Old Year, New Year

January 1, 2012

Dear Friends,

Sorry for not writing. Most of you have probably given up on me anyway! I feel like a bad daughter who has run away from home, and then ignores all pleas for communication. Thing is, I just haven’t been able to write. Not that there’s nothing to say. Rather the opposite. . . so much is churning through my life, through the House, through the country, that I don’t know how to write about it, without sounding cheap and artificial. There’s too much to say. I am soaking, but eventually I will write, that just happens. The only way I know to survive, is by writing, just not now.

This has been quite a year, accompanying many, in loss, death, and a marriage, and a few glorious baptisms. Then on viernes de dolores, on the 15th of April, my own beloved Mother died. I smile when I bring her to mind, and feel her love, wrapping and re-wrapping my heart, and I am at peace. Lucho, the cat, ran and came back to the House numerous times, and disappeared, finally in October. Chester, the miniature schnauzer that Maco gave me, has become the love of my life, and doses at my feet this very minute.

All of my beloveds: Maco, and children, Margarita and family, Isabel, Irma, Mario, Pascuala, Lesbia, Leocadio and family, don Lorenzo and family, don Juan and family, and countless others, have been through the many struggles, sufferings, and joys, of living in this shattered, fragile country. They are all treasured in my heart and constantly in my prayers.

So, the news . . . as many of you know, the Anglican Church of Canada has closed its overseas ‘mission’ department. As well, the Bishops of the Episcopal Church in Guatemala have chosen to work differently with their partners. All of this meant that I was floating for a bit, wondering who I was. That is actually a healthy thing to do, once in a while, as long as you have the support wires attached, and I did, and those were many of you, with your love, prayers, financial support, and presence on the other end of these wires.

So the renewed status of my presence in Quiche? With the ongoing commitment of my support group, I have continued to offer a ministry of presence. Very low-key, but thriving. Peace House is sinking into the community, a place of rest and healing, of encounter, and prayer. We have offered space to many a wandering pilgrim, from the north, Canada, USA, from Europe, and from all over the highlands of Guatemala, people have come, for the night, a few days, a rest, a meeting space, a quiet time, a party.

The Mural Project was a highlight, and the youth who participated came away changed, and the outside corridor walls ever more beautiful. We have had occasional workshops, on a variety of topics, from roof-top gardening, and worm-composting, to learning to operate the legal system, for campesino and indigenous activists. We have offered space to one of the Pentecostal youth groups, to host a fund-raising dinner (cooked by yours truly with the sou chef support of a vegan human rights activist from Italy!) and to the Episcopal youth for a weekend retreat, and to others for meetings, celebrations and seminars.

I have carried on my pastoral work, with many, many of my beloveds, and continue to offer prayer in our Chapel of the Holy Innocents, and indeed, to work with a number of highland Episcopal priests, especially in Chichicastenango, and Quetzaltenango.

Two partnerships have been critical, and have allowed Peace House to grow and thrive. First, with our neighbours, the Chilam Balam Council of the K’iche’ Peoples, an organization focused on the recovery and preservation of Maya spirituality. We share the House and courtyard (and dog) with them, and over the year, many activities have unfolded, large and small. The ecumenical possibilities with Chilam Balam are spaces for real encounter, challenge and peace building, as we operate together, within our shared space, and out in the community. Don Juan, one of Chilam Balam’s principal spiritual leaders, always introduces me as an Evangelical pastor, one who doesn’t hate and fear Maya traditional religious practices (no matter what I tell him, he always says I’m a Lutheran, not sure why).

The second relationship is one that goes back 25 years for me, with the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA). One of the longest-operating campesino and indigenous rights organization (and the creators of the wonderful Cafe Justicia) the CCDA is in the process of strengthening its network in the Quiche. Peace House, and its members, have been central to this, and it has been thrilling to witness, and to support the rebuilding of this transformational work. Because, of course, Guatemala is still a terrible place . . . after the war, through the cataclysmic ‘natural’ disasters, and the ever-grinding poverty.

I wrote about the horrendous elections, and I’d rather not say any more. It’s too heart-breaking. The General takes office in less than two weeks. Other statistics deepen the story of suffering:
murder rates off the map, child, and general, malnutrition rates, highest in the Americas, third highest in the world, and this just in, coming from the climate change conference in South Africa, Guatemala, after Bangladesh, is the country at highest risk in the world for disasters sparked by climate change . . .

Of course, one might feel overwhelmed, and hopeless. Sometimes I do. But mostly I’m too busy. Working in relationship with the above mentioned organizations, has allowed me to channel that love, and frustration, into cosmological and practical ministries.

Last year we were blessed at the House with many visits, including two church groups: All Saints Anglican, from Mission, BC, and their priest, Sharon Salomons, and a mixed group from the United Church, led by the wonderful Doris Kisinna. These groups left their mark on the hearts of everyone who met them, especially those in the Quiche. And following the visits, we, from the House, have carried on a relationship of compassion, with a number of communities and families. We have engaged especially with the community of Pacaja, and its abandoned school, and with four children, with terrible, under-treated eye problems (including Hector, aged 11, who hasn’t been able to shut his right eye for 7 years). We are also working with community and family leaders, to re-model the Pacaja school, and in December, a Spanish architect-without-borders dropped from the sky and has put his oar in, for free.

So this year, I will focus on erasing myself from this picture, and leaving Peace House in the capable hands of neighbours and friends. I will continue, of course, to visit and support from farther away in the years to come. During my epic battle with God in October, and the questioning, Dear Lord, now what? I also became clear about another huge project, which I am grateful beyond measure, to be allowed to carry-out. When the pot boils dry, and everything else is gone, I am a writer, burned to the bottom. Not a great thinker, and pretty lousy teacher, and no kind of academic. But, humbly, I put forth, that I kinda have a way with words.

So, this year, marking my 28th in walking with the people of Guatemala, since I was baby-young, and after all of the years of trials, witnessing to death, survival, recovery, loss again . . .studying — of all things — to be a priest, then donning, cautiously, the title of theologian, I realize that I am called to write: A Theology of Life, from Guatemala. I have asked for blessing, and partnership, and have now identified 18 Guatemalan dialogue companions, and two North American thinkers, to help me. I have been on the mission and vocation sacred hill, for a permission and pardon burning ceremony, with Don Juan, and I have broken bread at Holy Eucharist, with the esteemed Christian poet and theologian, Julia Esquivel, at her kitchen table. So that is why I probably won’t write much publicly this year to come. Please hold me in your prayers, and write to me once in a while, so that I won’t get too lonely.

xo,
em

Night Fall

In one more hour, it will be election day, again, and I don’t want to know,
in the living room, the red lamp, with a broken shade, the light is on,
because on the other side of the door, in the chapel
the boys are sleeping,
little, little boys, whom I love,
Juan Carlos, also known as Juan Jose, because he was born on the night before christmas,
and his little, little brothe, Juan, too, Juan Casimiro.

They are sleeping on beds, with blankets, and sheets, and pillows, and their faces were dirty, even after I washed them.
They missed the last bus back to Primavera,
and now their showshine boxes sit in the empty courtyard, flooded with strange shadow making moonlight.
Attilio fixed Jose’s box, yesterday, with a couple of screws, and the tin lid from a black bean can, and my knife, because I don’t own a screwdriver.

