Quick Update from the Weekend

- Spending Thanksgiving without my family was weird, but now I’ll appreciate being with them that much more in the future.

- I went out with Sergio for a couple beers that night. After a few pool matches on a table as flat as a putting green and a few rounds of microbrewed hefeweizen, deliciously potent IPA and Cabro (the other big Guatemalan beer… also owned by Gallo), drunken man talk in Spanish was inevitable. For such a lonely day, it turned out to be a great night. Sometimes, I guess, man must drink as well.*

- Machismo really is a big problem here. I mean, I always heard it was, but I guess I just assumed it was limited to cat-calling and the occasional pinched butt cheek. I was wrong. A lot of young guys will often juggle two or three lady friends while keeping the girls in the dark. Of course, young guys become old guys with families one day, and they still hold onto the beliefs that women are inferior, deserve to be domesticated, and absolutely should not leave the house. Having a son is a triumphant moment for a father; having a daughter is too often akin to hiring a new maid. The women here who try to break this cycle by going to college and getting a good job often find themselves unable to get a man.

- After two and a half months of cold showers and sleeping with a pillow the size of a couch cushion; after twelve weeks of a diet consisting of two helpings of beans, four eggs, and at least a dozen tortillas almost every day; after eighty-four days of waking up to the screaming/crying/laughing/beat-boxing of a three year old child, I’ve finally decided to move out of La Casa de Paty.

- I got them all going away gifts. For little Javier and Diego, I brought back a new soccer ball that my little sister got for free and my copy of Spider-man 2. Diego was asleep, but Javier’s face lit up like I’d never seen before when he opened his eyes to find that new, shiny ball in his hands. He hugged me and said I was his friend forever (didn’t quite make it to bff status).

- I moved into the Casa Argentina, a hostel in town with WiFi, hot water, and six power outages a day. Transient travelers and long-termers cook side by side in the kitchen here, creating an interesting mix of accents… unfortunately most of them are in English. In my room, my new bed might have been a comfy mattress fifteen years ago, but the padding has worn thin and I can feel every spring and coil suspending my body. That’s what you get for $3 a night.

- After two days of being here, it feels like I’m incapable of speaking Spanish already (though I can listen better than ever). I’m going to have to make a move soon.

- I went to an elderly home with my friend Rachel, Paty, and Paty’s church group this Sunday morning. We sang, prayed, and ate together for about an hour and a half this past Sunday morning. The twelve elderly ladies and gents there were about 4’5”, with cobweb color hair, leathery skin, and squinty smiles. They all showed off their lack of teeth in glee with the songs and the food. It’s a beautiful thing when faith goes beyond words and becomes action.

*Please drink responsibly.

A Thanksgiving in Guatemala

Here's a little article I wrote for the Colonia Corner, my town's monthly newspaper. Don't know if it'll make it in, but here it is anyway!

This past Thanksgiving, I ate all three of my meals alone. It was the first time that I spent the fourth Thursday of November without my family. There were no dulcet candied yams blanketed in melted marshmallows and nor was there cylindrically shaped cranberry sauce. Instead, in my Thanksgiving this year, food-coma-inducing turkey was replaced with a couple fried eggs cooked with as much butter as egg-whites. Stuffing came in the form of a hefty helping of black beans. And of course, no Guatemalan supper would be complete without a six-inch stack of hearty corn tortillas to balance out the meal.

For the past two and a half months I have been living in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala and volunteer-teaching English to kids from the outskirts of the city. Having spent the majority of my life in our quiet chunk of suburbia, I’ve experienced culture shock to the max. Everything here feels different. Everything. I look absolutely nothing like most people here and I’ve suddenly gone from being of average height to being a giant. Something as simple as walking down the street has left my senses overloaded. There’s unmistakable smell of burning garbage diffusing from a “house” made of corrugated tin and a few two-by-fours holding it up. Dust kicked up automobiles and their black, unfiltered exhaust mix in the air before settling and leaving their stale flavor on my tongue. My ankles are always rolling in new directions as they tread over the treacherously unpredictable sidewalks and streets. The syllables that enter my ears are all foreign from my native tongue, and my brain has to work overtime to process these new sounds and translate them into words, thoughts and feelings. Most of all, however, I’m overwhelmed by what I see. There are the elderly indigenous women with their tanned and leathered skin carrying giant baskets of vegetables for sale on their heads trying to make a survival wage. Stray dogs and the homeless share the sidewalks as a bedroom. And worst of all, if I walk through the European-styled Central Park, I’m offered shoe shines and cigarettes by boys no more than ten years old during school hours.

