My sister Janet arrived a week ago Thursday, ferried by the school direc
tly from the airport to my house, and after breakfast with the Houstons, we picked up our rental car and made our way to Panajachel, on the shores of Lake Atitlan. Surrounded by volcanoes, it is said to be one of the most beautiful sites in the world. Our two and half hour drive was lengthened by a short boat ride to our hotel, situated by the small village of Jaibalito. The lancha dropped us off at the hotel’s dock, where hotel staff helped us carry our luggage up the hundred and fifty or so steps to the hotel desk. Our hotel, named La Casa Del Mundo, is literally built into the side of the hill. Owned by an American man married to a Guatemalan woman who met, somewhat improbably, in Alaska, they bought the property about fifteen years ago, spent five years building it, and have been opened for business ever since. Though perhaps not the most luxurious, it is certainly the most beautiful hotel I have ever stayed at, a cascade of stone stairways, patios overlooking the water, flowering gardens and hanging plants, complete with hummingbi
rds and a hot-tub. Our arrival was damped somewhat by an overhang of clouds, but even in the mist you could appreciate the grandeur of the lake. (The hotel, by the way, was only about $45 for the night). Before dinner, which was served family-style in a candle-lit room overlooking the lake, we took a short hike into Jaibalito. As is so often the case here, wealth and poverty are cheek-by-jowl, the beautiful lake-side villas just steps away from aluminum-roofed huts with dirt floors and open-fire stoves. The same is true on their very person: among the Maya, even the poor wear handwoven clothing with bright colors and intricate designs. Both the beauty and the struggle of life here is palpable.
The next morning we awoke to a sparkling clear day, and after hanging out on the patio for a bit before breakfast, where Janet did a water color, we made our way to the largest of the lakeside villages, Santiago Atitlan (we’re pretty sure we paid way too much to cross the lake, b
ut even that, by American standards, was cheap). In Santiago, we opted for a guide to take us around in his little three-wheeled taxi, a decision that turned out to be better than we imagined. Janet and I had both read a book by Henri Nouwen about an American priest, Stan Rother, who was killed in 1981 by a military death squad during Guatemala’s brutal civil war. Rother had been assigned by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma to Santiago, one of the epicenters of the war, where hundreds of people had been killed or “disappeared” by the military. Without asking, our guide took us to the “Peace Park” built across the street from the form
er military headquarters where, in 1990, thirteen people where shot dead during a peaceful protest following the attempted kidnapping of one of the townspeople. (The military fort closed the next year). He also took us to a nearby village where Hurricane Stan sent a mudslide that killed nearly 800
people, and to see “Maximón,” a sort of Mayan icon to whom local people pay homage by supplying him with cigars and liquor, to ward off evil spirits.
At the church there were several memorials to Rother and others who had been killed during the civil war. Rother was not an activist, and had not been implicated in any guerilla activities, but had simply participated in the apparently subversive activity of helping the local people, and providing sanctuary in the church building for people who were afraid for their lives. (His devotion including translating the New Testament int
o the local Indian dialect, something no one before him had ever attempted.) Rother was killed in a small room in the church rectory, now turned into a chapel, the blood spattered wall preserved under plexiglass. His body was returned to Oklahoma for burial, but not before removing his heart, which is buried on the church grounds.
We drove that afternoon to Quetzaltenango, (a horrendous four hour drive through a half-dozen road construction sites, during which I apparently burned out the clutch of our little car trying to make my way around tractor trailers in the hilly terrain) where we had dinner with David and Jeannene Wiseman, Presbyterian Mission Co-workers who help establish partnerships between local Presbyterian churches and U.S. congregations. The Pre
sbyterian Church is the oldest Protestant Church in Guatemala, but it remains small, and is divided—much like our own PCUSA—between more conservative churches who think the church should stay out of politics, and more progressive churches (many of whom were under threat during the war) who urge the church to enter the struggle to improve social and economic conditions, especially among the poor.
The next day we drove to San Felipe, where there is a Presbyterian seminary, stopping along the way at a natural hot-springs that Janet remembered
visiting thirty years earlier. It hadn’t changed much, and is still a sort of working-class resort, with pools heated from volcanic action, a small restaurant and changing area the only amenities. Nearby there are several small cabins that you can rent, with outdoor grills for picnics. Curiously, we met several American National Guard officers there, who had been stationed in Guatemala for the past nine months, helping with several water purification projects in the rural areas.
