Some Thoughts Surrounding Our Flight From Oakland

From what I can tell, even though we haven’t lived there yet, San Cristobal will be more our speed. There is a Scandinavian Gym just down the main boulevard from our neighborhood, so most likely I will fit right in (Mom—I’ve been meaning to tell you there’s a Curves not two miles from our house here in Zona 10; I’m sure I could get you a part-time gig there if you and Dad decide to winter in Guate). There is also a view of Volcan Augua, yes, the very same volcano our little neighborhood in South Antigua butted up against. And to the left—I have no idea which direction this is—there’s a view of the city which I imagine at night will light up like Christmas. Harder to get used to, I think, will be the morning cock’s crow next door. Kristin is dreading this wake up call. Anyway, I am anxious for Saturday—to get our stuff in a truck and out of town, up the hill, and into our new digs. Despite being a little old fashioned at heart, I love new places, sights, roads, geographies. I like that we will be learning a whole new area, with its own feel, its own pace.

However, we will not leave Oakland without some regret. Our house at the end of 11th Avenida “B” has a charm and tranquility hard to come by in this city. We wake up to tall exotic trees, the sound of birds, a distant and harmless dog’s bark, and always the sun. Even now as I write this an almost full moon is in my office window, and it’s perfectly quiet outside. We will miss our neighbors, the gringos from Portland, their kids, their friendship, and their pong table in particular, but not their dogs. And of course Tony, my morose nextdoor neighbor with the bum hip who wants so badly to leave this country for a new life in Florida. This week alone, no kidding, he has asked me for 40Q, bummed six Advil, two AA batteries (twice), the last of my good rum, a cup and half of brown rice, and a bag of microwavable popcorn. I will miss his laugh and his heart that I know is good, but there is nothing else about him or his life that I will miss.


(15th Avenida Finale, Oakland, Zona 10)

I will miss too the quiet street leading out of the barranco, and the folks that greet me every morning with a wave on our drive to the bus stop and back again—the neighborhood gardener whom we’ve passed urinating on the side of the street countless times (not uncommon in Guatemala), the pack of women walkers, the handful of maids on their way to work, the rides I sometimes give them where I try speaking to them in something like Spanish. Three months has felt almost like a year, a complicated and sometimes arresting year, but a good one.

New Digs

We met a motley crew of missionaries at a party a couple weeks go in San Lucas. It was hosted by Gregory G. (I can’t spell his last name), a missionary qua entrepreneur who runs a medical clinic in the mountains, among other things. There were horse rides and food and assorted entertainment pieces. It was great to get out of the city, and to be among folk whose speech we could understand. After talking with missionaries of all breeds all afternoon, including one American ex-cop working full time for the Guatemalan police, we learned that most missionaries end up doing something different than what they originally came for. This came as good news to us, since we are in the process of a significant uprooting ourselves.

Kristin has decided to find another ministry here since things at the Hannah’s Hope have not worked out. The details are a little complicated, but the short of it is that they are going through a lot of changes, and the timing was not right for us or them. So at the moment, my unflappable wife is researching other orphanages and ministry opportunities. While we did struggle with these turn of events initially, we’ve grown more and more excited about the possibilities that are opening up to us. For one, we’re happy to be moving out of this dog and pony show called Zona 10, and into San Cristobal, a more residencial area just outside of town with cheaper rent a better view.

I have to confess I am a little embarrased to be moving into a house even bigger than the one we are presently living in, but we were ready to give anything for a yard. There are so few parks in Guatemala City that a yard is essential if you have kids. The place we found is in a gated neighborhood called los Pinos (the Pines), which is a five minute drive from Mallory’s new school, the Christian Academy of Guatemala, and within walking distance of our bank and Paiz, the better of the grocery stores. We will have a great view of the city and two of the volcanos, one of which is still active and was smoldering yesterday as we drove by. The neighbors have chickens, turkeys, and yes, a few gallos too.


(The view from the street)


(Front view from inside the compound)


(The yard)


(The view from the terrace)


(The wife)


(The cool stairwell)

A Gallo Christmas (Or, The Beautiful and the Ridiculous)

Standing in the center of Parque Independencia, the city’s most picturesque obelisk where the main veins converge—Avenida Las Americas, Boulevard Liberacion, and La Reforma—, stands a massive green cone glittering with Christmas tinsel, candy canes, snowmen, and crowned with, of all things, the ubiquitous Gallo Cerveza logo. The sight embodies so much of what I’ve found to be a balancing act between the beautiful and the ridiculous here.



Not far from the Obelisco, and just a block over from La Reforma, Guatemala City’s grandest avenue (to our consternation, they close it every Sunday for public access—dog-walkers, joggers, bike rides, and the like, so it’s nearly impossible to get from one side of the city to the other), the most obnoxious replica of the Eiffel Tower you could imagine stradles a dirty intersection of a run down business district of Zona 9. We pass by El Torre del Reformador every Sunday on the way home from Church.

