Weary, sore and cramped after five hours stuffed in a mini bus, the beating sun created a sardined sauna as we bumped along endless Guatemalan roads. We finally peeled off the highway, winding through small villages, staring hopefully out the window at families walking down the street dressed in traditional Mayan regalia, beautiful full length skirts pleated in every color of a bold painter´s palate, sturdy intricate embroiderty exhibiting extraordinary patters atop thick sturdy wool shirts of bold lavendar, majestic blue and emerald green. Is this it? Are we there yet? With every long curve, seconds crawling into minutes, we grew ancier. More sore. More impatient. Until we stopped. Halfway up a hill and were told “aqui estamos!” And just like that, we were up and out. Immediately, children gathered around the bus, buzzing around our ankles with big cheeky smiles, traditional thick belts holding up miniature traditional skirts, small brown hands reaching up and roaring in delight when we lifted high and swung them over our backs and shoulders.
After the blur of our lunch (prepared and served by women in the community), it was time to meet the host families. The students strapped on their packs and we began to meander through the dirt and cobblestoned town, children galloping around us, mothers with babies slung in colorful shawful on their backs greeting us with inky warm black eyes and gold capped, half toothless smiles. The first house was right outside the school. A Mayan woman greeted us at the door and lead one student and me to the one large room, an intricate tile floor beneath a tin roof in a spatious barren room, the only furniture two beds on oppsing walls··the woman and her baby on one bed and one student, Kenzie, on the other.
We continued on, walking a slow loop around the tiny town, more kids joining our parade, swinging our hands and jumping on any back that was free of a bag, their tiny bodies feathers compared to the burdensome weight of our own belongings. At each stop, Alfredo, our local contact, would stop and call out a student´s name. Then, Noah and I would curiously follow the student through a dirt path, wander past a tiny wood shanty shack, beside smiling wrinkled old men tending to boiling steamy pots, up atop makeshit stone steps, and through dark doorsteps lit with matriarch upon matriach, smiling and beckoning us inside. We trailed student after student into their little home, watching them find their small corner cot in a dirt, tin·roofed home shared by 6, 7, 8, or more members of the family. Tyler even found a toddler sound asleep on his bed.
The swarms of kids followed us everywhere a buzzing cloud that breezed effortlessly into different homes with the ease, comfort and familiarity as if it were their own. Who needs separate families in a community of 1200? As the sun set beneath thick blouds hovering in banana trees and ripe mountains, our group became smaller and smaller until we dropped off the last student, waving goodbye as she wearily plopped down on her cot, her new host mother smiling curiously at her from the doorway, another tiny woman wrapped in a rainbow.
The afternoon was a fairytale of difference· everyone so friendly, so welcoming, guiding us so warmly into their homes, their history, their timeless lives. I could never have waltzed into these homes and peeked behind these realities in any other context. Just another random morning and then we are unexpectedly whisked away on a little bus to a town so small, so hidden, we couldn´t locate it in any of our guidebooks. For all I know, we are transported to, another place, another universe. Writing by candlelight and listening to the gentle chorus of crickets and giggles and shouts of children outside, I could be anywhere, at any time.
Days like today are why I travel, why I marvel at my life and that of others· so separate but somehow crisscrossing on top of and through generations of lives starkly opposite from my own. Like ships passing in the night but flashing a beam of light and capturing the direct stare of a foreign captain, we catch each other in this moment and then we pass silently on, moving forward towards our own horizon.
-Julia