In San Felipe we stayed at a coffee plantation run by a French-born American man married to a Guatemalan woman. The farm had been in her family for three generations. Six years ago, after her father died, they moved back to the farm to help her mother run the operations. Mark and Ana Maria met in Paris in the 1960’s where they were both studying Marxist-oriented Third-World development. Mark’s father had
been president of Chicago Theological Seminary (related to the United Church of Christ and just down the street from my alma mater, McCormick), and involved in national and international church affairs. He was born in the town of Les Chambon, where—recounted in the book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, which I read during my seminary days—the local Reformed community had sheltered Jewish children from the Nazis. (They moved there after World War II because Mark’s father, who had been a conscientious objector during the war, wanted to learn first-hand what made such people tick). After college (but before Paris) Mark himself had lived for several years in the Congo, with the Frontier Internship Program, run by the irrepressible Margaret Flory, who twenty-five years later rented h
er apartment in New York City to me and Cheryl. He was astounded that I knew who she was. We had a lot in common in the small-world department, and needless to say, they were wonderful company.
That Mark and Anna Maria are now running a farm that employs more than 80 families is a never-ending source of irony. After a life-time working for church-related and secular international development agencies, now he is the one responsible for making sure the farm turns a profit, employees are treated fairly, not to mentioned establishing patterns of efficiency, discipline, and hard-work. They have even (I imagine his pacifist father rolling over in his grave) hired an armed guard to patrol the grounds at night to keep out unwanted intruders. To make a go of things in the turbulent coffee market, they grow everything that will take root, including bananas, plantains, coconuts, mangoes, pineapples and bamboo. The varied crops help provide a steadier stream of income (coffee is harvested only once a year), provide more local employment, and help with reforestation. He showed us the entire coffee harvesting process, which is very labor intensive, and has not changed much in the past one hundred years. One point was regularly driven home. Of the $4 they charge you for a cup of latte at Starbucks, less than four cents represents the farm workers’ labor.
On Sunday we met
up with another Presbyterian Mission Co-Worker, Ellen Dozier, who lives at the seminary, and works with Presbyterian women. She took us to the local Presbyterian Church in San Felipe for morning Bible Study (Sunday is market day, so church services are in the afternoon). The church was more of a store front, but the assembled group was welcoming and enthusiastic. The pastor (who pastored another church as well) led us in a Bible study of the 2nd chapter of James (“faith without works is dead!”), and talked about the importance of Christians being involved with the upcoming presidential elections. (This was not chosen because we were there; the pastor didn’t know we were coming. Ellen said this was a typical conversation in this small but active congregation). After lunch we made a brief visit to the seminary. The beautiful grounds no longer house many students. T
he current president, for reasons that Ellen supports in theory and yet laments in practice, has pushed out most of the foreign faculty. The faculty that remain are all Guatemalan born, but they lack both the theological training and devotion to the seminary to make for a thriving seminary community. It is not clear what sort of future the seminary will have.
The next day was certainly the most emotional of our six-day journey. In the morning we drove to Retalhuleu, where Janet had been an exchange student thirty years earlier. We tracked down the house where she had lived (but did not stop in; the family had n
ot been all that hospitable to her), and then went to the store owned by the aunt of her old boy-friend, Enrique (the reason for her excellent Spanish and why she returned to Guatemala several times over the next three years, including a year in university in Guatemala City, much to my parents’ chagrin). She assumed that Enrique, who had been studying medicine when she left, still lived in Guatemala City, and was not intending to make contact with him. But she hoped to see Enrique’s other aunt, who had been the high school principal, and had sort of taken Janet under her wing (and, of course, also introduced her to Enrique). Well, as it turned out, not only was the store owner in, the other aunt was in town as well, and Enrique lived nearby with his own medical practice, and she was sure they would all want to see her. An hour later they were all there in the flesh, the first time Janet and Enrique had spoken or laid eyes on each other since they broke up twenty-eight years ago. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), Enrique had clients and could not stay for lunch. The aunts were free, however, and we spent the next two hours with them catching up and reminiscing. All in all, it was a very satisfying day for Janet, and made the entire trip more than worthwhile.
We drove that day bac
k to Antigua to drop off our rental car and do some more shopping, and then took a shuttle the next day to Guatemala City. There is not much to tell you about the city except to report that what the guide books all say is true: the city is large, ugly, and overrun with noxious bus fumes. We had a wonderful visit to two museums, with a taxi driver who sang Guatemalan folk tunes to us, but all in all it is not a place I am anxious to return to.
