Vacation [Stateside]

In December I went to California for the holidays. My parents, sister, and future brother-in-law all flew in, and we saw my grandparents, two sets of aunts and uncles and some cousins on my dad's side of the family. It was the first time I have spent with family and my first time in the States since August 2010.

The whole experience was surreal in that it felt so very normal. After such a long absence I somehow expected it to be hard to pick up where I had left off, but that's the nature of family at its best; the important things don't change, and the things that do change all get rolled into the mix with good cheer. We ate, drank, laughed, cried, celebrated, lazed, and worked where appropriate. I walked the beach, visited the Monarch butterfly grove, went sea kayaking, took a trip to admire the opulence and finery at Hearst Castle, did some wedding dress shopping with my sister, and met my cousin's new little baby.

There were two moments that particularly struck my Guatemalan sensibilities.


Moment 1: Scarcity and Abundance

When I arrived in Texas to change flights, I went through customs and with a thrill filled up my water bottle from the drinking fountain. Free, cold, drinkable water. I hadn't realized that I needed to go through security again to board my new flight. I approached the line and a TSA agent told me I needed to dump out my bottle. I stared at him. At my mostly full Nalgene. Quailed at the waste. Considered chugging the whole thing there and then.

Mentally I knew that there was another drinking fountain on the other side of the security scanners, ready to dispense more free, cold, drinkable water. I knew that we use potable water to flush toilets in the US. This wasn't a huge deal. Emotionally, I reacted as someone who lives in a community that subsists on captured rain water, where I bring in drinkable water from the nearest city and where the dry season means limited bathing, laundry, and dishes.

I looked at the garbage can where he pointed. Took one swallow of water. Poured it out. Went on.


Moment 2: Serenity and Anxiety

One evening at my grandparents house my uncle announced he was heading back to the hotel for the evening. On foot. After dark. Someone offered to drive him, but he shrugged it off and said he'd enjoy the exercise on such a nice night.

My stress level spiked. My stomach tied into knots. I reminded myself we were not in Guatemala, and that pick-pockets, muggers, and kidnappers were hardly likely to target my uncle in a sleepy little beach town in California.

He left, spent the night in the hotel, and arrived back at the house the following morning without incident.  


At the end of the vacation, I mistily hugged each family member, content that at least this time I know I'll be seeing them all again much more quickly than the last span of 16+ months apart. I had a great little bonus visit with a childhood friend who was also vacationing in San Francisco, and then made the trip home to Guatemala.

I stepped back into my life here without much thought, again, things felt surreal in that they felt so normal. How can I comfortably inhabit  the world of Scarcity and Anxiety, as well as Serenity and Abundance? In the US airports I made small talk with strangers, sat between iPad and laptop users while I happily read on my Kindle, and took out my wallet without a second thought as I swiped purchases on my credit card. In the Guatemalan airport I smoothly picked up my defensive living habits of hiding valuables, stowing cash all over my body, and judiciously choosing who to make eye contact with or smile at.

As I walked down the muddy path to the house I share with my host family, my three host siblings shouted my name and ran to me to help carry my bags. I stumbled over the Q'eqchi', but it came out alright. Canchita meowed plaintively at me while I fumbled with the keys, but one look at her plump self assured me she was by no means neglected in my absence. In the evening I walked into the kitchen with my glass of water and tore into the fresh tortillas, easily using them in place of silverware to ferry food to my mouth. Sometimes I wonder what it is I am accomplishing here, but at the very least, I have made a home.

It’s All Q’eqchi’ To Me

I have now been struggling to learn a Mayan language for a year. Admittedly, I spent five or six months working on K’iche’ and then in June switched over to Q’eqchi’. Moving from one language to the other felt how I imagine it would be to switch from Spanish to Portuguese after taking only one semester. The pronunciation is mostly (but not wholly) the same, the grammar is similar, and there are just enough vocabulary words that are the same to keep you confused. My first teacher had almost no experience teaching K’iche’ and so was long on patience but short on structure; my current teacher has been teaching Q’eqchi’ for over a decade and is long on structure but somewhat set in her ways. My class sessions are dominated by me filling my notebook with dictations from my teacher on vocabulary and grammar, but very little verbal practice. Still, living in the community gives me opportunity for practice and most of the fault for my slow progress is my own lack of discipline to study.