El Torre was erected in honor of president Justo Rufino Barrios’ “reforms” of the 1880s, which amounted to putting Guatemala on the capitalist map with the introduction of coffee as a large-scale cash crop (finally Guatemala had something to offer the world besides cochineal, a dye made from cactus worms, and formerly Guatemala’s chief export. Never heard of it, right?) But to pull this off, Barrios needed both land and a sizeable workforce. Like so much bad history before him, he looked to the indiginous Indians to fill both needs. Barrios seized Indians lands and auctioned them off to the highest bidders. Since the Indians could not afford to buy their own land back, they lost it to wealthy landowers or foreigners, mostly Germans. Not willing to work for the pathetically low wages offered them, the Indians were content to live in self-sustaining simplicity off their own corn plots. Good enough. But Barrios solved this problem by instituting a system of forced labor called mandamientos, giving local police authority to round up the males of every household to be used as landowners saw fit. A convenient system of debt bondage was adapted to put the Indians to “good use” helping Guatemala become another champion of “capitalism.”



El Torre del Reformador, then, with all its junk metal, celebrates the junk reforms of a junk president; yet another example of a beautiful country blurred by an obnoxious monument.

A prominent though more subtle form of the same thing is Guatemala’s social class system. Guatemalan’s are beautiful people, both on and under the surface, rich or poor, it doesn’t matter. Not to us anyway. Class in Guatemala, and maybe everywhere it holds sway, is defined in large part by education, which is defined by birth (usually), which is defined by fate or if you’re religious, by God. Ultimately then, if you follow me, class comes back to a source outside of ourselves. We can do very little to control it. There are exceptions, of course, but you must turn stones to find them. There is little use boasting in one’s birth, since one can’t lift a finger to influence it.

If you engage a ladino (generally mid- to upper-class mix of Indian and Spanish blood) on the subject of the “help,” education is cited as the dominant divider between rich and poor, upper and working class, the haves and the have nots, or however you want to put it. It most cases, it is taken for granted that the “uneducated” cannot be trusted, befriended, or given any decent measure of outward respect. The “help,” as they prefer to be called (not 'maid' or 'muchacha', which are more common), don’t eat at the same table, in some cases don’t use the same utinsils, and are often reduced to a humble table in the garage. The “help,” if they’re lucky enough to get a ride in a car, climb in the backseat without a word, even if they’re the only passenger.

I realize this is not the United States, and I know this country and others like it have long and complex cultural histories, but at the risk of sounding naïve to these realities, I cannot buy into this kind of supercilious nonsense. I may be beating a dead horse, but here’s why: First, “education” is only got by proximity, or luck, or, to use the language of Christianity, by grace. If you are born into a family of means, you get educated. You get to have maids. You get what you want. You drive shiny SUV’s with tinted windows and uniformed guards with shotguns man your house front, and subservient muchachas wipe your toddlers plump asses for you.

Second, “education” is overrated. Regardless of education, life happens to you. Nobody is spared. Both get ill, both have mediocre sex, and both chew the same chiclets bubble gum under the same ultraviolet sun. They both fall in love in the same old ways, die the same tragic deaths, and get buried in the same soil as their fathers and mothers before them. Both eat rice and beans, cry at births and weddings and funerals, and dream of betters lives in a time of peace.

Aside from all that, and perhaps more importantly, we’ve found the “lower” class to be much warmer and friendlier—the kind of folk, rooted in community, we came in part to find. The class makeup of this culture is the most ridiculous—no, the most obnoxious—thing we’ve seen yet, worse by far than the Gallo Christmas tree.

And here we are, oddball and obnoxious lower-middle class Americans living amongst a private, buttoned up, and elite diplomat community in a part of the city so removed from the real Guatemala it begins to resemble the materialistic commericism we thought we had left behind. No such luck.

Las Abejitas

We found a great little school for Cristian in our zone called Las Abejitas (the Little Bees), and decided to send him. They start the kids in school early here, and since we figured he’d pick up on Spanish quicker at a school than here with me and the maid, we went ahead with it.




Today was his first day. He wasn’t exactly terrified, but was in no mood for such nonsense as picture taking by Dad. We dropped him off out front like we had been told to do without ceremony. He entered without a scene.




We picked him up a little early, at 11:15, and we could tell straight off that he’d had a great morning. The Director confirmed it. So we paid the first month’s tuition and bought him a chupa (this has become my favorite word to say in Spanish. Pronounced choo-pah, it means frock or coat, but could also mean a tobacco pouch. What versatility! In this case, it means a little orange warm up suit which he will wear twice a week). And so begins a lifetime of school, which is what it seemed like to me. And I loathed every minute of it!