Speaking of being anxious to return, I am ready to come home. Coming back to language school after the trip has been somewhat anticlimactic. On top of it all, the travel has made my stomach a little queasy, which makes me miss my own bed and more familiar food. Though I wish I had had more time to master a greater depth of Spanish, and everyone here has been wonderfully hospitable, I am ready to board the plan home on Tuesday. This has been an excellent adventure.
tly from the airport to my house, and after breakfast with the Houstons, we picked up our rental car and made our way to Panajachel, on the shores of Lake Atitlan. Surrounded by volcanoes, it is said to be one of the most beautiful sites in the world. Our two and half hour drive was lengthened by a short boat ride to our hotel, situated by the small village of Jaibalito. The lancha dropped us off at the hotel’s dock, where hotel staff helped us carry our luggage up the hundred and fifty or so steps to the hotel desk. Our hotel, named La Casa Del Mundo, is literally built into the side of the hill. Owned by an American man married to a Guatemalan woman who met, somewhat improbably, in Alaska, they bought the property about fifteen years ago, spent five years building it, and have been opened for business ever since. Though perhaps not the most luxurious, it is certainly the most beautiful hotel I have ever stayed at, a cascade of stone stairways, patios overlooking the water, flowering gardens and hanging plants, complete with hummingbi
rds and a hot-tub. Our arrival was damped somewhat by an overhang of clouds, but even in the mist you could appreciate the grandeur of the lake. (The hotel, by the way, was only about $45 for the night). Before dinner, which was served family-style in a candle-lit room overlooking the lake, we took a short hike into Jaibalito. As is so often the case here, wealth and poverty are cheek-by-jowl, the beautiful lake-side villas just steps away from aluminum-roofed huts with dirt floors and open-fire stoves. The same is true on their very person: among the Maya, even the poor wear handwoven clothing with bright colors and intricate designs. Both the beauty and the struggle of life here is palpable.The next morning we awoke to a sparkling clear day, and after hanging out on the patio for a bit before breakfast, where Janet did a water color, we made our way to the largest of the lakeside villages, Santiago Atitlan (we’re pretty sure we paid way too much to cross the lake, b
ut even that, by American standards, was cheap). In Santiago, we opted for a guide to take us around in his little three-wheeled taxi, a decision that turned out to be better than we imagined. Janet and I had both read a book by Henri Nouwen about an American priest, Stan Rother, who was killed in 1981 by a military death squad during Guatemala’s brutal civil war. Rother had been assigned by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma to Santiago, one of the epicenters of the war, where hundreds of people had been killed or “disappeared” by the military. Without asking, our guide took us to the “Peace Park” built across the street from the form
er military headquarters where, in 1990, thirteen people where shot dead during a peaceful protest following the attempted kidnapping of one of the townspeople. (The military fort closed the next year). He also took us to a nearby village where Hurricane Stan sent a mudslide that killed nearly 800
people, and to see “Maximón,” a sort of Mayan icon to whom local people pay homage by supplying him with cigars and liquor, to ward off evil spirits.At the church there were several memorials to Rother and others who had been killed during the civil war. Rother was not an activist, and had not been implicated in any guerilla activities, but had simply participated in the apparently subversive activity of helping the local people, and providing sanctuary in the church building for people who were afraid for their lives. (His devotion including translating the New Testament int
o the local Indian dialect, something no one before him had ever attempted.) Rother was killed in a small room in the church rectory, now turned into a chapel, the blood spattered wall preserved under plexiglass. His body was returned to Oklahoma for burial, but not before removing his heart, which is buried on the church grounds.We drove that afternoon to Quetzaltenango, (a horrendous four hour drive through a half-dozen road construction sites, during which I apparently burned out the clutch of our little car trying to make my way around tractor trailers in the hilly terrain) where we had dinner with David and Jeannene Wiseman, Presbyterian Mission Co-workers who help establish partnerships between local Presbyterian churches and U.S. congregations. The Pre
sbyterian Church is the oldest Protestant Church in Guatemala, but it remains small, and is divided—much like our own PCUSA—between more conservative churches who think the church should stay out of politics, and more progressive churches (many of whom were under threat during the war) who urge the church to enter the struggle to improve social and economic conditions, especially among the poor.The next day we drove to San Felipe, where there is a Presbyterian seminary, stopping along the way at a natural hot-springs that Janet remembered
visiting thirty years earlier. It hadn’t changed much, and is still a sort of working-class resort, with pools heated from volcanic action, a small restaurant and changing area the only amenities. Nearby there are several small cabins that you can rent, with outdoor grills for picnics. Curiously, we met several American National Guard officers there, who had been stationed in Guatemala for the past nine months, helping with several water purification projects in the rural areas.In San Felipe we stayed at a coffee plantation run by a French-born American man married to a Guatemalan woman. The farm had been in her family for three generations. Six years ago, after her father died, they moved back to the farm to help her mother run the operations. Mark and Ana Maria met in Paris in the 1960’s where they were both studying Marxist-oriented Third-World development. Mark’s father had