With the clinking of my fork and the slurping of my coffee being the only noise at the table, this year Thanksgiving was uncomfortably quiet. Usually, Thanksgiving in my house is filled with the din of shouting matches darting across the table combined with the ravenous sloshing of a face-stuffing session. However, this year, in this unexpected silence, my brain was the only companion I had to talk to. At dinner, I thought about what I’d be doing if I was at home: probably struggling to stay awake on my couch with my belly inflated to twice its normal size. I couldn’t help but wonder what my students would think if they saw the overabundance of food: the plates of turkey, the casseroles, the mashed potatoes, the cookies and pies, and so on.

From there, I thought about what they would think if they saw how life in Colonia was every day. We’re able to drink tap water and rest assured that our stomachs won’t be pumped full of diarrhea-causing amoebas. What would they say if they saw how much we wasted leaving the water running doing dishes or brushing our teeth? We have yards and parks with grass, playgrounds, fields, and space. How confused would the kids be when they saw that almost no one was outside?

Then I thought about what made me so different from these kids that I was blessed to be born into a family that could send me to quality private schools, that could afford a house with insulation, central air and heating, and that earned enough money to sign me up for Little League and buy me whatever the newest Nintendo system was. Were we somehow naturally superior? After seeing how hard my Guatemalan host mom works – ten hours a day, five or six days a week doing basically everything at the El Nahual Community Center where I volunteer – there’s no way that I could believe that. The only conclusion I could reach was that somehow, when I came into this world, I did so with the winning lottery ticket in hand. From that day, I would be blessed with a loving family and a comfortable, trauma-free childhood.

As I sat there, experiencing Thanksgiving as if it was just any other day, I realized how much I really had to be grateful for. I gave thanks that my parents never struggled so much to put food on the table that they made me beg for money on the streets. I gave thanks that I was taught the importance of an education and that I’ve been able to experience of having one. I gave thanks for hot water, for being able to throw toilet paper into the toilet, for clean air, for traffic laws, for growing up in an environment that told me I could do whatever I wanted to in life. I hoped that I’d never forget how lucky I’ve been and never forget to appreciate everything I’ve been given by my birth. Mostly, I prayed that I’d treat every day – every miniscule, seemingly insignificant moment – as if it were an occasion to give thanks.

Bull Balls and La Boca Costa

“…son testiculos de toro,” Hector explained to the table. I don’t think I have to translate this one for you all to get the idea. “Tom, quieres probar?” he asked me. Tom, do you want to try? I looked at the filleted and pan-fried testicles and thought to myself, ‘juevos de toro’ eh? They kind of look like eggs over easy. My friend Sergio’s Elisa’s eyebrows shot up spontaneously, as if to say “mi juevo,” or absolutely not. Ana Maria, Sergio’s mom, didn’t seem fazed by any of this. Diana, Anamaria’s daughter, seemed a little eeked by the thought of eating bull balls, too.

Now, you might be asking yourself how the hell I came to be seated next to a man, eating testicles a la bull and eager to share his treat with those seated around him. Actually, if you’ve been following my blog, you’re probably wondering who the hell these people even are in the first place. Well, that in itself is an interesting story.

Just over a month ago, when I went to Antigua for a week, I was introduced to a man of sixty-some years by my Polish host Zena. His name was Edgardo, and we all ate lunch together. He told stories of living and working in the states for years and years and his struggles finding consistent work right now, all while unabashedly showing off his warm toothless smile. He also told me of a woman, a good friend of his, named Ana Maria who lives in Xela. He asked me if I could deliver a gift to her; a simple necklace with a stone he carved as the pendant. “Of course,” I told him. It would require practically nothing of me to call up this woman and deliver his gift.

There’s an episode of The Office in which Andy and Dwight try to out-polite each other so that the other would not be indebted to return the favor to the other. Well, if Ana Maria thinks anything like Andy and Dwight, then Ana Maria and her family made sure to pull out the trump card right off the bat. I met her in the Parque Central, in front of the cathedral where she works, and, after giving her the letter and necklace, she invited me to her house the following night for coffee with her family. When I showed up, she gave me food and hot chocolate. Her son Sergio is also twenty-two and also plays guitar. We had a little jam sesh, shared some music, and when he went out to pick up some cigarettes he came back with a couple brewed surprises. I had no idea what to expect from that night and, to be honest, what I did expect wasn’t much. But good intentions and good deeds go round and round here; it seems like all you have to do is throw yourself into the cycle and enjoy the ride.

We hung out a couple more times, playing guitar and enjoying a couple more beers. Sergio showed me pictures of his house on the coast, the home where he grew up and where he returns now with his family each weekend. He asked me if I wanted to join them one weekend so that I could see a different part of the country. I was shocked, but I said I would love to.

