Continued from The Big Cry (Part One)

Clara saw my tears, grabbed my bags and helped me up the concrete steps, my host mom following behind. I immediately went for the medical kit and took two non-aspirin. (If they are non-aspirin, what are they? Why call them non-aspirin and instead just say what they are?) I kept repeating: “No sé que me da..” /I don’t know what is happening.. “Perdón no les quiero asustar pero tengo un dolor tremendo..”  “I don’t want to upset you all but I feel..” estranged from myself, not planning on these tears. I stayed up two nights before running lines with Evelin for 2 hours, reason #49 why being a parent sounds like too much work. Now I was going off-script.

I took the non-aspirin as my host sister and mom took the familiar line of concerned questioning: “What happened, who said something, when I talked to you on the phone you sounded fine, you were joking.., do you want a tortilla with avocado, do you want dinner, tea? When did you last eat? Put your sandals on so you don’t walk on the tile. Did someone say something to you? Something must have happened in Pana, did something happen in Pana?” they ask me. But they accepted that I just needed to lay down. They turned off the lights and left me to the medicinal, quiet dark. I climbed under my mosquitero and covered my face with my trusty walmart blanket, releasing the tension in a steady stream of raindrops from the thatched roof of eyes slammed shut. Crying escalated to a certain weeping, and I had to let it happen unsure of what train I hopped to end up in this pile of extemporaneous human. Today was a completely normal day, and this?

There are three volunteers I can call when I am in this state, but I didn’t want to. You want to save your crying phone calls for when you have a good reason but this was a mysterious attack of emotion. I have two people I could call from home, but that is even less feasible given the wild range of mental dancing bulls that are impossible to tame and even harder to describe for all of their ebullient parts. In these moments either my support network shows a deep level of empathy which seems unfit or I struggle to express the complete experience for all of it’s nuance. I struggle to paint the picture around the object that casts the situation in the right light, getting the lighting right on the lake. So I stay alone.

In eight months, this will not be my home. In eight months I will leave my host family and I won’t have an egg lady or an eggplant lady or Profe Noel to bug about marrying me or hearing “Pazapik a jolom” (ratchet head) as I walk by. In eight months I will be back in a culture of text now talk later. In eight months I will be uninsured and uncertain, in eight months my default position will be parents’ couch. In eight months I can hold a man’s hand and think it could go somewhere, in eight months I can start grad school or be a flight attendant or go on a trip across South America with my readjustment allowance. In eight months I can speak without constructing sentences word by word. In eight months who knows where I will be.

After the tears subsided, the pain still sharp around my cranial carriage, I knew I needed to go downstairs and assure the host family that I was okay. Sure enough, Clara was at the top of the stairs to check on me when I left the bathroom. I descended to the kitchen to make tea.

My host mom put my trusty water-boiling pot over the fire and I sat. They sat around me and waited. They were worried and wanted to know what happened. I began to explain what I didn’t understand: my own compunction from out of a clear sky. It’s always a calculated risk to be upset or sick in front of my host family because they worry that I will get sick and go home. But whatever I was feeling was intense and I felt compelled to melt right in front of them, unleash The Kraken. I heard my monologue and felt far from my words, like I was narrating a story I didn’t write. Was I speaking in Spanish? I don’t know. I mean of course I was but my speech felt like someone else wrote it.

Okay so yes I am on my period but I don’t (typically) get emotional like this on the fourth day of my cycle, I get emotional before. And as a general rule I don’t have super-headaches. But I was working and at the training before my period and I didn’t have time for emotions, I suppose. Was I working my emotions around my schedule because that does NOT sound like me, that sounds like a software engineer.

And once my exposition was over, they understood a little more. But there were still questions and problem-solving to be applied before they would understand my state of mind and the situation at hand to know how to respond, how to support me.

To them it is super-weird and super-sad that I wouldn’t have a home with my parents even though I’ve explained how my culture views this. They ask: “But your parents would let you live with them, right?” Thankfully without question but it would still be a point of ‘verguenza’ to be 32 and living at home. “But Natalie, you still have eight months left before you leave. Why do you need to know this all now?”.. Well because if I want to apply for grad school, I have to study and take the GRE and apply in a short window of time. And on top of that I explained the prospect of going into debt to get a degree. My host sister asked me if I could ask my parents for the money to pay for the program and I explained why I don’t want to do that, that they paid for my education up until now which is more than most can say. I don’t want to ask them for money, and she understood. And I explained that it is not easy to find a partner here nor in the US, and if I want to find a partner that will be difficult as well.

..”But your sister found a partner, she said that she prayed to God.” And I explained that they worked in the same religious program and that’s how they met. “Iglesia” my host sister explained to my host mom (even though they did not meet in a church, there’s no such thing as non-church religious programs here to explain).

I am accustomed to pause for Clara to translate into K’iche’ what I am trying to express in Spanish. So I paused, hearing my own words translated to another language. They made more sense when I couldn’t understand them. I could see that my host mom was tired, she hunched over the plancha but kept direct eye contact with me. My host sister was the one to meet me in my compunction and offer a steady hand to pull me from the mire. Even though my host mom was tired, I needed them both. I needed both of their understanding, questions and responses.

