monday, monday

What is going on relative to my research project--

Getting settled in here has been really hard, I never really did it last time, but Im feeling hopeful about this trip. I am taking care of myself. I have a good living situation with a family. It is an interesting adoption case actually. The domestic, Marga, got pregnant and the man left her with the baby. Meanwhile her employers who lived a bunch of years in the states-- he was born in Louisiana-- and who are grandparent age decided to let her keep the baby. They don´t pay her much at all but she has plenty to eat and is healthy and works in the house and can stay with her little two year old. It has been good for me to watch as I am thinking about how adoption works for everyone involved because although the boy has not been officially adopted, something like an adoption has happened where the owners of the house deeply love the little boy like his mother loves him, and where they care for him a lot economically as well.

I met with the social worker last week and recorded a great interview with her. This afternoon, she is going to set me up with a long interview time (hopefully) with a woman who is about to give up her third child in adoption, a kind of unique situation. The offices there have been remodeled so the walls are thin and sort of open, but it is MUCH more private than it was when I was down here in May and everything was under construction.

This week is our week together to really do a lot of interviewing at the court house. Then, this weekend, this taxi driver is going to take me to Rabinal and Salama, where he is from. Finding him was very lucky because those are places that I have studied and thought about a lot. It will be an opportunity to think about the forced transition away from subsitance farming that happened during the 80s. The taxi driver really wants to talk about this hydroelectric project that Rios Montt made and hes going to take me to the site of a model village where everyone was to relocate.

I have gotten back in touch with a young woman who works as an assistant to an adoption lawyer. Shes great and Im so lucky to know her both because we can go out together as friends and because she knows so many stories. So, things are shaping up, and that is the word from here.

sunday picture show

I brought my camera with me for the Anthropology Museum and for the walk down there, but I couldnt take any pictures that would show you anything about what its like to be in gautemala, part because enough people have already taken enough pictures of guatemala that you can find all on the internet and because everyday life is so difficult to photograph and I dont have the cord to transfer the pictures anyway. . . There are some people with a little girl in traje crossing the bridge over the traffic, its sunday and everyone is out with their kids. There is a dog asleep on the sidewalk. There is a no parking sign printed by the local newspaper, I guess for free advertising. There is a man selling flowers by the busy part of the street. . . he made a sale! He is running around the corner to deliver out of the way of the traffic. Above is a cell phone billboard and something about roaming. There is a futbol game across from the museum, which is looking very Colonial with its yellow walls. A young man with his bike watches the game through the iron fence. The grass is kind of long on the field. A couple of guys pass on a motorcycle, and some others in crappy cars from the 80s. Another mom and child wait on the grassy path that goes along beside the airport while the boyfriend or husband comes running across the road. He stops three lanes of traffic to bring his girls some Burger King. Its a clear day, and the clouds have interesting shapes.

And then I met this gay man from Oakland at the museum, well, I didnt know that at first, but once I realized, it was so great—gay people from the Bay area who Ive met always seem so darn well-adjusted. He told me I needed to go eat some fancier food or go to Antigua to relax a while, but even the city was looking like a pretty nice place to be on this temperate Sunday afternoon.

edge of something

At certain moments, this country holds me fascinated. On the one hand, they have lived with dictators and waves of brutality and war for so long. The taxi driver I rode with yesterday told me how Rios Montt wanted a hydroelectric plant and so he built this model town to put all the displaced people in with tiny little houses and asked them to leave the land that had always fed them and fed their families, their cows and chickens and plots of corn. And when the people didn{t want to move he killed them-- first one at a time and then with bombs and fire and there was a terrible fire and he built the dam and the water rose and now there is nothing left of all that. And so this country is almost mortally wounded, but suddenly, recently, the taxi drivers can talk about it.

On the one hand, the inequality here is staggering. As Daniel Morales in the "Voices on the Street" section of the paper when asked about the economy, "They are bringing us to disaster and ruin because the government confused growth of the GDP with distribution of wealth. They should help small businesses grow." Another said there are two routes right now, things are improving for the rich and we are experiencing an apocolypse for the poor. Another said that the government wouldn{t stop hassling her for taxes, even though almost all the money most people make is in the informal economy and they can{t afford taxes. On the other, the people can really articulate it now and I don{t think they could do that in the same way just a few years ago.

