“Oooohhh!” was a fairly common refrain I got when I mentioned I was leaving for fieldwork to Guatemala.
“Keep a blog.” Common advice that we can’t get or give enough of in the western world when someone is going to to travel off somewhere.
“Put up pictures! We want to know what you are up too.” So I dutifully plug a few snaps into facebook every few days. Afterall, I have essentially placed my social life on hold for the better part of a year. The least I can do is give those I am lucky enough to call friends, a glimpse into why I am (yet again) dropping everything and everyone to move.
And now, for almost three months, I’ve been trying to sit down and write a post. To say something about tortillas, or mangos, or eating beans three times a day. To somehow convey the shape of the mountains rolling off into the distances in the Alta Verapaz; the way they are anchored deeply within the earth, a landscape so powerful it feels alive. To adequately describe the sounds of the birds complaining for rain and the smell of the smoke drifting on the air as the undergrowth burns in preparation for the planting of the corn. I’ve been sitting down and trying to write a blog about the dichotomy of living in a country whose history my government has littered with atrocities, while I am blessed enough to feel completely at home with a family I have loved as much as I love my own for almost a decade. I have been sitting down, trying to write a blog, and I come up short even when thinking about the trundling mini buses I sit in every day, crawling across mountainsides to towns and houses perched on the edge of believability.
I stumble when it comes to wondering whether the stories shared with me are ones I am allowed to pass on. The strength of community health workers who, at times, are left only able to help people die with dignity at home. A $500 test is too expensive, let alone the treatment that might follow. The universality of the words a woman says about her husband who hits her “only when he’s drinking.” I can almost mouth along “He doesn’t really mean it”, I’ve heard that phrase so many times back home. The inevitable reminders as I work through basic Q’eqchi’ language classes that colonialism is alive and well here, its ongoing impact rooted in the very structure of the language. A language shaped by the conquest of its land, even as its people and culture somehow hung onto their identity through over a half a millennium of assault. I struggle when thinking about whether or not to write about the hummingbird that hung out on the patio, or the frustrations of struggling through a bureaucracy I do not understand. Would anyone care that “la tortuga” (that is its name) circled the patio 12 times one Friday, or that I counted and took photos of the epic journey? How does one write about commitment to family, and community squabbles when that family and those communities are not, and never will be, one’s one?
How am I proposing finishing a PhD, 80,000 words, on a subject that I can’t even manage to stumble through 650 words on, day after day?
It’s something that I am still trying to sort out. Whether I like to blog, whether I can blog. What exactly it means to blog. In the meantime I meander through the internet, looking for examples of blogs or websites or facebook posts that navigate the roles of researcher/tourist/outsider/friend/storyteller with the sorts of grace and awareness I can’t quite seem to muster, and I write blogs about politics back home. A subject I feel I can fully claim as my own.
In the meantime. Here’s a picture of the turtle.
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