Guatemala

other

Awesomely brilliant timing and speed from la Pulga, two freaking beautiful goals for the good guys.

Yes the good guys beat the bad guys today. And it makes me so happy.

(I’m less happy about dirty-slide-tackler guy snapping Zakuani’s leg the other day. Not cool, man)

Messi’s second freaking beautiful goal. Solo he schooled the three guys in white in the picture, one other guy in white and the enemy keeper.

 

photography

Well, at least they pretended to.

The Jews (red capes and hats) shouted and jeered. The crowd began to get into it; that was the weird part.

photography

Here come seven photos.

Well, actually technically I posted this post after I posted the photos, but if I’d posted this before, then it would show up after…really. I thought this out carefully.

Each has a story, each tells a story. Each is a story.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

ideas

Take a look at the first before you read this second one,
http://wp.me/p14q4r-Rx

Also, I’m not sure whether or not I think the word god, as used here, should be capitalized or not. Thankfully the word Christian is a straight up syntax question without baggage, so it stays normal.

I don’t like to write something that’s not a story; I’m not very good at it and it feels stuffy.That said, here she goes.

The churches here in Guatemala have given me some problems, of them there’s one whopper. They made me realize something: I feel that god is for people who have good education and read lots of good books. If you don’t wonder deeply about redemption and covenant and all that and then go have a scotch and cigar and talk about all that with another  well educated book reader, if you don’t ponder infinity or make philosophical jokes about god…I feel you’re pretty much screwed.

When I first arrived here I first noticed that the churches are loud–the one across the street from my house is unfortunately very exemplary. They sing a lot of songs that sound much like what I imagine pagan chants sound like. They don’t sing the worship songs I know, like and am moved by. Then, when I began to visit churches and hear radio sermons, I noticed that they always preach very topically*. That’s not all, the topic almost every time hits hard on prosperity doctrine. Also, when someone prays it does not sound to me like a boy talking to his father or a woman to her mentor, what I feel prayer should be closest to. Instead it sounds like a screenplay being exagerated by an unskilled actor.

All these things together in my mind made for a single mental swing of ego and judgement: “wait-all these people are fake Christians. What’s all that   about?” If you want to duke it out with me for having thought that thought, take your best shot and see what happens.
So I notice all these things that are so different, and I am really bothered. I think to myself that I’m not like them. The next thing I think is “why?”

Why am I not like them?

I’ve come to the place I am at with respect to god by four things: (1) praying, (2) arguing about god and man, (3) thinking and (4) reading. So then I think to myself “of these four things, what makes me not like them?”

They pray here; they pray really differently, but prayer is such a complicated and peculiar thing I’m just going to leave it at “they pray here,” and so rule out number one. I’ll smoosh 2 into 3: arguing about god and man only counted when the arguement made me think, and what counted was the thinking, not the arguing. I know that the major part of how I think came from my studies at the university, and I know that very few here have had an education like mine. I’ll keep number three, with smooshed-in 2, and rename it “education.” Lastly there is reading. I’ve simply read more substantial books than the majority of churchgoers here. Through these books I’ve seen so many crazy different ideas and wild created worlds. Without doubt what I’ve read is key to how I think and a not-insignificant part of how I’ve come to where I am with respect to god. So I’ll keep number four.

So the result is that I threw out number one (prayer), smooshed number two (talking) into number three (thinking), and kept number four (reading). Education and books. So I look at these people and think to myself, they are spiritually fake and I am the real deal because of a degree I earned and the weekends and evenings I’ve whittled away reading books.

And worst of all, I have neither scotch nor cigar nor another “educated” book-reader to go argue, banter and joke about this with.

…maybe for now that’s best.

The end

———-

PS:
I implicitly cursed once. If you spotted it on the first pass, come visit me and I will make you a complex three course meal in 2 minutes flat and then give it to you.

*If you’re not familiar with preaching, there are two general ways to make a sermon. Exegesis is exposition using something resembling the “when did who say what to whom, where were they, and so why they say it like that at that moment?” It’s like this: imagine you were my boss’s coworker and needed to completely understand a very quickly-written incomplete email I’d written to him. You’d first need some knowledge of me and my job. You’d need some feel for the context of the email: was I pointing out a problem, clarifying a detail of an in-progress design job or maybe poking fun at the CEO with an inside joke? This is a good way to preach: good exegesis leaves little room for subjective error. Obviously there must still be a personal element-a preacher can’t just spew facts. But without the presence of rigorous reason and fact, sermons are at best lukewarm and at worst extremely decieving. Topical preaching is exactly what it sounds like: an arbitrary topic and an arbitrary batch of bible verses, almost always clipped out of context, that “talk” about it, where the definition of “talk” is up to the preacher’s whim. It is, at the core, the preacher expressing an idea or viewpoint in terms of phrases from the bible. If the idea or viewpoint is good, then often no harm is done.
stories

Last Saturday:

12 hours traveling (4 car, 8 bus), enough dramamine to kill a freakishly large lab rat, possibly the single most delicious lamb meat I have ever had in my life for breakfast at the highest place in central america with blue sky above and clouds on the horizon, one sponsored child successfully examined for hearing aids that will let her be a kid again and at the of the day one extremely sore butt.