And then they asked me a question that they’ve never asked me: And why are you not religious like your dad?

Woof. Reaching back into history to make sense of the present.

I delicately unrolled the plot of my ‘individuation’ in my 20s which involved turning dramatically and painfully from my parents’ belief system. I knew that they would not like this divorce of belief systems but Clara understood and explained it to her mom. “De plano habré sido algo adentro de ella que no acepta los pensamientos y creencias de sus papas.”

I think for the first time Clara considered the pressures that I feel in my country. To many Guatemaltecos the US is some dream land where you can earn bukoos of money, but there’s a reason why I clicked “Lived outside of the US all 12 months” on my tax return this year.

And then, after the complete mapping of my woes, it was time for my host family to gather their words and deliver.

“Tienes que ser una mujer valiente” Clara charged me. (Brave). She uprooted these words from her earthen core, perhaps a phrase maybe her grandmother always says. She started in with her story: “When I left the capital” she’s referring to the same time when I moved to Santa Clara “I was still telling people that it was temporary and I would still go back to the capital to work.” (I could hear my host mom using the bathroom in the next room over. But that’s how close we are, pooping-proximity). “I knew my jefa would give me my job if I went back. But I didn’t want to leave you here alone” (referring to me) “but the main reason I stayed was to take care of my Abuelita. And two years, I will tell you this story, two years ago I decided that I was done working and I went to my boss and renuncié. She called me one night. ‘Clara.’ She said. “I don’t want to let you leave. I am going to increase your pay..” and at this moment my host mom walked back in. I could tell she was going to say goodnight. But, she stood in front of the fire to address my teary monologue from the evening:

Now, I should say, nothing that she told me was new. I had heard all of these pieces of information before. But what she was doing was sewing them together to invite me into her sanctuary of survival.

She started from her beginning: “we struggled, some days there was no food and we survived off of the small basket of corn grains that our neighbor gave us. Some nights, we would just eat tortillas.” (I’ve seen Abuelita eat and it’s always very little. I wonder if it is because she accustomed to eating less so that her children had food). “Then, I went to the capital when I was sixteen.” Pause. “When I first worked there, they paid me Q15 a month.” Pause. (Are these pauses cultural or because Spanish is her second language?) “My pay slowly increased, and by the time I stopped working years later, they were paying me Q500 a month” (I make more than that now as a volunteer). She showed me her flat palm: 5 fingers (for Q500). “I ironed, I cleaned, I cooked and I worked. Then my brother told me: ‘Come home, you need to get married and have a family.’ So when I was 24, I moved home. I got married. But Clara’s dad hit me, and I put up with that for 1.5 years until I left him to live again with my mom. And my mom said: ‘we will live together.’ I left Clara with my mom to work in the capital again. And they told me: ‘Chayo, you are working hard. Keep working because one day once your daughter has studied, she will work and she will support you.’ And so I did, I kept working and Clara studied. And for what reason should I lie, Natalie? The clothes I own, she bought them for me. When she got my teeth fixed, she paid for me. This house, poco a poco she paid for it.'”

And I sat humbled, silenced. Again, not the first time I heard these stories, but my host mom had to stitch them together once again to share with me her own fight. The circumstances of her life had to be reintroduced to me in succession to cast the right light on who I know her to be today.

Her past is one of poverty, war, illiteracy, an unfaithful and abusive, addicted spouse and discrimination for her Mayan ethnicity. My future, when I stop to realize it, is full of opportunity with not a threat of hunger, violence or destitution in sight.

I continually wrestle to find equilibrium between these two realities and how, or if, I can really use the same word for both realities: the word struggle.

Her story, her fight and her humble diligence and contentment in spite of what her life did not hand her proves to me time and time again that I know nothing of struggle. And while what I have lived (depression, individuation from my parents and religious estrangement from my family) is real to me, I have more to be grateful for than I can justify forgetting. And that’s why I signed two years of my life away with a single click of a button: not to save the world or be a hero, but to forget myself and find another part that I didn’t know was there all along: strength and capacity. I can do this. I always could.

I knew that joining Peace Corps would make me estranged, further estranged mejor dicho, from my life-as-I-knew-it and the people in it. Still in full recognition of this I didn’t consider that I would learn a new definition of what it means to be family and to survive together by mere proximity. I didn’t know that I would redefine what it means to fight, work, and laugh from three incredible women in three different generations and between three different languages, English, Spanish and K’iche’.

Somehow, and I don’t know how, I got lucky enough to step back from my life and learn another reality in the beautiful company of these three souls. Even though I feel like I am going through this on my own, I have never felt alone during the process, and that makes all the difference. Togetherness, company, support.

These three women have seen hardship and figured a way to overcome it. While I don’t always feel deserving of their love and companionship, I feel capable of accepting it and finding my own path of being. Más que nada I am simply grateful. Grateful. And I’ve heard gratitude is a powerful determinant of contentment and centeredness in this “one wild and precious life.”

Maltiox Chawe (muchas gracias in K’iche’).

Maltiox Chawe.