Homecoming

I'm back in Guatemala. It's been eleven years since we moved to the US, and eight since I've been back to visit. As might be expected, some things change but others stay exactly the same. Last night I slept in our former apartment, in my former bedroom. Today I wandered around the old neighborhood in Guatemala City. I walked up to a big black metal gate on 7th avenue and told the guard that back in the day, when the place belonged to the Instituto Linguistico de Verano, I'd lived there and I wondered if I might be allowed in to have a look. He took great pleasure in welcoming me in, saying I wasn't the only one who's been back to relive old memories. It struck me that at that moment, the friendly guard who let me in and told me to explore was in a very real sense grace embodied. When we had left Guatemala and I heard that the center was being sold, it made me very sad, because I pictured myself returning to Guatemala in, say, eleven years, and wanting to visit my old home but being turned away. Grace is when you're surprised with something good, when it didn't have to work out the way it did. Today, it was grace.

From there I went to the shopping center a few blocks away where I changed my dollars into quetzales, purchased a pen, and made prints of some digital photos to replace the ones I was supposed to bring with me, but on account of absentmindedness, currently lie on the floor of my bedroom in Lancaster.

In the early afternoon I caught a ride out to CAG - Christian Academy of Guatemala - where I again got the chance to relive old memories. I talked with the three remaining people from my time there - Mr Rosa, the director; Ms Rensch, a teacher I never had but who is apparently awesome; and Mrs Ovalle, an older Mennonite lady who also happened to be my fifth grade teacher. Her students and I collectively did the math on how long ago that could have possibly been.

From CAG I got a ride to the town of Antigua with some people I just met: a pastor, his wife, and their two kids who are headed to a retreat for missionaries. They dropped me off at the central park as a procession with a statue of Jesus made its way down a side street with a hodgepodge following, which struck me as somehow poignant.

After a little bit of wandering, I found a hostel sort of place I had read about in my travel book, and it's where I'll be staying the night. I've got my own room, my own bathroom, and there's a nice quiet plaza where fellow travelers mingle. Tomorrow I'll visit a couple of the sites here in town before heading on to Panajachel, a town at Lake Atitlan where on a warm spring day I came down with chicken pox in the ninth grade.