Why I still haven't seen Blood Diamond

My friend Juan's brother was killed in front of his very eyes in a raid by his own country's government. My friend Julia was beaten and held against her will in an American household where she nannied the kids. These two people have each looked me in the eye and told me their painful stories, and both times I looked away. I focused on keeping my eyes dry and thought about what I could say afterwards to lighten the mood.

It's shameful. Why do I react like that? Why didn't I look back at them and try to share in their suffering? Isn't that what my faith tells to do?

"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn." Romans 12:15

My discomfort is what happens when another story crashes in on my stable, comfortable world. It's a negative reaction to having to change my reality to include this awful truth. Maybe I'm scared of getting stuck in the sadness, that it'll stick to me like tree sap and taint all the good stuff in my life. Either way, my fear of that feeling usually pushes me to quickly distract myself with something fluffy or, even worse, to counsel myself that it all happened so far away from me and even that maybe, just maybe, those people deserved it.

It's the reason I avoid watching the movie Blood Diamond, what makes me skip over the newest reports on the horrors in Syria in favor of a EW's preview of summer movies.

In the book The Bean Trees, the main character Taylor, a small-town girl from Kentucky, meets a couple who escaped from 1980s war-torn Guatemala. They tell her how their friends were tortured and killed for being in a teachers union, and how they themselves lost their daughter when they refused to give her kidnappers information to help hunt down other targeted teachers. Taylor, like me, can't accept this reality.

"'I can't even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.

'You live in that world,' Estevan said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn't want to."

There's a lot that I wish I didn't know, and too much that I try to forget. Our world contains the beautiful, but also the horrible, and I really can't see clearly or live with integrity if I don't acknowledge both. The thing is, I think we need to take that moment, soak in the details of some other flesh-and-blood peoples' suffering, and feel that wrench of our hearts. Cry, even. I say let empathy have its moment.

The term "bleeding heart" is used to mock people who outwardly show concern or shame in the face of injustices. People who talk passionately about oppression and injustices are "downers." I'm not saying we should live our lives in lamentation of Biblical proportions, but I think we do need to yank our heads out of the sand and look our neighbors in the eye.

It's not just the tree-huggers or the bleeding heart activists who care about things. No one is exempt. The difference is that many of us just swallow the lump in our throat, push away that empathy, before it can get us down.

So, yes, often I'm still too much of a wuss to mourn with those who mourn, but I'm working on it. When the constant news noise leaves me numb, I'll find a book on a serious topic, a well-researched novel or a memoir. With these stories one resonates, empathizes with real-life global neighbors in a much deeper way. This brings me back to my humanity, to deep empathy for my neighbors, wherever they may be. And sometime soon, I'll borrow someone's Blood Diamond DVD and hunker down with some tissues and a prayer.

Elisandro´s Apples

It`s May, and I am a happy camper, because plums, apples, and peaches are now back in season here in Guatemala. I`ve been going months with my one fruit option of bananas (shipped in from the coast) and have been dying to get my hands on something juicier and well, local-er.

This is a new limitation I`m experiencing in my SALT year. I`m living in a small rural community that doesn`t warrant enough attention of supermarket chains for them to open up a  Walmart or even the smaller Despensa Familiar that you see in bigger cities. I have to travel at least two hours if I want to access shiny aisles filled with whatever my stomach can dream up. Here in Sibinal, what appears in the Thursday street market is what`s in season, and that`s that. Poor us, right? I`m starting to think not.

It wasn´t that long ago that people in the States ate with the seasons too, that the perishables one ate were brought in from surrounding farms only a couple days before sale. The thing is, our perishables now are not so perishable, thanks to preservation and maturation chemicals and petroleum wax.

Our grocery shopping used to support our neighbors, and now it benefits big businesses that give us the prices we like, nevermind the added chemicals, watered-down taste, or the hidden price tag of oil consumption. Is the convenience of an air-conditioned shopping experience really going to trump my nutrition or my solidarity with my community?

Last week I stocked up on apples for the first time in months. How did I find out that apples were back the very week they were back? My apple guy. His name is Elisandro and I buy my apples from him. I know the guy who grew the stuff I`m eating! Crazy, right? It shouldn`t be. On my end, it just makes sense that I would buy from someone I know, from a guy I can chat up and ask what exactly he puts on these apple trees to make them grow. On his end, he has the connection with me that motivates him to produce quality (perhaps over quantity), and knowing that I buy his apples gives a bit of security to him as well.

