Adíos, Guatemala!

Here are the last few entries from my Moleskine, and the closing of the Guatemala Notebook…


*

I put Kristin, the boy, and the dog on a plane the other day. The house is nearly empty. Almost completely quiet. The things I’m taking with me are spilling out of four suitcases. Mallory has been sick with a high fever all week. She’s lying in the only bed left in the house dreaming, I hope, of good things.

The neighborhood has been carrying on with its perpetual song of hammers and birds and dogs and cars by day, and by night, crickets and more dogs, more cars. I imagine it hasn’t changed since they first began putting up houses in San Cristobal. Bob Merrick, my boss here in Guatemala, told me he remembers flying in a helicopter up here not 15 years ago, and there was nothing in these hills but the high grass and a few farms. Houses are going up now in every neighborhood on every street. Over our wall across the street a beautiful new home is being built, is almost finished. An old man lives there now. He sleeps on a blanket in one of the front rooms on the dirt. Maybe he is watching over the worker’s tools. I see him sometimes sloshing something with a stick in a few barrels, see him sitting on a bucket. The day I walked through (out of curiosity) he was sitting in front of a little fire poking at it with a stretch of rebar. He wore a straw hat. He didn’t smile.

I stood on our terrace last night and began thinking of last things. I usually try avoiding it, but sometimes you can’t. It was the last time I would look out over the city from that spot. The same lights flickered back, and I was no less amazed by the view of the closer roofs fading out toward the city and the hills toward El Salvador beyond. I will miss it, that view, this place.


*

My friend Paul dropped Mal and I off at the airport. We kept it short because men shouldn’t cry in airports. I guess. We flew Taca Airlines which, to my surprise, served free drinks. They pushed a mini-bar up the aisle, and I ordered a rum and coke and drank it beside a Mayan woman that couldn’t figure out how to unfasten her lap belt. Sweet lady. She couldn’t understand my Spanish, bless her heart.

Arrived in Chicago at 2 a.m., shuffled through customs, baggage, bought an Edy’s ice cream scoop for Mal and I, and took a shuttle to the Marriot. I slept, in the words of my friend, like a dead cat.

I’ve been back a week, and the buzz of homecoming hasn’t quite worn off yet. I’ve been shocked all week at how easy it is to get things done here. It feels like I’ve taken off a great big heavy wet coat and laid it down (in some airport maybe), because simply living in my own skin these last several days feels so much easier. Thinking back, I guess we had grown used to the inefficiencies, and the constant stress of getting by on bad Spanish and very little money. I keep wanted to speak to everyone in Spanish, or find myself making small talk with store clerks or strangers at the park, amazed I can communicate with these people.


*

I can’t in good conscience say Guatemala was good to us. It was not. These have been a difficult two years. Sometimes I think Guatemala is just like America, only drunk and a little stupid. But talking with Kristin recently, we were both amazed at all we experienced there, the things we saw and lived, the people we met and knew. I suppose it’s less where you are that matters, but who you are when you’re there. But the who that you are when you’re there shapes, in return, where you are, the place itself. Flannery O’Connor said that "somewhere is better than anywhere." And I supposed someone, it would follow, is better than anyone. I will miss the people more than the place, but again, the place is so much what it is because of the people. I will miss them both.

I am not sure how Guatemala has or will continue to change us, or how (in some infinitesimal way) we may have changed Guatemala. But to be honest, I’m not much interested in all that. I have learned to say with Walt Whitman that to be with those I like is enough.

A Word on Teaching at the Christian Academy of Guatemala

I realize I have been quiet about teaching, which has consumed much of my time these last nine months. Maybe too much. Still, it has been good for me, and worth it. Several of my students claim mine is their favorite class, but that could be because I am easy. I have also been told more than once by my 12th graders that it’s more like a Philosophy class than English, but English was always more of an infatuation, not my area of expertise. I might have done better with History. Or maybe P.E. In any case, I am grateful for the year I’ve had, how it has forced me to speak in ways I have never spoken before, to read wonderful things I have not read since high school or college, and how I have been privileged to spend so much time with these good kids. They are every one of them filled with the beauty of promise (or is it the promise of beauty?), and I am glad to have known them. These deserve at the very least a page of this notebook.


(English 11, American Literature)


(English 12, British Literature)

“Real Madrid Signs Mallory Todd”

(Pre-game photo)

Between the 6 or 7 stations covering futbol round the clock here, Real Madrid gets plenty of air time. So it was no small thing (for me anyway) to see the Mal in the white of Real Madrid last Saturday. I didn’t care that our kids lost 11 - 0 to Casa Shalom, an orhanage outside of town. Those kids deserved to win. They were amazing. But at least we looked good.


