I sat up straight during the taxi ride through Guatemala City. I leaned forward onto my rounded backpack, never against the car window as I had before I had mailed the Peace Corps application in the grocery store parking lot. For months, thick dust and smoke had been the usual travel companions. Water, rain specifically, was worse. One week ago, I had followed government protocol in a hurricane that caused a national state of emergency. Or, I ran away.
This had to be a crazy dream, me, who never really wanted to go anywhere, taking on a project like this so far away and unrelated to teaching in everyone else’s opinion. Moving towards that goal or gray humid exhaust caused the same sensation. Nausea. My feet had winced against while clumping through rubble laced mud up to my knees. I could still turn around, but I hadn’t turned back in a week. No, six months. Maybe one year. Actually, fifteen years when I had decided I wanted to be a teacher.
The first requirement of Peace Corps service in country had been an aspiration statement. “What do you expect from Guatemala?” the blank piece of paper had prompted.
“My goal is actually quite simple, to feel as though I have done everything I possibly can to be an effective teacher. That is why I am here.”
The glass high rise hotel set against a Mayan step pyramid design reminded me of the last play area my dad had constructed for my second and third grade students using an upside-down table top. That terrarium was the dirtiest and least interactive, as if my feelings about the year couldn’t help but show through, but like my Spanish language, poor fluency was no longer better than silence on the subject of teacher education.
The taxi eased against the curb of the circular drive away from the clatter and chaos of the main street. The air spit on me. Hovering mist was no longer romantic. Before writing my aspiration statement, I had read the distance on the map from my experience to this tiny country south of Mexico. I had expected to be sad, but about the country’s education and preparation, not my own. The sliding hotel doors responded to my movement. I shouldn’t be tiptoeing over polished tiles in mucked up hiking boots balancing a ten-year-old backpack. It was so unprofessional. How did I get here?
I followed a group of Guatemalan women, three who worked with a women’s rights nonprofit and two who owned a local comedor.
“No water. No food.” No one from the village had said anything to me.
I wasn’t really there, after all. If I wasn’t there, I should have been able to evaporate. Only six months into Peace Corps service I was still wearing the assumptions of tourism. That should have saved me. Instead, I had hiked through spongy mud up to my knees barely tugging the hiking boots up through the mud with each step. Next, I tried bare feet. Easier? It wasn’t. Sharp pebbles in the landslides across the road sliced into my feet. I retied the boots, somehow losing one pair of hiking socks. We had arrived at the next village over, Panajachel with no means to cross a now tumultuous river that had toppled the bridge. I had nowhere to go when the women continued on to their predetermined destination. We parted ways. I walked to the only address I knew how to find, the house of a Danish family I met once only briefly through a series of ex-pat to white person connections. With no cell phone service, I couldn’t call ahead to ask if they would help me.
I stayed with the family for three days. On a borrowed phone, I contacted Peace Corps, which was frantically trying to account for all its volunteers. I imagined the secretary checking a box on a list when I had given my-
“Name?” Of course, the desk clerk offered me the question in English.
“Erin?”
“Last?” I pulled out my identification. I couldn’t even do the exchange rate in my head to know the cost of the room. I slid my high interest emergency credit card across the towering counter. The desk clerk was looking down on me to deliver the directions to my room. There were no bags for anyone to carry so stepped into the elevator alone. I rose to my assigned floor courtesy of the glass elevator.
I set my backpack on the recently vacuumed floor. The mattress, unlike seats on bumpy cramped pickup rides, responded to my shape, but somehow wasn’t as soft as it looked. My lack of skill weighed heavier than the bag. Its worn leather bottom was too dingy for the satin comforter. I had read about the rural and possibly isolated conditions so I expected Guatemala to be physically uncomfortable, surroundings deficient, dirty. Now the negative physical descriptions described me.
If sunglasses had set me apart as a tourist each time little girls asked me for money, now the sun’s absence had cast deeper divisions into sharp relief. I closed my eyes and tried to put brightness back. Embroidery floss came to mind. Santa Catarina’s traditional guipil was woven on a red background; however, the guipil most commonly seen was a combination of blues both highlighting geometric patterns or figures representing the native flora and fauna of the lake basin. Walking more slowly and carefully than my balance was able, small but curved figures were engulfed in corte of a deep blue material. I liked the belts the best, wraparound strip, or faja, decorated with the same patterns as the guipil.
