Carlos was coaching me in my very first Mayan Kekchi sentence. He had just gifted me a handwoven straw hat, and I fumbled the strange words in my mouth while he laughed and corrected me. Carlos was happy for the visit and proud of his new hobby - having recently rekindled a craft that had been a lost part of his heritage from generations past. His wife Maria was rekindling a forgotten craft as well, weaving "backstrap" style.
Carlos is the appointed forest ranger for the fledgling Betel community, a new settlement of 16 families situated in a remote area in the cloudforests of the Northern Guatemalan department (i.e. state) of AltaVerapaz, alongside a forest reserve protecting among other natural beauty, the fast-disappearing national bird, the Quetzal. The families are part of a new land project funded by a local foundation, whereby formerly landless, displaced farmers are given the opportunity to buy a home plot and a farming plot at a fair price.
I was visiting fellow MCCers who were stationed in this and a neighboring community
in AltaVerapaz, learning about their work in the cool, green, rural highland
communities, where Kekchi, one of the 23 indigenous Mayan languages of Guatemala is spoken. Here, my limited Spanish did me little good, so I soaked in the new sounds of Kekchi and communicated as all humans can through smiles, thankful eyes and laughter. MCCers Gini and Travis, a my-ageish couple, who took me through the forest, proudly showed me their baby banana trees and how they rigged makeshift "plumbing" for a gravity flow shower in their rustic house where they lived among the Betel community, along with Carlos and Maria.
A bumpy, 2 hour, forest/mountain ride away, Rob and Tara gave me a whirlwind tour of the Bezelel boarding school, where Kekchi youth from communities throughout the Ketcki-speaking region live and study academics during the weekdays and vocational training in tailoring, weaving, baking, carpentry, masonry and metalworking on Saturdays. Tara (daughter of a Calvin prof Bert DeVries ya'll, among other bizarre GR connections!) brought me to visit sweet-faced girls with their flourishing collections of goats and rabbits - part of a Heifer International project to incorporate more protein into rural diets, and then onto an impressive terraced organic garden, which is helping to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the middleschoolers at Bezelel.
These MCC supported programs address two of the main problems that Guatemala faces--land distribution and accessible primary education. The roots of these problems trace back as far as the Spanish Conquest in th 1500s, where lands were seized from the indigeounous peoples and and given to Spanish nobles. But recent history bears blame as well with eonomic and political moves in the last 100 years seizing prize farm lands and turning them over to US corporations such as United Fruit Company
(aka Chiquita).
Today, many Mayans are left with little choice but to farm steep, rocky mountainsides - the last available land - and/or work the multinational banana plantations or coffee fincas of rich landowners for wages often 1/3 to 1/2 of the legal minimum wage of 6ish dollars a day. And this system of exclusion and exploitation has also kept indigenous Mayans from accessing basic services, such as health care, and primary education.
So seeing some small steps like these gives me hope, although there are still many deeper, structural elements that need addressing that I will continue to learn about each day I am here. But I am encouraged to see hope in the faces of Carlos and Maria. And am struck, as I knew I would be, with a taste of just how much I will be blessed and changed during this new life I have been given in Guatemala.
>Bantioux.
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