This is what I learned as a Girl Scout.

As you are likely already aware, Girl Scouts of the Nation's Capital, the Girl Scout Council based in Washington D.C. will be represented in Donald Trump's inaugural parade into the White House.  While it's unclear exactly how many Girl Scouts will be marching, what is evident is that this particular Girl Scout Council has decided against breaking a century of tradition. They are both providing girls an opportunity to march, and girls are taking that opportunity.  GSUSA, responding to queries about the local council's decision, noted "as a non-profit organization GSUSA is nonpolitical, nonpartisan, & will continue to encourage our girls to be civically engaged."

The internet appears to feel both betrayed and incensed.  

I'm heartbroken. But I remember:

Girl Scout Councils and Troops organizing, running and promoting the first desegregated troops and camps in any youth organization in the US.

Girl Scout Councils and Troops publicizing to the nation that they couldn't care less about sexual orientation in girls or leaders. What they wanted was dedicated volunteers.

Girl Scout Councils and Troops marching against the Iraq war.

Girl Scout Councils and Troops raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for AIDS research.

Girl Scout Councils and Troops partnering with Planned Parenthood to raise community awareness of services provided.

Girl Scout Councils and Troops welcoming trans Girl Scouts with open arms.

Girl Scout Councils and Troops advocating for the voiceless in their communities across the USA.

What GSUSA does as an organization and a movement is to empower girls and young women to believe that their voices can be heard, their actions make a difference, and that their views are important. That they matter.

Which bears repeating.  GSUSA teaches that they, girls--someday to be women--actually matter, and that they matter as FAR MORE than tools; far more than pawns; far more than voices of agreement. They matter as people.  They can be actors not only in their own lives, but in their communities and across the world.  Girl Scouts, above all else, empowers girls to believe in and to follow their own internal compasses.  And the wonderful, amazing, heartbreaking thing about teaching girls that they matter, and empowering them to act, is that in acting, some girls and young women will invariably disagree with me, and they will take action to change the world in ways I don't want the world to change.

But as a woman--a person whose gender has always been counted on to line up behind the right cause, support our men, do our level best to keep things from being out of control--the joy and pain I feel in supporting an organization that gives young women the strength, courage, dedication and chutzpah to stand their own ground in the face of controversy, even when I disagree fundamentally with those young women, is overwhelming.

Yes, I could, if given the opportunity, strangle parents who raise girls to believe Trump is a legitimate president.  Yes, these girls are breaking my heart.  

But yes, I am damn proud that Girl Scouts has given them the strength, the space and the ability to break my heart.  And I still believe that teaching young women that they matter is a radical and radicalizing act.  And I believe that 30 years from now, some Girl Scouts will look back at things they did with pride, and some with shame.  Learning and growing into your own power involves mistakes.  However, I want a generation of women who were each given their own voices, even if I disagreed with what they said, rather than a generation of women told to shut up and stand in line if their thoughts didn't fit my worldview.  I believe that empowering girls produces, in the end, radical women.  And, as my mother was fond of saying during my childhood: "I'm not raising a 'good' 9 year old.  I'm raising a responsible adult, and what makes a responsible adult is not always a good 9 year old."

As a Lifetime Member of GSUSA, a Bronze, Silver and Gold Award Recipient, a GSUSA and Girl Guide Volunteer and a former staff member of a Girl Scout Council, I have never worked to raise "good" or "cooperative" Girl Scouts.  I have worked to instill in young women the radical idea that they, and their voices, are equal to ALL voices.  And you know what, I'm willing to get some mud on my face along the way if it means raising a generation of women empowered to feel comfortable, present and valued.

GSUSA is perhaps the only organization of its caliber in the world where girls aren't expected to sit down and shut up if what they are saying falls outside the party line.  Women and girls in our society in general are expected to be the quiet assent; the support; the steady undercurrent of approval.  Their voices are valued when they fit the overarching narrative, and are all too frequently shunned if they choose to display the slightest sign of dissent.

