Jonás arrives finalemente!

“Cuidado Hermano,” cautions my guide from just a few steps behind on the muddy path that winds us through the endless slopes of cardamom. He’s cautioned me to “be careful” about fifty times since we started our hike an hour ago. It’s partially because, like most K’ekchi’, he is overly polite and worried about the happiness of his guest, but the fact that I’ve already fallen onto the slick, muddy slopes twice, has probably influenced him as well. We’re on the third leg of a two day journey to arrive in the home of my guide and friend Alberto Cac Ca’al, an indigenous K’ekchi’ from the mountains of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala.

Our journey began yesterday, a Monday, immediately after Alberto and 16 of his companions became the first graduating class of the K’ekchi’ Mennonite Education Center Bezaleel. The school, which is run by the K’ekchi’ Mennonite church, is in it’s forth year of operation and during the past school year, was home to 92 K’ekchi’ students, 76 men and 16 women. This year’s graduates received their degrees from Basico, or ninth grade, and are now some of the most highly educated of their K’ekchi’ brethren. Alberto, like me, is 22 years old.

We leave Bezaleel around noon for Coban, the commercial center of the Alta Verapaz region. From Coban we catch a bus that will carry us on the seven-hour ride to Alberto’s home in the remote municipality of Senahu. The trip is steady but slow as the bus pushes itself through the winding mountain roads that are mainly surfaced in mud and potholes.

Along the way, we pass a chain of twelve police carriers, each with a cargo of about twenty heavily armed Guatemalan crime fighters. We later learn that they were returning from a coffee plantation some thirty odd miles away, were they had put down an uprising of unpaid and discontented indigenous laborers.

An hour or two later we pass through a five mile swath of pure gray. It is home to a large cement refinery and the many small, wood and sheet metal homes of the families who supply its work force. Everything from the flowers to the faces of the people that we pass is a drab, light gray. Near the far edge of the monotone landscape, we pass a small mountain stream as it enters a swirling opaque river, which flows through the valley. The contrast where the two meet is almost as sharp as the reality of what the current Guatemalan ruling party (the FRG) has promised the indigenous peoples of Guatemala, and what it has delivered. Ironically, this same government has now abandoned the cement industry, one of the primary monopolies of the old Guatemalan elite. Instead, the current government, which is mainly supported by the younger military establishment of the 60’s and 70’s, is inviting in new competition for the countries entrenched industrial families, while continuing to ignore the industries indigenous workers. We do pass a number of small blue and white billboards with prominent FRG logos, which they have kindly provided to the local communities in order to advertise what current local development projects are underway. The vast majority of these projects, I am told, receive no government support.

Our bus lets us out in the middle of a deserted street, the end of the line, at 9:30 p.m. Alberto and I, arrive in Senahu along with our happenstance-traveling companion, an indigenous surveyor on his way to help a local community “junta” (committee) to measure out land for new families who are moving into the area. Once we find a hotel with an empty room (three cots and a table), we head out again to look for dinner. We find a small kitchen, which serves a single typical meal of scrambled eggs, beans and all the corn tortillas you can eat. After a long day of travel, the small meal seems a bit inadequate to my stomach; although to my companions all that really matters is that there are tortillas. The corn tortillas, which in K’ekchi’ are called “cua” are the staple of their simple diet. The cua is so important in fact that it is also the word for food and half of the verb to eat (cua’xi). We stay and chat with the talkative young cooks until 11 p.m. when they finally decide that I am looking tired and we return to our hotel for five hours of rest before 4 a.m. the next morning, when we must rise to catch a truck that will take us further up into the mountains. To Alberto and the surveyor this is a good night sleep, while to me, sleeping on a cot that is about three inches short for my six foot frame and has no pillow, is about the same as a long blink.

