Greetings from Guatemala

Okay, I'm not actually in Guatemala at the moment, I just liked the
sound of the alliteration in my head so I went with it. I did go this
weekend, though, and had a grand adventure with-- who'd have guessed
it-- Tim. He is really enjoying living in San Cristobal, and as I'm
currently in the middle of two weeks' paid vacation for Semana Santa
and Easter, I've had the chance to check out the famous (infamous?)
city of San Cristobal de las Casas myself for a few days while he was
at work in addition to a little weekend trip over the border.

To put all this in context, I should mention that I have dreamed of
coming to San Cris since high school, as it has been pinpointed as the
heart of the organized Zapatista movement and is a hotbed for issues
like land ownership and indigenous rights. Tim has found his way into
a cool organization called CAPICE, for which he is doing miscellaneous
media work, and absolutely loves the place. So anyways, I hopped on a
bus and came down, to get a break from the constant work and white
noise of Orizaba. i brought Crackers the ferret with me in his little
traveling backpack, and the vacation got off on a bad foot when he was
stolen somewhere around Tuxtla (a horrible city, full of horrible
people)... simply disappeared off the bus. We searched when we got to
San Cris, but he was nowhere to be found... didn't respond to his
squeaky chicken leg toy, which he usually comes running to... nothing.
Just gone. I must say, was (am) really upset over the situation- he
was easily the best pet I ever had, we woke up at 5am together and
played before my roommate and her princess poodle woke up and took
over the house, and then again before I went to bed every day... I
only hope that whoever stole him resold him to a nice family
somewhere. That is the best thing I can do under present
circumstances. I have been trying not to think about it.

On the positive side... I must say, San Cristobal is incredible. A
tourist mecca, cultural center, and just a little bit of everything
else. Hundreds come here for the laid-back environment, from hippie
tourists to academics studying land reform and anthropology to
Mexicans just looking to get a change of scenery. All kinds of
artesania, just about every kind of food you could possibly imagine,
beautiful churches, and above all-- fabulous weather. I spent this
morning, in fact, suntanning on the patio of Tim's nice little
apartment, which includes all the best aspects of camping (namely, a
fire pit on his patio and a fireplace in his bedroom) and all the best
aspects of the real world (namely, a clean place to sleep and a hot
shower!)... we bought a grill to put over the firepit and have been
BBQing Mexico-style regularly.

I spent the better part of last week exploring local places, including
all the local cafes and markets, but also the market and church of
nearby Cholula and a private home in Zinacantan with home-brewed pox
(pronounced "poshe", essentially Mayan moonshine made of god only
knows what) where we tried plain, tamarind-flavor, orange-flavor, and
jamaica-flavored pox and I spent a whopping $60 (yikes! the single
most expensive purchase I have made in Mexico) on one of the most
beautiful hand-embroidered tapestries you have ever seen.

Tim's work, CAPICE, located in a cafe called TierrAdentro (earth
inside) is an amazing place: it features a number of stores, mostly
Mayan women cooperatives, which make amazing crafts and jewelry, all
centered around a good cafe with coffee so strong I think it tastes
like chalk half the time ("California strength" Tim and I call it
after our adventures in Utah with Don's class and the cranky parents
who needed their daily fix of caffeine to come both early and strong),
but it's a good kind of chalk, and it's free for Tim and sometimes me
if I smile broadly enough. They recently had a conference where a
number of Zap subcomandantes (including Marcos!) came and spoke about
social reform and the next phase of the Zapatista movement... and if I
can brag just a little bit here, MY boyfriend was the techie behind it
all! He is getting the awesome opportunity to meet with different
kinds of professors and researchers and social activists. We were
recently invited to dinner, for example, with a couple of professors
from UMass and some local professors to sip margaritas and talk
politics. It's certainly a good foothold for his own research
interests, and a great field experience that I'm happy to be able to
share at least while I'm on vacation.

Then, as if things couldn't get any better, we hopped aboard a bus
full of Canadian students (ey) and took a quick (well, 3 hour) trip to
the border directly down 195, got our passports and visas stamped,
changed buses, and took another quick (well, 5 hour) trip to Lago
Santiago, one of the most gorgeous lakes I've ever seen, really. Of
course it was raining when we got there, but even from our misty
vantage point descending down into the valley (the lake is surrounded
by three volcanoes), we could see that the view was absolutely
fabulous, something like on a postcard.

From the horrible tourist town we arrived in, we took a boat ride of
maybe half an hour across the lake to the smaller, more comfortable
Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, where we would stay for Thursday and
Friday nights to witness a Mayan-Christian costumbre (in this case,
translated not to mean "custom" but as a religious event stemming from
two distinct traditions which have blended together): namely, the
rebirth of Christ (in Mayan religions, the god of Maize) after the
ruling of Relaj-Mam, god of the underworld.

