My experience there seems so far away from me now that I have been back for almost two weeks. Most of my culture shock has worn off, although when I think about the people in Paso Caballos or the guys working at the bio station, Connecticut starts looking a little bit uglier and I start thinking about whether I can afford a plane ticket just to go visit sometime. Sometime before I head back for my PhD research, that is. The I-will-return promises that I made to people got more and more sincere as the summer went on.
Perhaps I'll just start with a brief description of "the beginning", and then fill in more stories and details in the random and shuffled order of my memory. Here are the various places that I went:
I started in San Andres:
A little town on the side of lake Peten Itza, where I stayed with a family for my first two weeks, attending a little Spanish school. It was nice to start here, and get a little bit adjusted to the heat and the Guatemalan pace (s-l-o-w) before actually starting to try to work. Still, even though the Spanish school helped me immensely, by the end of the summer I ended up wishing I had spent less time here so that I could have had more time out in the field. The un-readyness to leave that I felt at the end of my trip will likely be a recurring theme.After San Andres I spent a week in Flores, the tourist-dominated capital of the Peten, where I claimed to be getting things ready for my research, but was really just too scared to start right away. I was all of a sudden overwhelmed with the realization that I was about to head out into a part of Guatemala where I would have no telephone, no internet, without knowing a single person who would be there, or having any kind of idea what I was supposed to be doing for this "research" business. I was terrified, really. Freaking the fuck out, even though I was only going to be out in the field for about twelve days that first time.
But on Friday morning at 7am, when ProPeten (the Guatemalan organization that runs the biological station, and with whom I coordinated my research) took off to the station in their rickety blue Toyota pickup truck, I was inside. So was Don Raquel, who later became a good friend of mine... but he, like me, tends to be very quiet at first, so we rode the two and a half hours up to Paso Caballos in silence, watching sprawling cattle ranches and tiny aldeas passing by as we made our way over the rutted, washed out dirt road.
I was still freaked out for my first two or three days there, it took a while for the sounds of the howler monkeys, birds, and the friendly chatting of Raquel and the other Bio Station workers to calm me down. Mostly I hid in my dormitory, or sat out on the porch and watched a hummingbird chase the butterflies away from its favorite flower bush. Here's a picture of my dorm:
The station was nearly empty. They have two big dormitory buildings, this one for "investigators" and another for tourists, volunteers, or other visitors, but I was the only person there. There was also a huge separate kitchen for visitors, with a fridge and gas stove, but the three men who were working that week invited me to come and cook and eat with them in their kitchen, in which they each had their own fire-pit stove. Of course, in the midst of all my terror and confusion before heading out there, nobody had told me that I was supposed to bring my own food supplies, so I was forced to ask the guys to help me out, which only added to my anguish and unhappiness... Who does this gringa think she is? She can barely speak the language, she doesn't seem to know what she's doing here although she claims to be a researcher, and now she wants us to feed her???Luckily, the guys were incredibly nice, and took me fishing my first afternoon so that I at least felt a little bit like I was contributing to the food (I caught three fish!), and in the end eating with them was probably one of the best ways that I got to know them, and the conversations over meals were sometimes the most informative for my research. Even when I went back the next time and brought all my own food, I continued to head down to their kitchen and use their fires to cook, and shared my food with them as they had shared with me before.
After a few days at the station, I had some thirty pages of research notes in my moleskine, a belly full of fresh-caught fish and wild cilantro, and a regained feeling that maybe everything was going to work out ok.
And then Don Raquel took me into Paso Caballos.
We hiked up the river, me carrying my ridiculously over-filled backpack, to the "new house" of Don Nicolas, the mayor of Paso. Luckily, Don Nicolas was taking a day of rest from his work, so he was in his little store that occupied about a sixth of the space of the house, and was able to sit down while Raquel introduced me and helped me ask permission to stay in the town and interview people who lived there.Don Nicolas was incredibly wary, and insisted that there was nowhere in the town for visitors to stay - there were no dormitories, or anything like that. I said that I didn't need much, just a bed in some family's house, and that I would be able to pay the family for a bed and for food. When I said I could pay, Don Nicolas declared that I could stay right there in that house, in the back where his oldest son also lived, and he would bring a bed over from their other house where he lived with his wife and six youngest kids.
The first day was nothing. Don Nicolas barely talked to me, nor did anybody else. I was under the impression that I was supposed to wait for the other men of the town council to come for a meeting that afternoon, and that I could present myself to them and ask for permission to study in their town, but eventually it became clear that the meeting had been cancelled, somehow, and I had simply spent the day waiting for nothing.
Nobody talked to me in Paso Caballos. Mostly because many of them didn't speak Spanish at all, they only spoke Q'eqchi' Mayan, but also because of a general distrust and wariness of outsiders that I had only started to break through just as I was getting ready to leave. It was a very lonely place.
I got very good at sitting still, and doing nothing. This is a difficult skill to learn, and one that is already lost to me in the land of constant wireless internet and other hi-tech distractions. The sense of isolation was immense, and as a result I spent more time reflecting on myself, on my life, and on all of the people who I have ever known or who ever influenced me, than I have done in a long long time. If you are reading this, you were probably in my thoughts while I was lying in a hammock one day, or while sitting watching the boys play checkers in front of the store in the unbearable heat. I wrote very long letters, most of which seem to have been lost in the Guatemalan mail system.
Sometimes, I did some research.
No comments:
Post a Comment