I awaken to the quiet, but insistent call of “Hermano Jonás, Hermano Jonás,” my constant reminder in Guatemala that I am officially part of a missionary organization. I grab my things and we head out, not bothering to change clothes, as our day of traveling will be long. I do manage to convince them that I need to brush my teeth, although I’m not sure they understand my insistence. Outside the hotel, we head up the main road through Senahu. It is not as small of a town as you might expect, considering there is not a single paved road entering it from any direction. The street is already crowded with vendors neatly arranging their wares in huge stacks on the street. Today is a market day. The majority are busy tying immense tarps in between the buildings that line the street in order to protect their booths from the inevitable rain. The middle three blocks of the road are already completely sheltered, wall-to-wall, with the large blue and black patchwork. When we reach the edge I realize that the sun has already started to rise.

We wait at the corner where our transport is supposed to pass for forty-five minutes before learning from another passing truck that the one we wanted had already left as we were waking up at four that morning. Although we are all a bit frustrated by the news, the up-side is that we will be able to spend some time at the market and Alberto can take me up to visit the Catholic cathedral, Senahu’s centerpiece, where his father still sometimes worships during particular Catholic and K’ekchi’ holidays.

The next truck headed for our desired destination of San Francisco arrives on the outskirts of the market at eleven and we climb aboard along with nine other passengers, not including the two, twelve-count potato sacks of chickens, a small crate of chicks, a medium size pig (also in a potato sack), two, approximately 150 lb, sacks of corn, and of course the rooster that sits regally in his brightly colored bag that hangs from a metal bar running down the center of the truck bed. The road is rough and I begin to develop a bruise under the ribs of my left side where I am continually pounded against the railing that holds me in the truck. As we head out of town, its starts to rain steadily and continues for the rest of the morning. About fifteen minutes into the mountains, the woman who owns the chickens decides they are probably getting too hot and dumps all twenty four, feet-tide and panting into the middle of the truck. I spend the rest of our trip standing on one foot or the other to avoid having to stand on the feathered mass. When we reach San Francisco, it turns out to be no more than a small central market for the farmers of the surrounding countryside. I’m carrying about a gallon of purified water on my person on this trip.

After our short breather, we are ready to set off on our final hike, which will take us to the home of Alberto’s family. As we head off through the sloping fields of coffee and cardamom, Alberto and the surveyor squabble over how long the walk will take. Eventually, they agree that it will be at least six hours. As we walk, I try to formulate simple questions in Spanish to ask about Alberto’s family and community. Usually it takes at least two tries before he understands what I am asking, but I not sure if it is because my Spanish is still elementary or because Spanish is the second language for Alberto as well. All twenty-four of Guatemala’s indigenous groups maintain their own languages, which they use almost exclusively instead of Spanish, the official, foreign tongue. Alberto’s parents and most of his aunts and uncles have never learned Spanish.

I do manage to learn a little about the basic seasons of cardamom and coffee and that the land we are walking on was still a German owned finca until 1997. After coffee prices began to plummet late in the decade, many finca owners decided it was no longer lucrative business and started selling off their vast land holdings to their former employees. Alberto’s father still owns their original smaller plot a few hours away. When we arrive, we find that Alberto’s parents and his six younger brothers and sisters are away at their old house for a few days to visit family. Because there is no phone access within several hours, Alberto’s family did not know that he had finally graduated, let alone that he was coming home for the first time in nearly nine months. Alberto is very disappointed that his father will not get to meet his new gringo friend who has come all the way to their home. As he tells it, I am only the second foreigner to arrive in their community since his father has been alive, the other being an Italian priest who visited in 1997. As a member of a Mennonite missions organization, I feel oddly out of place in this community, which has remained entirely Catholic since the arrival of the first priests nearly five centuries ago.

As exhausting as our trip was, I am too in awe of my current surroundings to really care. In all during our journey, we spent seven and a half hours in a bus, two hours standing in the back of a small pick-up, and nearly eight hours walking. So it is that I, Hermano Jonás finally sit down to a special meal of spicy chicken soup and tortillas at the table of my new found friends, their exhausted, wide-eyed, trophy gringo.

Jonas Hart is a senior from Newton.