Sunglasses Always Fit

It’s cold here in the high mountains of Guatemala. Cold in a wet, everyone around you has a hacking cough kind of way. There are no heaters, so the smell of wood burning is ever-present either for heat or trash disposal. Children keep wet-sneezing and coughing into the very closed and unventilated spaces that are our classrooms, mine in particular, so I have been pretty ill for about two weeks now.

Our school is a renovated hotel – my classroom was literally a hotel room, complete with an non-working brick fireplace which seemed redundant when I brought my boxes in August, but now would be great. Oh, and also a tiled bathtub in the back. The toilet was removed at some point in the last few years, but the exposed wiring and thinnest of windowpanes were not. 

It reminds me of when I first came to Central America in 2008, when the States was recession-ing and un-livable for a recent graduate, and I sold everything I had to buy a backpack and walk around a continent I had studied eating street food and drinking cheap beer for a few months.

In the middle of those chaotic six months, I took a volunteer opportunity in the highlands of La Esperanza, Honduras, as a medical translator for a group of doctors come down from Minnesota. Every morning for a week we’d climb into the back of a pick-up truck and drive up mud roads to aldeas where people had walked since 4am to see someone. The children had never seen white people before and cursed us for the devil, fighting us off with the force of ten men when we tried to administer deworming medicine.

I saw tuberculosis for the first time in my life and so many asthma cases and hacking coughs and we were trying to recommend ventilation not realizing they were so poor that they burned wood fires in their one-room homes to keep warm on their dirt floors and couldn’t afford to accurately cut holes for the smoke to exit. Oftentimes we handed out bags of Advil in ziplocs and my biggest job was explaining to the children that it wasn’t candy, constantly worried one would just eat a handful for fun.

This marks the second weekend this year that all my friends (I have three) have gone to the city for revelry and I am bedbound back in Panajachel, population 13,000 and three stoplights, give or take. It’s just me and my crazy landlady and her Vietnam Vet husband in the building. They’re greaaat. They just say unhinged things like “you can’t tell women folk to smile anymore” and  “you have to watch this documentary Mel Gibson made about how Joe Biden is a pedophile” and “they’re closing America starting November 1st, so you can’t go home again, I’m sorry,” every time I run into them. And I respond “Here’s my rent, please turn off Fox Fake News.” 

I’m too sick to be polite to her conspiracies these days. My nostrils have only worked 5% of the time the last few weeks, and I’m coughing and sleepy and achy and 

My mom reminded me about Covid and so yesterday I bought a test to take and rule it out. Just setting up the equipment gave me the chills . . . it wasn’t nothing to live through that, let alone in a super strict country like Hong Kong. Did you know that 2020 was the year I’d planned on leaving? I applied to a million jobs, but the international teaching economy shut down that year. Certainly no school wanted to entertain the idea of hiring someone who lived hours away from the epicenter of Covid. I stayed another four years in Hong Kong, made the best of friends, trauma-bonded beyond belief. And that’s the hindsight blessing I get out of it. 

It is really quite strange to think “there are exactly four people in this entire country I would hang out with, and all of them are gone.” Even Krystal, one of my Santa Barbara college besties who is also an international teacher and just moved to Guatemala this year is in Uruguay this weekend! What would happen if I fell ill? If I was hit by a firework (a real possibility in this crazy town) and hospitalized? What if I got bored? Who would I call, what would I do? Would I just type random words onto an internet blog? Likely.

I will say that this experiment in very small town living has taught me some valuable lessons . . . like, I can never again be so far from an airport, for starters. It takes three plus hours on windy (both ways you pronounce that word), treacherous roads on a good day to get there. That stresses me out.

I’ve learned I need more things to do. More options, more social circles. Importantly – a gym, trails to hike, walks to walk. Single men in my age bracket.

It has taught me that there are so many beautiful, proud, fighting indigenous communities out there in the world taking a stand against the capitalist rat race nonsense I think most of us hate. I feel so lucky to get to see many people in their traditional clothes every day, laying their lives on the line against state police in our tiny lake communities to fight against injustice. 

I’ve learned I just don’t like TV. I can watch about an hour and then I’m bored. I’ve learned I need to see the sunset to feel grounded. Learned you can always find your people with the right attitude. And good snacks.

Learned how blessed many of us are to have hot water in our sinks or showers, drink water from a tap, flush toilet paper, (generally) trustworthy government and police, a working postal system, sidewalks, public bathrooms, etc. 

All those lessons now well absorbed. And I am looking at where to go next . . . and very open to suggestions. Hit me with your best shot!