What`s more, ask me how excited I was to see heaps of plums in the market today. SUPER EXCITED. I immediately ran (okay, maybe I speedwalked) home, dropped those things into a pot of clean water, and popped one into my mouth, eyes crossing as I made a couple embarrassing noises. I fully appreciate this thing God brought up out of the ground and into my stomach. Do you see anyone showing that appreciation to a supermarket plum, apple or peach? How about fruit like pineapple, mango, and kiwi, which don`t grow in most parts of the U.S., yet are pretty much always stocked in stores?

In my experience, I grew up basically ignorant of how the veggies and fruit that ended up on my plate came to be, when they were harvested, where they came from, and even what part of a plant they actually were (root, stem, leaf, flower, fruit). My simplified story of the carrot was that I walked into Meijer, it was lying next to the broccoli, and I brought it home. Sad. Embarrassing. I can do better.

I plan to do better. One of the most concrete changes in my time here has been my understanding of food justice, with a reconnection of myself to the natural world that sustains me. It`s so basic, but I have missed it for most my life. When I`m back in the states, I WILL know where my food comes from. I will make choices based on this knowledge. This means that I will seek out farmers markets and make weekly trips to buy the fruit and vegetable part of my diet, at the very least. I hope to someday have a garden, and perhaps even find out where I can buy local bread, cheese, yogurt, and milk. I want to cook beautiful, vibrantly-colored meals from scratch in my kitchen, (next to my husband, an Italian model and a massage therapist, of course).

As always, I have a bunch of ideas, and I´m serious about all of them......except the Italian model. What remains to be seen is whether I´ll follow through on them. Luckily for me, I have a blog and friends that read it. With this public declaration of some goals, I hope to have some accountability from you all. So please, when you see me again in the States, ask me how this is going. Give me a kick in the pants if I need it. Thank you all in advance. :)

"Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text. Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just conjured three different visions of damnation. Guests with high blood pressure may add a fourth. Is it such a stretch, then to make moral choices about food based on the global consequences of its production and transport?"
-Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (a really good book about this stuff)

March Madness

March was a whirlwind of visiting groups, MCC meetings, and crazy traveling around Guatemala. In short, another month of blessings. 

The first week, we had a group visit from the Foods Resource Bank, which partners with MCC in funding the projects for small farmers here in Sibinal. I missed the first part of the visit (which means I missed the cool soap-making workshop they did....I was pretty sad), but I went along for the rest of it.Within the first day, I made a connection with the director of FRB, Bev Abma, who turned out to live in Byron Center, Michigan, about two miles from where I grew up. Small, small world. The visit was a great time of learning for everybody. I got some more practice translating as we visited peoples plots and even got put to work as we helped Aníbal, one of the farmers, harvest his potato crop.

 The second group came only three days later, a learning tour from Rockway Mennonite Collegiate in Ontario, Canada. This group was ridiculously full of energy, although maybe that´s not so surprising, since they´re all about seventeen years old. We did the "Trout Trail," in the community of Vega del Volcán, learning all about the impact of Hurricane Stan on the community, its response with trout production projects (supported by MCC), and new agro-ecology projects. Later that week, I finally bit the bullet and climbed that pesky volcano I´ve been living next to for seven months.

It´s called Tacaná, it´s the second highest peak in Central America, at 4,092 meters (13,425 feet), and here I am at the top, with fellow MCCer Nancy Sabas and our patient guides Roman and Limber!

I had the opportunity to tag along for the second half of Rockway´s trip, in which we journeyed (after a quick stop to some hot springs) to Nebaj, an area in northwest Guatemala populated by another Mayan ethnic group, the Ixil people. We had a chance to share with young men and women from three small Ixil communities. MCC is also supporting projects there that give young people alternatives to migration, as well as projects that celebrate Ixil knowledge and ways of life, uniting the pueblo against the many injustices they suffer at the hand of the government and multinational corporations. 

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One work project involved building chicken sheds using sticks, clay, dirt, water, and pine needles. I was the group monkey, dancing around barefoot to mix it all together.

