The Hairy Elite

Today I had my final dentist appointment in Guatemala, in which Mr. Ex-Vice President Luis Flores Asturias did the “build up” for the crown I’ll have done when I’m back in the U.S. I’d actually like to have it done here because it’d be cheaper, but because there is a lab procedure, the amount of time I plan to be in GC again is insufficient. Francisco, the root-canal specialist (endodontista), who did my root canal almost two weeks ago and then did the permanent filling yesterday, became a friend of mine and told me all about how the Flores Asturiases, as one of the elite families of Guatemala, can trace their roots back to the original Spaniards. And as Dr. Flores Asturias had his hands in my mouth, I recalled a conversation I’d had with my teacher and friend Lucky months ago. Her parents were both born in Guatemala, she considers herself 100% guatemalteca, but three out of four of her grandparents are from Italy. It pains her that her sole ancestor from Latin America, one of her grandmothers, is from Mexico. And Lucky told me that when a child is born in her family, the other grandmother would come to look at the baby and be satisfied if she could tell that the baby would be hairy. I don’t know how you can tell this about a baby, but this is what she wanted to see, because hairiness is an attribute of European ancestry while a lack of body hair is an attribute of the indigenous. So while Flores Asturias had his hands in my mouth, and I was looking at his arms, I knew that if Enki were there she would make her usual pronouncement for men like him, that he is “like a monkey.” His arms and his chest are extremely hairy, the only place there is a marked lack of hair is on top of his head, thus giving him the look of the ruling class.

Personal Security

Back around the time of my original visits to the dental office, I became aware of the ubiquitous presence of bodyguards in this town. As I was sitting outside a café in a swanky area of GC with Francisco the endodontista, he clued me into the fact that the woman walking down the street, being trailed at 15 feet by two men in suits, was a well-to-do woman and her two bodyguards, and that the 4 or 5 men always lingering in the parking lot of the dental office are Flores Asturias’ bodyguards. I had greeted those men in my comings and goings from the office, but never really questioned their purpose. Apparently there is something like three kidnappings per day in GC for ransom money, so the rich, whether they are important politically or not, are always accompanied by guards. The man outside the house across the street from the dental office is the guard left to watch the house of the disgraced CEO of one of the recently folded banks, Banco de Café, now living in Australia to avoid prosecution for his role in the shady dealings leading to the collapse. Because so many people in GC are gun-toting, some years back Francisco bought himself a gun for protection, and would go to the shooting range with Flores Asturias’ bodyguards to practice. He fancied himself a good shot until the went to the shooting range one day and saw dozens of bodyguards practicing, all much much better shots than him. At that point he knew it was useless to try to protect himself with a gun, since bodyguards are actually the perpetrators of many of the organized bank robberies and kidnappings in the city. When those bodyguards aren’t protecting that woman from abduction, they’re kidnapping other people for ransom or probably one day will participate in the abduction of their own client. I’m leaving tomorrow to go to Petén, an area with an even higher prevalence of people just moseying around with guns stuck out of their belts, and according to Francisco the first way men up there will try to impress me will be with their guns. As such, he thought he should take me to a shooting range and teach me how to load and shoot a gun, to demystify the process so I wouldn’t be so easily impressed when I was in the Petén. Well, there wasn’t much risk of that anyway, but I went along with the plan and yesterday afternoon we drove out of GC and went to the shooting range. He was asking me, wasn’t I scared to learn how to shoot a gun? And I was like, uh, well I’m not going to have to shoot at someone, will I? Of course not, but then I told him about an article I’d read in a magazine a while ago, about how in Cambodia you can go to a shooting range and they’ll let anyone with money shoot machine guns, throw hand grenades, and if you pay enough you can use those things on living targets like goats. I think the most expensive option is to use a rocket launcher on a cow. In the end, this shooting range we went to was in such an isolated place near a sand quarry, I think we could have used a goat as a target if it’d just happened to walk across the range. I don’t know what kind of gun it was, but the bullets were 9mm and they loaded into a cartridge that was shoved in the butt of the gun, like in Magnum P.I. So now I have loaded and shot a gun, not well, but I know a little bit about basic gunmanship. And today Francisco is selling his gun, since he realizes that with pros like the bodyguards he has no chance of protecting himself with the gun, and with other regular gun owners like himself a gun is more likely to escalate the regular road rage confrontations into something that gets out of hand. And thus concludes my dental adventures in Guatemala, which in addition to providing much needed relief from pain, has been overall a pretty incredible glimpse into this place.

