Serendipityormadness

I have to admit to being a slightly reluctant blogger.   Just as I was a slightly reluctant facebooker but now I have been sucked into that time-consuming world …….. and worry that I am stepping into another yet more sinister world of self absorption and unbridled opinion sharing.  I fear I am guilty of enough of that anyway without forcing it onto a bunch of people who don´t even know me!  However here I am for better or for worse.  I promise to try to blog away from the banal and self absorption or self promotion as much as I can!  I challenge all bloggers to respect this rule.

However despite my hesitance, narrow minded I certainly am not.  I do enjoy reading good novels and news articles from around the world but have very little time to do so (as my children and more recently Facebook seem to take a lot of that time).  I am lucky enough to have my mother send me a great publication from the UK called The Week.  Their tagline is …….

all you need to know about everything that matters

Here, in a brief form I can read articles from newspapers all round the world, as well as film reviews, book reviews, gossip, talking points, finance news, obituaries, travel articles, art reviews, music reviews, a letters page, sport, Health and Science amongst other interesting titbits.  If you want to find out more, go to

www.theweek.co.uk

Recently I was having brunch with some fellow bloggers, as now I suppose I am one.  I expressed my fears of adding to the self absorbed banal drivel available on line and that I needed to try and find a way of writing something that was worth reading and I showed them a copy of The Week.  Unfortunately, there was a picture of April Ashley on the cover and they sneered at the transexual´s picture in a rather narrow minded way.  Poor April Ashley.

I admit to being very ignorant and possibly a little judgemental like these bloggers when it comes to transsexuals but I was intrigued to read about this character and thus learn a little more about the lives of these often fascinating characters.

April Ashley has just celebrated her 75th birthday and as Britain´s first transexual she has some pretty extraordinary memories.  She grew up an abused boy in the slums of Liverpool and later as a young merchant seaman she began to grow breasts (I actually know some very untranny men that have this problem!).  After years of trauma she ended up working as a dancer in Paris and then heard about a pioneering operation she could have in, of all romantic film locations, Casablanca.  She was seen onto the plane by an American dancer called Skippy who made her promise to be her first lover when she returned.  She lost her virginity on Bastille day when the whole of Paris was celebrating in the street.  She later went on to become the toast of London with an array of lovers that ranged from Peter O´Toole to Michael Hutchence.  She however was never under the illusion about the reason for her celebrity.

You say I met everybody but it was the other way round.  Everybody wanted to meet the Freak

And yes I wanted to read about the beautiful freak and how she had turned her life around.  Happy Birthday April Ashley, and maybe I can share fascinating snippets from the Week from time to time when I am blogging.

The Bodegona (literally meaning large warehouse) is, I suppose, the nearest thing Antigua has to a supermarket, but that is stretching the term somewhat! It is more a ramshackle collection of things organised in a way that still defeats me (they keep moving things around). Some of the aisles are impossible to get down with your trolley, and trolley plus baby, absolutely forget it. You need to abandon trolley and make a kamikaze style manoeuvre to get what you need.
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Hygiene standards are not their forte. The latest rumour, and I almost have CSI type evidence, is that they turn the fridges off at night, which is a tad worrying to all of us who live in a country with more than its fair share of tummy bugs.

The place has however improved a lot in the last year or so and at some stage a visit is a necessary evil. Now they have proper checkouts and trolleys and there is even a private carpark opposite, so when you are desperate you have the option of paying 6q to park so you don´t have to walk 2 blocks with all your shopping and a baby strapped on. That said, I usually find some 10 year old hanging around the door who wants to earn a couple of quetzal carrying shopping. So there are advantages to third world supermarkets!

However, all things taken into account, I have grown used to this strange place and it is often the only time I bump into expat friends and neighbours who I wish I saw more. I also have been treated with extraordinary kindness, especially by the people who work there. I can´t imagine it is a great place to work, but generally they all seem remarkably cheerful no matter how grumpy I am when I make it to the checkout. (By the way the 10 year olds that collect the rubbish (trash that is) look fiendishly happy too, a subject for future investigation I promise).

Last Friday, I was dragging myself around the supermarket when I should have been having my first glass of wine of the weekend and with that in mind was cheering myself up, selecting a bottle of my usual Chilean delight when …….. some weird looking guy sidled up to me. I sidled away from him in what I thought was a graceful manner but no. I smashed a bottle of unidentifiable liquor on the floor. It caused a palpable little flurry of excitement around the booze aisle. At that moment a neighbour (British Belize) appeared next to me with her new gorgeous baby boy, after a brief, ooh ahh cluck cluck mummy session, we looked down at the booze on the floor, which by this stage seemed to be burning a hole in the cheap dirty lino. As we were both marvelling somewhat at this, I admitted to have never done this before, and not knowing what the supermarket etiquette was, here or anywhere on this matter, I was biding my time.