And as much as I disagree, as heartbroken as I am, Girl Scouts of the Nation's Capital is telling girls, 'You have power; you have a voice. Use it.' I disagree with some of those girls, but I am proud as hell that they have the courage to disagree back. I hope that as they grow from 9 year olds marching in a parade I view as a travesty into engaged young women, that the radical message that they matter guides them into a better and deeper understanding of their power and to better ways to use that power.  And I sure as hell know that if *any* organization can challenge the messages they are getting in this world about objectification and secondary status, and lack of value, it's the Girl Scouts.  So Fucking March in that Damn Ugly Awful Fucking Parade.  And I will bawl when I see you go by, because I am heartbroken that young women buy into this, or have families to buy into this, but I am SO DAMN PROUD that you have been taught to step forward and take action, and that you know your actions matter.  Because almost no one in this world teaches women that.  And Girl Scouts DOES.  No matter who those girls are. Republican, Democrat, Trans, Straight, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Atheist, or Purple People Eaters.  Girl Scouts teaches the radical concept that as a girl, YOU MATTER.

And on Saturday, I encourage all of you Girl Scouts, Girl Scout alumnae, Girl Scout leaders, and Girl Scout staff, to wear your Girl Scout Uniform with your pink knitted hat as we rally in Washington DC to protest this illegitimate president, because that's what Girl Scouts do. We take action. Because we matter.

And that's what I learned as a Girl Scout.

Stories

My Grandmother is going to die.

This fact has always been indisputable. She is human, just like I am, just like Mother Theresa was and also that guy who fought alligators. It’s inevitable. No matter who we are, where we live, or how much money we made (or didn’t make), we all die.

But what’s different about the inevitable death of my Grandmother is that my Grandmother is now going to die soon.


It’s not like I haven’t had time to get ready. She began slipping away, you see, a decade ago.

First it was little things. She had a bad car accident (not her fault) but then started getting lost driving to the grocery store in her little 1997 white Grand Am. When grapes rotted for the first time on the counter of her spotless kitchen, or when she didn’t ask one of us to take her trash bins down to the curb on a Tuesday night. Standing in her kitchen I asked her what went into the pumpkin cookies next and she sat and stared at me, unsure, at her little table under the 1980s chandelier.  

I stayed at her house, most of one summer. Tidying up here and there and poking around my grandmother's mind. Do you remember Pearl Harbor? Which brother was it on the USS Arizona, was it Guy? Tell me the story about how you met Grandpa again? Was he handsome? Were you gorgeous? Stories that had once poured out of her with the tiniest bit of prompting. Now she sometimes shrugged. “I dunno.” She would say that it was a long time ago. She’d snap. Her patience, previously as endless as the sea, abruptly ran into a wall.

It’s not like I haven’t known. It started when she was 80 and 80 is an old age to be. And she was younger than that, even, when she moved from her house to our house. My mother bought a tall twin bed with a sleigh frame and a firm mattress. It wasn’t the kind of mattress that lets you sink in and envelopes you, but was instead the sturdy sort. The sort that propels you up in the morning. One that it would be easy to get her in and out of. Maria, a home nurse, came in every morning for an hour or two to help us get her showered and dressed. Every morning, when we’d get her up and get her breakfast, she’d sit on the porch, or the couch, listening to Rush and occasionally patting the dog that followed her around like he was hers.

My grandmother was always immaculate. Her hair as exact as her penciled-on eyebrows. The smell of the Pantene spray pervading her iron-pleated slacks and turtleneck sweaters even more than the odor of her cigarettes, the ones she would secretly smoke outside. Or the Avon perfume she once sold to her neighbors, and wore to mask the cigarette smoke, spritzing it on only as she slipped in the door.

Maria helped her become perfect, immaculate, every day. After Grandma burned her hair with a curling iron, because she just sat there, holding it in her hair, Maria would curl it carefully each morning for her. She’d remind my grandmother not to touch the metal rod, that she’d burn herself and then wonder why. But that first time, that time that she burnt her hair, that was a sign. A sign that her mind was wandering away somewhere as she began to leave us, piece by tiny piece.  

She adored Bailey, the dog, and used to sit on the couch and watch Fox News, or ask questions about my day when I wandered in from work. Sometimes we went to the park. But now it was me, not her, driving that 1997 Grand Am. The cushion she had used to scoot her tiny self far enough forward in the seat to reach the pedals was now relegated to the passenger side.