Partying with mis padres

For the past week I was tooling around Guatemala with my parents, so no time for extensive internet use. We had a great time, and I´m not just saying that because my mother is the most dedicated reader of my blog. I've included some of the photos my dad took here, but you can see all of them posted at
http://picasaweb.google.com/ljsuter/Gautelama?authkey=2Z9Rah3dQZY . I met them at the airport last Saturday in the wee hours of the morning, and from there we spent 3 nights at a beautiful hotel in Antigua, a former monastery called Casa Santo Domingo. Their first full day in Guatemala, we took a day trip to Tikal, the ruins of the Mayan city in the Petén. A shuttle picked us up at 4am and took us to the Guatemala City airport, then a few hours later we were walking amongst the ruins in various stages of repair with our tour guide Antonio. Not missing a chance to make a dig at the Mexicans, according to Antonio the Mayan ruins in Mexico that look so impressive like Chichen Itza or Palenque look that good because the Mexicans will use all new stone blocks and just rebuild the whole dang thing, while the Guatemalans use the original stones when available and fill in the rest with smaller stones, so it's obvious what is original and what's not. Tikal definitely seemed less reconstructed than Palenque did when I went there with Marion in 2001, but that could be in part because Tikal is so huge. I'd say it's at least as big as the Aztec city Teotihuacan near Mexico City (el D.F., yo), if that gives you an idea. After that blow-out day trip, we spent the next day chillin' in Antigua, then went to lake Atitlan for 3 nights. We stayed at the lauded Casa del Mundo, which all my peeps with experience in Guatemala said should not be missed. And they're right, it is a really special place, off by itself on the lake edge, with its own private dock, then the rooms are in various different small buildings built along a steep hill and connected with stone steps. At night, a delicious 3 course dinner is served family style, where we chatted with fellow guests. During the days we hung out in some of the other lakeside towns, San Pedro, San Marcos, and Panajachal. The area is reputed to have some serious cosmic energy radiating from it, so the towns are a mix of indigenous Maya communities and different varieties of hippies, from party-harty youngersters to mellow meditators. In San Marcos we saw a gringo hotfooting it up one of the paths with a big bowl of recently sprouted wheat berries, to give you an idea. I think banana bread in Guatemala is the equivalent of banana pancakes in Vietnam: it makes an appearance in the areas extensively catering to their foreign guests. And the towns of Atitlan are a banana bread bonanza. Friday night, the night before my parents left for home again, we met my friend Hannah's sister Janet Volkman in Guatemala City. She's been living in Guatemala since 1985 running missionary projects, which for the past several years has been a soup kitchen, providing 500 meals/night Monday-Friday. We did a shift there, helping to serve a very typical Guatemalan supper (or breakfast, for that matter...) of scrambled eggs, black beans, bread, and coffee. We didn't eat there, but I finally satisfied my resultant craving for those things this morning, when I had breakfast in Antigua. Anyway, bright and early on Saturday morning, my parents took off for the airport, leaving me solita, a little lonely gal. A quick trip, but we all really enjoyed it. I have to hang around the area for the next couple of days to have a meeting and finish up my tooth, so I decided to come to Antigua, which is safe like the upscale zonas of GC but you can find much cheaper accomodation than is available in the swanky zonas. I'm here till Wednesday, when I'll take a marathon bus ride up to Petén. What adventures await?

Hail to the Teeth!

Because of my non-stop pain since my temporary filling last week, I was having second thoughts about seeing the GC colleague of my Xela dentist, and consulted Kathryn Grace's doctor friend Oscar in Antigua for a recommendation. Happily, his recommendation, Dr. Luis Alberto Flores Asturias, also happened to be on the recommended list of dentists put out by the US Embassy in Guatemala. However, neither of these sources mentioned that he is the ex-Vice President of Guatemala. He told me that himself when he stopped by my chair to tell me why my dentist was late. He didn't actually do my root canal, his on-call specialist did it, but he will be doing the "build up" for my crown in a few weeks. Anyway, after retiring from politics, he did a stint as a guest professor on dental implants in Loma Linda, California to get back into the world of dentistry, which is his passion, like painting is a passion for some, and he gestured at some art prints on the wall. I feel I am in good hands now. Apparently the Xela dentist #2 reamed through too far with his pointy scrapy thing, and then didn't identify that I had another infection, and that was why I was in a world of hurt. So the pain is practically all gone now and it's quite a relief.

Esteemed delegates, we must address the global menace of not flossing daily!

Adiós, Xela!

After a little over a month in Xela, it was time to move on, go to the big city and meet with some academics and agencies about my research plans, as well as get my tooth fixed up, all before my parents arrive next Saturday. Unfortunately not all my last experiences in Xela were good, as on my way to the dentist for a check of my temporary filling on Saturday morning, as I walked along a momentarily secluded street at 8:20am, I was the victim of a bike-by boob grab. He was biking in the same direction I was walking, but I guess he saw his opportunity and pulled a u-turn, then whacked me in the chest as he biked by in the opposite direction. I turned and yelled after him, "You jerk!" No big deal, but in combination with the non-stop ache I've had in my cheekbone since my temporary filling on Wednesday, and then the dentist was over a half hour late to our 8:30am Saturday appointment (because of that cursed 'history of the marimba' spectacle going on next week), I was very temporarily out of sorts.