At that point I noticed the gap in the shelf where said bottle had been, and believe me, it did not look up to supermarket standards, in fact it looked as though a dog had been chewing it! Some poor guy who had been chosen to ´come and admonish the tall gringa´ appeared at my side.

Hombre, fue muy mal puesto which translates to something along the lines of mate it wasnt very well shelved.

I offered to pay half and the deal was done with all parties happy. What was it? I still dont know but it was luckily very cheap and I will never be drinking it after what I saw!

Five minutes later when I had finished buying all my things and was saying goodbye to my neighbour the same young guy dropped what was left of the bottle all over the floor in an even more spectacular fashion than my earlier attempt. At this point everyone around us was laughing. Mire, es vivo, yo te dije! Look, I said, I told you it was alive.

Me and my little ´half pint helper´ chuckled across the road to the car with the groceries with him muttering under his breath es vivo es vivo and shaking his head at my rather successful little joke!!

To follow will be a more sensible blog on food shopping in Antigua for Mums. I don´t think it will be blog that will have global importance however I shall write it as if it does!

For those of you who don´t know quetzal (q) is the currency in Guatemala as well as the national bird that nobody has EVER seen. There are around 7q to the dollar I think.

My boys were not too excited about doing sports camp again this vacation. They said that it got boring and the teacher made them walk a lot, and they didn´t do much sport. This amused me as I think a bit of brisk walking is good for everybody, and my number 2 is very lazy. So with this is mind I was still planning to send them for one week at some stage during the whole ridiculous 2 and a half months they have to kill.

However, still on the lookout for a vacation course for my two boys, we were ambling around the plazuela in our pueblito on Sunday and heard a loudspeaker announcing ………. curses de vacaciones ……sport, dance, craft, music. I ran across the plazuela with the boys to investigate. When we passed through the gates I was amazed at the size of the village school – it was like a warehouse with a sports field in the middle and several classrooms leading off it. The late afternoon sun was dropping behind the volcanoes.

Nobody asked me for any money just to fill out my name and age, it was then that I was informed that the courses were only at the weekend. I think they are organised by an NGO of some sort, as there were lots of freshfaced youngsters in white shirts that declared something interesting about Social Cohesion. Well I´m all for a bit of social cohesion.

There was a nice atmosphere and everyone was asking my blond boys to join in their games of football and basketball including my nanny´s children. The boys were too shy to play sport with the big boys but we found tucked away in the corner, a chess room. My oldest has recently been taught by his Papa as a (partly successful) way to keep him away from TV and video games. Immediately. everybody made space for the boys and in seconds my oldest was setting up to play a rather cool looking 15 year old!

He lost both games but it was great to see how hard he was concentrating and he took quite a few of his opponent´s pieces. Very respectable for a 5 year old. The games were quite tense and there were a few people watching.

Meanwhile my young one was in the corner being taught some moves by the younger boys.

Living in a country which already has its own set of apartheid rules to get used to, means it is not always easy to know how to integrate as much as that will ever be possible for a 5ft 9 blond woman with an accent. I have wrestled with this problem for the last 7 years and find my own little ways to belong here in my adopted country.

I live just outside Antigua but fortunately not in a prison-like gated community but a large green sprawling one that has a modicum of security and a friendly atmosphere. My colonia is right next to a typical Central American village with its usual collection of shops, schools, colonial church, pila for washing clothes and gossiping and the usual collection of characters (the habitual drunk, the camp gay guy, the happy crazy bloke, the unfeasibly fat woman, the woman who never smiles etc etc). My children and I are well known in the village and I do as much of my shopping as possible in my community. I feel that this is one of the few ways I can connect on a daily level, otherwise I am just another gringa flying past in her car keeping my distance.

There is a hardware shop where I buy my bits and pieces, screws, nails, cement for repairs etc. from a young man called Wellington. We have joked about what a national hero he is in my country, he always looks slightly puzzled but flattered.

My boys have their haircuts for 10q in our village peluqueria. Don Byron with his slightly dodgy eye has a wild look like the 19th century romantic poet himself, but it doesn´t seem to affect his haircutting abilities and he always finds a little dulce in his pockets for the boys.