Edit: I tweaked the exposure of the second picture in lightroom a little bit. Otherwise they’re both unedited.

stories

Yesterday morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. This song wasn’t horrid like the title says, merely very curious. It was being played over a megaphone on top of the house kity-corner to the one I live in. It was being played very loudly, too. I didn’t really understand the lyrics, could only make out something about jesuchristo, then something about jamas asi o algo asi. Anyways, I was only bit annoyed; by now I’m accustomed to things happening unexpectedly in the morning (machine-gun-fire story coming soon). The part that mildly annoyed me was how the chorus had this terribly screechy and out-of-tune violin part.

Then the song finished. Phew! I thought to myself–now onto a different song, or if I’m lucky that was just some good-morning-world greeting from friends to another friend. They have different ways of showing friendship here.

Silence…for a few moments and then the music started up again, the same song.

Uh-oh..this cannot be good, I thought. I thought right. This song, at first innocently curious, for 14 hours repeated, became horrid.

At eight-thirty p.m. yesterday I left the house to go to the office. I’d spent the better part of the day making soup and reading and was at my wits end with this horrid song. I’d tried thinking about it as a joke, and this worked for a while. I tried enjoying it, and this worked for a while. I tried making fun of it in my mind, and this too worked for a while. I finally plugged earphones into my little mp3 player and used this, but the earphones aren’t sound isolating so I had to use serious volume to overpower the neighbor’s megaphone-piped screechy-violin song. Finally at eight thirty my head hurt too much to think or really do anything, so off to the office I went, and there I found good peace and quiet–it was wonderful.  I’m ashamed of it, but I actually did have brief thoughts to wait till a bit later at night when there’s good darkness and then to hurtle a rock at this screechy-song-spewing megaphone. Honestly, I thought about it–but no, that’s not a good thing at all. I quit the ideas of destruction or violence, but remained very bitter and somewhat angry at whatever ridiculous person, the ridiculous person who thought it some sort of stupid joke to play the same horrid song all day long.

This morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. Again.

Yes, you guessed it, the song with the out-of-tune screechy-violin chorus. However, there is a saving grace, and because of this saving grace I actually laughed out loud (lol!) when I heard the song pipe up. Today is the first day of work–a day I’ll spend at the office, not at home, not near this horrid, horrid song. Because of this, I laughed–those silly fools, their snarky joke today will fall on nothing but an empty house. Bahahaha. I have to say that, at the office the night before, the resident security guard Don Alvaro had mentioned that an old man had died and the music was some sort of tradition, some custom of the indigenous people–that didn’t really strike me as too important though. It paled in comparison to both my headache and the concept of this ludicrously snarky joke. By morning today, I’d practically forgotten what Alvaro had mentioned.

There’s a little tienda, this tiny snack store, a stone’s throw away from the office; I’m a ten-a.m. regular. At least two or three days out of the week I head down to the tienda to quench the jones for some sweet and salty treats; sometimes I go healthy with juice and a piece of bread, other times it’s Coca-Cola and chips.

As I was walking out of the office to the little tienda thinking about Coca-Cola and chips, I heard music. It was the screechy-violin-chorus song! I heard it faintly, growing louder; I froze in my tracks and looked to my left down the dirt road towards where the music was coming from. There was the funeral procession, forty or fifty people: family members and friends. All the men were dressed in old suits dirty with road dust and the women in traditional woven skirts and blouses, all of them somber and quiet. Towards the back of the group was a beautiful ornate coffin on the shoulders of five younger men. I walked to the side of the road and stood, cap in my hand, thoughtless. Walking next to the pallbearers was an older woman with a single candle. The small yellow flame, barely wavering in the calm breeze, was hardly a notable thing in the bright midmorning sun of a cloudless sky. One man was carrying the megaphone mounted on a tall two-by-four, another was carrying the stereo and battery, a third the cables that carried this song from the stereo to the megaphone to be sounded out in static-heavy reproduction for all to hear, as if it was transmitted from a poor radio station or a radio station in a town very far away.