At any rate, I bid my adieus over a few days, including returning Rodolfo's 8th Habit book to him, unread. Maybe because of his definitive split with Martita, maybe because I obviously was foolish enough to have the tools within my grasp but not make use of them, maybe because he read my blog, but when we met he just took the book, gave me a sad look, and bid me pleasant journeys.

One of my final activities in Xela was going to a soccer/football game between the local team, the Xelajú Super Chivos, and a team from the south-east, Jalapa. We ended up looking like extreme sports fans because it started to rain (the first time since I've been here), and we bought plastic sheets to drap over ourselves as ponchos. But then at half-time it was raining buckets and Xela was leading 1-0, so we split. This morning I took the 8am bus from Xela to Guatemala City. Since it is reputed to be an extremely dangerous city and I have a fellowship application due soon, I am living large at the Howard Johnson's in the mellow Zona 9, where I have internet in my room and where I am overmedicating on non-narcotic pain killers. Owie.

Lucky Mama

Lucky's adopted daughter Moncie ended up ready to come home a few days in advance of Friday, leaving Lucky scrambling to find caretakers while she finished out her week teaching Wednesday and Thursday afternoons at Celas Maya. Her cousin had already taken off Friday for the big day. I volunteered for Thursday so Lucky picked me up after the morning classes ended at 1pm, then took me to her house and I have to say that taking care of newborns is a snap because during the 6 hours I was with her she just slept the whole time and I fed her 3 times and changed her diaper once. Piece of cake! Now that the work week is over, Lucky's going full-time mom and not working again for a while.

Barrio

Since I am springing for the spendy dentist, I figured I'd better get some cash, in which case I'd better start the search good and early to make sure I found it before my 5pm appointment. And since I am leaving soon, here is a photo-journal of the search to show a bit of daily life in Xela.


This is where I've been living for the past 4 weeks, in an apartment on the 2nd floor of this building. Martita, mi señora, is hamming it up in front. She is from Nicaragua but moved here 18 years ago. Below her place there is a restaurant that blasts music from about 11am till 10pm, pretty much the same 10 songs over and over.








Walking towards the town center...














Funerales Quetzaltenango, near the pink tower, below. Urban legend has it that when the buckets of water they sluice over the floor to clean it come flooding out the front door, it is tinged with blood.





The faro (lighthouse). The low orange building towards the back is Martita's other house. She is making it into quite an enterprise with Rodolfo, or at least they were before his latest storming off. There are rooms for rent, then coming in the future there will be a café, an internet café, a latin american cinema, and a botanical garden. She and Rodolfo have a whole concept attached to the place, where it's going to be a space to showcase local artists and film and show a Guatemala that is not hopeless poverty and violence. Rodolfo wanted to call it "pinktowerhouse" because of the nearby Faro, but then he subsequently rejected that as "too gay".

My language school, Celas Maya. The two gals out front are nursing students in Sweden, though the one on the left, Kristen, is Norweigian. Signe is on the right. Look at Kristen and tell me if she reminds you of Julie Karpenko. They decided to accompany me on the money search. When we got to the central park, the first thing we were struck by was the flood of people, mostly men in cowboy hats, waiting outside BancoRed. A crowd of this size in front of a bank is noteworthy, even in these times, especially when they have a common feature such as cowboy hats. I asked a spectator what everyone was waiting for, and he said that they were there to cash there checks paying them for their service as community patrollers during the armed conflict here, which ended about 10 years ago. According to this fellow, most of them are now finally being payed for their work 10 to 35 years ago.

At the central park, site of many banks, but the only semi-dependable ATM on the central square, Banco Industrial, was out of service. I ended up returning to the school to get my passport, then got cash inside of the Banco AgroMercantile. And thus I was flush with cash for my dentist visit. But I still had some time to kill, so while walking home with my laundry I noticed a classmate from the school drinking in a little hole in the wall near the pink tower. Sierran was leaving the next day, and his host dad and he and another friend were having some beers to bid him adieu. This guy recently finished his undergrad in geography at U. of Oregon, then did an internship at National Geographics in D.C., where he worked with UCSB's star geography undergrad Maral Tashjian.

Last stop before going to the dentist, the internet café near the school and my house, El Infinito. This is one of the two places in town you can purchase fresh tofu, which is made at a women's cooperative in Sololá. Pedro on the left is the owner and is friends with my friend Dayna from when she lived here some years back, and Bonifaz on the right is Pedro's roommate and employee. There is a table behind a partition with an internet connection where I come and hook up my laptop, and since I started to refer to it as mi oficina Bonifaz now refers to himself and Pedro as my coworkers.