Semana Santa, skirts and single mothers.

Another Semana Santa, Holy Week or Easter has just passed me by in Antigua.  For those who don´t know, the Semana Santa processions here are one of the highlights of the Catholic Church calendar  in this part of the world.  It is a spectacle of flower carpets, incense, purple robed cucurucho (people that carry the anda, the procession float I suppose we would call it).  The purple is worn until Good Friday and then apparently they change to black.  I have to admit I hadn´t even noticed this important dress change.  Antigua is invaded by thousands of pilgrims and tourists and you have to forget about driving anywhere for a few days.  People take to their bicycles, motorbikes or walk.  So far as to say,  it really is a big deal and Guatemalans fly home from all over the world to take part in this event.

Semana Santa for me (oh so spiritual that I am) has begun to mean lots of hassle and no nanny for 4 days but this being my last one for the foreseeable future, I did plan to get out and about and see some processions with the tribe but was struck down with food poisoning for 2 days which destroyed my will to fight my way into town through the crowds.  I was planning to make it to one of the processions at dusk when the lights, the incense smoke and the beauty of the whole thing even makes this confirmed atheist feel a little spiritual!

Although I am not religious I have to admit to liking the Catholics more after my 7 years here in Guatemala.  I am not sure why, but it may be something to do with their history and their discretion.  My friends who are catholics here never try to justify themselves, their faith is something private and they are not interested in preaching to others.  It is something that most of them feel is so culturally embedded in them that they would never question it.  I even have to admit to being a little bit jealous of their faith and the peace and composure that comes with it.  Also you have to admire the beautiful churches and cathedrals that fill Antigua, if nothing else.

On the other hand the evangelicals who are down here taking over, scare the living daylights out of me!  This fundamental, fervent, self righteous bunch never miss a moment to tell you all about their faith and why they are better than anyone else.  Missionaries with T shirts that proclaim to the world that they love God and he loves them more than anyone else.  I´ve seen it all!  Huge grotesque churches with multi-storey car parks shooting up where money could be better spent on education and food for the poor.

Also if you look at the history of the war here in the 80´s the catholics actually behaved like christians, fighting for human rights and trying to stop the genocide.

The evangelicals were the ones who were killing in the name of God as far as I can work out.

Anyway enough about that and on to another Antigua subject.  The NGO industry!  Antigua is full of people who have come here to get a do-gooder star on their CV.  If you want to skip around in your own moral high ground for a few months this really is the place to do it.  There are no end of people here hanging out in bars talking up all the good work they are doing.  The longer I have been here the more I have realised that the people who really are doing good work are the ones with the lowest profiles and the most humility and to those people I take off my hat!  You know who you are my friends 😉  However for every one of those there seems to be about 100 self righteous dullards propping up the bar night after night telling everyone about all their good work and their hearts bleeding fake blood all the way home to their moralising little beds.

I tend to steer clear of these kind of people especially as my connection to Guatemala is profoundly deeper  ………. my man and my three gorgeous hybrids.  I sometimes feel that I know more about Gautemala and it´s psyche than these zealots as I married it and gave birth to it.  But hey who am I to get on my high horse?

So it was with this jaded attitude that I discovered Dita and her skirts and fell in love with her project.  This project reached out to me as a mother of Guatemalans and a discerning fashionista.  I would not be seen dead in most of the hippy, traveller rubbish that gets peddled everywhere.  But these skirts are BEAUTIFUL and look good on everybody.  So here I am plugging them big style:

1000 Faces is a community-based initiative that is designed to help provide economic support and stability to local Mayan communities around Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Each of the unique skirts, made partially with recycled materials, are sewn and hand-embellished by “Single Mayan Mothers” from villages around the lake. The 1000 Faces project is as complex and interdependent as the threads we weave together day by day to make a Skirt That Makes Sense. When you purchase a Skirt That Makes Sense, you help weave together the threads of nutrition, economic support and stability, and environmental protection.

Check out the website above and click on links to see her collection of very cool designs ……..skirts (my favourites), T shirts, bags , scarves and dresses.

One of the things that got me off my sick bed this semana santa was hooking Dita up with a new friend in town and starting to sell her skirts, brainstorm ways that we can help her wonderful project and share and show them to as many stylish discerning women we could.  It is very much a work in progress and if anybody is interested in a skirt let me know!

I would like to dedicate this post to three women …….my oldest and dearest Guatemalan friend Fatima, who has always shown me the love and compassion of a good catholic woman and my new friends Lissette and Dita who have the energy and passion to help other women in this country by giving them the respect they deserve.