It’s not a surprise, that my Grandmother is going to die. She’s 90, almost. She turned 88 on September the 9th. Many people do not live to turn 88. Or 87. Or even 70. By any measure, my Grandmother held more than her fair share of years in her delicate but hardworking hands. She has had more years than anyone in her family was ever given--except for maybe her grandmother. Maybe, because we don’t know exactly how old she was when she died. She might have been 87, or maybe 89.  But my Grandmother has lived through 88 falls and 88 summers and 88 winters and springs.

No one is left anymore who knew my Grandmother as a young woman. Her brothers died young, but not as young as her father. My great Aunt Fontella, her dearest friend, was the last…and she slipped away just earlier this year, fading into the soft summer nights she loved so well after a series of strokes left her half present and half gone.

There’s a photo, hanging on her wall, of my Grandma at twelve with her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. She’s sullen in the photo. Angry about a beautiful new haircut she thought her mother ruined, just because it wasn’t formal enough for the photograph. Grandma’s mom had combed the curls out with water so that she’d look respectable. There were four generations, sitting in the same room, so clearly just holding it together after a fight, all because the camera was there. It was a special occasion, in 1940.

My Grandmother was born the same year as Shirley Temple. But she never had natural blonde curls. Her hair is still almost black, incredibly fine and softer to the touch than silk. Wrinkles line her face, but they’re not the wrinkles of someone who is 88. If it weren’t for her dentures, which she got at 22 after losing her teeth to gum disease, she wouldn't look particularly old. Not as old as she really is, the age of someone who slips away quietly one night in their sleep, glancing back only to remind themselves that all will be okay. The world will turn anyway.

It isn’t a surprise that my Grandmother is going to die. Because it is never a surprise that anyone is going to die.

And I have had more years to prepare than most. To remember how safe her arms were when I was a little girl. The way that nothing in the world could ever be wrong if I was sitting in my Grandmother’s lap. How much I admired her giant glasses and perfect makeup. How Grandma never wore pajamas or sweatpants or jeans. She was the prettiest, classiest, most beautiful and strongest person I have ever known.

And I have had more years than most to choose what to forget. The times she snapped at me. It stung more than I could bear, because it was Grandma. The cigarette smoke and the semi-constant evaluation of my weight. Those moments happened, but they never defined who we were to each other. They needn’t take over now.

Dementia is a slow, slow death. One that creeps up on you, that leaves you wondering and waiting, holding your breath, and holding their hands.

So I went in, every day I was home. I went in and I sat, or I call, winding up hours and hours on the phone.  I sat and I waited, and while I waited I’d tell my Grandma all the stories that she used to tell me. I’d sit in the chair I dragged in from the hall and propped next to her bed and I’d squint a little bit up at the ceiling, trying to remember the details she knew so well, that used to come to her so easily.

After that I would call from far away, winding up hours and hours on the phone. I’d search frantically for the battery charger and for one last international calling card, with another twenty minutes on it. Punching in the numbers while on the speakerphone, hoping I hit them all before we’d disconnect. “Disculpe, no tiene mas credito.”

She, a firebrand of a woman with a temper as hot as ice to match, now lies in the bed, drifting in and out of awareness, while I talk and talk and talk.

I tell her about how she used to sneak into her mother’s bedroom when her mother and stepfather were sleeping, to take money from her mother’s purse. And how when she’d squirrelled enough away, she’d buy a bus ticket a few towns over to where her Grandmother lived in Twin Falls. How she’d stay there, working on and off in the “hotel” and “restaurant” her Grandmother owned throughout prohibition and beyond. How she’d sometimes tend bar, and how much she loved her Scotch Whiskeys.

I tell her how she ran away at 17 and married a man 25 years her senior. Just to get out. To be on her own. I talk and I talk and I talk about a young Air Force vet, just back from England and the World War. He was from Sugar City, Idaho and mistook her for a date that had stood him up. He chewed her out right there, in the bar where she worked--only realizing she was an employee, and not his date, afterwards.

Then I ask if she remembers when he came back a few days later, carrying flowers, because he’d been out of line. She fell in love. How his apology bled into a first date. Then a second. Then a third. How he stood next to her in front of a courthouse and swore he’d hold her as long as he lived, which he did, even though for him it was only until 50-something. How their honeymoon lasted only a few days and was only a few towns over, but their romance lasted her whole life, so strong it stayed alive long after he was gone.