I buy most of my fruit and vegetables from Doña Letty who comes down with all her produce on the bus in the morning from the town of Santa Maria much higher up the volcano than us. Tomatoes, potatoes, avocados, limes, leaks, carrots, brocolli, onions, lychees, blackberries, local apples, local greens called acelgas, corn, cauliflower …… on a good day I don´t want for much. Doña Letty is one of those smiling, cackling, toothless women with her chattering daughters and nieces helping her, all dressed in their beautiful typical clothes. All the woman pass my happy baby girl around as I select my weekly produce and between them load it directly into the boot of my car. We chat about the weather, the children and whatever disaster big or small has struck our community lately. If I´m feeling peckish I get an avocado smeared tostado from the young girl with the large bust on display, who sits next door to Doña Letty.

Although we live in the tropics we live at a very high altitude so firewood (leña) for a large part of the year is one of my preoccupations, finding it and making sure it is dry and good quality is a constant here. I am lucky enough to have a park opposite my house for collecting kindling (little twigs for lighting fires) with the boys, who start enthusiastically and then leave the rest to me. In one of the shops in the village I buy my wonderful organic firelighters known round here as ocotes. Ocotes are natural resin infused sticks that you light and stick in the fire to get it going in no time ……..bliss. On very damp rainy season days when dry wood is hard to find these things are my life savers and ridiculously cheap. There is nothing nicer when the hard rains fall to be inside cosy around the fireplace with all the family. My husband, after years of living in the mountains fighting to stop the genocide here (and that is another story), is the best fire lighter I have ever met. Known as Doctor Fuego by me and the boys!

Coming from a country with a national health service, I have never been keen on private medicine so had a hard time adjusting to life in Guatemala where rich white Guatemalans seem to think if they are not paying a fortune their doctor can´t be good. In San Pedro we have a project funded by a church in the US and staffed by local Guatemalans which has a very nice doctor, dentist and lab (for the inevitable endless poo testing that happens here). I have taken all my children there for their various ailments over the last few years and we sit chatting with the locals in the waiting room. They can never believe how Chapin (local word for Guatemalans) my little blond boys are when they start talking. It costs a nominal 18q which is about a tenth of the price you pay anywhere else and I prefer the doctor to any of the other doctors I have visited, he explains everything to me and my children instead of the arrogance I have experienced with expensive city doctors. They wont let me pay them more than anyone else so I pass all my old children´s clothes and toys and unused medicines back to them to distribute in the community.

My last favourite place in the village is the sastre shop. This could roughly translate as the old fashioned word seamstress. It is basically a room with a couple of guys with old fashioned sewing machines. ……….and they can fix anything for 10q. With two little boys they have patched endless pairs of trousers, made cushion covers out of old designer dresses (from another life!), hemmed skirts and trousers and altered old trousers into shorts.

My neighbours in the colonia who I see on a daily basis are all guardienes. That means they are the poor people that live in the gardens of the rich people to keep the rich people safe from the bad poor people. Crazy I know, but this is Guatemala. Doña Natalie next door has 4 beautiful girls and Doña Amanda on the corner has 4 cheeky boys they are always in the street for a smile and a wave as we pass. The boys playing how boys should: climbing trees, playing football and marbles or flying kites depending on the weather and the girls tending the garden helping their mother, and quietly watching the boys antics. Doña Amanda is also our resident babysitter on the few occasions we manage to get out.

Don Carlos has the village pinchazo …… a wonderful word for a great service. The roads around Antigua are not always that great to say the least, especially in the rainy season when they are habitually covered in debris and rocks. Puncturing your tyres is a common occurrence so it is a relief to have Don Carlos right there and my boys love watching him at his work, taking off the tyre and then slowly turning it in a water filled oil drum looking for the bubbles with the hawkeye of a professional. A couple of times I have been left with a flat tyre outside my house and good old Don Carlos has cycled over with all his tools balanced on the crossbar of his bicycle and after 5 minutes and a big smile he has me back on the road so I can get the boys from school or whatever other vitally important domestic task is awaiting me………..

I suppose I could drive to the city and buy all my things in Pricesmart or Walmart or one of those other faceless marts in another cheap and faceless mall all wrapped in plastic. Maybe it would be quicker and more convenient, maybe it would even be cheaper ………. but I don´t think so, and I get something a lot more valuable to take away with me ……. my interaction with my community ………. thank you San Pedro for treating me like your neighbour. Underneath everything we are all the same, just people wanting the best for our family and our community and maybe a little bit of gossip and laughter along the way ……..