My Unbearable Lightness of Being in Guatemala

I had no specific plans to emigrate from my country and if I did, in my daydreams, it was to my neighbouring countries of France or Spain that I pictured myself setting up home.   I had lived or spent enough time in these countries already, enough to feel comfortable with their culture and lifestyle and more importantly, comfortable with the fact that they knew my culture the good and the bad.  I always imagined that I would stay close enough to my country so that phonecalls and quick trips home for family occasions and weddings and laughs would never be a problem.  But following my philosophy of serendipity I always had a sneaky suspicion that I would not be living in suburban England. And also, maybe more importantly my biggest fear was boredom, of ending up like Lucy Jordan of Marianne Faithful´s famous song.  That awful feeling that you would just get to a certain age and realise that you hadn´t lived and done all the things you wanted.  I had already achieved many of Lucy´s missed dreams including driving through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair . (see note 1)

When I set off for Antigua Guatemala for a 6 month break I had no idea that I was making such a huge step into a completely new life on a new continent.  (check out the archives on this site and you can see how I arrived).  For me the geographical isolation was also a huge physical and cultural barrier in this part of the world.  Two huge oceans separate this continent from the rest of the world.    On my other travels I always felt that I was connected by land and small sea hops from London to Beijing, Paris to Cape Town, Yorkshire to Afghanistan.  Here on this continent it is easy to forget that other continents exist, especially with the empirical mass culture exporters who live right above us.  In Guatemala, such a small country, you can swim in both the Atlantic and the Pacific in the same day, if you set your mind to it or own a helicopter!

Now after nearly 8 years here, who am I?  I gave birth to 3 children, learnt the language and the cultural issues, tried to make sense of the society whilst recognising the history, stopped being Jo (at times) and became Josefina or Doña Jose, my Spanish speaking alter ego!

I know that I will never know how it feels to be Guatemalan but my affection and acceptance of the country that gave me my husband and my children and the last 8 years of my life has been part of a long and interesting journey.

It has not been easy and I missed my country and my continent so much it hurt at the beginning, like a physical pain.  I missed the OLD WORLD, the British sense of humour, the great music that enters your psyche like osmosis, cricket, pubs, Sunday newspapers, delicious apples, the best cheese (700 of them!), from the gritty working classes to the eccentric aristocrat I missed them all.  I got tired of people talking to me every day of dollars, estados and gringos.  I was frustrated that people knew very little or nothing about my culture even the ones that should.  Generally people here view us as all the same.  We are all gringos, white people from the North.  I rarely get any acknowledgement of my own culture.  A poor muslim peasant knows more about Britain than a rich Latina.  How could I explain that this gringa felt more comfortable with an educated Iranian or Bosnian than someone from Idaho who looks just like her.

But I am who I am ……. a foreign mother who does not know if she will ever live in her home country again.  What does that mean?  How do I instill my children with the Britishness that made me who I am?  These days the two older ones speak less and less English to each other as they always used to (mother tongue), their apron strings are now more elastic and Spanish is the language.  Last year I only managed a trip home with my baby girl and left my two boys for two weeks.  They missed out on their little month of immersion in all things British.  Which can be anything from Bagpuss (note 4) to the use of the word bollocks!

I did not flee into exile from my country like my husband and his family but I live in serendipity exile never-the-less and the feeling is similar.  I have never been a mother anywhere else and I will always be grateful for the kindness and acceptance that I have received from the ordinary people of Guatemala.  Will I find it  difficult to be a mother anywhere else now?  Or does the emigre mother live in a different bubble of multi-culturalism which at times feels as though I don´t belong anywhere anymore ……….. just the unbearable lightness of being. (see Note 2)

As the last weeks of my adventure here in Guate are dwindling I wonder how I will live without the volcanoes, the sweet kind humble people, radiant colours of the flowers, the fun of market day and our nanny who symbolically represents to me and my family the best of everything this beautiful and troubled country has to offer. (see note 3)

So Cuba here we come, I hope now I have learnt how to move as an emigre to see the best in the cultures that I immerse myself in.  As my husband said all those years ago (in a wise and reassuring moment) when I shared by deepest fears about leaving Europe.

You are not losing your world you are gaining another.

My family and I will be enjoying a few weeks in my old world this summer with family and friends before heading to a fast-changing Cuba for four years.

Note 1 The Ballard of Lucy Jordan was one of my mother´s favourite Marianne Faithful songs and I listened to it with her as a teenager and the lyrics never left me.  A surburban housewife full of regrets for the things she never did.  I don´t think my mother felt like Lucy Jordan but maybe all of us mothers have Lucy Jordan days!   I was determined to never feel as trapped as she did.

Note 2 I read Milan Kundera´s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being at an early age and at the time I felt the power of his writing and began to understand the importance of identity for people forced to change their lives due to ideological or geographical issues.  One of the characters ends up in California looking out to the Pacific and feeling not the freedom but the unbearable lightness of being as she thinks about her old world and the people that inhabited it.

Note 3 I will be writing more about Juju ………..

Note 4 Bagpuss is classic BBC children´s TV from the 70s

 

Unexpected post about the Royal Wedding – Feeling homesick in Guatemala

I did not expect to be writing a post about my own country quite so soon especially not one about the Royal Family but when I got up this morning and put on the TV to catch up on the news, I had totally forgotten that Prince William was marrying the beautiful Kate the commoner (I love that expression, only used in relation to royalty, just like gentil only used in relation to Jews). I have to admit I felt rather tearful watching it all and I had to stop and try to think why.