They passed by me and proceeded on to the cemetery, led by a pastor with an old and worn bible in his hand.

I ate lunch at home in peace today, the song wasn’t playing any more. The man who had died was 65, I don’t know if he left behind a wife or not.

The end.

Edit:
Later, I explained this a little bit to my sorta-boss and really-mentor, Danery. As I got to the point about hearing the song and realizing that the funeral procession was passing by, I thought of my friend who died and his funeral and what it was like to see soldiers and his brothers and his coffin being carried by them and I nearly started crying right there half an hour ago. And right here as I type this in the office I’m a hairs-breadth away from falling apart into a bawling mess. Asi anda la vida.

photography

So this one time I went to Mexico.

street in a little town
Self portrait courtesy the window of the bus that took me from a Mexican town to a Mexican city
a little town in Mexico the bus passed through
The pacific ocean, Playa Linda
funny, other

Here in Guatemala

1. Possums eat chickens, and in return folks eat possums. You know how possums love to play dead? Sometimes they’ll decide to play dead after they’re caught and clubbed. Then sometimes they come back to life after being skinned. Can you say angry-zombie-possum?

2. Common courtship process:
i. Boy and girl meet
ii. Boy decides he likes the girl, drives up to her house sometime after one in the morning and cranks a love song on his stereo for some indeterminate amount of time
iii. Girl goes to window and swoons for this indeterminate period of time, or goes to window to glare briefly then goes back to bed.
iv. Depends on the result of iii: (negative) the boy repeats step iii until he goes back to step i, or (positive) the boy and girl start to date.
v. After some time of going out, they become “novios,” something pretty similar  to being boyfriend/girlfriend. Then after being novios for a while, they get married.

…at any point in the process, either the boy or the girl can tell the other that they do or don’t like him/her; often neither this event nor whether or not it’s reciprocated generally affect any of the five steps.

3. It is not a meal if there are not tortillas. Literally, like it doesn’t count as a meal without them–if you eat what we United-States-ians would usually call a meal, and it’s without tortillas, you actually get to eat another meal (with tortillas, of course) because the first time around didn’t count. This is pretty awesome, although may bode ill for my health if I don’t play a ton of soccer…and number four…

4. Soccer is different. It’s like…eating a meal or walking to work. I’m used to “oh cool, yeah lets go play soccer!” Here it’s not really something to get stoked about. Not that people don’t love it…they really, really really love to play soccer…it’s simply a part of life. Just about everybody has a brother who’s played semi-pro, or plays semi-pro.

5. In the U.S. if we’re going to make a gesture to signify the person we’re talking about, we generally point with the hand or nod with the head. What’s the most common way to do this here? A kissing-like-gesture with the mouth. This one took a while to figure out.

6. They drink lots of fruit punch. It’s very delicious and very specific: apple and pineapple juice with a bit of sugar and cinnamon, only served hot and with little pieces of coconut floating in it.

7. Coffee’s like this: brewed light, heavily sugared and always with sweet bread to dip. Once in a blue moon somebody in a restaurant will order coffee with milk–beyond that, coffee with any sort of dairy product mixed in is purely out of the question.

8. There are tons of motorcycles. They all–
1. Look different
2. Have nearly the exact same Chinese chassis and engine

9. There’s more of life and death and heaven and hell than you can shake a stick at.

photography

Click on the picture for the bigger version–it’ll take a second to load.

Almost at the mountain top, but the sun had already set

Courtesy Microsoft ICE.

other, stories

Today I rode through a little town in the middle of nowhere in a developing country in Central America on an old dirtbike, to my desk inside of a warehouse-building-turned-office.

photography

This community, Maxbal (spoken Mash-bal) is a two and a half hour rough-road (anything without low geared 4wd can’t make it) drive away from the town I live in.

This is the first group of students, ever, to graduate from 9th grade–the community was proud.

The teachers had the students go out into the soccer field to take their picture while the game continued.

Throw in
Soccer and school
funny, stories

Guatemala is a land rich in culture and history. There is war and violence, poverty and pain, pride and love and more variety than you can shake a stick at; its anthropology is deep and rich.

With this deep and rich anthropology comes a particular thing: you generally can’t tell a Guatemalan by hair color or skin tone–there’s lots of variation. There’s only one quick way to tell if someone’s not of Guatemalan heritage: eyes, brown eyes. There are immigrants, African or North American, but they’re not too common.

Today was absolutely stunning. This weekend was a national holiday weekend for Guatemala, along with many other Catholic countries of the world. My unofficially-adopted Guatemalan Uncle, Profe Jorge, invited me to travel with him for the weekend. Not wanting to be stuck alone in Barillas, I traveled with him. Today we went to Santiago Sacatepequez, which I guess is the go-to place to see the celebration of Dia de Todos los Santos: they have an absolutely wild and beautiful crazy kite-festival celebration in the cemetery each year. Of course, there’s also delicious and cheep food aplenty.