On the one hand, a man can promise a young girl he will marry her and then abuse her and leave her pregnant, but on the other, the father of the girl, illiterate and burned from working in the sun can say, “I love my daughter. My daughter has always been loved in the house, and I will not permit someone from outside to abuse her," and run the guy off and put the baby up for adoption. (side note. I realize that some of you do not know what I am studying here. I am trying to think about adoption of Guatemalan children who come to the United States from a Guatemalan perspective. Particularly I am trying to learn about the perspective of birth mothers, during this trip. And for those of you who are my advisors and that sort of thing, although I am not posting it up on the blog, I am learning a lot.)

So, on the one hand the number of sad stories is completely overwhelming and they are all true, but on the other hand people are starting to tell them and to voice opinions about the way their world might look better. It sometimes feels to me like the beginning of a time of change. Change is so tied up with violence here-- Conquest, Arbenz, "modernization" in the 80s and stuff like Montt{s hydroelectric plant-- but it seems like sometimes the people are trying to say we know our history and we want to be through with violence.

But the sister of the dona of the family I am staying with says she thinks it is getting worse and she may well be right.

bienvenido a guatemala

I have arrived! after getting lost in Queens and getting to my plane only one hour before departure and being pushed onto the later flight and. . . and I am here and have a good place to stay, and people I recognize and I´m ready to take this all on tomorrow!


So, I want to welcome you to this long blog, a place that´s becoming my history book or something like it.

yesterday I wrote- "This blog is going to parallel the more publically published parts of my Senior Fellowship project." There´s something more to this, something about the way that our private lives and our public/political/published lives are only artificially separated. I´ve been thinking about how forcefully the political world has entered people´s homes and families here, how clear it is to them that there are not two separate worlds, and how that is really true in the United States, too. What we can all imagine wanting and how we can imagine getting it is so tied up with the history and everyday politics of where we live.

I think it will be much harder to focus and write coherently here in the public internet cafe with all the traffic of people and the timer and all the things that I am about to go do instead of write, and I hope you´ll forgive me that, and I hope you enjoy checking up on my adventures here this month.


miss alice

ps--On the personal/political theme I want to recommend a film I just saw called Tout Va Bien about the spirit of Paris, May 1968. Jane Fonda´s character says something like "When you think of me, all you think of is eating, going to the movies, and going to bed. What about when you go to work and shoot advertisements to get paid or when I go to the radio station and they won´t air what I write? Isn´t that also part of our lives together?" and she is also trying to deal with the artificial separation of these worlds. Naomi´s mix CD gets it, too...

If you want the best jam, you got to make your own

I began my trip to Guatemala yesterday from Shantytown, Hanover, NH, USA yesterday at 10 o’clock in the morning. Marshall made pancakes from scratch (I wonder what “scratch” originally was/meant? Lissa?) and I packed half to take with me in the car.

The first sign that this next month is going to be a real adventure: When I went to put my key into the ignition, I saw it was all twisted up. How did that happen? I guess it was tending a little that way? This time though, when I went to straighten it out, it made a breaking metal sound and creased just where the stem starts. yikes. At least it didn’t break through, and there was a spare key at Panarchy. Ah ha. With special determination I put it in the ignition and turned it (still in one piece) and started the steep gravelly ascent out of the shantytown hollar.

But lo! Up ahead was an enormous yellow truck! with a lift! and feet! And it was sitting right at the mouth of the driveway.

The power company had me blocked in. The young gentleman in the reflective orange vest shook his head mouthing, “I can’t do anything for you.” I parked my car, angled as if to be shot out of a rocket launcher. I spoke to the young man and said, “I am going to Guatemala tomorrow and I need to get on the road.” And he said maybe you can fit through here, motioning, and I thought it looked unlikely and said, “What about here,” motioning between the woods and the mailbox. And he said, “Well I can’t break down the truck, but we’ll be gone in maybe 10 minutes anyway,” and I said, “Oh, just 10 minutes,” and he said, “Yeah but give this a try.” The policeman and the signaler stopped the cars on that side. I drove over the grass and the curb and between the machines and I was free!

