Beautiful busy day

This was quite a day of transition. I woke up at 5 am in a hotel in Guatemala City, was picked up by my Uber driver, a friend of a Guatemalan friend, who took me to a mural where pictures of the disappeared had been pasted (by my friend) as an action of resistance and memory. Then he took me to a scruffy bus station and hung out with me a little while I waited for the bus to leave. He was a sweet young man who accompanied me like family in a fairly dangerous city.

Then a 4 hour bus ride to Xela. Guatemala is beautiful and has volcanos, 36 of them, 3 of them active! We drove by one that had clouds of smoke coming out the top. I’d never seen such a thing. They have earthquakes here too. This earth is truly a living being, and it’s a little spooky.

Got to Xela at 10:30 am or so and had to find something to do until 2:00 pm when the school opened. Another friend of my Guatemalan friend suggested I go hang out at the Central Park. So I called an Uber from the bus station who drove me down to the park. I asked him to take me to a café and he dropped me off at a great little place where I had breakfast. Then I hung out at the park for about 3 hours. Here’s a little note that I wrote to myself while sitting there:

It’s Sunday and there are a lot of dressed up people strolling around – families with little kids running and pulling them along, young sweethearts arm-in-arm sometimes smooching, teens being boisterous, the works. Many just came from mass at the huge and gorgeous cathedral here on the plaza. There are all kinds of booths set up in the plaza and along the streets selling arts & crafts, clothes, food, and more. There is a cool “train” on wheels circling the plaza and city clanging its bell and giving rides. It’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining, it’s warm, and a breeze is blowing.

I walk around a little and sit in the shade a lot, taking it all in – the people, the colors, the balmy day. Doing nothing, really. Just letting the time pass. This is pretty unusual for me, just sitting like this. I am conscious of relaxing into this moment of non-doing. I’m being patient as I wait for my appointed time to go to the school.

It comes to me that this patience might be part of what I am here to do. Not just to learn Spanish, but to get in touch with the disposition to accept my situation as it is. In terms of learning the Spanish, my situation is that I can’t really understand what people around me are saying and I struggle to say even the simplest of things. And trying to learn Spanish tires me out. I have my doubts about how much I can improve that during my month here. And I harbor this feeling of inadequacy. I am inclined to blame it on my age, but that shouldn’t matter, I tell myself.

So maybe this is a lesson I’m here to learn. I should allow myself to be patient with whatever I can do with my Spanish learning and just accept that it’s well and good and so am I. Let it be and wait for the process to unfold. It’s a beautiful day inside of me.

When I got to the school, I met some of the other students who were also arriving. We are a mix of young and old, male and female. Most from the U.S., but not all. And the most amazing coincidence happened. A couple of months ago, I visited a friend who was recovering in a rehab center from a kind of stroke and in the room with him was a nurse intern whom I chatted up for about a half hour. At that time, I was struck by the coincidence that she lived in Swannanoa, the little area outlying Asheville where we live. And that her husband was the farm coordinator at Warren Wilson College, right near our home, where my daughter and son-in-law went to school. Well, imagine our mutual astonishment when we saw each other here at the school thia afternoon! We hugged each other like we were old friends. Which we might just be.

Then I was assigned to a family for my home stay. The mom and her teen son came and got me and walked me back to her house, giving me a kind of running talk along the way about where we were. She was very conscious of speaking simply and slowly, hallelujah! When we got to her home, she showed me around, naming things for me – the stone kitchen sink is la llavanderia, the clothes line where they hang their laundry in the hallway is el lazo, and so on. I listened to her various instructions, repeated words after her, and followed her around. Then I retreated to my room to unpack and be alone for a bit.

I emerged after an hour or so to hang out in the kitchen with the family and to have dinner. And for three hours, I proceeded to have converations with the mom, one of her daughters, and one of her grandsons. It was exhausting, but – with their help – I was able to share a lot about myself and to find out a lot about them. The kid wanted to tell me jokes (which I needed explained, of course), the daughter wanted to know about my life back home and my family, and the mom just opened her heart about the difficulties she her family have been going through. It was so heartfelt to be with them. Mom said I’m one of the family now. How quickly we can get close to each other sometimes, even when crossing cultural and language differences.

Whew, what a day.