Email: Callie Vandeweile

Friends,

I am spending the next year working in Guatemala and have just gotten back from the first volunteer retreat. It was everything that I hoped it would be and more. After four weeks of "exile" here in our permanent placements, the six of us, Hanna, Anna, Celeste, Jane, Allie and me (Callie) slowly gathered at the finca Santa Elena in San Felipe Gutaemala, near(ish) the Boca Costa region, and it was wonderfully, amazingly warm.

The weekend was complete with palm trees, fresh honey (made right there in the finca by the most aggressive bees I have ever encountered—I personally suffered two stings and that was just the beginning of their onslaught, which lasted the entire retreat) on toast, beds that more resembled hammocks and tropical sunsets that faded into pleasantly warm nights overpopulated with insects larger than anything with six legs and four gazillion eyes has any right to be.

Everything seemed serene, old fashioned in the oddest, sometimes disconcerting ways on the finca—or small farm. The coffee harvest happened around us and we watched it. We are white and comparatively rich, the finca workers are brown and comparatively poor. An accident of birth in a highly stratified world.

The wooden plantation house was built in the 1930s, so was the coffee processing plant adjoined to it. Its wooden walls and steeply slanting European roof feel like they belong in another, colder, place. It's almost like we slipped back in time, the bumpy ride here dislodged us somehow and shifted us back. A time where work is more manual and class divisions are more clearly defined and accepted. It's almost picture perfect, the blues in the sky highlighted, like an artist created the sky soaring above us, the light shading down through the palm trees seems tinged with an almost exaggerated softness. There are touches of darkness seeping in around the edges near the frame, it is gentle in its reminder that our paradise exists in tandem with a daily struggle for existence. Our relaxing afternoon passes less than a few hundred yards from men, women, and children who will pick coffee beans all day to ear 40 Quetzales, about six dollars, for every hundred pounds they bring in.

It's a gentle, subtle, reminder of the world's inequity, but like all such reminders it has the biting edge of a tragedy repeated one too many times beneath its surface. The scraping awfulness of an inescapable collective reality.

And then Guatemala struck again, bursting my philosophical bubble and pulling me back into the here and now.

As soon as I walked into the house after my retreat my host mother, Sandra said, "You missed the fight."

"What fight?”

"The big fight. In the market," my host sister explained.

"When?"  I asked, still thoroughly confused.

"Saber," My host mother answered from the kitchen. (“Saber” can mean a range of things from "Who knows?" to "Why don't you know?"  I assumed it meant closer to the latter in this situation.)

"Monday or Tuesday, " my host sister said, "the fight was right before they lit the truck on fire."

"Who?" I asked.

"They did, after the fight," came the reply.

Our conversation went on like this for some time. I slowly gathered, by talking to a variety of people over the next few days, that Monday morning (just as the daily market was starting up) two women had had a rather loud vocal argument over some as of yet unknown to me subject. This had then resulted in blows, several more people had gotten involved, and eventually the instigator had stormed off. Ten minutes later she dumped gasoline all over her adversary's old pick up truck and lit it on fire before any one could stop her. She is still at large.

In the five days since, I have been (much to my mortification) asked to give more English lessons. I hate teaching English. It is one the most dreadful afternoon activities I could imagine. I look forward to January when things things pick up a little so I can be legitimately "too busy" to tutor English.

I have attended one major Christian rock concert, in a full stadium that seated upwards of 2,000 people. My host sister had waited for weeks to get in, so we went three hours early to stand in the rain in order that she might both buy a t-shirt (an activity I also participated in) and get to stand in the mosh pit. I sat up with my host parents, further away from the deafeningly huge speakers—didn't help much, I still had earplugs in the whole time and despite that my head is still ringing from the event.

Saturday morning (after the concert) I got to go to a wedding. My host parents were very involved in the ceremony (which lasted over three hours—this is not including the arrival, greeting of the guests, eating, everything that happened after eating, etc). They needed someone to watch their 2-year-old granddaughter, Abbie, during this time, and I (whom the child has started calling "Momma Callie," not exactly the term of endearment I would have chosen for myself, but hey, whatever) was the only other adult member of the household who didn't have plans. So I went to a wedding, watched a 2-year-old and got to eat cake. The bride's dress was pretty, but the bridesmaids looked sort of like fish.

It's still raining here, and quite cold. I'm told that in March it will be so hot that I'll dream of January. I can't wait. Sunday I leave to spend a week in Guatemala City and Xela working with CEDEPCA. Guatemala city is closer to sea level, so it will be really nice and warm. Xela's near 10,000 feet. You can probably guess what that means temperature wise. Ugh.
It really wouldn't be so bad if they had warm showers.

Buena suerte, All!

Take care.

Callie

 P.S. In addition to being in Spanish (which is confusing enough for me) Don Quixote is Spanish Spanish. This means I have, for the first time, encountered the Vosotros form and about eleven trillion words that I have never seen before and that my Spanish teacher tells me no one here ever even uses!  This book may turn out to be even more challenging than I originally predicted, and much less useful to my eventually being able to communicate in Spanish.