Now I had to go to Panarchy and find the spare key. I left the car idling out front (although that didn’t really make sense since I had to turn it off anyway to change the keys) and I was talking on the phone to my dad.

My dad keeps me honest about the important things. Did you check the antifreeze in your car? So now I had this series of car adventure to recount. And, in fact, the nice woman at the co-op gas station checked my antifreeze for free one night. She said the car is good to 12 below and I said thank you have a good night.

I was really happy to see Alyson in the house, and also really happy to see my spare key in my mug full of weird things and rubber bands.

Then I realized that since it was by this time 10:30 AM and not 6:30 AM, I might as well check my mail and see if my credit card had arrived. It had recently been canceled because, according to my credit card company, there was potential of fraud. They called on Wednesday of last week and told me that I needed to cut up the old one and wait for the new one which would be there in 7-10 days, and I said, “I’m leaving the country in fewer days than that, is there some way I can get it sooner,” and she said, “well I’ll express mail it,” but on Saturday my mailbox was still empty, and I thought it would be worth one more try and there was a parking space in front and I put a quarter in the meter (because now I had change for the tolls) and then saw that there had already been 54 minutes and that I gave some free parking to someone. It was like Monopoly except focusing on the free parking instead of the purchasing and hoarding. And I checked my mail and there was a paper notice of my card being cancelled (useless) and a notice to call at the postoffice window for a package and that was when I realized that I keft my ID in shantytown because what good would it do me in Guatemala and I couldn’t get mail without ID, and so I explained this whole large situation to the postman and then he said, “don’t you have a licence?” and of course I did because I was driving, I had just forgotten because we don’t hardly use government ID at Dartmouth. And there was my credit card! Shiny and new for my trip South.

On the way South, I listened to a mix CD that Naomi made me. Naomi, it was fantastic! Here is one note from Naomi’s mix cd. I went back and listened to it again so I could get it all right:

“It’s only in the last 50 years or so that people have started to let TVs and radios do their singing for them. You know. . . we’ve been sittin around for a couple a hundred million years or so, I don’t know how long we’ve been here, but we’ve been sittin around campfires singing songs and before that just regular fires and singing these songs and making up stories and passing on who we are from one generation to the next-- it’s just nice to see that it’s continuing and it’s nice to see that it’s growing and it’s nice to see that it doesn’t belong to any particular group of people or one person but it sort of just belongs to everybody.”

Naomi will you send me the track list and then I’ll put it up here? Or you should give it to someone else, too, because it seems like a lot of other people might appreciate it. I thought the first two songs were one song they fit together so nice.

Then, on the road, I saw a pheasant. He was big and rust colored with pretty green plumes in his tail and a black and white mask. He was just walking down the highway by the median guardrail looking troubled (For those of you who have seen The Falls-- whenever Greenaway does the movie The Johns, I’m sure he will note this encounter as an early sign that I am a victom (victim?) of the VUE). I worried about him and hoped that he made it across sometime, alive, and got away from that highway, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Then I crossed the Connecticut River again, in Connecticut, and I thought about how if you had canoed it from Hanover to the sea before, like some folks have, then you would look at that stretch of river with completely different eyes than mine, me, passing over the river on a bridge.

This blog is going to parallel the more publically published parts of my Senior Fellowship project. I’ll write articles in the Spring about adoption of Guatemalan children and the experience of birth mothers, but meanwhile, as I’m travelling and thinking, I’ll try to put my thoughts up here from time to time. Feel free to write me back through the blog, too, if you want? Maybe that will work.

I also wanted to let you know that because you are so special, and because Guatemala has gotten more dangerous since I was wandering that land five years ago, I have decided to travel less and on more direct buses. Most of the work I need to do is in the city this round, too, and the college will certainly pay for taxis.

So, tonight, to New York City to sleep on an air matress, and TOMORROW at noon that little plane’s wheels will touch down and I’ll pick up my bag at the claim (in the spring, there was a video playing silently above the luggage carosels of cat mishaps, clip after clip of cats falling off tables and trees and getting wet), and I’ll walk out and past all of the taxi drivers offering rides, and say, “No, gracias” and I’ll go past the roundabout and down the hill, and there I’ll be at my hostel to set up for the days that come.