Then, a few weeks later as if I transported in time, I was at a table in his spacious but simple colonial style house, being offered a taste of testes a second time. The group waited anxiously for my answer, probably half-grossed out by the idea of eating testicles and half-hoping that I’d do it and expose myself to a barrage of ball-related insults. I told Hector, Sergio’s older brother, yes, but only if Sergio manned up and joined me as I crossed a boundary I never thought I would. Sergio let out a bass-y laugh and agreed. We both got pieces about half the size of my pinky nail. We looked at each other, nervously chuckling and probably wondering if this would somehow make us gay. I picked up my fork, scooped up the Italian-sausage-looking sliver of meat and before I knew it, there was a piece of testicle in my mouth. The taste was actually overwhelming. I don’t know how to describe it, but if I hadn’t known it was bull ball I probably would have said it was ‘alright.’

I looked around the table as the little piece began its journey to my belly. Hector was smiling. Diana had that cheeks-pursed, eyebrows-raised look you’d expect someone to have if they just watched you eat an animal’s testicle. Anamaria’s eyes remained hidden by her tinted classes, but her usual puckered-lip expression transformed into a big, lip-sealed cheek-to-cheek grin. Across the table, Sergio grabbed his Coke and took a big swig, washing away the taste but not the shame. His girlfriend just chuckled and shook her head.

After dinner, Sergio and I exited the finished wooden walls of his house into the mini-compound that his family owned. Behind the gate to the street, there was an entire yard filled with tiny four-wall structures with families living inside. Sergio told me that the people living here were only charged about 400Q (about 80 bux) each year. He said that she couldn’t just give them away for free because then everyone would come in and try to claim something for themselves. By charging them almost nothing to live there, it keeps the peace and also does some good for these families as well.

We hopped in his mother’s pickup. I didn’t get a look at the make, but it was nice and new, spacious, and had air conditioning, something I had not yet experienced in Guatemala. We drove through the town, looking for a little tienda that had a couple of liters of beer for us to enjoy. Even though it was dark, the streets were vibrant and full of people enjoying the warm night air. A lot of the houses – if you can call them houses – we passed were assembled from corrugated tin paneling and pieces of wood thrown awkwardly holding them up. Out of all of the kids that we drove by, I’d say one out of every three were running and playing on the dirty, rocky, garbage covered roads barefoot. Men merrily stumbled by, red-faced and drunk.

Our first trip, I walked into the tienda with Sergio. There were two small kitchen tables that a few young guys were seated at, drinking some beers, a small counter, and an even smaller refrigerator. That was it. Everyone’s jaw in the tiny square room dropped when they saw me. Apparently not many foreigners had passed through these parts of the country. This will probably be as “real” of an experience of Guatemala as I will get in my time here. I was happy Sergio let me pay for my half this time. The rest of the night was spent sitting and talking with the family over a few small glasses of beer.

I woke up the next morning with the sun peaking through the windows of my second-floor room for the night. I walked out onto the balcony – yes, there was a balcony surrounding the entire square house – and looked out at the five or so volcanoes visible in the clear morning sky. The view was stunning. Guatemala really is a beautiful country.

That day would be filled with a visit to Hector’s grandparents-in-law’s coffee/cacao/over-sized lemon plantation, delicious carne asada, a lot of relaxing, and capped off with a variety show to elect the “queen” of the town. We watched the show from the balcony outside of Sergio’s bedroom (which became mine those two nights; Sergio shared his mother’s bed). I sat there, watching men in white masks, wigs, and hilarious “your fantasy animal” dresses strut their stuff, a standup comic, and a ridiculously talented ten-year-old singer, understanding almost every word that was said but somehow still missing almost every joke that was cracked. It didn’t matter. I was just grateful to be a part of it all.

Attitude and Gratitude

I never thought throwing a piece of toilet paper into the toilet would be anything worth writing about. Nevertheless, there I stood in a Houston airport bathroom, feeling guilty about the piece of paper that was about to fall from my hands into the water waiting below. It had been exactly two months since I had flushed toilet paper. Before I knew what happened, the paper was prematurely auto-sucked down with enough force to swallow a small child. The next piece felt more natural. I was back in the States.

For those of you who don’t know, I flew home Friday, November 13^th to surprise my old man the next day at his surprise 50^th birthday party. I was home for less than five days and, looking back on them now, they feel like a weird dream I had in the middle of my Central American adventure.