I ask if she remembers Fontella. How they grew up together and married brothers. How they were best friends before Reid hauled Grandma Shirley off to Island Park, and Vance set out for Washington with Fontella. I trace an 8 inch scar running up her arm, and wonder aloud for the thousandth time how much fun it must have been, attached to a toboggan behind a pickup truck, flying at full tilt across the snow. What, I wonder aloud, did she think of the snow plane her husband built out of old parts? How much was it, in total, that they sold their Candy Apple Red Convertible for? After they’d finally given up on kids, bought that car and moved to California, only to get pregnant with my mom weeks later?

Was she in love at first sight? With that beautiful baby of hers?

I sit and I tell her the stories of her life. The golden succor of my childhood. Reminding her, I hope, of the formidable, intelligent, beautiful woman she has been. Of a life lived in full. Of love freely given over and over and over. Of my Grandmother. Shirley Dene Casperson Haws. Brave, bold, daring and everything I ever wanted to be.

I’m reminding myself why it hurts so much to have lost her so slowly. And why it will hurt so much when the last glimpse of her will be gone.

Reminding myself how lucky I have been, to call her Grandma. And how lucky I have felt every time she has looked at me, with so little else left in her mind, and said “I love you, too.”

Home.  

I’ve never forgotten the way that the Provo City valley stretched out in front of our verandah.  The way that the lightning creased the sky in an instant flashing down from above while we sat huddled in blankets just watching, and waiting for the rain.  I can still hear the sounds of the aspen trees brushing up against the house in the wind, their leaves chiming as they rustle together.  And that smell.  Overpowering as the ground soaks up water for the first time in months.  Steam dribbling upward lazily from the cracks in the pavement.  

Home.

For the most part Ceiba’s only grow at sea level. Their defining roots grasping into the ground around the trunk.  The cool smooth bark stretching and stretching and stretching an impossible distance into the canopy.  The legend says that the Ceiba in Chamelco was planted by Aj Poop Batz’, chieftain among chieftains, king among kings.  Planted to guard a bell he carried underground, guided by the spirits of the homeland as he brought back this strange gift from Spain.  Bell or no, the Ceiba towers over the central park, in front of the old white church front.  The broken jagged outline of the mountains reaching out into the distance behind.

Home.

It’s freezing. One of those perfect mornings where we come tumbling out of the fifteen passenger van to discover that the fog we were driving through in the valley below hasn’t touched the lake. Deep blue, before the sunrise, the stars are reflected as perfectly below as they are above--once you push past the ice crusting the edge of the water.  We’ve beaten even the fisherman and the park ranger. Coach cuts the engine on his skiff, mostly so we can hear him yell a little better, and for a brief second the only sound is the glide of the hull in the water and the echo of the coxswains last call.

Home.

Tony, who used to work here until last year, would repeatedly declare in his thick Yorkshire accent, that these were the best gardens in the south of England. And for all I know, he may have been right.  Perfectly trimmed lawn, literally acres of daffodils and meandering red gravel paths perfectly contained by Queen Anne style red brick.  There is a sense of timelessness here. The students sitting on the lawn, studying and laughing in the sun, will be gone in a few years time, but there will always be students.  Sitting in the sun. Tony is gone. But there are still gardeners trimming the edges of the pathways, and minding the daffodil fields.

Home.

Where the huckleberries are, and the mountain looms. Where we fight and laugh and cry and pray. Where the smell of the ocean drifts in on the wind, and the rain washes all the dust away. The Big Pink Building still soars behind the mistake they are building on Burnside, and Californians are driving up the cost of our coffee our gas and our apartments.  Where an old man still makes pottery on a wagon wheel, and we still smile a sad smile when we cross the Hawthorne, just remembering Working Kirk Reeves. Where my bicycle tire got caught in the tracks, and where I didn’t have time this summer to buy one Hermiston Melon.  Walla Walla season isn’t on yet, and dammit the Thorns lost this weekend.

Home.

Because I’ll always forget to do one last thing before I leave. And to say one last goodbye.