The short version of the (ridiculously complicated, totally unclear
even after a weekend of study and witnessing of reenactment) story is
that each year, Christ dies and for a time the god of the underworld,
Relaj-Mam (who is considered a necessary evil, and to whom one prays
so that bad things do NOT happen to one's friends and family) rules
the world. Each year, special fruits are brought from the coast and
wrapped in foil and draped over the central altar in the normal
church, representing the portal to the underworld and the web of the
universe above it which Relaj-Mam controls. A papier mache figure of
Christ is then prepared for a special night-long procession, where San
Juan pendejo (literally, Saint John the prick) carries his, um, semen
to the virgin Mary, who is a few streets away. I am not kidding about
this part. The men carrying the Saint John figure on their backs
literally run back and forth all night without stopping between Jesus
and Mary and do this funny little dance every time they reach a
terminal to represent the impregnation of Mary. While this is
happening, the Christ and Mary figures are moved slowly towards one
another until at dawn they are united in front of the church and
Christ is, well, immaculately reconceived from his own semen
somehow... or something. I know, it doesn't make much sense,
especially given the fact that according to legend, St. John is both
Mary's husband and Christ's brother before he dies. I don't reccommend
you try to figure that one out, it is nothing but a headache. We
stayed up until 2 watching, but nothing much happened except that most
of the women and children went to bed and the die hard males in the
community stayed awake either participating in the ceremony or getting
wasted off of pox and, as rumor had it, crack. So we went to bed for
the better part of the night, trusting that the beautiful ceremonious
part of the tradition had already been seen and that we didn't need to
see what ills lie awake at night.

The next day and night's ceremonies are a little bit easier to
understand, but they also last the entire 24 hour period (some elders
and religious personages stay awake for 72ish hours during the
ceremonies). Christ is put into an urna (sort of like a beautiful,
transparent form of a coffin) beginning at the beginning of the day,
and artists from the town over spend the day making a sort of carpet
of patterns made by multicolored sawdust (I am not doing it justice;
even as I write I realize that sounds kind of strange- better to look
at the pictures), and then at night Christ is placed in the
(ridiculously heavy) urna and a procession of perhaps 20 men spends
the entire night until dawn walking at a snail's pace (slower, even)
around maybe four blocks on the sawdust paintings, destroying them
with their feet and again arriving back at the doorstep of the church
at around 6am (dawn). The two days culminates in the raising of Christ
on his crucifix and a Catholic mass... unless I have that mixed up...
which I very well may... I have it all written down somewhere, but
every time I spoke to someone I found more questions than I found
answers. Anyways. That's the Short Version.

The whole thing was incredible, and a ton of fun. It was a weekend of
candles, ceremonies, four-hour naps, photographs, changed camera
lenses, and trips to the church and the few blocks surrounding it. We
even sat through almost all of a ridiculously long mass in Spanish and
the local dialect after the raising of the cross in the navel of the
world (supposedly, its centermost part) until our legs would not hold
out any longer and our feet fell asleep and we had to go eat. It was a
bit esoteric anyways: I understood most of the Spanish half, but that
was all, and Tim even less.

Unfortunately, I and a few other members of our expedition got
wickedly sick on our last day (monteczuma's revenge guatemala style),
and had no chance to check out the tourist mecca across the lake,
through which we again exited on our way back into Mexico. Tim walked
around a bit, but didn't find much of interest except for a delicious
street vendor which gave him babyback ribs. Instead, he finds himself
ill today. Fortunately, it seems to be a quickly-passing illness, and
when I spoke to him last before dragging his computer to TierrAdentro
to write, he looked much better and was about to take a nap.

So... that's pretty much it for the Mexico side of things. I plan on
staying out this week in San Cris and taking it easy. I found a
meditation center that I would like to check out, and there are as
always new hidden corners to explore in a new city, and of course more
free coffee at TierrAdentro, should I decide to start eating something
besides rice, beans and Gatorade in the next few days.

In other news, I am awaiting the official offer letter from the
Academy of Urban School Leadership (www.ausl-chicago.org), but I
passed all of my tests (including physics, which I was sure I failed)
and it looks like in late June I will be moving to Chicago to become a
certified, master's degree-ified teacher in the Chicago Public Schools
system, and will therefore be much easier to keep track of, as it
requires a six year commitment. However, as Don always says, "the top
three reasons for becoming a teacher are June, July and August" and I
have promised myself to have a lot of international adventures in the
summers when I am not putting my nose to the grindstone teaching and
being taught to be an even bigger nerd than I already am.

Mostly I just wanted to check in and say hi, that yes I do still exist
and am still writing as much as ever, but that most of it hasn't made
it to a computer yet. I have mostly been journaling, and reading
Tolstoy, (Anna Karenina was recommended to me by a teacher friend I
have been spending most of my time with in Orizaba). I also uploaded
some new pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/anjolley/ ... I
haven't quite gotten to all of the Guatemala ones yet, but there are a
few there... many were taken at night (I have several hundred to go
through) and I need to spend some more time sorting them before I put
them online, but I promise to do so soon...

Cheers,

Anna