What caught me off guard at first was driving up the NJ Turnpike and I-95 with my girlfriend, Julie. The wide, well-lit lanes, the tolls, the bridges, and the impatient Jersey drivers weaving from shoulder to shoulder to save thirty seconds on their trip – everything felt so… well… normal. New Jersey was still the same New Jersey that I’ve known my entire life.

That night and the next day all happened too quickly for me to notice anything different about home or myself. Waking up next to Julie felt too good to be true. On the trip to my house, I was too anxious about surprising my dad and not somehow blowing the surprise in the last minutes beforehand. Walking into my house I was bombarded with a blur of faces and middle-aged men getting drunk in honor of my dad reaching the half-century mark. I stuffed my belly full of Italian food, imported German beer and birthday cake and cookies. And I got to see my best buddies from home. I was scared it would all seem different or foreign now, but I seamlessly slipped back into the old routine. Sometimes it’s nice how things just don’t change.

It was only during the next couple days, after all the excitement died down, that I started noticing the little things. Monday was exceptionally warm for a mid-November day and, since I didn’t have a car or car insurance, I decided to go for a couple hour bike ride around my town. As I rode through these familiar streets, everything was so quiet. It was almost eerie. The night before I flew home, I stayed with a Guatemalan girl named Italia. She visited Austin, Texas to see a Grad School and she told me what struck her most was how all the houses had perfectly maintained lawns and the parks had brand new jungle gyms and basketball courts, yet there was not a person to be seen. She joked that in Guatemala, this playground would’ve been beaten to shit already but that there’d still be people there at all times. I shared her confusion on this beautiful autumn day and when the streets were abandoned.

On Monday, I decided to visit Julie for the night up in Connecticut. On the way home the following morning, I looked out the window from my spacious Amtrak seat and took in the remaining colors of fall. I noticed the suburbs, too – the cookie-cutter houses with their backyards and second stories, the well-paved streets and sidewalks, the cars moving in a well-choreographed dance between stop signs and lights. Everything was so tidy and organized. I thought back to the streets of Guatemala: both the windy, essentially lawless highways and the city streets congested with black-fume spewing buses and trucks and cars without blinkers. All the exceptional things here that I never notice, I thought to myself, that we never notice.

Finally, my last Ah-hah moment came when I was helping my dad put away the dishes in the kitchen. He let the hot water run over the dirty dishes in the sink as he leisurely strolled about the kitchen and to his bedroom and back. Almost instantly as he left the room I thought of the dirty, amoeba-ridden faucet water of Guatemala. I thought of what my host family would think if they saw so much clean, drinkable going to waste. How could I ever justify it? I stopped loading the cups into the dishwasher to turn off the faucet. I am not one-hundred percent sure why. I mean, it’s not like I could’ve saved that excess water, bottled it up and delivered it personally to my Guate-family. But access to something as seemingly basic as clean water is not as basic as we’d like to believe. It is a blessing, and for us to treat it as anything less than that would be a sin.

And it doesn’t just stop with water. Think about washers and dryers. Sure, you’ve gotta wait an hour or so for your clothes to be clean and dry, but most Guatemalans that I’ve met do their laundry by hand, scrubbing the clothes in a cement sink and letting them air-dry for a couple days. I’ve tried it. It’s quite the forearm workout, but I’d much rather toss my clothes in a machine and forget about them for an hour. Just about everyone I know in the States can get on the internet whenever they want in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. It’s really incredible, if you think about it, how much great information we have access to at any given moment – we can watch TV shows, get news from around the world, watch YouTube videos on how to fix a flat bike tire or how to salsa. It’s also really sad when you think about how much we can complain that Facebook isn’t loading fast enough. Or think about driving. Yeah, it sucks being stuck in traffic, but after seeing the roads here, I’ll take traffic lights and organized merges over roadway anarchy any day.

My good buddy Paul asked me in an e-mail if I thought people leading simpler lives here in Guatemala made them happier. I told him that I don’t know if it makes them happier, but it definitely keeps things in perspective. That is, what is important in life. But after thinking about it a bit more, I think it also forces them to make the most out of what they have. For example, I’ve seen a family of five fit on one motorcycle. Husband, wife, and three kids. No joke. When you don’t have much, everything you do have becomes that much more valuable. Back home in the States, we are spoiled, myself included. After all, I drank about two gallons of milk every week for the past eight years. It’s not healthy, physically or spiritually. But it’s not that we have to feel bad that we have so much, provided that we’re actually aware of how much we have. It’s all in our attitudes. And if we take time to mix some gratitude into our attitudes, we’ll find ourselves appreciating the little things more. All of a sudden, sitting in traffic sucks a little less because all of a sudden just having a car becomes pretty damn sweet. Each meal is a little tastier because just having food is something to celebrate. If the internet decides to crap out for no apparent reason we won’t fret because we’ll realize how awesome it is having it the other 364 days of the year. When you’re surrounded with the exceptional, it’s easy for it all to start looking ordinary. That’s why it’s on us to consciously remember how damn good we really have it.