In the beginning, the most difficult thing for me was learning to distinguish between different consonant sounds, and to then be able to make them accurately. In Q’eqchi there are six different letters that can make a sound like a “k” to the untrained ear.

• Q – Sounds like you’re clearing your throat
• Q’ – A click in the back of the throat
• K – Sounds like a normal English “ck”
• K’ – A forceful sound off the roof of the mouth
• Y – Depending on where in a word it is, it may sound like the “cu” in “cue” followed by other vowels, or it may act like a normal “y”.
• W – Depending on where in a word it is and its relation to vowels, it may sound soft like the “w” in “bower” or it may sound like the “coo” in “cool”.

The next hurdle was vocabulary. As with the classic example of the many names for different types of snow in the Inuit language, I have found that there are many distinctions between types, stage of development, and preparations of corn that I never would have considered creating a new word for before. Likewise there are different verbs for “to carry” based on if it is done in the arms, on the back, on top of the head, or on the shoulders.

One of the areas I’ve mostly given up on is the myriad of terms for people in the family. For one thing, people usually don’t introduce themselves to me with any explanation for how they are related to anyone else, so I don’t hear the words used much. For another, it’s just confusing. In the US relationship titles are usually determined by the gender of the person spoken about (a female child is a daughter of her parent; a male child is a son of his parent, although cousin is gender neutral). In Q’eqchi’, relationship titles vary by the gender of both the speaker and the person spoken of (a female child is a ko’ to her mother, but a rabin to her father; a male child is a yum to his mother, but a alal to his father). In the case of siblings, titles vary by the gender of the speaker, gender of the subject and the age relation between the two. Thus, a girl’s older sister is chaq’na’ but her younger sister is iitz’inixq, while her older brother is as but her younger brother is iitz’inwinq. On the other hand, a boy’s older brother is as but his younger brother is iitz’in, and a boy’s older sister is anab’ but his younger sister is ch’ina anab’

There is also the inverse problem in which words I consider vitally different are lumped into one term in Q’eqchi’. For example, one verb, wank means to live, to have, and to be. You have to figure out which one is being used through context. More frustratingly, ajok means both to want and to need. Thus, I have no way of explaining, “I want to eat another cookie, but I don’t need to, so I won’t.” Nor, on a cold morning, can I complain, “I need to take a bucket bath, but I don’t want to.” I mean, really, how do you raise a child to understand the difference between wants and needs if there isn’t a distinction between the two in your language? 

For all my griping, I do like learning Q’eqchi'. I signed up for this, after all. I savor the little victories of making it through small talk when I meet a woman I know on the road. I like breaking out a new set of vocabulary words with my host family and seeing them exchange glances. “She finally learned ‘slow’ and ‘fast’!” their looks seem to say. When I can more or less follow where we are on the agenda in meetings, or I get the gist of what the people next to me in the microbus are saying, I congratulate myself. It’s been more than ten years since I was at this beginning stage with Spanish, so it took a bit to resign myself to being a true beginner again. Now that I can explain my travel plans to my host mother and set up a play date with my host siblings, I think I’m almost ready to graduate back out of beginner status. 

Commute [Small Blessings]

I settle into the first bench seat in my microbus between women, children, and baskets.  We jolt and jostle along the slickery rocks and greasy mud, stopping every so often to pick up additional passengers eager to escape the misting drizzle.

We turn onto the highway and pick up speed on the smooth pavement.  The gangly driver unrolls his window halfway, leans forward, snakes a long arm out the crack, and scrapes at the water-beaded glass before his face with a dismembered windshield wiper.  He reverses the process, guiding the window back up with help from his other hand to keep it in its track.  Perhaps twenty seconds later, he repeats the performance.  I quietly breathe the rhythm of a chuckle.  The woman next to me smiles.  The driver allows himself a wry acknowledgement, and soon all eight of us crammed in the front two rows are giggling. 

And so, merrily we barrel down the winding road, thankful it is merely sprinkling.