It’s hard to isolate single words and explain them, mejor usar frases o cuentas completas, because in this culture when I refer to something I learned I remember it in story form. Responses, answers and information is usually a story of some kind. This culture loves stories, but more they love story-telling. It’s a skill that’s taught from a young age by listening to parents have conversations and visit with neighbors over coffee and pan. As I write this, I picture the expressions of two friends leaning into each other’s presence as they express in great detail something that happened as they sit on their front step, I hear the cadence of my host mom’s speech as she unfolds her tale, her gestures as added emphasis. In Guatemala I’ve observed that telling a story is a form of hospitality, friendship, gossip, update, guilt trip and company.

“You want to know more of my story?” and my host mom stretches her long ponytail over her left shoulder to sit over her woven blouse like an added adornment, “okay, I will tell you.” And brick my brick, she lays a path of reference for me to follow. That is how people share life in this village and I’ve come to remember everything in that same format, in the story in which it was told. It’s never a passing conversation during statistic swiping on football season on the ipad, it’s face to face, hand on shoulder, story.

I remember my grandfather Popi saying and then I says in his stories. ‘”Fine. You can have the car if you can learn how to drive it’ I says!” It’s like a midwest thing. My host mom here does something similar: she punctuates her stories with “Vaya” le dije yo. Which just means “Fine. I told him/her.” And for some reason, even though the ‘”Vaya” le dije yo” does not advance the plot, the phrase has come to mean so much more as I learn her story.

“Vaya” or “Va” is Guatemala’s version of “Okay,” “Sounds good,” “Got it!” “Will do” “Fine.” Vaya also means “Go” in command form, but when it’s used in conversation as a single word, it takes on different shape. In Spain our vaya is “vale” and in Mexico it is “bueno.” Here you say “Vayaaaaaa…” When I’m about to hang up the phone, “Vayaaaaa,” when I’ve told my host sister “I’m leaving for the day, hasta la noche” I hear her response with an extended “Vayaaa” trailing from the pila.

As I’ve come to know my host family, I find that their attitude is reflected in these four words, especially the perspective of my host mom. Very rarely do I see them pitying themselves, paralyzed with grief or immobilized by laziness: a state of being I can express with the greatest of ease and Netflix logins. I will explain this with stories they’ve shared:

(But before that, an important note: I want to be respectful of my host family and their individual stories. At the same time I want to recognize that, while they’re stories are individual to them and no one can replicate their exact situations, these circumstances are extremely common in rural Guatemala. Because of that, I think it’s worth sharing. But this comes at the risk of me taking advantage of them sharing their lives with me which I do not want to do. They know that I write about my experiences online and that I share it with my friends and family. Also, their names are extremely generic so I feel I am still regarding their anonymity to a respectable degree).

My host grandmother’s husband died when my host mom was 6 years old, so I imagine my grandmother was in her late 20s when she lost her spouse. My host grandmother took to the monte/land to work, cut her hierba/herbs, provide for her family and I imagine to keep busy. I wasn’t there but I know that this is what she did because I see how hungry she is to work at age 90. Through many conversations she has shared with me in K’iche’ flavored by little Spanish lifelines I can extract the meaning, that she wishes she was still working. “What’s the good in living if I cannot work?” I sense in her expressions. “But what can we do? Así es la vida.”

Abuelita knows how expensive her pills are (she takes exactly one every day). She wants to go outside, to walk on the street. “Antes Tylia” (she cannot pronounce my name, Natalia) “yo me fui al monte a caminar, trabajar, saludar le gente pero ahora…. Hah!” And she gestures with her pointed finger warped with age and esfuerza, and I know there is grief in this gesture as if to say: I can’t now. Now I am too old.

But still Abuelita gets up at 6:30am with her daughter and granddaughter, she feeds the chickens, grabs them by the wings when they don’t hace caso/do what they’re supposed to and puts them back in their place. She pets their wings, she mashes up the tortilla for the cat Mix (Meesh) and sits in the same seat to eat her breakfast. I am sure her morning begins with prayers on bended knee as her nights always end.

My host mom’s story is different. Her husband didn’t die young, like so many husbands, he started to drink and he left his wife and daughter. I am told that this is why my host sister Clara doesn’t have any siblings. A few other men expressed interest in her but she was concerned they might maltrata her daughter, so she moved back in with her mother and they lived together and raised my host sister.

When my host sister was still a baby, my host mom left for the capital to work (4 hours from here). She went to the capital, she worked as a “muchacha” (me cae mal este término but it is the term for housemaid) and got paid 3 quetzales a month. I repeat: three quetzales a month. I asked her to repeat the number when she was telling me the story, just to make sure I heard her right. By the time she left the capital, she was not making as much as I make every month as a volunteer, but still much more than she started out with. Granted that was several years ago, about 18, and when she came home her brother advised her to get married and have children. She was older than most women when they get married, she was 24. After a year of abuse she left and she has been a self-sustaining woman ever since, in the context of her mother’s home and her siblings living more or less on the same street.

My host mom and host grandmother are illiterate, “because they did not estudiar.” They speak K’iche’ and Spanish. I have taught my mom how to say three English words: Bean, Cat, Corn. She’s tried to repeat “Guatemala” in a US accent as well as “Natalie,” but it doesn’t sound at all like English. We always laughs when the words come out wrong. She can laugh when she says things incorrectly in Spanish (because it’s her second language) and it only encourages me to be more accepting of my own shortcomings. One time I asked her for a pen and she said: “I don’t have a pen because I can’t write!” and started laughing without a shred of shame, just tickled by the situation. I felt so embarrassed but I was the only one who was.

So unlike so many women who stay home, clean, cook and mantiene su cebolla, my host mom doesn’t. She takes her machete and her costales and leaves for the monte to work the land she and her mother own.

I can give absolutely no statistical evidence for this number except my own experience, but for every 15 men who leave their wives, one woman leaves her husband in this context. I’ve met a kabajillion single moms here and it breaks my heart. For my host mom to live with her mother and live without her spouse shows just how strong she is, especially in the 70s when this all occurred and leaving your spouse was not at all culturally accepted. Divorce or spousal separation in Guatemala is still spoken about in hushed tones and occluded phrases, especially in the campo. Very few people say: “divorced,” they might say separated or in “the particular situation my spouse and I are in.”

My host sister wants to be married, I know. She’ll be 40 when I’m done with Peace Corps. Knowing this culture and how much I get asked if I have a boyfriend, I imagine the pressure she feels to find a spouse is at full bore. I say this not because she feels she has to be married, but because she wants to be married and have children.

But she has looked at me with an honest expression and said: “Cuesta conseguir un buen hombre..” and I won’t share the details of her relationship past, but she has not been able to find a good man. “A good man is hard to find” she says. And isn’t that something they say in my own culture? I worry because I don’t know when that is going to happen for her. I worry because in this culture not having children is nearly a sin, especially to simply flat out say that you don’t want any. “Who will take care of you when you’re old?” My nieces and nephews.” “But it’s not the same, Natalia..”

And for that and another million situations I say “Vaya.”

It’s okay. It will be okay. And if things don’t work out the way I want, I will still get out of bed and go to work and write about it. I’m lucky to have what I have and what I have is so good.

Vaya.