I surveyed the dark hotel room, shadowed in thick curtains, deep and monotone like dress slacks. Its surfaces were not bright like the streets in my Peace Corps village, dotted in woven cloth. I had tried to connect by dressing my rented room in table runners, pillowcases and bedspreads, traditional weavings purchased from the women in my host family. Six months later, they still substituted letters in my name, or forgot them altogether. This hotel room was another borrowed space. For a night, I belonged here, because I paid for it, like the weavings.
I flipped on the T.V. Anything in English would be fine. I was tired of the parts I was supposed to enjoy as a Peace Corps volunteer, listening to the same track on the CD player as the kids danced around me, or catching an isolated phrase in Kaqchikel during a family meal most often comprised of beans or eggs and a mountain of tortillas. I hadn’t expected no effort to require effort. Fuzzy. Broken sentences. Poor reception. I didn’t know what I was supposed to pay attention to, nor which detail was important to learn. I had dreamed of watching cable TV all day instead. Tonight, I could.
I pulled open the backpack’s drawstring after slipping off the hiking boots. I needed something to sleep in. Most items in the bag were clean. The Country Director did a load of wash for the small group of volunteers who spent the night in her gated community apartment in Guatemala City while Peace Corps assessed the security situation. My fingers fumbled around the second pair of hiking socks and the purple long underwear my dad bought me for Christmas from the official packing list. More a gift from a farmer to his daughter, they were usually too warm to sleep in and definitely would be in the hotel. I selected the Superman t-shirt. My eyes begged for a clue of any kind as to what to do. I saw my journal. Journaling had been recommended. What would I write about now? How I had baked cookies while other volunteers across the lake guarded mud coated dead bodies in a tent. I wanted to save my novel for the plane. Books were hard to come by. After accepting service in Guatemala, I had read tackled the reading list. Those writers traversed the winding, unpaved roads on motorcycles or scaled hidden trails with guerilla fighters. None of them mentioned hillsides oozing in mud. I read until I sketched two very polarized images. One detailed the regal ancient Maya. The “other” was the downtrodden and oppressed, listed last in Central America in education. The first image was for the tourists; the second was for ‘professionals’ working in country. Who was I?
Suddenly cold, I eased myself under the decadent and bleach white bedspread nothing like the cushion my first host family provided which was only slightly worse than the one in my current apartment. I felt the wood frame through my own mudslide of hotel pillows. I dropped my hand and searched for my passport for the hundredth time. I checked the date to make sure the flight was tomorrow. I would look weird, travelling internationally with only a high school backpack. I laughed. Why would looking out of place bother me now considering the mismatch of objects I lugged into Santa Catarina six months earlier.
The welcome packet sent with my invitation had instructed volunteers to pack two bags. Two packed bags had contained what the government told me a university trained professional looked like or worked like. After glimpsing what the other Guatemalan teachers wore, I knew I should have packed more dress slacks and heels than jeans that were too a size too big for me or an extra pair of glasses. The hiking socks I used mostly in my apartment as potholders and mosquito repellant. Now, having less meant I could return with a new suitcase from home, a second chance at packing with more understanding of who and what my role was.
“Why didn’t I break from the list?” I could easily have asked myself, but I wasn’t ready for the answer. I had believed I should follow what books said, what books defined, what the people who wrote the books knew. I had wanted to be the professional “they” wanted.
Landing for the first time in Guatemala, the pilot gave both sides of the plane a chance to look below at the green trenches. We took a little dip to one side and then the other. The relatively restricted flat area Guatemala City occupied made the landing a vertical zigzag more sudden than stairs. We had travelled in minivans forty minutes from the capital to the training center. Beyond the rolled barbed wire rested volcanos, cobblestone streets with lime green cement homes, Coke in glass bottles and Snickers bars. None of those details became part of my summarized description of Guatemala, repeated with the same frequency as the vaccinations so as to ensure retention.
“Guatemala is roughly the size of Tennessee. It has many microclimates, so many in fact, that there are more bird species in Guatemala than in the United States,” Flavio, my Environmental Education program director had informed us only days after we arrived at the training center.
For each lecture, I had pulled my black fleece jacket tighter around me, and a shiver vibrated up my leg.
“Sites may be hot or temperate.” The cement buildings were always frigid. I attempted to warm my fingers by cramming them underneath my baggy jeans, the same pair that now trailed ripped material coated in dirt around the ankles.
Of the thirty trainees, there were four of us in Environmental Education. “I don’t know why it’s so difficult to get teachers for an education program,” Flavio said as he packed up his things. Good question. Perhaps a better question than those I had addressed in my aspiration statement. What was it about the classroom that was hard to leave but hard to like? Same as Peace Corps, probably, and its unnamed requirements underneath the mission.
