The night after Christmas

It's the night after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. Just me actually. Travelling is interesting and I've been going pretty nonstop. I still haven't been anywhere for more than a couple of days, weeks, in a long while. My flight from Guatemala landed in JFK at around 11 o'clock, clear night. The landing was normal, smooth, but since it was a plane full of Guatemalan grannies coming to the United States to see their families, we were all gripping our armrests and looking out the window, and when the plane touched down everyone sighed and then applauded. That's one thing I feel like this trip did for me, made everything fresh and exciting. Once I get back to Hanover and school, I plan to settle in for what I hope will be a cold snowy winter (afraid that climate change is not on my side) to think and write and hopefully the results will be good enough to share.

divination

Last night in Antigua I spoke with a fascinating woman who works to find birth mothers for adoptive families who want to establish contact. She works alone, accompanied on her trips by her husband for safety. She has no agency, she doesnt use any institutional contacts, no lawyers, no social workers, nothing. She works, like everyone here does, straight from her gut. She goes to the adress of the woman that is listed on the cedula. She asks around, she gets a feeling, someone tells her that maybe they know the father of that woman and that maybe he is living in a town 30 km away. She goes and there is the mother, she is in the right place, and she intends to talk to the mother, and the husband is there, maybe she can only speak to the husband who speaks to the mother who speaks to the husband who speaks to my friend the finder. A few months ago in the highlands, twelve women had their hair cut off for giving up their children in adoption, Mayan punishment. One of these women has an eight year old son in the United States. The son wanted to know that his mother loved him. He asked for some sign from her. The finder brought pictures of the young boy to his mother in Guatemala. She told the mother that the young boy was looking for a sign from her. The mother had nothing to give. She put the photo of her son against her heart and asked that the finder take a photograph of her, and send it back to the United States where he lives with his family there. The young boy doesnt know yet that his mother was punished for sending him to the United States to live, but he knows that she loves him and maybe his parents in the States will tell him more story in the years that come. He cried and cried, but he said he felt more complete.

Here, people do not talk so much about politics, or about other places, about books they have read. Conversations it seems are much closer to the core of a person-- who are you why are you here what are you doing can i trust you are we on the same team or different-- there is so much to be learned from the tone and tempo of the conversation so that sometimes only this pitch matters and not the words.

Last night I went to a talk (with some folks from Hanover! who are here helping teach english) about the Mayan calendar and the power of day counting for divination. The man sounded foolish, was hawking his book too much. He was white, had learned quiche, had studied this sort of record-keeping and divination for twenty years. He didnt want to really tell us anything, but it came out in the q&A that all three of the shamen who were his major sources of knowledge had been killed in the last four years by people in the town (not mobs, murders) who feared their power. According to this man, and to the people in the town who believe, these men have the power to heal, to enrich a person, to recognize auspicious and inauspicious days for things, and they also have to power to harm the enemies of their "clients" (I did not get him to talk about who were the clients, how the shamen chose which clients to work for, if they had to be able to pay for example). The man giving the talk had obviously feared them even though they were also sweet old men. I wonder if his foolish persona is only for the gringos in Antigua and Panahachel or if he maintains it when he speaks in Quiche, too, as a sort of protection.

The Mayan cosmology seems to be about doggedly maintaining order in the face of chaos. The day you are born, the deity and the day that influence you, is supposed to determine your path, to determine what sort of person you will be-- precise and good with money, an agriculturalist, a warrior. And then the community sets out to make you like the person you are destined to be. Order. Control. Violence. Stability? Peace? Confidence in your role? The man had not thought enough about gender. He said there are very powerful women, and I said I know. He could not say what happens to the young girl born on the day of obsidian blade (precise, good with money and numbers) whose father wouldnt let her go to school or speak to people outside the house-- what is she supposed to become? Maybe I did not ask pointedly enough. And he was afraid to admit how much the possbilities had been limited as families split up, a son or daughter living in the city to bring in a little money to supplement the food they could grow. He was afraid to admit how limited the options had become as fewer people lived by the calendar. He was trying to soften the Mayan cosmology because he had let it get so deep into his life and it is a dark sort of cosmology. He said that Mayans love apocolypse, endings of things, completion, starting over. He said that in his new book (waving it around for us) he had tried to smooth over some of the darkness and make it more positive. Im not sure he has the power to do that.

