November 24, 2016: We stood in a circle on the grass as our boss passed out classic manila folders.
We were celebrating Thanksgiving Day in the cocoon of the well-manicured office.

Like it was a medical chart, a nominal first aid certificate or another copy of your resume printed off last-minute for a job you aren’t sure about, our futures rested in each folder adorned with a white label. I can honestly say my fate has NEVER been delivered so succinctly and out of such mystery. The only experience I can compare it to is opening the college acceptance letter. While college is usually four years and this placement is for two, I CHOSE to apply to that college, visited it beforehand, knew where it was and Bless God we all spoke the same language there. This placement came without a preview.

This white label that zipped through an HP 3600 on an Avery label was everything but paperwork: it was the air I’d be breathing, the location where I’d live and work for two years not to mention my proximity to the rest of the volunteers. Would I be close to acquaintances and far from friends? How far from the office? How far from the closest city and by that I mean cappuccino?

December 6, 2016: Sure as printing labels would have it in a week and a half I was sitting at a kitchen table with my new host mom as she talked feverishly through whichever mental door swung open first. And only a handful of times can I recall feeling so vulnerable, so entirely reliant, on one soul. If the manila folder was like my acceptance letter, my host mom was like my RA. Thank God she is wonderful. I took in the elaborate stitching on her green güipil (woven blouse). I nodded at her words. I calmly responded to my new life as if it were a nutrition label: “Good to know, good to know.”

What else could I do? Panic? Rejoice? Just be. And that’s what I did, take the moments in succession like watching a film for the first time. My new reality was being dispensed frame by frame.

In the middle of conversation at dinner that night my host mom Doña Rosario told me “Pero el Español me cuesta” (pronounced cway-stuh more than quest-uh). It was the first time I heard it put that way, “it costs me” instead of “it’s hard.” And speaking as someone who understands the phrase SPANISH COSTS ME with sparkling clarity when I’m metaphorically naked in front of a group of be-pimpled adolescents just hoping to GOD that I make it through without saying something fundamentally wrong, I SHOULD USE THIS PHRASE. Before I learned ‘me cuesta,’ I would say: Para mi, el Español es un poco difícil. But Spanish isn’t difficult. A language is neutral. But learning it, using it, yes that costs me.

But truth be told, even though she said it correctly, the significance didn’t register until much later. Lost in translation about being lost in translation. As far as I could tell her Spanish was just dandy, her Spanish was fabulous, her Spanish could light up hot air-balloons and send them from here to New Zealand. Unlike me, she doesn’t reach as a toddler does longingly for a balloon that’s left for Heaven like I do for verbs that my lips can’t begin to form in Spanish. And that THAT MY FRIENDS is what it’s like to live in a culture and learn a language simultaneously.

April 5, 2017: As I’m four months in to site, I’ve noticed little things along the way that reveal that Spanish does cuesta my host mom: Sectiembre instead of Septiembre, piegra instead of piedra, and my favorite: ovisnando instead of llovisnando. Once I asked her what elote loco was and she told me it was a crazy woman, when it’s actually baked corn covered in ketchup and mayonnaise. As the Spanish words begin to droop lower on the language branch for me to alcanzar, I notice more of the ways her pronunciation pivots slightly from the text. It’s like when I see the students write “ablar” and “aser” on their papers for hablar and hacer. I see the same omission of the ‘h’ with ‘honestidad’ and ‘muebas’ instead of ‘nuevas’. Sometimes it makes me feel better that I may not know how to speak sometimes but I can spell in Spanish. Other times it makes me feel concerned about the verbal ability of my students.

But then I realized that these kids didn’t grow up speaking Spanish the way it might appear. They grew up speaking K’iche’ with their parents, saying “Shoka ap Tat” instead of Buenas Noches Señor. And their language is not Spanish, they just speak it. Spanish is as much their first language as it is mine, and it’s what we have in common. Spanish is our common ground, which I never thought I’d say. Spanish feels so much more accessible than when I hear K’iche’ from the other room or around the plancha.

And English is super hard for some Guatemaltecos to pronounce the way K’iche’ me cuesta. I’ve listened to my host sister attempt to pronounce the word “bird” which always comes out “bee-ehld.” The soft “r” is really difficult. For me, the ‘l” sound in K’iche’ and all of the glotales (apostrophes) promise humiliation. There’s a clicking sound you’re meant to make in the back of the throat for k’ and q’ and before you know it I’m on the wrong street in alphabet city.

But what I find interesting is that people here don’t call Spanish Español, they call it Castilla. And while I don’t know nearly enough about the history of the Mayan people, I know that they were conquered by the Spaniards and had to learn Spanish because of this. There is still a strong division between Ladinos and Mayans. Their language was diminished, their culture was marginalized and they were pushed further into the “interior” of the country, apart from the ladino culture (ladino spelled with ‘d’ in Spanish). Abuelita and I can’t communicate because she speaks only so much Spanish, and I speak only so much K’iche’. And her hearing is that of a 90 year-old. It’s amazing how much I feel like I know her. Words don’t tell you what being in someone’s presence every day can.

And I see how faces light up when I say “Xeq’ij!” as I pass by. Somehow speaking K’iche’ to the townsfolk is like unlocking a door to their culture and saying “Yes, I see you.” And not that it matters what I do or say, but I see how special it is to my host mom that the Pastor of the Catholic Church delivers sermons in K’iche’ and Spanish. Because my host mom doesn’t read or write, spoken word is tantamount. I regret the time I asked her for a pen (she laughed and said “I don’t write so I don’t have one!”).

But the more and more I experience, the term “me cuesta” is so fitting in regards to boundary lines between Ladinos and the Indigenous People. For all the reasons I know and all the reasons I have yet to learn, the Mayan culture in Guatemala has fought to preserve their tradition and their existence even when it has costed them. When I speak Spanish it costs me because I can’t find the words not because I’ve been hushed into silence.

My manila folder didn’t mention anything about it.