My new family is quite different from my first. The housekeeper/cook, Margarita, picked me up at school to bring me home for lunch. She is a tiny woman barely coming up to my armpit and reminds me of my grandmother on my Dad's side. Hardy, kind, smiles easily, and bustles around the kitchen producing delicious meals as if by magic. She wears the more traditional dress of a colorful skirt, huipil, and apron. Once we got to the house, which is several blocks further away from the school than my first home and on a quiet street that has a bakery (Peter Pan - pan is Spanish for bread), I met Margarita's assistant, a young girl of 15 named Cesia who has been working for this family for 3 or 4 years. She started out working in elementary school after classes and during school breaks, and now that she's in secondary school she works full time and attends classes on Sundays. She comes from a family of 13 siblings and lives here in the house along with Margarita. From what I understand Margarita has no children of her own and has been working and living with this family for some time. There's also Jullian, a young man who looks about the same age as Cesia. He is also an employee of the family but I'm not sure what he does.
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| My new street, Diagonal 1, looking in the direction of 6ta calle (6th street - my old street although several blocks down) on the walk to school. Building facades are very colorful pretty much all over the city, although some areas are less so. I never cease to be amazed at the spaces that are contained behind the doors. Cafe Red is a great example. It's a cafe with a drab, industrial looking facade on the street - indeed, it's easy to miss if you don't know what you're looking for - but step inside and you find yourself in a beautiful courtyard ringed with a covered patio for tables and an asian architecture-inspired tea-house looking building in the middle that houses a dining room, the kitchen, and a funky bathroom with a claw-foot tub |
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| Looking back up my street in the opposite direction, towards my new house - the front door is right where those cars are, on the right-hand side of the street. If you look closely at the blue building on the left you can see the Peter Pan bakery - it's open in the afternoons. I wish I could give you an idea of how narrow the sidewalks are - maybe 2.5 feet across? It's not enough for two people to walk next to each other, and someone has to turn flat to let another person pass. |
Sitting down to lunch I first met Ana-Lucia, Margoli (I think), and Jeni (pronounced hen-y). I hadn't been told anything about the family, really, so I assumed that they were sisters all close in age (18-20ish) especially because Ana-Lucia and Jeni were going back and forth like siblings. When I asked, however, Ana-Lucia and Jeni laughed and said no, Jeni was just good friends with Ana-Lucia. I puzzled over this for a bit because Jeni seemed to have her own room in the house. I decided that maybe there was some reason she had moved in with Ana-Lucia's family, like for school. Shortly after we were joined by yet another young woman, Mady (short for Madelina) who finally explained to me that, no, none of the girls in the house were related, they were all students renting rooms or apartments. Soon after Mady arrived she was followed by Tanya, Mali, and Milton, yet more university students who are staying here. Apparently the house (which is huge and includes three apartments outside the main house but within the same roofed compound) is more like a boarding house. The couple that owns it have three sons, all grown and either living or studying in Guatemala City.
While there are several advantages to such a living arrangement - ample hot water, internet, and very flexible meal times - I miss the more cohesive feel of a single family unit. I definitely had a couple days of culture shock after being uprooted and, while everyone here is very nice, the students are young and talk very fast and tend to ignore me during conversations unless they want to try out some English. I don't mind so much as I like teaching and it's kind of fun to hear them stumble over English pronunciation the way I do with Spanish, however technically they're not supposed to speak any English with me. I learned from my first family that they have to sign a contract with the school about that, although it's likely the students aren't aware of this. They're just all so young. Secondary school ends at 16 here and then folks start on what's termed their Bachelor's, which takes 2-3 years depending on the degree (generally technical degrees or trade professions - like a secretary, legal assistant, nurse, mechanic). Professions requiring more technical instruction or academic instruction, like medicine, engineering, psychology, lawyer, go on after their Bachelor's to University. Mady and I had an entire conversation about the differences between the US degree system and the Guatemalan system, and she had a hard time understanding that for us, University and a Bachelor's degree are practically synonymous terms - they're not separate entities.
So, all of the students attend University. Jeni is the youngest at 19, she just started her first year of med school, and Mady and Milton are the oldest, both 23. Mady is studying civic engineering and Milton is studying orthodontics.
In Guatemala there are very large disparities between socioeconomic and "racial" classes - those Guatemalans of primarily indigenous Mayan ethnicity comprise the poorest socioeconomic class, tend to live in the more rural (read: impoverished) areas, and face a lot of racial discrimination. Their recent (past 500 years) history is not unlike that of Native Americans in the US. During the 36-year armed conflict/civil war, in the 1980's, nearly 200,000 Guatemalans, 80% of whom were Mayan, were killed in one of the worst government-led genocides seen in the northern hemisphere during that time period.
This background helps explain why, today, it is only very well-off families who can afford to send their children to University, have them live in a boarding house, and not have to work while in school. In that sense, the students here are very much like young 20-something students back in the states. They all have cell phones, listen to popular music from the US, dress in very similar fashions, and like to party and go out with friends. Cesia and Jullian present the other side of the story, having started labor-based work at a young age out of necessity, and don't have the same opportunities for education.
In the setting of this class system, what is very interesting about this living situation is that my host mom, Sandra, appears to be of indigenous Mayan background - she and Margarita could pass for mother and daughter. However she has clearly had more socioeconomic opportunities than the average Guatemalan and is very well-educated and very well-off financially. Sandra is a biochemist and works in a local lab along with her husband, Jorge. They may actually own the lab, I'm not entirely sure. Jorge keeps track of data and back-office documentation, Sandra "is the one that draws the blood samples and looks through the microscope" as Jorge tells me. Jorge is retired, he had another profession in the past but I'm not sure what it was. He's an interesting character as well, very outgoing, talkative, and tall, which is unusual around here. Sandra is clearly the head of the household, which is another rather interesting dynamic here because the culture is so masculine-dominant. I actually didn't get to meet her until lunch yesterday because she works long hours and generally doesn't come home for lunch like Jorge, and I kept having evening events and not being home for dinner. When she's in the house, the feeling is almost like you're in the presence of the ruling monarch, and she's holding court. Everyone just gets a tad more formal and straightens up.
Everyone in the house gets very excited whenever I mention that I live in Boston (and that's all the time because it's the 2nd or 3rd question when folks first meet me). Apparently Sandra has spent time in Boston, and has a second house in Roslindale, MA, although I'm very fuzzy on the details.
Mady has been really quite awesome, she and I clicked right away and our meal times match up pretty well so we chat over breakfast and lunch. She's patient with me when I take a while to get my words and thoughts out, and doesn't mind speaking slow or repeating something. She helped me get the password for the internet and as soon as I brought out my computer, she hopped online and added me as a facebook friend. We were going to try and go to El Cuartito today because she's never been, but our schedules didn't seem to connect. Although I requested at school to be placed with a new family when I return from the Mountain School after next week, I hope Mady and I can stay in touch and hang out some more at some point.
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