I went to lake Atitlan on Sunday, and we arrived in time to leave our things and go down to the lake side and sit with some friends of John who he had met in the city, some young guys from there who lived in Panahachel as thousands and thousands of people passed through to see their lake. It was a particularly spectacular sunset. The five of us almost didnt speak at all for a couple of hours. Just sat and looked at that light on that water.

And the next morning we found that some people we knew from the Pension Meza in Guatemala City were staying right below. Circus girls from Spain. And travelling with them was someone who I hadnt seen in four years, four years ago in El Zonte El Salvador. I appears that I am on route.

Tomorrow I have a date at McDonalds in Guatemala City with a group of University students, organized by a young woman who just gave up her first child in adoption. We both want to know what they think, especially about condoms. Im safe and happy and Ill see you all when I see you.

Alice

more update than you are ready for, way less than there is to say

I went to Rabinal and I heard the story that I was expecting to hear and then a little more. The taxi driver took me to a little settlement outside of town with rows and rows of little wooden houses. We stopped on a corner and began to talk to the women in the house, a grandmother, mother and baby. They peel sunflower seeds for cash and the men work these little plots of land with corn and beans. they have a pig. hungry dogs everywhere. The people are drinking out of the river. you know that they are sick and a little hungry or feeling bad almost all the time. A man approached us. He told us about how the government surveyor had just come and measured his little plot and only given him title to half because he had only planted half. And he told us what he went through to get what little he had. He had been living down in the fertile valley but when Lukas was in power they decided to put a hydroelectric plant there. So he moved up the hill to land that wouldnt be flooded. But the government pursued him there because they told him that was private property now. Before it had always been communal. They were trying to kill him and he and his family, and some other families were hiding in the mountains there. In some parts, the government cut down all the trees on the hills so that the people couldnt hide. Now the hills are all eroding and the land doesnt produce as well. They were eating tree roots and stuff, almost dead when Lukas fell from power and Montt came in, as I understand it. And Montt was building these little houses to give people to resettle and so they fought and they got one of these little houses and they came back to living near Rabinal. But the houses dont have foundations, and so when it rained, they would have water up to your knees. What good were they? a little good. One of the weirder things about the rio negro resettlement is that there were a lot of the houses that had signs for Habitat for Humanity. I guess what happened is that they saw how the people were living, whenever they showed up probably in the 90s, and they didnt realize that the houses that they used as models are sort of evil. They modelled, I guess, more houses for the settlement after the original ones. And they came with all good will and built them. I assume that Montt didnt hire them to build the original ones. But there are definately Habitat Houses there. Very weird.

Before the man had cattle and chickens and enough land to feed his family. It was just like the taxi driver told me it would be. The man we talked to said that they were tying people up and burning down the house around them up in the mountains. This stuff happened in the government counter-insurgency campaign. But the man says that the people in town dont believe that it happened. The town people. There are all these divides between people living very close together.

On the block where I was living last week before I visited El Salvador, there is a little tortilla place with real poor people, and there is also a guy from a very rich family who sits and plays videogames and runs a hostel by the airport (where I stayed in May). He didnt know about the young man who was shot in the food place across the street because those arent his people, not his problem. He has a servent. A lot of people have servents. The rich and the poor are very close together here. There arent really suburbs. A few very rich people live very outside of town, and there are some ghetto-like parts that are even more dangerous, but in most of the city, maybe everywhere in the city, the rich and the poor are enough close together that sometimes the poor get some guns and then they get very very close to the rich people and they rob them of everything they have. This happened once about four years ago to the people where I was living last week, and they live in a pretty classy neighborhood. All this happens on one block.