Canadian and Ixil youth after a day in one of the Nebaj communities 

The next big even was MCC´s partner meetings in Guatemala City. I don´t have any exciting pictures of this, since we mostly just sat in a big room and dialogued, but the dialogue itself was actually pretty darn interesting. We talked violence; how it manifests itself in different ways in Guatemala and El Salvador, and what each partner is doing to reduce it. For example, there is quite a bit of alcoholism where I´m living in Sibinal, which results in domestic violence, and many men, women and children suffer. Many times this habit develops in men because they are the ones who are paid and also the ones marketed to. Projects in Sibinal address this by involving more and more women in the generation of the family income, and promoting a livelihood shared by the family, in which the whole family works to maintain the farm and reap the benefits together. Pretty exciting stuff. No, really, it is, and it´s inspirational to see fiesty women taking charge of their households in a new way. 

The last week of March was the Holy Week, and because the MCC partner organization I work for is the Catholic Diocese of San Marcos, I got quite a bit of time off. I of course used this time to go get incredibly burned on the black sand beaches of the Pacific coast, see friends, and go dancing. It was an incredible time. A highlight was Good Friday, which I spent in Antigua, with its cobblestone streets, colonial Spanish architecture, and unbelievable Holy Week celebrations. 

A Holy Week tradition is the creation of sawdust carpets, which are laid out on the street a couple hours before a procession is scheduled to walk down it. You can see that on the left is the finished carpet in all its glory. On the right is the same carpet halfway through a big procession with a float of Jesus on the cross followed by a float of Mary.

This week, I´m back to work with all my regular activities. One of these activities is teaching English in a middle school in Vega del Volcán. Because there´s very little transportation to this community, I go every other week, but teach three days in a row, staying with this lovely host family. They have the model farm for agro-ecology, which means delicious organic veggies, plus María (below with her adorable daughter Sheily) is an EXCELLENT cook. She´s also excellent in a lot of other things, but I think I´ve rambled on enough in this blog, so I´ll leave it at that. 

To sum up, I am blessed. So many experiences have opened up for me this year, and I continued to be humbled and inspired by the people around me. It doesn´t hurt that the all around me is this gorgeous view :) God is good.

''Is this real life?''

Most of you have probably seen the viral YouTube clip ''David after Dentist,'' which shows a young boy on post-cavity-filling high. One of the most memorable (and hilarious) moments in the vid is when David sincerely asks his father, ''Is this real life?''

This question has sometimes popped into my head (usually in David´s little voice) during various experiences I´ve had here in Guatemala. It`s usually followed by a mental note to write down what happened so I can tell someone back home.

I´ve begun to realize that my life (during my SALT year and otherwise) is NOT just material for anecdotes. It`s real life, for me and for others. If you know me, you know I love having a good story to tell. When something exciting, strange, ridiculous, or even frustrating is happening in my life, I still think about how to most comedically phrase my description of the event and even who exactly would appreciate it the most. This isn`t wrong, necessarily, but I`m starting to see how it distorts my understanding of the real life.

It might be fun for me to talk about, for instance, ''that time......''

--....I crossed undocumented into Mexico with the host family for a party with their relatives''

but this is real life for people in this area of Guatemala who live so close to Mexico that crossing the border doesn´t make them feel like criminals, so later many are surprised at how differently it feels to be in the U.S.

--...I hiked three hours to Vega community for the first time and thought I was going to pass out.''

but this is real life for every person who doesn´t live in a town or city center, who either spends a half of their possible grocery money for a pickup ride on market day or else makes that hike with the groceries (and quite possibly a toddler) on their back.

--...I went two weeks without eating meat, which made me feel super healthy.''

but this is real life for both the urban and rural poor, for whom access to protein is a legitimate problem. Around 50% of Guatemalan children are malnourished. An average ten-year-old here in Sibinal looks about seven.

I realized that what I´m struggling with is my own default attitude that I,the young American in a foreign country, am the main character in all these experiences. All these things I experience are happening to me. It`s like I´m Julia Roberts in "Eat, Pray, Love," except that instead of eating hand-crafted pizza in Italy, I´m eating hand-crafted scrambled eggs with black beans. With this mindset, I`ll have a rollicking good time hiking mountains, have funny miscommunications across languages, and maybe meet a cute Guatemalteco, all before going home in July to tell everyone about all this crazy stuff that happened......to me.

This ethnocentricity is somewhat natural, but that doesn´t mean that it`s okay. In my culture and in this one, the effects of colonialism are still very present, and it is all too easy to keep on thinking my opinions, my time, my very life matter more than those of the rural Guatemalans around me. This is absolutely wrong. My experiences are NOT the only experiences. Others matter, as more than just secondary characters in my movie.