Attilio, from Italy, who boiled more pasta tonight than he has ever seen in his 27 years, on the woodstove,
with the wood that Mario brought me, and Jose moved from the front of the house, to the back kitchen, then he helped me mop,
and then made four puzzles in a row, while I peeled roasted red peppers in the other kitchen,
the ones that Attilio and I had roasted last night, on a fogata,
not a ceremonial, but damn well sacred anyway, in the courtyard, that is now, at last, empty.

My feet ache. I haven’t sat down in three days . . . lay down, to sleep, yes, and stand up to stir, and to chop.

Maco, whom I love most dearly, is sad.
They are all sad, all 35 cousins and tias, because Abuela Andrea died this week, on the day before All Saint’s Day, and they all went up north again,
and there was nowhere to sleep, and everything was so odd,
. . . and that day, I missed my mother so much I thought I was going to die,
and the cemetary, where she is not buried, was a like a moon scape to me,
and I looked for Maco’s father, but no luck, and later,
Maco told me, we never had money to put up a marker,
but he’s there, we’ll go later and clean his grave.

Dona Aurita comes and helps me buy 20 pounds of tomatoes, and 30 carrots and 5 cabbages, and 5 pounds of onions, and garlic, and other things, and we carry them back to the house,
but she’s too sad to stay for tea, and tonight she didn’t come at all, with her sisters, the tias, to help me chop, because her heart is breaking, and I know, it comes and goes.

But these days have been like that,
lining up to tell me about love, and drowning,
Herlinda and her children, Isabel and her sister, don Lupe, and Dolores, Lencho, and always, o
the boys from Primavera, and their boxes, and their hunger, and their, black, forever hands . . .
Choche, and Vale, whom I love,
and then Betzy, whom I love, and the whole gang, the kids from the peach church down the way,
and we cook, for three days, for them.

And even the doctors come across the street to the party, to eat, and to share, with us, in their matching pantsuits, they work so hard.
But now I can’t find my glasses, so I write with my eyes closed, my head aches, and tomorrow, the elections, and tonight, the orphan boys sleep
in the chapel, and their boxes shine in the courtyard, where Attilio fixed on the little moon.

THE LOUD PARADE TO ELECTED VIOLENCE

 

THE LOUD PARADE TO ELECTED VIOLENCE:

Guatemala, and the Voting-in of a Strong Man General

 

 

I put the Tallis Scholars on full volume, and it half-blanks out the delirious, happy march of death, that’s going on non-stop just two blocks away, in the Parque Central of Santa Cruz del Quiché. My colleague, don Juan, an esteemed aj’ki’j, or Maya priest, celebrates his burning ceremony in our courtyard, seemingly oblivious to both my music, and the counter pounding bass, the drums, the patriotic shouts and the firecrackers coming from the rally. We are two days away from the end of the world as we knew it, here in Guatemala, and as we’ve known it, its always been really bad. Now things are about to get worse. Elections on Sunday, the disaster day of September 11^th, promise to bring into office a General, one of the old boys, from the horror days of the war and genocide.

 

General Otto Perez Molina – Comandante Tito, as he was known in the early eighties, directing operations in the butchering fields of the Ixil communities 3 hours north of here – stands at about 42 per cent in the latest polls to win the presidency. Perez Molina is the founder of the Patriotic Party, and his sneering face on billboards, huge and small, the PP symbol of the fighting Iron Fist, their pumpkin-orange flags and banners, and frenetic pounding music are ubiquitous throughout the country, and especially here where I live, in the Maya highlands, the very land where the genocide occurred. (It was determined by the UN truth commission’s report, Memory of Silence, 1999 that 250,000 people died during the 36-year war and genocide, and that fully 93 per cent of these deaths were perpetrated by state security forces, principally the army.)

 

Perez Molina has a both a shady past, linking him to some of these atrocities, and questionable associations with the obscure powers that operate throughout Central America and Mexico. The Washington Office on Latin America, names him as a founder of El Sindicato (the Union), an association of Military Academy graduates from the same year (1973) who at one time made up one of five “hidden power”groups controlling organized crime in the country. According to declassified U.S. National Security Archive documents, many Sindicato associates have been directly linked to the drug trade.

 

Perez Molina himself states on the PP website that he graduated as a top student from the military school. His career was just beginning. His resume includes: commander of the Gumarkaj Task Force in the genocide zone of the Ixil triangle, during the time when more than 20 massacres occurred; one of the founders of the elite Guatemalan kaibil fighting force, directly linked to the worst violence during the war, and now filling the ranks of the drug cartel, Los Zetas, responsible for much of the extreme violence along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. On May 15 of this year, 27 farm workers, including two women and two youth, were murdered and decapitated in Peten, Guatemala. It was part of the drug war. The only ones capable of such extreme acts of violence are the kaibil-trained Zetas.

 

Between 1991 – 1994 Perez Molina was the head of the G-2, the Military Intelligence Unit of the Guatemalan army, and from 1993 – 1996, he was the director of the Presidential General Staff, the EMP, which operates similar to the US Secret Service, offering security to the President, and also engaging in military intelligence, and clandestine operations. These two institutions were the principle organizers and architects of a vast apparatus of torture, disappearance and political assassination. The EMP was directly tied in the death of crusading human rights bishop, Juan Jose Gerardi, murdered in 1998, three days after handing in the church’s investigation into the war and genocide.

 

Also, during these years Perez Molina, and Sindicato associates, were implicated in various embezzlement and money laundering schemes, including a high scandal case related to the capture of Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joachin “El Chapo” Guzman. (Guzman later made a spectacular escape, from prison in Mexico, and is still at large. Forbes names him as the Number One on its Most Wanted list, now that Bin Laden is dead.) After the June 1993 arrest of Guzman in Guatemala, Q23 million quetzals (approximately $3 million, Canadian) and a fleet of luxury vehicles mysteriously went missing. Perez Molina was at the time the head of the EMP. It also became known some time later, during the presidency of Oscar Berger, that Perez Molina attempted – unsuccessfully – to have his friend, Giovanni Mendoza, drug cartel leader in eastern Guatemala, appointed as a government official.

 

This adds up to a very ugly picture. But Sunday’s elections will be fair and open; the military aren’t storming into power, guns a-blazing as they did in this country, right from the CIA-sponsored coup in 1954, and for more than thirty years thereafter. Perez Molina will drag into his office, his checkered baggage from the past, not hiding it, but in fact celebrating it – at least selected parts of the story. He will be claiming that what Guatemala needs, during these days of continued great violence, is an even stronger arm, and an Iron Fist, a bigger gun that will crush all lesser violence. Many, many agree.

 

From what I can tell, all around me here in the Quiché, the Patriotic Party is wildly popular. I have a pal, Juan Carlos, a shoeshine boy who comes into the city from a nearby village. “Who are you going for,” he asked me. “No one,” I said. “They’re all skunks.” “I’m pure Patriotic,” he said smiling widely, and showing me the tell-tale orange sticker on the side of his shoeshine box. Orange is everywhere, coming out of people’s mouths, and in places I wouldn’t expect. But why on earth? It seems so counter-intuitive to elect a military man, when the country is at last, breaking free from them, or are they?

 

Mostly, people are afraid. Guatemala consistently lands in the highest hemispheric statistics for violence. Bus drivers get shot, every single day. Most businesses, large and small, are paying exorbitant protection fees to teenaged extortionists. The prosecution and conviction rate for the average 6500 murders a year, in this country of 14 million, is in the single digit porcentages. You want to murder someone and get away with it? Guatemala is the place to come. We are living in a failed state. People are looking for a strong man.