I read Linguistics as an undergraduate and spent a year studying Language Acquisition i.e How we learn languages. British people are famous for not bothering to learn languages or proclaiming that they are not very good at languages. I have always disliked this island mentality or the arrogance of the old empire …… and inspired by my mother (a passionate language teacher) I sought to learn the languages of the countries close to mine.

First I went to Berlin, then Paris and finally Antigua after acquiring a few Spanish friends along the way. I was always the foreigner who managed to have local friends …….. why? Not because I was particularly great at learning languages but I was always motivated to try to communicate with people in their own language. People like this. Contrary to what people like to think, we are ALL capable of learning languages the main decider is MOTIVATION.

You have to feel a little silly and swallow your pride but it is worth it in the end. After 7 years here I can now make people laugh in Spanish and express my emotions and frustration and almost be myself. I am not as eloquent of course but people like me in Spanish!! so I must be doing ok. I now have friends with whom I only speak Spanish and I truly feel close to them and even manage to chat on the telephone …….. the hardest!

I am lucky that my husband has a large circle of Spanish speaking friends, not all of them living here ……. some in Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Spain. We visit them, they visit us and they have accepted me and my bad Spanish with a lot of love and affection as I am the love of their great friend.

When I met my husband I could hardly speak Spanish and he was the one making all the effort. Now we are slowly changing to the perfect model for a bilingual family he speaks Spanish to me and the children and I speak English. We are in our comfort zone but we are always learning.

Over the years my husband has met a lot of my English speaking friends and although he manages he is not always comfortable speaking English especially in a large crowd. Also, at times he quite rightly says. I am in my country and these people have been living here for years and speak Spanish so why do they never bother to speak Spanish to me. I think he sees it as a lack of respect to his country and culture and ultimately himself.

Why do people think it is ok stop bothering? Is it not rather an imperialist attitude?

Please friends try to speak Spanish with my husband. I know you can. He will feel much more comfortable and you may find yourself even enjoying talking to him. He is a VERY interesting man when you bother to speak to him in his own language!

You should still keep bothering. Building bridges and connecting with people is vital for multicultural relationships. We should set this example for our families, our friends and our children.

I have been here 7 years but I never, never, ever get tired of seeing these amazing volcanoes that surround us! When you pass through a very rainy period and you can´t see them their reappearance is all the more breathtakingly spectacular. ……..a maravilla no less ………..! You cannot beat a volcanic silhouette when it comes to inspired photography.

Pacaya has recently been dumping ash on the city and made global headlines. The last major eruption was Santiaguito out the side of Santa Maria near Xela (Quetzaltenango). These volcanoes I have not visited yet but I have a few photos to share of the others. All three pregnancies the tour operators kept giving me flyers to climb Pacaya ……. ahorita non hombre. But we must do it soon!!

SO with this in mind, I have been reaching into the archives for some of my best volcano photos. I would like to thank Mr John Hampson (known as Papa Grande to my boys) for a lot of these wonderful images.

The three volcanoes that surround us are called Agua, Fuego, and Acotenango and there is a little nub on Fuego which looks like a baby on the way. Until my little girl was born we were all named after the volcanoes which made our morning walk with the two boy toddlers and the dog a little bit more entertaining. Agua, the big one was Papa, my first born was the active fiery fuego, always farting, Mummy and the little one were Aco and bump. Now that I have another littler one we will have to tell her that the volcanoes are all her family protecting her ……… or something like that so she doesn´t feel left out.
Beautiful Fuego with authentic Guatemala wires hanging

When we go for weekends to Lake Atitlan we have some more beautiful volcanoes to ogle at. In fact there are 33 volcanoes in Guatemala which for a country this size is very impressive.

I have some sweet and curious nieces and nephews in London who every time they see me never fail to be incredulous that people like us actually live on volcanoes. Their questions seem quite understandable for people that come from an island that has seen no volcanic action for a few hundred thousand years or more.
Fuego puffing

But Auntie why did people go and live there?

Because that is where they have always lived.

But why don´t they move now?

Because they are used to living with the volcanoes and they like them.

Really ……….. they say with their big English eyes aghast and puzzled. I´ll wait a few years before I explain to them why volcanoes seem so harmless in Guatemala compared to racial repression, civil war, genocide, gendercide, gangs, narcos and one of the highest murder rates in the western hemisphere.

Ahhh our dear friends the volcanoes they don´t really bother us!!!

My husband has told me that he will follow me anywhere but he must come back and die with his volcanoes! Maybe my children will feel the same.