It has to be an internal battle to correct myself every time I think "Why on earth would they do it that way?" to keep conscious of what I really think about something versus the cultural residue that cruds up my view of things. I want to keep challenging my worldview so that in the future, ''real life'' to me can be a much more complex concept, truer of the world that I share with billions of very different others.

An Brief Update for November AND December

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas AND Happy New Year to you all!

It has been a long time since I last updated this blog, and I´ve spent the last months traveling for various meetings, reunions, and vacations, meeting many new people and learning (surprise!) a lot. Thanks to whoever is reading this, for continuing to take an interest in my life here in Western Guatemala.

Here are some pics of my travels:

Beatiful Santiago Atitlan, where youth from MCC´s programs in Guatemala and El Salvador gathered for leadership training and cultural exchange.

I was lucky enough to spend some vacation time in Roatan, a Caribbean island off the northern coast of Honduras.

Not so much a landscape pic, but I definitely had a grand carol-singin´, cookie-baking Christmas with the VerBeeks in Tegucigalpa.

My parents came out to visit me in Sibinal, and we took the bumpy pickup ride out to beautiful  Vega.

I´m looking forward to the new projects in 2013 here in Sibinal, especially as the new long-term worker, John VanderHeide, moves out here in February. We´ll be supporting agro-ecological farms, working with school gardens in the four communities, and organizing community markets for Sibinal´s small farmers. I appreciate your continuing prayers and support!

Remember Erin Brockovich? It´s kind of like that.

In the last few weeks, I´ve settled into life in Sibinal and with the Zunums, my joyful, hardworking host family. Everyone has their chores, and there´s much to do on this family farm, which includes three pigs, two sheep, four geese, three ducks, four chickens, two dogs, five cats and about five hundred trout, as well as the crops on the land behind the house.

Just like my family at home, everyone jokingly rags on one another, hangs out in the kitchen, and fidgets in church together on Sunday morning. Plus, having four host brothers between the ages of eleven and seventeen makes me feel like I get to have my brother Seth at four different ages. I love the way Fernando hops on one leg to the dinner table, how Danny sings at the top of his lungs while he´s on the computer, how Napoleon has entire conversations with the cat and how Alexander loses his mind with high-pitched laughing when the others team up to tickle him. Just last week, there was a full-fledged water fight going on for well over two hours. The boys filled up old ketchup and maple syrup bottles to use as water guns. Poor Napo was trapped in the stand-alone bathroom while his brothers shot at him from the open windows. I, of course, was hiding out on the second floor, well out of range. These boys are so much fun.

I´ve also enjoyed my time "at the office." In reality workdays are super varied and the work takes place in many places. For example, a few weeks ago, I tagged along with Magui and Juan Pablo as they gave agro-ecology capacitations to the community cooperatives, each a few hours from the town of Sibinal. We spent hours riding in the backs of pickup trucks, rising and falling with the dusty roads and hiking up and down green, rocky mountainsides. Once there, the groups, each made up of about fifteen people, weathered, lined faces along with young, bright-eyed ones, learned how to make their own fertilizer, herbicide and insecticides out of cheap and accessible materials.

Since they were the last capacitations this year and because this was my introduction to the groups, many of the members explained to me what these meetings mean to them and why agro-ecology is important. Some mentioned the solidarity of the group setting for learning, the aspect of sharing the successes and of supporting one another. Many talked of returning to their roots, respecting the “mother earth,” and providing for their families. Finding ways not just to make their land produce, but to make it produce to meet most or all of their needs, in a way that does not harm the earth, is key for these farmers.

Why? One big reason is that their government has historically failed them. The people of Sibinal, along with 51% of Guatemala´s population, are descendants of Mayans who fled to the unwanted land of the highlands when the ancestral lowlands were taken, in order to live in peace. They are the people who were targeted during the 36-year-long civil war (1960-1996), not because of their involvement in the conflict, but as a tactic to starve out the guerrilla forces hiding in the mountains. Hundreds of thousands were massacred, kidnapped or raped by the soldiers who should have been protecting them. Today, rural Guatemalans are understandably disillusioned with the government. The disillusionment grows as they see large, multinational corporations given rights where theirs have been ignored, as mining companies and hydroelectric dams continue to move in where peasants have modestly farmed for centuries. These companies threaten the environment and the people, using and subsequently contaminating enormous amounts of water without any say from the communities who live around them, without any warning about the health risks they create.