 

My friend Isabel, a community activist, says: “It’s like a woman living in an abusive relationship. We all shake our heads when she goes back to him, after a beating. But she feels safer with the horror she knows.”

 

The wild rally over in the parque shows no sign of winding down. People are excited; they want to be on the winning side, for once. Manipulative campaigns of disinformation, and deep forgetting, or confusion about the country’s past and its violent legacy, all play a roll in why Comandante Tito stands to win on Sunday. So does deep set apathy. Nothing will ever really change, for the poor, I hear over and over again.

 

Opposition is weak, and one-sided. There are 10 candidates for the presidency, all but one from the right, or the extreme right. Second in the polls, after Perez Molina, is Manuel Baldizon, whose sinister toothy grin has been haunting us all year – his party’s lead campaign promise: the implementation of the death penalty. The candidate who may have had a chance against the PP was Sandra Torres, the current president’s wife – well ex-wife actually. In a cynical move to override a constitutional rule where family members of sitting presidents may not immediately run for office, Torres divorced President Colom in March. Widely spurned by much of the public for her manipulative maneuverings, the constitutional court also rejected her application to stand as candidate, leaving a wide vacuum.

 

Progressives, after years of divisive bickering, and disappointing results at the polls, have come together, in the Broad Coalition of the Left, and have posted as presidential candidate the capable Rigoberta Menchu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 1992. The Broad Coalition is putting on a good fight, and while there is no chance what-so-ever at the national level, there is lots of hope that small battles can be won across the country, in races for the congress, and, most of all, for mayor (In Guatemala, in a special kind of madness, ALL political offices are voted on and change on the same day.)

 

In August I made visits, with various groups of Canadians, to different communities in rural Guatemala, to Cunen, and Zacualpa, in the department of El Quiché, and to Quixayá, and San Lucas Tolimán, in the department of Sololá, around the lovely blue Lake Atitlán. In Cunen, we roared around with Osmundo, waving flags with stalks of corn hand-painted on them. In Zacualpa, we met with doña Katerina, and a couple of hundred furious citizens, and we heard, over and over again, about the corruption and abuse of the current mayor. Mayabe, just maybe, these two might win the race for mayor. Down on the lake, things are stirring all around, and years of steady, honest community-building by groups like the Campesino Committee for the Highlands (CCDA) are starting to bring in a harvest. Maybe not this round . . . but people are organizing, as they haven’t since the silencing and the horror of the genocide.

 

 

Now it is evening, the rally has shut down. The rules are that 36 hours before the election begins, all campaigning has to end. It had started to pour anyway, in the afternoon, with the season’s daily deluge. I hear that Tropical Storm Nate is blowing wild up north in Mexico. Evil thoughts flood my mind, maybe the whole election could just get washed away. But no. On Monday morning, Guatemala is going to wake up orange. There are going to be four more years of lying, stealing and violence greater than violence.

 

In the courtyard don Juan attends to another family, now that the rains to have come and gone, and they have their sacred fire. Guatemala is nothing if not a land of survivors. The original Spanish invasion, the 1871 German coffee invasion and the massive theft of communal land, the gringos and their railroads, and their bananas, then the CIA invasion in 1954, leading to the war, and then the genocide. Canadian mining companies raping and pillaging across the land. But still, here they are, the Maya majority. Finding a way, in every generation for the preservation of identity. Don Juan counts, and prays in the courtyard. The flame roars – a brighter shade of orange.

 

 

 

Blue Spirit

July 30, 2011

Dear Friends,

It’s been a while since I’ve written. Haven’t felt like it . . . and then it became, where do I start? So from the front back, maybe?

Lucho came back. He’s sleeping on my lap, a little fatter than when he first returned, whining and meowing loud enough to wake the dead, or at least Maco who was having a dead-asleep nap, after a long day. Lucho wandered this time for three whole weeks, and was a furry skeleton at his return. So, as usual, who knows where cats go, when they do. Although I was thoroughly miserable, I was also kind of calm, a quiet misery, knowing that cats wander, and come home — And it is Lucho’s anniversary! He arrived exactly-ish a year ago, during the rainiest wet-season in 60 years, he was found in a sack, in the garbage at the bus station, and I was called, and went running, in my sandals and my green raincoat through the dark flooding streets. My mom was still alive then, to tell her the tale.

Chester is peludo, extra-hairy, and going to doggie-spa tomorrow, so that he’ll be in top shape when our friends from Canada arrive on Monday. He’s been a good friend, delivered the week after my Mom died, by Maco and the girls. I’ve never had a dog before, and I wasn’t sure quite what to do with him . . . he follows me around everywhere, saying, I love you, I love you, I love you. With Chester here, I’ve been forced to smile, and even laugh, and he has these deep, black eyes.

Of course my heart has been in ruins since the 15th of April, viernes de dolores, Friday of pain. Things stumble along, I forget and then I remember that my mother isn’t just 40, 000 miles away, she’s NOT HERE. Not there, not loving me from her sofa, reading Roberto Bolano, and cutting out New Yorker articles to save for me. Oh devastation, the crashing unbelievable end, the no, not me, place. The one who carried me, birthed me, on a stormy night in Cordoba, with bomb blasts going off, just finished it all, and is gone from this earth . . .

So the world exists, amazingly, without my mother, and I can’t go to Canada anyway, because descending upon the House are a pelaton of youth, gathered from the four directions, from four communities, four ways of being in the world, four practices of love, and honour, and gratitude and humility, and four teachers, and then five, to guide us all, and on the walls, newly-plastered and fixed up, goes the Mural.

Ah, in this place where so much hatred has soaked into the earth, so many fires have been lit to destroy, and not to kindle love, or feed anyone, just to hurt. Now, three decades have passed, but still, the ripple, and the ripple, and the ripple again of genocide, is not ever erased, and certainly not by forgetting, but the walls and divisions are not always clear, and how can there be forgiveness, if the truth is still not stirred into the core-story that people tell? So here in this house, where a (compassionate?) general once shot a boy’s dying dog, here where despicable things took place, or were planned, here the pila was used to wash the clothes soaked in mud and the blood of thousands, here on these walls, into that hatred, they came, that pelaton of youth, and they painted. Not painted over, but painted out loud. Here we are, five hundred years later, thirty years later, and we are good and beautiful – and damn you Canadian mines! You too, Spaniards in disguise.

So we painted and it was chaos, and holy, and now the inner-courtyard of Peace House glows, and is more beautiful than ever . . .

And then I left, and went north for a month, and loved my boys to death, the treasure and the joy that they are, from end to end, what I love best on the earth, my absolute heart’s core. And I walked out and around, and met with almost everyone I love, all these who are so treasured, and who sustain me, and all that I do, in this Web of Love. And I tell the story, about the Mural, about the shoe-shine boys who come to see me everyday, and about their wrong red hair, leached of colour, chronic protein deficiency. And about Selvin, and his brave mother and sister, and Isabel, and Lorenzo, and teaching Manuela enough English to pass her teacher’s test, and all the rest.

So then I come back, crying for those I love, and are in Vancouver, and anxious for all that happens in my absence, in this land of mine.