I do not consider myself a royalist or a republican in fact INDIFFERENT in capital letters would be the category that I would put myself in.  I realised that the fascination for our Royal Family that was all over the world was good for our tourist coffers if not for our image as a modern democracy!

I think I just felt homesick and sad that my children and I were not there to enjoy and remember what is essentially a great big party with a truly British sense of irony whether you spend most of it slagging off the Royals and making fun of them or watching on adoringly …….. that is our prerogative.  Yes we are a modern democracy that still has a House of Lords and  a Monarchy and that is ridiculous, but I like the fact that we are ridiculous.

In this time of celebrity culture I think I would prefer to watch this wedding more than J-Lo´s or Tom Cruise´s.  A New York friend was surprised that I was watching it and said ¨ohh that is so tacky¨.  A British Royal Wedding can be many things to many people but tacky no, we leave that to the Hollywood stars they do it so well.

SO what would I be doing if I was home.  I noticed that there was the usual alternative Royal Wedding Party in Shoreditch my old stamping ground in the Bohemian multi-cultural Eastend but I have to say the party in Hyde Park looked pretty good!  Lots of great British picnics and lots of bottles of champagne being passed around.  And even though I am a socialist I am a champagne socialist!  The weather was good, London looked beautiful and so did Kate and her dress and for a moment I felt as though I was watching Shrek with my kids and the sadness of the real world melted away.

The Syrian Ambassador was disinvited.  Tony Blair didn´t receive an invitation (cool, slimy little toerag) but Margaret Thatcher did (very uncool).  Victoria Beckham managed to get in there hanging on the arm of her husband (very uncool as she is TACKY).

Nico asked me.  Is that what you did when you married Papa?  I didn´t like to tell him that we had never had the time or the inclination as I sat there staring at the screen wondering if I could wear that dress like a pathetic teenage girl!

I wonder how many people watched the Royal Wedding in Cuba?  Not many I suppose!  I wonder who watched it here in Guatemala?  My nanny Juju just arrived full of questions.  She liked the dress too!

 

Welcome to Serendipity or Madness – Leaving Guatemala heading to Cuba

I promised I would start posting after Semana Santa and here I am.  My site is not quite finished but not far off, so no more procrastinating.

Just to summarise how I got to this stage.  All the stuff you see in the archives here is everything I have written since I arrived in Guatemala nearly 8 years ago, apart from the endless emails of course.  So if you want to know more about me and my journey to where I am now, dip into the archives.  A lot of it was written to family and friends including great Aunts and 8 year old nieces etc.

Last year I started blogging with a group of people and it was a bit of a disaster for various reasons not worth going into here.  But in those early days of blogging I did not have a clue what I was doing, and still don´t really, but at least now I have been reading other people´s blogs and have spent a few months thinking about what I want to achieve by blogging.

So in my research into other blogs I had lots of fun but did not find many blogs about people like me, emigrant mothers who took a cross cultural walk on the wild side.  There are endless blogs about people skipping off to a new life on paradise islands and making dream holiday destinations their home a bit like all those endless TV shows in the UK.  They are usually doing this with a partner who is from their own culture so they can sit and moan together if things do go wrong.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy I say to those bloggers but good for you for working out how to have the easy life and pulling it off.  Maybe I will visit you one day in paradise.

Also the other kind of blog which seems to involve moaning about your adopted country.  A lot of these, white folks in the brown world being a little bit too superior for my liking.  I even found foreigners blogging in my own country, Americans lamenting about the lack of Tex Mex food, the lack of shopping malls and how tomato ketchup does not taste the same in the UK.  I´ll keep my comments to myself on this particular topic!

I even read an awful blog set up by a horrible American (who is now in prison) who just seemed to spend all his time slagging off Guatemala, the country which had actually given him and his family refuge from the FBI for a couple of years.  Some people are never grateful!

So I promise that I will not spend too much time moaning or criticising Guatemala or Cuba but will try to share my feelings with you as I discover things good and bad.  I am a qualified social psychologist so I try to approach things in an investigative manner.  There is always a reason why people behave as they do.  The interesting thing is to peel back the layers of the onion to find out why.  This way I am always learning and thinking about research topics for when I do return to work!

I am a mother of 3 children but I promise to veer away from the endless cutsey Hello magazine indulgent posts about my children.  But you shall be hearing about them, the good and the bad!  Paulo, Nico and Saskia, my gorgeous little hybrids.

I am not very whizzy with most things technical but I´ll try to get better at putting the odd link to something interesting.

I promise to try to see the world with the sense of humour that my culture is famous for but at the same time I may need to share the important stuff with you too.  Why? because I do care about the world and the mess we seem to have got it into!