Where´s Julia Roberts when you need her?

Fortunately, Sibinal is an area relatively untouched by mines and hydroelectric projects, although exploration projects are approaching more and more. I was recently warned not to go alone to a community for the threat of being chased out by villagers with pitchforks; since most of the companies are North-American or European, my gringo appearance arouses suspicion. The topic is controversial.

Hopefully, with the solidarity of the cooperatives and the resilience of improved family farms, this area can stay under the control of its people, not the highest bidder.

I write this update a little sheepishly, as I know it´s been about a month since I posted anything. Sorry, everyone! I promise to do better.

I have now been away from home for eight weeks. Seven of those weeks have been in the country of Guatemala. Four of those weeks have been in the city of Guatemala, the following two weeks were in the city of San Marcos, and the past week has been, well, all over.

After finally finishing up with Spanish classes, I was on my way to the town of Sibinal in the western highlands of Guatemala. However, after only two days with my host family, I was off again, this time to meet an MCC tour group that came to learn about migration: the journey migrants make, the context from which they come, and what people are doing here in Guatemala to create opportunites for people to stay home. This meant visits to the two cooperatives where I will be working places called La Vega del Volcán and La Linea, as well as a trip across the border to Chiapas, Mexico.

In La Vega del Volcán, I met many of the people I´ll be working with this year. Froilan Ramos (pictured above with his fish ponds) is the community expert on raising and reproducing trout, and was one of the first to take part in MCC-supported food security projects that include raising trout and flowers. In Vega and also in the cooperative in a place called La Linea, I met more small farmers who are taking leadership in their communities through agriculture and tourism initiatives.

After the energizing week with the MCC group I´ve been feeling inspired and anxious to begin serving and learning with the local team. This week, I was able to settle in with the host family, start planning with the local team and learn more of the context for the development work MCC has been involved in here in Sibinal. Sibinal is a small town less than 10 miles from the Mexican-Guatemalan border, and the fact is, migration is a way of life here. In fact, both of my host parents spent time in Georgia before returning to Guatemala. My host father, Elfego, often talks of how he enjoyed his time in Atlanta, working in contruction. Ultimately, he and his wife decided to return to Guatemala with their earnings and luckily, they were able to connect with one of the cooperatives supporting small farmers here in Sibinal. Now, they raise trout in ponds behind their house, which is the main source of earnings for the family. Elfego and Julia have been able to live a life with dignity in their own community. They are able to feed and educate their four sons, support Elfego´s aging parents, and serve as leaders in their church.

Many people here do not have such luck. As I mentioned above, migration is a way of life here in Sibinal, as many people cross the border to work long hours in Mexican coffee farms. More and more, this has not been enough to sustain families, and so people have made the perilous journey up through Mexico, to the United States. Sometimes they return and sometimes they don´t. Sometimes the money they earn makes it back to family members here and sometimes it doesn´t. More often than not, the migrant family member is gone for five years or more, and the family structure has suffered greatly. Many homes are missing fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. This happens because opportunity is missing here in Guatemala. The privileged elite have control over the  majority of the country´s resources, and use them to generate personal wealth. Very little of Guatemala´s rich resources is utilized to serve the poor majority.

The programs MCC has partnered with here in Sibinal, where I will be serving for the next ten months, have focused on capacity building and education for the peasant farmers here. They have taught the farmers the value of the resources to which they do have access and how to utilize them well in order to feed their families. This has taken the form of agricultural projects that teach farming methods and business skills, as well as community tourism initiatives that support the construction of restaurants, lodges and roads to bring in tourists from Mexico and the United States. The projects started small, but are ever growing as more and more people see what is possible within their own communities. Opportunity through farming trout, selling flowers or guiding bird watchers through the green mountains creates a way of life here in which migration is not the only way to survive. Fewer dangerous journeys can be made and more families can stay intact.

I have thus far been incredibly inspired by the leaders of these projects, who have created opportunity where things seemed so hopeless. The work is still slow going, as many have tended to mistrust the new ideas or are simply apprehensive about the risk of a new way of doing things. As I join the team in its work, I ask for prayers that God will open the hearts and minds of the communities here and that he will unite the people as they struggle against hunger and injustice.


Some pictures of my house:

The kitchen stands apart from the rest of the house.

Everything is made from scratch and cooked on a wood-burning stove.