The political campaign is in full gear, and I hate it all, and feel like the victim of assault by political crap and lies, propaganda, manipulation, ambition, greed, horror and violence. The extreme-right wing party, the general who was up in the Ixil triangle during the genocide, then the head of the secret army intelligence division, and then head of the horrifically secretive, violent power, the Estado Mayor of the President . . . they are washing the country, and will win, and I think of those who loved peace, when Hitler was duly elected to office. I want to die. Or fight. Or something

So, our Home, a shelter, our Capilla of the Holy Innocents, a place to remember, to hold true peace, the truth, to be with God, that One, who loves all Good, my God, my ferocious and ever compassionate Father. In the chapel, I pray, we sing and we pray, and our hearts are strengthened beyond measure.

Today, Maco and I roar to Huehuetenango to see a girl, who was very sick, with a hideous tumour of some sort. I sit with her, and we pray to the Guadalupe, this girl’s beloved protector, and mine. To pull things out of this morass of suffering, her brother and her sister have been really sick too, her mother without hope, her father without hope too, and without a job. Home again, I go to visit another family, hiding from a violent father, then the shoe-shine boys come by, Meme first, and later, Jose. Juan Carlos is sick and didn’t come into town. Jose was robbed again today. He just can’t stand it anymore, and he cries at my table. For the third time today, I sit quietly with a crying man. I bunch up some tissues, and hand them over, I lay my hand on these my beloveds’ shoulder. It’s so damn hard.

Up on the roof, the chicken coop is complete, and awaiting its chickens. Rodolfo and our pals from the CCDA are up next week, and we will repair the veggie boxes. Sharon and group are coming, and I don’t know if they know how much we need them, their love, their standing with us, their sharing of our story.

Today, when we were driving back, I saw little blue flowers on a slender stalk. They looked like chicory, but they weren’t. A guardabaranco flew over our path. Every single time, without fail, when we drive some where, its blue flashes around us in a blessing. My mother loved chicory, and I remember it growing in the dusty summer streets of Nelson. I realized all of a sudden, that I’m not sad when I think about these blue flowers, and about my mother. I smile, and feel her love present, closer than ever, not gone at all, just different. quiet and mysterious. I am with my mother all the time now! I have been blessed, more than I can say, being the daughter of Cathleen Benson, and ever now in the circles of my friends.

em

Irrefutable Evidence for the Existence of God

Irrefutable Evidence for the Existence of God

March 22, 2011

Dear Friends,

Peanut butter cookies. That’s it. Theologians have struggled for centuries, but I have found the answer. We never, ever could have come up with that combination on our own. It’s true, my hands molded the damp dough, but what Hand was behind mine, making it all so, I ask you? Life is grand, good, full, miserable, crazy and sometimes quiet. There was a lot of roaring around the highlands this month, with beloved friends, Canadians passing through. The car died, and was revived, and coughs on. Projects and work unfolding in every corner, and yet the same awful face, the starving children, here, and there.

A wind of suffering passed through at the beginning of the month, people unsettled, sick, dying. Those were terrible days. Baby Nataly died two weeks ago, now, and the family continue in acute mourning. But full of love. Another young man was killed in Huehuetenango, family member of my friends. James Rodriguez, former resident of Guatemala notes: In Guatemala there are 52 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants each year, compared with 14 in Mexico and 5.4 in the US. According to UN data, more than 95% are never solved. Last week my heart failed in its cavity for a couple of days, and I spent an entire afternoon looking at pictures of Canadian daffodils.

But I know by now, that if I wait long enough, the pain will turn over, and new things will grow. And grow they are. The courtyard is overflowing with green and purple, and the boundless joy of calla lilies, shooting up. Our roof is going wild. The zucchinis have taken over, as zucchinis are wont to do, in the space of a week, yellow flowers burst out of the green, and then the fruits started, little and pale, and now they are everywhere. One box was overwhelmed, the weight of the dirt, the water, the plants, and it caved in at one end. Sunflowers, blue hubbard squash, garlic, green peas, crashed down and, well, they didn’t all die, just they’re a bit sideways. We are waiting for some magic money to appear, so that we can build the chicken coop. Maco says we should put in 12 chickens, I said three, so I think we’re getting six!

Last week water stopped flowing altogether in the house, but luckily Nico was visiting, and he and Maco squashed into the underground water tank (just like an army hidden jail! — says Maco – and I shudder, not funny), and don Lencho, who came by no doubt to talk about affairs of language and culture, was roped into the bucket brigade, and we drained the tank, and then the roof tanks of all the pea soup water. The toilets flushed thick green for the day, I refused to brush my teeth, but it all had a happy ending, and the blessing of water was restored to us, and I remembered how hard it is for so many here, dona Juana, I’ve been to her house in Santa Maria Jocopilas. Her husband went to el Norte, and never came back, and she lives in her hut, with her children. No water at all, just the river down the way.

Dona Juana and her daughter are at my door at 7:30 the next morning. Early. The workshop was scheduled for 9. But they have walked more than an hour to the road, to catch the only bus that comes this way, once a day. So I make french toast, and we all sit at the table, and they eat with quiet wonder, strange food. And the rest of the women come and the day begins. Nico, up from Quixaya, a volunteer from Montreal, is here to help us with worms . . .

So all day we do worms, and compost, and muck about, and share stories, and make piles of black wormie ooze, and then feed the garden. It has nothing to do with worms, well, it does, but it has more to do with us being together for half a day, and knitting beneath one another layers of love. Everyone is struggling somehow, I know. Herlinda comes, she has a month off, from her crazy nursing job at the hospital. She brings Selvin, one half of the set of twins — Iris is on retreat. Selvin can’t walk, or talk, or sit, or eat by himself, but we all circle around on petates on the ground. Stories, and strategies emerge. Later on we go into the kitchen table, and there we make Japanese paper cranes, and we pray for our beloveds on those islands so very far away, and unknown to us, that they may be strengthened in this their time of trial.

We share red beans and soup, and tortillas, and the women leave, carrying bags of worms, and shoots and cuttings from calla lilies, strawberries, basil, and more, and we plan to meet again next month, and do more.

So I think nap time, but before my sandals are off, the door bell rings, and people from the church in Chichi are here. We have a sign now, on our lovely blue wall outside, and I feel very official. The Chapel of the Holy Innocents. A place to remember and to heal. How lovely is your dwelling place, o Lord of Hosts, my King and my God. More talk at the table.

They leave, ah, I think, off with my sandals . . . ding, dong . . . my compadres, and my little godson, Pedrito. He doesn’t know why his parents are so sad, and he dashes up and down, and we eat the rest of my orange sugar cookies and drink coffee. My compadre says that it is an alivio, a relief for a little while, to see me, and without saying anything, what’s to be said, I hold his hand. We have ordered the cross for Nataly’s gravesite. We’ll put that in place next week. Now it is sprinkled with pine needles and white rose petals, and her oldest brother, who works in town, brings her fresh flowers when he can.

And the day is over, mostly, except for a brief incident of someone dealing with family violence, rushing through to tell me, and then off again, and then Nico and I settle down and watch movies and eat a mountain of popcorn. Tap dancing penguins save the world from overfishing. Well, that’s something I hadn’t seen before! Halelujah (even though it’s Lent)!

You can put all the ingredients together, and sometimes it makes a glory-pie . . . beauty, love, kindness, food, teaching, friendship. Saturday was a day, when Peace House glowed. And all were refreshed. Sometimes Selvin gets tired of sitting in his baby stroller, though he likes being in the courtyard under the leafing peach tree. Herlinda puts him on a blanket on the ground. I was washing the dishes from lunch. The ladies were somewhere doing something, and Nico sat with Selvin, and he started to sing: Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. The winds of joy blew threw the courtyard and how Selvin shouted and clapped!