We parked about a half mile away from the downtown area and began to walk. Not five minutes later we passed a pretty blonde and blue-eyed girl walking the other way. “Well that’s curious” I thought to myself–a little part of me inside said “hey Dave! There’s a good chance she speaks English. Go talk to her!” It’d been a long time since I’d talked with a pretty girl in English. “Nah, that’s silly, I won’t bother” I thought to myself. We kept walking, and a few minutes later made it to the downtown area.

Not more than ten minutes later, I saw a group of three that didn’t quite look Guatemalan, but I wasn’t sure–they were at least thirty feet away and I couldn’t see their faces with the way they were standing. Two of them, a guy and a gal, were dressed somewhat tourist-ly. The third, another gal in a rose colored shirt, looked less like a tourist then the other two but didn’t seem dressed like a local. All three were fair-skinned, so I figured they were probably not from these parts…but I couldn’t see their eyes so I didn’t know. I should also add that (even though I don’t ever think think much of how a girl looks without having seen her face and smile) the gal in the rose colored shirt, she looked pretty.

Just as I was turning away, something caught her attention and she turned her head and glanced over her shoulder. I saw her face and her eyes and my jaw dropped. I was mildly paralyzed for a moment or two, jaw dropped. Think of that one time when you were walking along and noticed that the sun was getting low. You turn to look at the sunset behind you and see the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen in your life, and your jaw actually drops and you gasp a little bit. Yup, it was like that. This girl had the prettiest eyes.

A few moments passed and my mind was still in “pause” mode. In all my life I’ve never seen a girl with eyes like her eyes. This girl’s prettiest eyes were somehow a glimpse of her self, a little bit of curiosity and contentedness and happiness. I don’t remember if she was smiling at the moment, but I do remember that her eyes were.

“Ok Dave. You need to go talk to this girl, right now” I told myself with conviction.

I didn’t.

Half an hour later I knew what I had to do.

I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and held it in my pocket. My hopes, jittery, unsure and unsecure, written on a little piece of paper in my pocket. Eight digits. Maybe by some wild providence, maybe by a miracle or other act of God I would get a second chance. Is it okay to pray to God to get to talk with a pretty girl? I wasn’t sure, but I might’ve prayed just a tiny bit. One hour passed, I didn’t see her again. Two hours passed, I didn’t see her again. We left the cemetery where the incredible kite-festival celebration was and began the slow return to the downtown area–the road was packed with people.

We were walking on the right side of the road and there she was on the other side. Somehow I’d missed her when we passed and now she was a ways up the road from us. I saw her and my mind started to spin like a wobbly top. Shoot shoot shoot, she’s all the way over there. I can’t get over there in time, there are too many people. She was a long ways away, and I would’ve had to suddenly take off  running and pushing, chasing through a very dense crowd and–

“Ok Dave, you know what? You missed one chance at what might become the most beautiful thing that’ll happen in your entire life and you’re about to loose your second chance because you don’t want to get pushy in a crowd. Man up Dave, man up.”

I threw myself into the crowd, people glaring at me left and right. One man cuffed me in the back of the head as I stumbled by him. Well, ok..I may have actually crashed straight into him when I was acrobatically avoiding body-checking an old woman. I got close to the girl with the prettiest eyes, close enough for her to hear me.

The crowd was noisy, I had to almost shout: “Excuse me! Miss!”

She turned and looked around, only mildly confused, saw me and said with a smile: “Why hello! Another gringo!”

“You have the most wonderful eyes and smile I’ve ever seen!”

She looked at me, eye contact for a moment that seemed longer than a moment, and with her smile said: “and you do too, chico!”

I just about lost my balance again, but recovered and reached over the sea of people between her and I, the piece of paper in my hand, that scrap of paper with my hopes and thumping heart scribbled on it, 8 little numbers.

She stood up on her toes, reached and took the piece of paper, glanced at it and slipped it in her pocket. The crowd had gotten noisier. I shouted my name to her over the noise, and she shouted hers to me. She turned to keep walking, but then paused for a moment to glance over her shoulder and wink at me.

I definitely nearly lost my balance again.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Every single bit of this story is true, all the way up to the part where I saw her again.

The End.

——–

*I don’t know much of genetics or anthropology, but I’ll hazard a guess anyways. The indigenous people have brown eyes, so maybe in the world of eye-color-genes the brown gene is most dominant and the others are recessive.