(After-game photo)

Brother John's Visit

My brother John gave in to my pleading and came down for a visit a couple week ago. We had a great long weekend, hitting some of the sights—Antigua, Pacaya, Monterrico, even a four hour stint in Chimaltenango where the Volvo broke down. Three highlights: walking over Pacaya’s enormous lava flow, swimming in Monterrico (after two pina coladas), and visiting Amor del Nino, a special needs orphanage our friend Steve Osborne and his wife run.


(John standing on a lava flow, Volcan Pacaya)


(The beach at Monterrico)


(Amor del Nino, Love the Child)




(Kristin and Jose, Amor del Nino)

Cooking Thai in Guatemala

I recently helped my friend Paul put together a Thai cookbook which included the more common recipes from his own kitchen. The book was part of a larger effort to raise money for a missions trip to Spain, which Paul and the youth group at Union Church have been hard at for several months. The idea was to open a monthly Thai restaurant at the church, with a suggested donation for the meal. Five courses, with variations: spicy chicken soup, curry puffs, Chiang Mai noodles, stir fry, and Thai curry. We did four nights over successive months, and I think raised over $7,000. Paul and I cooked, and the youth group served. For the last night, which was just two weeks ago, Paul bought the the kids restaurant-style aprons, black and to the ankles. For he and myself the same, along with white double breasted chef coats. For a night, I might have even felt like the real thing. Paul, of course, looked and was the real thing.



Paul and his wife Melinda have lived in Guatemala for four years. Paul works at the Union Church, and Melinda, like Kristin, is a counselor at the school where I teach. They both cook brilliant meals. We’ve been over numerous times, and I think every time we have stood or sat in their kitchen and cooked with them.

Paul spent a few years living in Bangkok as a kid, and attended boarding school in Penang, Malaysia. He remains connected intimately to those memories, which of course include the food.

After several attendees had pleaded for the recipes we were using, and with Kristin’s encouragement, we got the idea to do the cookbook. Unfortunately, it was only two weeks before the last restaurant, where we thought it would make sense to sell them. We finished it, and sold a handful that night, and a few more since. Paul asked me to write a Foreword. Here is what I wrote.

*

I confess that until moving to Guatemala, I had long associated Thai food with imported beer and business casual, the food that lured yuppies, and that all the cool kids from the cool side of town were eating when they were eating out. Thai was hip, and the spicier you ordered it, the cooler you were. The best Thai restaurant in Cincinnati, for instance, is located in Mt. Adams, a quaint little upper-class village overlooking the downtown. Here, successful young professionals spend their weekends eating Thai in their pre-faded chinos and Euro-cut button ups. As a small town boy from Michigan, with a humble cape cod on Cincinnati’s blue collar “west side,” there was always something about Thai food, or maybe it was the glib culture that appeared to surround it, that I rejected. Give me a grilled sausage and a helping of green bean casserole, thank you very much.

What I did not expect when we moved to Guatemala two years ago was to learn not only how to cook Thai food, but something about its enjoyment. I learned this in a humble kitchen in Guate’s Zona 11, at Paul and Melinda Gunther’s house. After several visits and many meals, some of them quite spontaneous, I began to learn the enjoyment of Thai food, or any food cooked with skill, care, and love, happens not in fancy candlelit restaurants with imported beer and a waiter named Hans, but over conversation and participation, in chopping cilantro roots and telling stories. What I found so memorable and moving about those times in the Gunther kitchen was the way Paul came alive behind his wok, and how the flame of his joy, his art, lit into my own mind.

Equally moving is that in Paul and Melinda’s kitchen, standing around and watching is forbidden. They will stick a cleaver in one hand, a stalk of green onion in the other. “Here. Chop.” And you’re off. And the conversation carries over the stir-fry and curry, and the world—yes, even out of the small economy of a rented kitchen in Guatemala City—opens up.

The thing is, I may never visit Thailand, never eat chicken satay from the street vendors of Bangkok, or taste fresh lemon grass from Ubon. But I have eaten some of the best Thai food imaginable, and that with good friends. With great friends. And in the process, have even gotten my hands a little smelly with fish sauce. And that is enough.

DANIEL TODD
Guatemala City
4/25/06


(Here is the book cover. Soi 10 is the name of the street Paul lived on in Bangkok as a kid)