Tim Høiland

It’s only mid-day on Monday so I don’t have a whole lot to report, but I have arrived in San Marcos, where I’ll be spending the rest of the day and night before leaving for Sipacapa in the morning. My contact here is an Eastern alum from my program a few years back who is working for an NGO in the area. This afternoon I have an interview with someone from the Diocese (the Catholic Church’s social arm) and I think he’ll be an excellent source of information.

So about the ride out here… There were just three of us in the minivan this morning – myself and two Dutch women who are volunteering at a school in Xela. I sat in the front and had a nice long chat with the driver, which allowed me to ask him anything I could think of about Guatemala: do the police still pull people over and fine them for no reason? do the university students still block off city streets leading up to Holy Week in order to collect money for their parties? is Lake Amatitlan (not Atitlan) clean enough to swim in? do you think the future is bright for Guatemala? do you know how the heck I can get to San Marcos without taking a chicken bus? He had answers to these questions: yes, yes, heavens no, no way, I don’t know, respectively.

I got dropped off at the bus terminal in Xela with my eyes open for the two bus companies that were apparently less shady than the rest, but hadn’t taken more than a step or two before I heard a guy yelling ”San Marcos”, so I talked to him and arranged a ride in another minivan for about $1.25 (double that to include my stuff on the seat beside me). The ride was harrowing at times as we passed buses and trucks on hairpin turns up and down steep hills, but I just kept reminding myself that the driver probably wanted to stay alive as much as I did. Probably.

But at one point during this ride it occurred to me that I felt right at home, and in some ways more so than I ever had when we lived in Guatemala. Back then I did all I could to stay inside an English-speaking, Americanized bubble. I was clearly not Guatemalan and every day reminded me of that. But now that I have lived in the US for more than a decade and have become accustomed to the North American way of life, I have been able to embrace my roots in Guatemala, because among my friends this background is a distinguishing feature of my story. Add that to the fact that my Spanish is better now (by leaps and bounds, I think) than it ever was when we lived here and voila! – my sense of belonging here, now, makes some sense. But still, ain’t no place like Lancaster.