Two more reports from the Chatham Belize-Guatemala Trip.
Belize
Rachel Martinenz’s grandmother was making tamales, for the educational and gastronomical benefit of the 23 Chatham students. We stood in the not-wilds of the Belize jungle, outside a replica Mayan hut, while Miss Nila, her husband Phillip, and another woman whose name escapes me did the preparation work. The students and Dr Lenz and Dr Wister did token work in assembling the tamales – flattening the soft dough into a tortilla shape, then spreading the red chicken filling, finally trying to wrap the whole mess in a banana leaf without spilling it.
We waited, some of us inside the hut beside the hot fire and tamale smells. Some of us outside, looking at some of the traditional herbs growing in patches around the wooden hut. Miss Nila and the other woman told Amy S, Lauren G, and I about what helped arthritis, and what de-wormed children and what was just wild cilantro (the last one had a smell you couldn’t mistake for anything else.)
While all this went on, a beautiful little girl wandered back and forth amongst the adults, playing, being distracted, picking up leaves and fiddling with the coolers of plates and cups. She spoke only Spanish. She was wearing “little girl shades” of pink and purple, with a design of a cat on her shirt. I desperately wanted to talk to her, because she somehow seemed more foreign than all of the well-spoken women. Small children are frequently aliens, and though I play well with them (having honest enjoyment of bubbles and sidewalk chalk helps) I do not possess that special knack for fake excitement and talking down that works well when trying to communicate with the smaller members of our species. Having a mostly forgotten, never more than basic grasp of Spanish would not help the ease of conversation. It would, however, help bring the experience up to a more notable one.
I never know how to open – I steeled my courage, leaned down but not too far, and asked the little girl, “como se llama?” No hesitation, “Rachel Martinez.” Somehow completely amazed by my ability to make a child who didn’t speak my language understand hers, I then asked, “cuantos anos?” She held up three fingers. I imitated my mother in my head, and said approvingly, “Ahh, tres.” She held up four fingers, “Cuatro?” She nodded. A while later, fellow students said she was three, going on four. Her communication methods were quite savvy. I certainly didn’t remember the Spanish word for almost.
Being completely unable to think of another Spanish phrase or question that a child would know, I wandered back the Mayan hut. There I told Lauren and Amy, with absurd amounts of satisfaction, about my brilliant cross-cultural exchange. It’s hard to describe the moment now, but it felt more real than the circumstances, which were fascinating, but still some Belizean version of Colonial Williamsburg. We stood in the jungle, twenty minutes’ walk from Duplooy’s lodge, huddled inside a Mayan hut as a woman paid to make tamales for us gave us token instructions in folding them. It was damned fun, a thrilling novelty, but it made me ache for some “National Geographic” excuse to document and record real, foreign life in action. My inane little exchange with Rachel Martinez felt like one of the first snatches of communication with someone alien to my life and my American bubble.
Guatemala
I didn’t learn anything about the merchant boy at Tikal, not even his name, but our interaction was a classic Not Friends moment, because it would have felt meaningful at home, if not as exciting.
After some hiking and exploring of the incredible Tikal temples, some Chatham girls and I walked a short ways down the road from our “Jungle Lodge” to the little market. As I had in Belize, while shopping, I quickly slipped away from the rest of the girls. My pockets were light, and besides stocking up on the infamous Guatemalan coffee, I didn’t have very many shopping ambitions. I just wanted to take in the atmosphere, and to do so, I had to ditch my pale compatriots (though since the market was tiny, I ran into one or more of them every two minutes anyway.)
The Guatemalans are often less pushy than the Belizean merchants, but still at every stall the (mostly) women urged me to come in, amiga, look around. We have skirts, shirts, earrings. If they spoke first, they often opened in English. Have to assume the worst about blonde girls in your country. I countered with awful Spanish that got progressively better. I had words filed far back in my mind that I managed to retrieve and dust off. I decided, without consciously thinking about it, that I was going to avoid English as much as I could. Usually, their English was better than my Spanish, but I managed to fake what I didn’t understand reasonably well.
I got to one booth, and a young man approached me. I can’t remember clearly how old he must have been. I think it was hard to tell at the time, but somewhere between 13 and 15. He had a very sweet face to match his manner. Earnestly he began to show me his wares. Inside was a woman who was probably his mother, with a baby tied to her back. I only wanted coffee, and spying big, decorate bags I asked, “cuanto café?” He said 65 (in espanol) quetzals, but after 29, my Spanish numbers got shaky, so in response to my black look, he clarified that it was 65. I asked “de donde?” and was pleased to remember that one. “Antigua” said the boy, and I replied as if I knew the place so well, “Ahh, Antigua!” I somehow specified that I wished to buy the coffee, and then did so. I circled the booths again, seeing nothing I desperately needed, besides beautiful weavings I knew my mother would kill for. Demasiado denero, though all of them well worth the cost.
I came back to the boy’s booth, without thinking about it, and before I knew it, he was in selling mode again. There was something wonderful about his methods, though. In place of flattery, imagined friendliness, or just plain pestering, he was unceasingly, earnestly showing me his wears. He held up a pink striped wrap skirt, and I politely called it pretty. Then he was carefully tying it around my waist in a way that I still can’t figure out how to repeat. The skirt was nice, but I had no real interest in it. I asked how much, and it was a very reasonable 75 quetzals. I admired the skirt on, as it fit well, and then took it off. I said “no se” in exaggerated tones (it seems instinctive to exaggerate your mood, when your grasp of the language is highly shaky; any way to get your intended point across.) To make sure I knew all of what he offered, I suppose, the boy fetched a hooked piece of wood, and began to capture a skirt perched high above on the outside displays. I tried to get across that it wasn’t necessary, but I was of course ignored. This other skirt was red striped. I held them both out and again exaggerated my indecisiveness. Hmmm, “Rojo o…” I couldn’t remember the word for pink. I signified that the boy should tell me his favorite, and after quick deliberation, he specified that the pink was best. I realized there was no way I wasn’t buying a skirt at this point. I certainly hadn’t wanted one at all, though they were nice, I had no desperate need to posses either of them. But I feel briefly in love with this young man selling them, we had our conversation in Spanish and bits of English and pointing, and all of that was worth more than 75 quetzals. He was just trying to sell me something, like anyone else, but like my moment with Rachel Martinez, it felt very real. I felt oddly relaxed, chatting with this boy, and then I waved and said “adios” with my coffee and skirt in hand.
Even if it was all business, it was still talking to a local on their terms, not just looking down and out the window at them, from a pleasantly cooled tour bus. Most of all, it was the simple fact of suddenly developing an inexplicable fondness for a stranger’s face and manner.