Languages

They say that the more bilingual you are, the more the languages mix and blend and move and shift.  Setting out paths across the neural networks of your brain and remapping it's layout as they travel.  That the more you live and speak and breathe in one language the further back the other settles, waiting it's turn to surge forward as your tongue slips and stumbles when someone addresses you using it's suddenly new and yet ever familiar sounds. Languages, like children, can wander, following the easiest path forward and through, focusing on mundane details or fixating on that which is not yet understood.  Like water, they can slip away unseen, bleeding through cracks and wearing holes in our memory as they wind their way out, ignored, unused, forgotten.  The footprints of their existence leaving cluttered marks in the form of an ability to make an odd vowel sound, or better hear and repeat a new and unfamiliar name.  Those of us who were bilingual as children whose second language simply vanished before we knew it was gone are left with scattered memories of words and feelings and meaning uttered in no definable identifiable language.  A gut feeling about the sense of a word, or it's emotional timbre when we a character utter it in a film or on TV.  We cannot define the value of what we have lost, because we do not know it was, or that it has gone.

Learning a new second language chases out the last remnants of that first second language from your mind. Grammatical structures you did not know you still remembered blend into those you cannot fathom as you stumble through how to ask for the ketchup. Or to find the bathroom and the bus. Understanding shifts as fluency starts to settle in, the way you feel about what you think is every so slightly different in your first language than in your second. Direct translations begin to lose their meaning as you seek out sentences that hold the same meaning when you mull over them in the part of your brain that deals with colours and song and the openness of the sky.  You wonder how you might have phrased it in the lost language as a child, and you choose your words more carefully in your mother tongue, unintentionally more aware of the power language has to define not only what others hear, but how you frame what you think; how you engage with your life. Who you are and why you are that who.  

And every once in a great while, at the edge of sleep in a half remembered dream, when you sing under your breath or catch yourself staring off into the distance, you get a glimpse of a tatter of an understanding you once had that has gone. And for that half second, you remember who you might have been, and how you might have known the world.  And then it's gone, the new language you are learning surging forward to battle with your mother tongue.  The old language, that was once new, skittering into a forgotten pocket, somewhere in the back of your mind, waiting for another reminder and another moment in the sun.

Chicken Soup

Dear Neighbors,

As we haven't seen each other in a few days, and I just very recently thought of you, I figured I'd put together a nice note and drop it by. I may not have mentioned this yet, but you have a lovely house and garden. The cute little group of hens out in the garden really give it a homey pleasant touch.  I thought I ought to share with you that you have a big beautiful rooster in your possession.  Yes, I know.  Rather forward. I'm American. It's a cultural thing. Yes, we talk a lot. I am aware. No I don't dye my hair.  No, Trump doesn't either because his is not real.  I agree. Strange. And yes, he is a terrible racist. Awfully vocal too. The worst kind of woman chaser.  A little like your rooster.

I have to say that having a bedroom that borders on your garden is, for the most part, a lovely experience.  My room is never quite as warm as the rest of the house can get, and in a summer that's already particularly hot and dry, it's an added relief that I can get a little bit of wind to cool things down at night if I crack open the window. Early in the morning--and in fact late in the afternoon, and often in the middle of the night--I find it relaxing to be able to listen to the sounds of the local birds.

Have I mentioned how big, beautiful and vocal your rooster is?

I haven't yet had time to thank you for the lovely traditional chicken stew you served on Thursday at Nicholas' 33rd birthday party. It was delish. I've gotta admit, that although I've developed a taste for fried chicken feet, this was the first time anyone offered me a chicken head, beak and all.  My heart did skip a beat--when I first took a gander at the plate. Staring back at me was (I was sure) was that virile and cacophonous rooster of yours.  Moments later, however, I was relieved to discover that his ample windpipes continued to very effectively ferry air in and out.  He really is something special.