Lucho has fallen in love with Bosco, my stuffed dog. I have a sliver in the pad of my right ring finger, making it hard to type. The trunks of cypress trees all along the entrance way to town have been doused with hallowe’en orange – the colour of the patriotic iron-fist party, they’ll probably win the elections time around, and have promised to beat Guatemala into shape. Their leader was a colonel in the Quiche during the genocide. sigh. Life thus continues.

love,

em

Ash Wednesday, 2011

March 9, 2011

Dear Friends,

Ay Dios! No hay palabras. The sky rains down hard, strange for this time of the year, with all of its thunder, and the floods fill the streets and it won’t stop for anything. I drink my reserve of my sister’s good English loose tea, the one I keep hidden, in an attempt to staunch the suffering.

Oh dear God. Burned now into the soft part of my heart forever, her little perfect head, her long black hair. She was so cold, icy, and floppy when we dressed her for her coffin. Her little white coffin, puffy in satin, as if somehow that could make it softer. Her teenaged brothers, and the littler sisters are beside themselves with grief, the mother collapses, the father sags.

I meet them, I rush, to the hospital, and they wait, and together, in the back of a black pickup truck we travel out onto the highway home. We drive slowly, as to not bounce anyone, and a Xoyita bears down on us, and honks, and I want to scream! Back Off! And the oldest brother clings to the little white coffin, and holds it, and the tears fall down without ceasing, his face soaking.

Down the ravine and up the next, and down and up, and we are home, in the ruined cornfields, washed out in last year’s floods. The girls’ faces lighten up to see me, and fall again when their mother gets out of the truck and they remember.

In the adobe house, the dirt floor, a low table waits. Candles, flowers, and there he places her, the oldest brother, as if this is his job alone. We sit on benches and the women wail, and keen, and the men shake their heads in disbelief.

The numbers, the stupid numbers, erase from my mind. How many children die before five in this stupid country? For no reason. For human sin and the famine of love. No need. Fury would rise in my heart, but no time. Now I am the one here to speak the word of God. It is my job. It is not cheap, or trivial. This is the promise of our beloved Christian story: death does not kill life. The God of Love gathers all of this beloved creation, into the everlasting arms. Such love is in this place, and still the chasm of pain . . .

They bring me water. We want to baptise her, they say. My heart quakes, and I speak to my interior liturgist – what now God? What is your Word in this broken house? I bring out my book, we are people of the book, we Anglicans. I don’t have my glasses, dammit. I force my eyes to read, and I create something, a mix of the blessing of the water of baptism, for the washing at death, and we bathe her little body, and her grandma and I dress her in her baptism clothes, white and pink. She is already perfect, without blemish or sin, she is already in the arms of God. But they need me to bless her this way, and that’s all that matters, and we wrap her one last time, and tuck her into her mother’s arms, and then at last into the coffin again.

I go off. It is Ash Wednesday. We gather eight or nine of us, and we smudge and we pray, and I say the words again, and we go back out into the world . . . solemn, marked each one with ash on our foreheads, fed with Holy Things.

Tomorrow, we bury her, Nataly Missel. Pray for us, please,
Emilie

Love Letter to an Old Man

January 27, 2011

Dear Friends,

Standing close in beside me the woman cries, her tears pouring down into her purple dress. Once in a while she carries her apron to her face, and wipes it crease by crease. For a second I wonder if it’s culturally the right thing to do, but to hell with it, my arm wraps around her, her stained-damp eyes peer into mine, we understand, and we love one another. So we lean together, holding each other, looking out, forlorn, lost, the two of us, the ten thousand of us here gathered – bereft, orphaned, undone. Before us, not ten feet away, he lies, or his body does, in a simple wooden casket, draped with the embroidered cloth of those he loved, those who loved him. The world has turned a different colour, now that he has died. Don Sam. Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia. jTatic Samuel. Canan Lum. The clouds gather over and threaten, but do not release, and the men up above on the platform say their prayers.

What did jTatic Samuel mean to this gentle woman? How can I know? When did he take her hand in his, listen to her suffering, uncover with her the hardcore truth – although the world denies it – of God’s most precious love for her? As she cries I can only wonder, again – how did he, with utter quietness, speak, almost without words, flooding into the hearts of God’s troubled children, a breath, a light, a fire, the Holy Spirit. . . What did he do to make this world more bearable, wonderful even, a place worth fighting and dying for?

I remember sitting at his table in Queretero, nicely asked to lunch by his niece, Rosy, and later, in his living room with a dusty charcoal drawing of the young Zapata, already wearing a wide sombrero. He was telling me about the horror of attending the funeral of his colleague, and dear friend, Bishop Oscar Romero, gunned down while saying Mass, with the Holy vessels warm in his hands.

Don Sam told me about the day of that funeral, in the cathedral in San Salvador, when the army opened fire on the mourners, and so many more died, and his witnessing of one woman, in particular, and her agony. He spoke as if in a clouded dream, as if I had been there too, and together we were remembering and mourning. Later, they took me to the bus station, he insisted on coming, and climbing out of the car, he blessed me, marking me with the sign of the cross on my forehead as one of Christ’s own, forever. He was 84 then, a few weeks shy of 85. For years he had been struggling with heart problems, and diabetes. I remember hearing about how much he loved candy.

Ours was a delightful brief friendship between an old Mexican Roman Catholic Bishop, and a Canadian Anglican priest, with a fierce love for Guatemala. I was invited into the circle only a short five years ago, first when I visited Mexico City and his team of peace builders at the SERAPAZ offices, where he had a little room, and a narrow cot, a place to rest from his full agenda, and then a few months later when he came to visit Vancouver for a peace conference. He came, and stayed as a guest in the rectory of my church, he, and his assistant, Martin (whose finger I later broke – by mistake! — slammed in a car door).

St. James’, if you don’t know, is the fuddy-duddy Anglo-Catholic parish in Vancouver, and there was a slight stir when I – a woman – was added to the team. Don Sam enjoyed his days with us, and at the High Mass on Sunday, said he was amazed, not so much to see a woman celebrate Mass, but to see that we did it all eastward, facing the altar and God, not the people, and that we still wore maniples and amices.

His life and mine, thereafter crossed over, intentionally and unintentionally – we were on the same path, though mine was forty years behind, and running to catch up. Oaxaca, Queretero, Mexico City, Guatemala, his own beloved San Cristobal de las Casas, San Salvador, in each place a gathering of the family on fire for a world built on justice and righteousness. An end to violence and to greed.

My memories are tender, though few, and formative. After hearing the news of his death in my house in Santa Cruz del Quiche, I sat in the chapel, lit candles and sobbed, alone. My friend, Don Juan Ixchop came by, and then went out and gathered some town elders, and we burned candles and pom, and kneeling prayed together. Word went out, and a few other people came – former refugees, some of the 250,000 Guatemalans who had fled the genocide. Don Sam it was who met them at the border, and short and stout, wearing gum boots, stood before the ravenous Guatemalan army in pursuit. They remember and we gather here in gratitude, and together we spread rose petals around his picture, and leave him candles.