And of course adoption is no less crazy. A friend of mine who is an assistent to some adoption lawyers was caring for a child while it was in the process. And some people came to her house, armed men and a woman who claimed that the baby was actually her baby and that the woman who had put it up for adoption initially (the DNA test comes later in the process, so these people never meant for the baby to go to the US, they just wanted to get the advance that comes at the start of the process) was not the real mother and was just trying to get the first advance. But it was obvious that these people were mareros (like gang people, but gangs are different here) and that they had just done the whole thing to get the first part of the money that goes to the mothers. So my friend called the police. And the police came, and she showed them all the documentation about how she was the legal caretaker of the child and how everything was in order and that these people were threatening her. The mareros paid the police some money, and the police took the documents from her and said they would file them with the report, and then they took my friend to jail instead of the others. And when she had to go to court of course the documents never appeared. And so she is paying bail and a lawyer bill and waiting for the day when she will have enough saved up from her work that she and her boyfriend can move to Spain.

On the other hand. BY FAR most of the adoptions are a real social service. And the government doesnt provide social services here. In El salvador, the presidents steal a lot of money, but they also provide some basic services in their somewhat poorer country (alas not healthy water or septic systems). But in Guatemala it seems that they really just keep almost all of the money among the rich people. The government homes for abandoned children are few few and bad I think. Here there is a certain type of racism that says, "those people are backwards, those backwards country indigenous people wouldnt know what to do with money if we gave it to them." Apparently the other option for the kids, for many of the kids, is just to leave them on the street somewhere and who knows what happens.

It is also much worse for women here. Women dont make enough money to have their own places to live, so they are dependent on men. And no one uses condoms, so there are lots of unwanted kids. And what happens a lot, based on the interviews Ive done with birth mothers through the Family Court people is that when the women get pregnant, the men disappear, or else chase the women out into the street, depending on the power dynamic. In the case of this university student whose interview I am typing up now, the guy changed his job and his house. She just couldnt contact him, couldnt find him anymore starting about two weeks after she told him she was pregnant. The end.

There was a very very poor indigenous girl; her father wouldnt really let her leave the house, certainly not go to school, and she finally ran away from home around 15, and then she worked as a domestic and sometimes they didnt pay her. I spent the day with her after her interview and she really didnt seem to know how to present herself so that people wouldnt take advantage of her. And she took up with this guy and did whatever he said, even sold some of her clothes for money that he took. And then when she got pregnant, he kicked her out. His whole family backed him up. And since she was pregnant she couldnt find work as a domestic because they dont like to hire pregnant girls. The story is that she was thinking of killing herself, but then someone told her dont do that give your child in adoption. And so she did, and the social worker is sort of managing the money for her, although not that well, but at least, now Julia doesnt have a baby, a few people have told her she is worth something, she has clothes and a rented apartment (and a TV with cable), and maybe she can find work. She (and a lot of other people) watches this talk show from Peru called Laura that is like Montel or whatever those peoples names are, everyone screaming and crying, screwed up families. She says watching it makes her feel less alone.

I brought Julia by the house where I was living because I thought she could learn something from Celia and Maria. Celia owns the house where I was living (her father was a train conductor for United Fruit and made a ton of money, bought a lot of land of what was then the edges of the city back in the first half of the century). She who has a very close relationship with her house-maid, Maria, but is also very strict and neat. I thought Julia could see what a probably much better house-owner/maid relationship would look like, maybe she could learn to cook some things from Celia who cooks a lot and then she would have more skills to sell when she went looking for work. And when she left, and when I finally had a big long talk with Celia before I moved out, she said Julia was a liar, that she didnt believe that her past employers didnt pay her. And I said that I beleived it for x and y reasons, but you see, all stories are contested here.

The adoption research is not putting me in danger because "thesis research" doesnt mean anything to anyone and because the US is already threatening/planning to stop adoption from here within a year. So I am under the radar. I am learning far more than I will ever know what to do with. I think after I graduate I want to write a book about Guatemala, maybe fiction but call it something like Dideditdedi(which words here, not sure): State and Society in Guatemala. Kind of an academic joke. This place is crazy. I am taking care of myself. I will have plenty to say in whatever I write next spring about adoption. I have also met some Americans at the Embassy who I think will email me and let me trade stories with them this winter. I didnt ask for their contact information because its sort of a sensitive time, but I gave them my email. It would have been neat if I had a card, but a scrap of notebook paper worked, too. Thanks for listening to my long stories. There are way too many to recount.

Alice