It was lovely to chat the other day while we were all outside with our buckets waiting for the fire department to bring us not-quite-enough-water-for-three-days-that-has-to-last-all-week on Tuesday.  I don’t think I mentioned how much I like your new haircut.  Super feminine.  I may have also failed to mention your vociferous rooster.  So much bigger than the one the neighbour behind us has.  He is quite the specimen. That large, boisterous rooster of yours. I’ve noticed that he is an early riser.  A late sleeper too.  Strepitus in his pursuit of the hens that are so often happily eating away in your garden, laying their eggs and living their quiet lives.  I almost don’t even know they are there--in fact, if it weren’t for blusturous rooster, I probably wouldn’t. He does such an excellent job of making sure we all know nothing has gotten into the garden to bother the chickens.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I’ll be here about another month.  But was thinking about throwing a little get together to say goodbye.  I thought I’d ask---if it wouldn’t be too much of a bother--if you could bring some of that delicious chicken soup of yours?

The gringa next door.

Tomorrow there should be water.

“Tomorrow there should be water”.   The Alcalde’s promise rings out in a hollow sort of a way. Since February we’ve been waiting.  San Juan Chamelco isn’t a big town. It’s 10,000 people clustered right at the edge of the mountains.  It’s the heart of the Q’eqchi’ region in Guatemala and has been dubbed “Garden of the Verapaces” because of the thick cloud forest filled with orchids that seemed to stretch on forever.

It’s really only been four days since the water just stopped completely.  But over the last three months we’ve stayed up later and later and later every night.  Waiting first for a flow, until that turned into a trickle, to start so that we could fill up buckets to cook and bathe and clean during the following day. The Chipi-Chipi rain--a constant drizzle that is the hallmark of the Alta Verapaz--hasn’t come this year.  Or last year.  Or the year before.  The sweaters, thick blankets and heavy rubber mud boots that define life in this chunk of Guatemala are gone. Replaced by flip flops, sunburns and t-shirts bought for 5 quetzales from a paca.

The heavy thunderstorms that signalled the end of the short dry season (March/April) haven’t come this year.  But neither did the rain last year. The orchids aren’t blooming and the corn ears are small, hard and dry.  Without the rain in May the baby corn plants, popping their heads up after an April planting are wilting and struggling. Riding the bus into Coban is to sit on a bus full of women and girls with their brightly coloured plastic water tinakas.  With toddlers in tow they are off to visit friends, relatives, acquaintances.  Anyone they know in Coban who has water. Walking down the streets, with containers balanced on their heads or hips, it’s like the town has somehow skipped back in time a decade or three.

“We’ll send a truck.” Says the alcalde.  A water truck, that will drive up and down the streets and fill a few buckets for each house. A reason to stay home from work and give up a day's wage--just to have water. My host family assures me that while the truck was helpful last year, it’s still not the same as having water. Or being able to wash our clothes or clean our hair. Their oldest daughter and an aunt haven’t had water all week.  The frustration is palpable when people talk about last May. It got so bad that they risked protesting. Something that the community elders still remember being dangerous, as protestors they knew in the 1970s and 1980s disappeared.  There was a petition and they marched to the municipality office. They waited in the park to talk to the alcalde. They were met with police, the military, paid counter protesters.

There was no water.  Not that week. Or the next.

And May is just beginning.

Large swaths of Guatemala have been fighting through one of the worst droughts in recent history over the last three years.  The European Commision on Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection estimates 1.3 million people are being severely impacted and over half a million are facing direct food insecurity because the rain just won’t come.  Oxfam is handing out cash to over 2,000 severely affected families and assessing what can be done to alleviate the heavy impact that drought has on health conditions. Families without water lose what little access to good sanitation they once had. Parasites that cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting hit families facing food insecurity particularly hard, impounding malnutrition and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to diseases such as zika, malaria and dengue fever.

Bouncing out past Chamelco in the back of a pickup towards the aldea of Chamil, the effects of climate devastation surround us; from the thick haze as massive corporate farmers burn sugarcane to harvest it (easier and cheaper than other methods) filling the air across the highlands with a smog that lasts for months, to the newly barren hillsides as deforestation runs rampant throughout the Alta Verapaz. Landslides, both small and frighteningly large, creep onto roads from Chicaman to Cahabon.  Dry loose soil, no longer protected by a canopy of root and forest, sliding off the hillsides.  Particularly when it rains. Dust coats leaves and flowers. Plastic bags and bottles float down streams, catching on twigs and branches.  Bobbing in the eternally brown water that is slowly washing away the topsoil.

Why I Can't Write A Blog

“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.