The next morning before sunrise, I am on the five-bus trek to San Cristobal de las Casas to say goodbye. My friends are all coming, down from the City. He is lying in the yellow cathedral. I kneel and talk to him, alone, and then go looking for my friends, I know exactly where to find them. And there they are. We embrace, and throughout the evening and the night and finally in the morning over a three hour breakfast we cry, and talk. I mostly listen to these who loved him, who lived close to him, their innumerable stories, echoing mine, so many more of them, of this man, who refused to hate, even those who clawed and ruined and did damage to others. And then the final Mass, we gather in the plaza, many, many more of us than before.

After the conch is blown for the last time, and the younger priests gather around his coffin and carry him inside the cathedral for burial, we stagger on, gathering to break bread and to continue to reweave this tragically rent garment of our lives. Miraculously, it will be possible, we will go on, the work is not yet done.

Don Sam, abuelo. I never knew my own grandfathers, but who are my family, asked Jesus, but those who gather around me and do my Father’s will? Don Sam never said as much, didn’t need too, that he loved me, approved of me, trusted me – when I didn’t even trust myself – that God was calling me to live and witness and to work. There were no grand fireworks about him. When he invited me to con-celebrate with him, and the other Bishops and a multitude of priests, in that cathedral in San Salvador, it wasn’t with banners and proclamations. Thirty years had come, and gone, since the terrible death of Romero. And there we were, not destroyed, simply living and refusing to go away. God’s love and beauty burst forth among the nations. I was there, but it had very little to do with ME. I was there, I am God’s priest, and my place was at my Bishop’s side, serving at the table.

Before the sun slid through the high mist in the mountains of Chiapas, my friends all went home to the City. I gathered my things, heading down to the bus station. Passing by the yellow Cathedral, I thought to slip in, one last goodbye. The crush had been too great the day before to visit his final resting place. But then I thought, no, no need to. He is no longer there. The Spirit that ignited his heart has not died, but beats in the breast of all who loved him. Of all who love that simple man from Nazareth, God’s Son. Don Sam’s hand is forever blessing gentle, on my forehead. I can feel it resting there. Well done, God’s servant. Descansa en paz.

emilie

Milk Men

January 10, 2011

Dear friends,

Today is the 12th anniversary of my baptism, which took place on January 10th, 1999, the Baptism of Our Lord. I was baptised at the font at St. Mark’s Kitsilano, the font that later caught on fire. The two events were unrelated. Twelve short-long years. Jesus did all that he could after his, in three cut-off years. Me? Twelve years of work, study, suffering, prayer, and the occasional dance on the waves of exaltation. In these years I have tried, and mostly failed, to curve my life into his, to love as he did, to let go, to never pile up in my house, that which was meant for the world. I have neglected my children, abandoned rotten love, and usually misunderstood what it is that I, this one soul, on this short turn around the sun, what it is that I am to do. I have walked out onto various planks, ridden my bicycle into snow drifts and buses, by mistake. I have sat at the feast table of so many lovely friends. I accumulated cats. And then I wandered south, again.

South, half way down, into the layers of Xilbalba, above, but just barely, the pools of blood which still circle here. I came, on a gift from those who believe me, for some reason, those whose long arms have held me as I could not help but go, and come, and go and go again. Into this town I came one night, it was raining, and I knew no one. But the sister of a friend took me in, and down I lay on her floor the first night, and there worried about the drunks outside my window and even more about the Bishop down the road. I wasn’t sure we were going to understand one another. If I had known then what I know now.

And then the days lingered, and I began to fall in love, again, with this place. What is here? Nothing special? An ordinary town . . . the heart land of the war. Here the biggest military base orchestrated the genocide, and now, the ghosts linger, and this year, the murderers run for office again, run for president, in a suit now, scrubbed clean of children’s blood.

Then I found the House. My House. Peace House. Here, which indeed was the control room of the generals planning death, I prayed for something different. At first we tried too hard, and built something too big, and like the gingerbread house I made last month, but worse, it fell in upon itself. Armed with Royal Icing, I have spent a few quiet months in love, tending the garden, feeding the cat, feeding my now growing number of beloveds. We ate Josefina, the turkey, for thanksgiving. We ate pizza with the young, and lasagna with those on the edge of retirement. We baked and broke: bread, pies, cookies, birthday cakes and cakes just because. We played with puzzles, and made pictures that now paper my fridge. We painted walls, and planted flowers and food things and green things too. The House is Beautiful. The chapel is coming along, I must chase down Pedro, the carpenter, who promised to make the pews.

Lucho came to live here permanently in August, and now he thinks he owns the joint. I guess he does. And numerous long and really-short term and occasional guests have curled up here. Girls made a cave in the bunk bed, and I served them biscuits and tea. Some things grow, others whither. Strawberries don’t seem to like the Quiche, and something green ate all the broccoli before it could flower. But I’ve been serving baby carrots and salad greens to everyone at the table, and throwing kale and basil into all things savoury. Am I an old hat in Quiche, yet? I don’t think that everyone looks at me strangely on the streets anymore, or maybe I’m just used to them.

I go ‘home’ for Christmas, and glory and joy in my endless treasure of boys turned to men. They are mine, mine, mine . . .and whoever else will love them. I visit mom, dad, sisters one and two, and assorted nieces and nephews, and dozens of friends. I sneak into the sanctuary of some of my favourite churches, and here we are again, gathered, on this quiet, dark, rain of a night, and in the glorious sun of a winter’s day. Singing in English, aaaaahhh. I collect stuff to take back to the children that surround me. They need everything, so I pack and over pack, my mother gives me her collection of tops, and a couple of dozen finger puppets, and some of my favourite books, even though they’re in English, Ferdinand the Bull, and Bread and Jam for Francis. And Father Scott, bless his generous heart, reaches under his sofa, and hands over his electric bass, and now there is a boy who I’ve rarely seen smile, never stop. Actually I haven’t seen him for days, he disappears with his cousin, who has a line on an amp. The bass sleeps with him now, under the covers, I’m told.

Leaving Vancouver, the patron saint of excess baggage surrounds me, and I fly home. Maco gets up at three to wind down the highway from the highlands. The dawn breaks as we both rush down through the volcanoes to the City, and find each other, miraculously, in the chaos, even though I’ve lost my phone.

So like the dough in the hands of the Chinese noodle maker, I am stretched and stretched again, between here, and there. Where am I to be? What am I to do? There’s nothing to be done, but try to listen to God on this one. But because God is not a man and doesn’t speak, English, Spanish or Quiche, I just try, put my ear to the ground, and listen.

No final word yet, but I think I’m still to do something in this place. I don’t know how long that will take, or how I will do it. I’m not worried. These things will become unfailingly clear, and all manner of things shall be well.

Guatemala. Xilbalba. Hell and Heaven bound together. The day I come home, a 20-year old girl leaves a bomb on a bus. Seven die right away. The eighth died on Sunday. A 13 year old boy whose mother, and two little brothers were killed in the initial blast. Maco’s best bus driving friend, and his ayudante, were shot on his bus in Sepela, in the first ravine after Chichi, where the river flooded so badly after Tropical Storm Agatha, and the other ayudante was killed in August. The boys were both injured, but both will live. Actually, they’re both driving again already, though Alex lost a finger, we saw them on the morning, coming in. Corn crops failed last year, and things are becoming critical.

I come home, water the plants, feed the cat, bake the bread, tidy the chapel. Read. Write. Rest. Pray like hell. In the morning I make a new discovery: the boy cadets from Adolfo Hall, the military academy, which now is called an “agricultural school” and occupies the land that was the Quiche base, come down my street in the morning, selling fresh milk. From cows that graze on murdered land. The boys, however, are just boys, they push each other, the milk spills on my step. I hope and pray, that what happened here, will never, ever happen again, and that we can one day tell the truth, and forgive.