I had turned to face Flavio. As a rare member of my profession in this setting, I should answer this question as best I could. “I think it’s hard,” I began. “Once teachers are settled in their classrooms. They are comfortable.”
Most teachers at my school thought I was crazy to give up a full-time job for Peace Corps, and yet, Peace Corps teacher training made me fiercely defensive of my teacher identity. I had paid for four and half years of education for something my fellow education volunteers were trained for three months to do. Were years in undergrad equal to a couple of handouts on “How to create a good workshop” and the opportunity to teach one lesson at an elementary school nearby.
Mostly, I had resented that our minimally trained group were “experts” in front of local teachers who very well could have been teaching for twenty years. The Guatemalan educational system only required the equivalent of a high school education and there was little professional development nor instructional support. No matter, I couldn’t suppress my gut reaction that those details didn’t make it okay to disregard their experience, despite unawareness of the reason why. The ecological content that had made sense during the three months of training had been near impossible to implement. I should have paid more attention to the third objective of the Environmental Education program, disaster mitigation.
During Hurricane Stan, it hadn’t stormed, just rained, for three days. It drizzled in the morning, and then, the next morning and a third. Something about that felt wrong. From my split cane gate set on the street near the town entrance, nothing had seemed worrisome. The blacktop had appeared like what I had in front of me underneath the plane’s expanse of rubber. But it had been really bad. No one came to tell me. No one had talked to me at all. I should have been scared, but no one told me that either, at least not regarding the weather.
I looked at the clock. It wasn’t even midnight. To tempt sleep, I turned off all the lights in the hotel room except for the lamp beside the bed. The room was stifling. Too humid? No, the hotel had air conditioning. I stood in the dark and felt my way to the bathroom. Flush toilet and warm water. Even after several first world showers, I didn’t want to think about how much trash or other disgusting substance had run over my hands and feet the last few days as runoff became rivers. I brushed my teeth and dreamed of one more shower in the morning before leaving for the airport.
I was assigned to Santa Catarina Palopó, a self-identified as a Kaqchikel village. Kaqchikel was one of the twenty-one Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala, and the majority still spoke Kaqchikel as their first language.
“If I don’t have water in my house, why shouldn’t I wash clothes in the lake? And my hair too for that matter?”
Thank goodness the women hadn’t asked questions like that. None of the copies in folders could answer them. My box of training materials had been unceremoniously tossed down on the street ahead of my feet on the first day I arrived. Curriculum books had endured the driver’s feet and his gear shift, miraculously not falling out of the bus.
At my Peace Corps site there was no water treatment for the contaminated drainage that ran down the sides of the streets into the lake basin. I didn’t have answers to problems that needed systemic change, not saying “no” to a plastic bag or straw at the store. My actions had repeatedly begged the question, “Why is she picking up trash when municipal workers are paid for that?” I wasn’t setting an example for a best practice. I was just being a weird gringa.
I flipped over on my side. If the sun was up outside the hotel window, I couldn’t tell. I wished I could blame my delusion on the malaria pill. Restless, I turned off my alarm on my “bean” phone before it went off. I hadn’t really slept, but I wished I was dreaming.
In the capital, unlike Santa Catarina, garbage cans were frequent, but shiny chip bags and black plastic bags whipped across haphazard city traffic. I had arranged a taxi with the front desk the night before. The other volunteers from the lake who had stayed at the Country Director’s house would most likely be boarding chicken buses at some point that day to return to their village and the oozing hillsides. At least it wasn’t raining.
Upon arrival at the airport, I held out my passport to enter the glass doors. I shrugged my shoulders under the bulging backpack. The men always looking to wrap bags in protective plastic didn’t look twice at me. Others did. Unlike my village, the majority here were dressed like me, better than me. Black dress pants, roller board suitcases, coffee, bottles of water, sunglasses. Some clustered in groups were vacationers in old t-shirts and overpriced chalinas.
After clearing security, I walked the single hallway to my gate. My mind wavered in heat framed by the window. It was so odd to see dry pavement and sleek planes when I still had gravel in my boots. The hurricane and mudslides should have been traumatic, but everything after was true cause for panic. Was I necessary? In theory, maybe. I was a formally trained teacher. UW-Madison was an elite education school. In practice? I tried to push out of my mind the anxiety I would feel bouncing back down the road into the village still littered with boulders. The houses and businesses nestled against one another and many times on top of one another would probably still be stained with mud. I had to be more convinced of not only my steps but my shoes and what was in my backpack. If I couldn’t, I would have to find another job besides teaching. One I was fit to do. I pushed my sunglasses up onto my head, catching hairs curled in the heat.