been president of Chicago Theological Seminary (related to the United Church of Christ and just down the street from my alma mater, McCormick), and involved in national and international church affairs. He was born in the town of Les Chambon, where—recounted in the book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, which I read during my seminary days—the local Reformed community had sheltered Jewish children from the Nazis. (They moved there after World War II because Mark’s father, who had been a conscientious objector during the war, wanted to learn first-hand what made such people tick). After college (but before Paris) Mark himself had lived for several years in the Congo, with the Frontier Internship Program, run by the irrepressible Margaret Flory, who twenty-five years later rented h
er apartment in New York City to me and Cheryl. He was astounded that I knew who she was. We had a lot in common in the small-world department, and needless to say, they were wonderful company.That Mark and Anna Maria are now running a farm that employs more than 80 families is a never-ending source of irony. After a life-time working for church-related and secular international development agencies, now he is the one responsible for making sure the farm turns a profit, employees are treated fairly, not to mentioned establishing patterns of efficiency, discipline, and hard-work. They have even (I imagine his pacifist father rolling over in his grave) hired an armed guard to patrol the grounds at night to keep out unwanted intruders. To make a go of things in the turbulent coffee market, they grow everything that will take root, including bananas, plantains, coconuts, mangoes, pineapples and bamboo. The varied crops help provide a steadier stream of income (coffee is harvested only once a year), provide more local employment, and help with reforestation. He showed us the entire coffee harvesting process, which is very labor intensive, and has not changed much in the past one hundred years. One point was regularly driven home. Of the $4 they charge you for a cup of latte at Starbucks, less than four cents represents the farm workers’ labor.
On Sunday we met
up with another Presbyterian Mission Co-Worker, Ellen Dozier, who lives at the seminary, and works with Presbyterian women. She took us to the local Presbyterian Church in San Felipe for morning Bible Study (Sunday is market day, so church services are in the afternoon). The church was more of a store front, but the assembled group was welcoming and enthusiastic. The pastor (who pastored another church as well) led us in a Bible study of the 2nd chapter of James (“faith without works is dead!”), and talked about the importance of Christians being involved with the upcoming presidential elections. (This was not chosen because we were there; the pastor didn’t know we were coming. Ellen said this was a typical conversation in this small but active congregation). After lunch we made a brief visit to the seminary. The beautiful grounds no longer house many students. T
he current president, for reasons that Ellen supports in theory and yet laments in practice, has pushed out most of the foreign faculty. The faculty that remain are all Guatemalan born, but they lack both the theological training and devotion to the seminary to make for a thriving seminary community. It is not clear what sort of future the seminary will have.The next day was certainly the most emotional of our six-day journey. In the morning we drove to Retalhuleu, where Janet had been an exchange student thirty years earlier. We tracked down the house where she had lived (but did not stop in; the family had n
ot been all that hospitable to her), and then went to the store owned by the aunt of her old boy-friend, Enrique (the reason for her excellent Spanish and why she returned to Guatemala several times over the next three years, including a year in university in Guatemala City, much to my parents’ chagrin). She assumed that Enrique, who had been studying medicine when she left, still lived in Guatemala City, and was not intending to make contact with him. But she hoped to see Enrique’s other aunt, who had been the high school principal, and had sort of taken Janet under her wing (and, of course, also introduced her to Enrique). Well, as it turned out, not only was the store owner in, the other aunt was in town as well, and Enrique lived nearby with his own medical practice, and she was sure they would all want to see her. An hour later they were all there in the flesh, the first time Janet and Enrique had spoken or laid eyes on each other since they broke up twenty-eight years ago. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), Enrique had clients and could not stay for lunch. The aunts were free, however, and we spent the next two hours with them catching up and reminiscing. All in all, it was a very satisfying day for Janet, and made the entire trip more than worthwhile.We drove that day bac
k to Antigua to drop off our rental car and do some more shopping, and then took a shuttle the next day to Guatemala City. There is not much to tell you about the city except to report that what the guide books all say is true: the city is large, ugly, and overrun with noxious bus fumes. We had a wonderful visit to two museums, with a taxi driver who sang Guatemalan folk tunes to us, but all in all it is not a place I am anxious to return to.Speaking of being anxious to return, I am ready to come home. Coming back to language school after the trip has been somewhat anticlimactic. On top of it all, the travel has made my stomach a little queasy, which makes me miss my own bed and more familiar food. Though I wish I had had more time to master a greater depth of Spanish, and everyone here has been wonderfully hospitable, I am ready to board the plan home on Tuesday. This has been an excellent adventure.
1 comment:
i hope you still check this from time to time. i was wondering if you had anymore pics of san felipe, retalhuleu. my daughter was born there and i would love to have some pics to show her from there. we were not able to visit when we met her. thanks!!!
amie
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