Until then, I remain as ever, Christ’s servant, and yours,
Emilie

The Last Letter

THE LAST LETTER

October 27, 2010

Dear Friends,

A smart friend in Mexico once said: if a writer visits a place for the first time, and spends a week there, she thinks she can write a book about it; if she stays a month, she realizes she only has enough information for an article, if, however, she stays for an extended period, she comes to the wise conclusion that she knows nothing at all, and it would be best to just be quiet. That’s how I feel. The more I live in Guatemala, the less I understand it. I could continue to write, but what would I say? So I think I’m going to stop writing letters, and just look around me, for the time being. But I couldn’t resist, once more, sitting here with Lucho draped across my lap, at my faithful little computer, who has been down ravine and up volcano with me all these months, churning out words, and never complaining, never getting sick with a sniffling virus, not once.

This has been a hell of a month. I don’t know which hurricane emerged, or where it came from, or how it started, but it ripped through the House, and left it barely standing. I don’t really want to talk about it . . . I have sent a total of 41 letters over the year, but still I don’t write everything, there are under and untold stories, in and out of the seasons, of anguish, of glory, of boredom. I’ll write to defend others, but be hard pressed to defend myself. I’ll write about the genocide, about mining, about chicken buses, about gardens, and cats. I’ll tell tales of Margarita’s plays and Julia’s poems, and Bishops and heroes, of Leocadio and Lesbia and Osmundo. But how much have I said about me? Roberto Bolaño says that autobiography is a tricky, untrustworthy genre.

This has been an unbelievable month. I have looked on from the sidelines, while I myself was mauled by the lions, down in the ring. This is what happened, in brief: a couple of people from Peace House became disgruntled, and laced with the idea that I was the source of their suffering. And they attacked. And it was ugly. They are bullies and they used bullying tactics, and told everyone horrific lies. And no one won. But I guess I came out the other side, and I am here in the House still. The calla lilies are going wild, and the strawberries too. I feel like just being quiet, and alone, which today, thankfully, I am.

But then the furious people sent an anonymous letter to the Bishops, and the Bishops’ hair stood on end, and they called me in. It seemed – in their eyes – like all of Quiché had risen up against me, and I was nigh to be lynched. Of course, three people do not a pueblo make, but there was a lot of explaining to do. At first I am told in no uncertain terms that I am going to be moved from Quiché.

Limping, I go to heal at Margarita’s house, and at Julia’s. Where we drink coffee, and talk, and cry, and pray, and for a time I am restored. Back to Quiché. Then one night Isabel and her sister, Etelvina, come to get me, to take me to a Maya ceremony. There, unexpectedly, I am asked by the head priest to come forward, and to speak. He presents me to the crowd as an evangelical pastor, from the Lutheran church (close enough). He says I am an example of how we could live and walk in the world, worshipping in different ways, but together in heart. He has no idea how healing his words are to my spirit.

I walk home alone through the safe dark streets, to the House, and I sit under the full moon in the courtyard, and I know I don’t want to leave Quiché. And the next day the ceremony continues in Gumarkaaj, the sacred site of the original K’iche’ city, destroyed by the Spanish. At one point we walk into a cave, deep, deep into the mountain, with little white candles showing the way. We are lead by drum and chirimia, and the mountains themselves tremble. Back out into the sun, we burn the sacred things, and pray. And I am restored, again, for a time.

But the pain creeps back in, sorrow at being the target of hatred, and of five hundred centuries’ worth. I am not a noble or a courageous person, I haven’t done anything particularly well. I have tried to be present, to be witness, to breathe Life, in my own way to be faithful to the Holy One, in my eyes clearly called Christ, but open and pleased to see other visions. JP is so kind to me, and Osmundo, and Irma, and Isabel and Maco, and his children, who themselves were just witnesses to a truly horrible accident and death.

Maco drives me down to the monster city for the Big meeting with the Bishop and my heart is broken and in my shoes. We eat apples and he scolds me the whole way, and builds up my courage, no seas alcahuete! — don’t be a wimp. You are a theologian! and by the time I go in to the meeting, I am Rocky, ready for round one. I am not going to be moved from Quiché, I don’t care what! Of course the Bishop, being Anglican, is reasonable. And after listening to my story, he no longer wants my head, or anyone’s head, and in a final direction affirms the complicated nature of the story, and, best of all, defines a path through it. God Bless the Anglican Way!

Back in the little carrito, now in the dark. The city is terrifying, the traffic throttling, and once through, the countryside, ominous and not-safe. The canyons of dirt, still marking the highway, are shrouded in mist. Occasionally a shape burns through, a late bicycle going home, a lonely dog, but no drug-bandits.

We don’t talk much. I am so tired, but can’t sleep in the car, and leave him to fend off the darkness. Tonight we don’t talk, although there are, I know, a thousand layers of stories, of being a boy in the Quiché, during the war. He has told me many stories, ordinary, for him, yet completely shattering. About these terrible things, I can’t yet write. Whose lives would be made better if I told these tales, which aren’t by any means the worst, just ordinary stories from the war, of deep horror? We stop at Los Encuentros for hot chocolate, and then up into the ravines of Quiché, at last, home at last. I almost know every curve. He knows every one. Passed the giant Rios Montt FRG mural on the wall in the first descent (why, oh why, didn’t a landslide take that one out!) Down by where the civil patrollers from San Pedro Jocopilas, under army orders, killed the moderate presidential candidate to-be, Jorge Carpio Nicol, past the molino, up into Chichicastenango.

While we thread through the narrow cobbled night streets of Chichi a fellow bus-driver friend calls. Maco drives with one elbow, and cradles the phone. What! An accident? A Xoyita, into the ravine past la Casa Blanca! The Xoyitas, the fastest chicken buses, heading to Joyabaj, sometimes meet in Los Encuentros, coming from three directions, from the coast, from Xela, from Guate. They bet Q100 quetzales each, who can get to Joyabaj first, and off they go. One didn’t make it. We head out to the highway again, from Chichi, and as we come around the first dark curve we see it. A monster tow-truck is hauling her, scraping, out of the ravine. Twenty-five injured, some gravely, but no dead, thank God.

Two ravines to go till we get home. Quietly, not making a fuss, my nose fills with salt-stinging and here they come, one, two, unstoppable tears. I cry the rest of the way, down and up the ravines, past the silhouettes of cypress lining the straight-away, past the Hall, military academy, into town, up town, and home. Lucho is waiting, complaining like always, that I have abandoned him. I am too
tired for words. Too weary for anything, too fretful to sleep. . .

October 31, 2010

Irma comes over in the morning for the last piece of lemon meringue pie that I saved for her, from JP’s goodbye dinner last night. It was a good pie, really sour, with lemons from her cousin’s house in San Andres Sajcabajá. It was a good meal, a good good-bye. Lucho meows, we head for the door, we fill his bowl one more time, and we’re off. Three mosqueteros and me. Heading slowly to the border, where we will send JP off and return again, home.

We go to Huehue, and we gather Maco’s children, still haunted by a death witnessed so horrible, and we play for the day, in Saculeu, an ancient Maya city. And the next day Maco and JP and I head for the Cuchumatanes, and walk up and up, to the highest place in Central America, that isn’t a volcano. Up top, past the bleating of the sheep, and the call of the children tending them, there is perfect, complete silence. For a few blessed minutes, we lean against the rocks, and each other, and for a while, we sleep. Still.