Reflection Numero Uno... Family Matters

So my Aussie buddy Andy told me time and time again, “Tom, you’re thinkin’ too much, mate.” And he was right. I think. A lot. However, somehow, against all odds, Andy’s persistence must’ve paid off. I find myself very able to get lost and immersed in whatever I’m doing here. Whether I’m trying to have a conversation in Spanish, teaching and playing with the kids, and even just lugging dirt and rocks around the construction site, it doesn’t matter. My mind, for the most part, has kept to the task at hand and stayed out of the sky, philosophizing to itself.

In the mornings, however, when I wake up is when I find my mind racing to put together the pieces of the big puzzle of life. I’ve resisted the urge to share any of these internal reflections thus far, but right now, however, I’m going to indulge myself.

So by being here, I can’t help but realize how ridiculously lucky I’ve been in this crapshoot called life. I was born into a loving family that was able to put me through great schools all the way through college. We live beyond our means a bit, but we’ve always had enough money to live comfortably. For most of my friends and I at home, our privilege is something we take for granted.

Here, however, on a daily basis I see things that we’d be baffled to see in the States. Of course, there are the more quirky things like the Mayan women balancing a huge basket on her head or the overloaded – with both people and products – beds of pickups, but here I’m talking about the more disturbing things. If I walk through the city on any given day, I’ll pass by at least a half dozen kids, no older than eight or nine, shining shoes. I’ll pass many more kids carrying trays loaded with candy, gum, and cigarettes, trying to sell them. I think back to my childhood, when I wore my yellow and navy blue colored SJV uniform, when I played Little League baseball, basketball and football, and when my parents would sure as hell never ever send me out to shine shoes. It’s overwhelming. You know the parents want better for the kids – after all what parents wouldn’t? Many people here, however, haven’t learned the value of education, or don’t believe in its value. Many times, it just makes more economic sense to have your kids be another source of income.

At El Nahual and La Cuchilla, when I’m teaching, I forgot all about these kids backgrounds. After all, they’re just kids. They love running around, screaming without purpose, fooling around in class, learning in class… kids are the same everywhere. But every now and then, I’ll be reminded how marginalized they are. For instance, yesterday one little guy ran up to me and gave me a huge waist level hug. He looked up at me smiling, and I noticed his front two teeth. They weren’t just a little yellower than usual; they were rotted black almost to the gum. Nevertheless, he kept on smiling. Other times, kids just can’t make it to school – either because of the rain, because their parents are sick, or – what we fear most – that their parents don’t want them to go to school.

I think about how I got to where I am today, a legitimately happy college graduate who has the chance to travel and learn about other parts of the world. Through school, of course. Through my own hard work and soul searching as well. But without my family, neither of those would have been possible.

So realization #1 on this trip: family is indescribably important. I just wrote about my host-mom Paty. She works her ass off, almost at all waking hours, to support her family, but she is not alone. Her mother lives here, as well, and a couple times a day I’ll find her jogging by my room in her old-lady slippers to her next task in the day-to-day chores of this house. Even more, Paty’s siblings and their families are constantly popping in and out, helping with cooking or with the kids. I still believe Paty is Superwoman, but I couldn’t possibly see how this family would still be afloat without some outside help.

I’ll think of my family sometimes and their stories. My Aunt Evey will tell me stories about how they lived in the projects – her, her sister, and my great-grandmother – together. Or she’ll tell me about the house those three plus my mom , my Aunt Dawn, and Aunt Gina lived in together… the one with the skunks living in the walls and the chickens in the backyard. Through abusive husbands and divorces, struggles to make ends meet, and raising kids, somehow my family stayed afloat and they did it together.

I realize, however, that many people have domestic family situations that aren’t the best of situations. I don’t believe, however, that a family is defined solely by blood. I believe a family is what you make it as well. I believe a family is that group of people who support you – through good times and bad – and believe that you always have it in you to be better, that you can always grow, mature, learn, and find satisfaction in life. Deep down, I think that it’s ultimately up to each of us to be our best selves, but we also need people that can see this person even when we ourselves cannot. Without these people, this life can be a very dark, hopeless, and lonely place.

So let me be cheesy for a moment, loved ones. I love and miss you all more than you can know. Thank you for… well, for everything.