeted a possible quarantine of California and Washington state. He’d already closed the barn door to Europe, so to speak, and the Guatemalan government had done the same. Flights from the USA to Guatemala would be next, and flights out could be problematic soon, especially for those of us connecting through Los Angeles. By Friday we all agreed we should get home as soon as possible. Randy and I had already booked our departures for early Saturday morning. Emma re-booked hers and arrived in Seattle via LA on Monday evening. Outbound flights from Guatemala were delayed as the offloading of passengers were routed through special screening, and the planes were being disinfected. But otherwise it was like the early days of jet travel, with rows all to ourselves and flight attendants who had time to chat. Mike, who’d been texting us pictures of palm trees and frothy pints of IPA from Antigua while we were back home in self-isolation, was the last to leave. Poetic justice routed his flight through Miami, and he didn’t arrive in Seattle until Tuesday evening. :-)
The TSA checkpoint in Seattle before our departure