It was exactly one year ago that I arrived in Quiché. The same crazy getting-readiness for All Saints’ Day is under way. The flower vendors are going to town. Student bands in the streets. Tissue paper kites of every colour strung up along the park. One year. I shake my head. Could I ever have imagined? Would I have come at all? What have I learned? What have I given? Who is this Emilie person, anyway? What have I tried to say, in the midst of it all? Who have I learned to love? Who has turned from me, after we had kept pleasant company? One year ago, I knew no one. I slept at Irma’s, on the floor, on a straw mat and a pile of blankets, in the dark, because the power was out. On the other side of my window it was raining, and the drunks from the Buen Precio store raised a racket. I was confused, filled with blind anticipation, excited.

Now things are filtered, transformed, more nuanced, more complex. I am more modest, quieter, perhaps. Anxious, yes, always. Here I have found yet more people to love fiercely. God please turn me into a bear. My taste for fighting has increased. But who to fight, or what, and how? There is no enemy, or none that I know, none with a single human face. Yet the devil has built his nest in this country, and lined it with bones of the dead. But what to do about that? It is a constant, every second thing. Sometimes I get tired. I want to move to a place where I can sleep in a meadow. Where children don’t die all the time from hunger and disease. Where the pool of pain is not quite so deep. But once you know this place exists, in good conscience, you cannot walk away.

Every bit of me loves being a priest. I am kind of a failed missionary, though. Can’t try to get people into the door, just try to love them if they come in on their own. I’m happy to talk about God, and His most lovely Son. The Holy Spirit is as always fierce here. And I run after them all, and never catch up.

Now I am truly torn, never to be sewn back properly. Where will I be this date next year? My mission then will officially be over. And, it seems, so will the Anglican Church of Canada’s overseas mission program. Done . I am, weirdly, the last Canadian Anglican missionary. Fair enough. Those days are gone, and I’m not sure that was what I was up to, and am still up to this year.

About the mystery of God, the mystery of Guatemala, the mystery of love, I know next to nothing.

Yet in gratitude, in unending thankfulness, I remain . . .

em

Flying, Between Heaven and Earth

October 16, 2010

Dear Friends,

Outside the peach tree throws off its leaves and makes a mess in the courtyard. Lucho gives chase and pounces, and then shivers down meowing as little yellow birds alight in the skeleton trees. Yesterday down the road past Chichi we stop for apples, the best I’ve ever eaten, outside of Guelph. It is freezing cold, misty, early morning. As soon as the sun burns through, silhouettes of children carrying paper kites suddenly appear. Hints of fall from the North, apples and peaches. Is it fall in Canada? Is it raining and getting cold, are the leaves doing their thing and the Canada geese? Are the snow geese covering the fields in Richmond with flocks of white? I ache with longing for those I love in the North, my boys, my father, my sisters, my friends, especially for my mother who is not well. Everyone feels so hopelessly far away. And I fear I am being changed so, by living in this land, that I don’t know if I can ever go back. Or if I go back, it won’t be me, not the same. My body is turning from the inside out, I eat corn almost every day. I am buffeted too by the scars that others bear and exhibit, in this oh so fragile country. I bear up, and at night I dream I am flying on my bicycle.

The season has shifted, hasn’t rained for at least two weeks. There’s relief on the roads, maybe the mountains and cliffs will hold fast now. There is relief, mixed with anxiety. So much was lost this year, the year of the greatest rains on record: lives, homes, and for the immediate future, right now, crops. Corn fields were flooded and drowned, and famine waits around the corner, sharpening her scythe. What to do?

We are on the road, through the apple orchards, out of the pine forest, down the mountains, down the slopes, around the lake, into the coffee hills, passed where the river turned into a giant triple-decker bulldozer and ground boulders and mountains themselves, right through the valley, wiping out Rodolfo’s watercress cooperative. We have come to see Leocadio, who is forever at work, and Steve, here from Vancouver. Steve is the one who started the whole thing with Cafe Justicia. We go out to the beneficio at the Hill, Cerro de Oro, the coffee mill, and just now, the harvest is beginning on the lower slopes. There are new buildings, and newly-painted de-pulping machines. The patios are ready to receive their load of beans to dry. Down below there are medicinal plants, and rows and rows of worm composters, where the pulp from the coffee cherries is turned into organic fertilizer. And the desague, the water filter and run-off that keeps this operation one hundred per cent clean.

When I can’t stand Guatemala anymore, it is good to come here. When I can’t stand the greed and the stupidity and the violence – three poor bus drivers shot to death yesterday, one of them with his wife travelling beside him. My heart never closes down when I see the children with no shoes, the children sick, and some of them dying: amoebas, pneumonia and just ugly starvation. I burn in useless fury. So when I can’t stand that the rich here and the rich there don’t care enough, that the poor are crushed almost beyond repair, this is the place to come, and to rekindle, in this God’s volcanic stone-tossed cathedral by the blue lake. Here with the lifting of the breeze, not only do we remember to care, we remember to act on that caring. Here, in this coffee mill, the CCDA are showing their friends – north and south – how it can be done.

The suffering of the poor in Guatemala began, in earnest, this cycle around, in 1871, and the triumph of the coffee barons. Those men who believed in “progress,” who stole the land from under the feet of everyone, and then turned them out, generation after generation to work starving and barefoot, or in broken shoes in the coffee fields. Here at the benefio on Cerro de Oro, and down in Quixaya, where the office organizes everything, and up through the ship container, to Ottawa, to Vancouver, to Halifax, to the bagging parties, and the volunteers, and to Rhizome Cafe, and before that, before the coffee even gets to Cerro de Oro, the seedlings and the little plants, the farmers, the cooperatives, the organic fertilizer, the harvesting, transport to the Hill, every step of the Cafe Justicia process is nurturing those who work, those who get up before dawn, and walk out to their green shiny bushes, rimmed with red coffee cherries, now the harvest. The chain of production is owned and shared by everyone, from seedling to steaming thick coffee. Nobody is stinking rich here. No one has a chalet down there on the beautiful lake just because. Here everyone works, and everyone eats. Drink Cafe Justicia! (end of advertisement)

It is fun to stand up in the back of the pick-up truck and roar around the lake, wind making a kite of my hair. Maco takes his cap off, and I remember (now Father) Scottie, who lost his favourite cap on this very road, because he didn’t. JP stands out against the Volcan San Pedro, and the towns and villages across the the way show through the green, and the brown, where the slides have come down. Around we go and down to the drowned waterfront in Santiago Atitlan and at the lakeside we eat fish (except me and my allergies), and drink coke and beer, and Guatemala becomes a little better understood, by listening to the Hurricane.

Then it is back to Quixaya, then back up the mountain, to the cold, home, into the now gathering again mist in the afternoon. We drive through an earthquake and don’t notice. Along the road every child has a paper kite, hand-made out of light sticks, plucked from the ravines, and tissue paper, of every colour, with long tails, or short tails made of paper and string, or sometimes even plastic bags. Every child has one, flying something. This is the month, until All Saints Day on November 1, and All Soul’s Day, the Day of the Dead. Tombs will be visited and cleaned. And down the other valley towards Guate, people will fly the biggest kites in the world. Sending messages from earth to those who have been transformed, through death, into the other world. . .

Irma’s dad is sick. So is my Mom. This is the time.

em